Sewanee 2025: Response to Fleshly Appetites (Session 8)

Hi everyone.

Jeff Stroyanoff’s paper reads the Miller’s Tale as queer horror, specifically, Alison as a queer monster, at least in relation to Absolon’s heterosexuality, which fails in so many ways to find the object it thinks it wants. I tend to teach Absolon as a character who’s in the wrong genre, an echo from the Knight’s Tale, a stuffed shirt, sartorially proud, au courant in popular music, and, if you will, a stage star, of the community variety. The horror, for him, is that although he’s doing everything right, nothing works, for him, not just because someone’s already beat him to Alison’s bed, but because he’s just not going about things the right way for the story he finds himself in, and we, the readers, know this. His horror is our delight.

That is, my response aims to bring some of the humor back to the tale. The paper you heard quoted me, from my contribution to the Dark Chaucer anthology, “ Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go,” where I considered how the female leads in the tales of the Man of Law, Physician, and Knight all have a moment where they beg to get out – to be killed (Custace), saved (Virginia), and let alone (Emelye) – before the tale chains shut the exit and drags them along to the inevitable. As I observed, they’re stuck because the tales themselves are stuck: the Physician to Jean de Meun and ultimately to Livy, the Man of Law to the pattern of the Calumniated Queen, and the Knight to Boccaccio. There’s a source, there’s an unalterable pattern, and what awaits all is Bad Fortune.

Not so much for the Miller’s Tale. As you surely recall, the tale’s often said to be constructed out of two fabliau patterns, the Second Flood and the Misdirected Kiss, not often found together. Now, in the 2005 Sources and Analogues, Peter Biedler strongly argued that Chaucer’s source was the Middle Dutch Heile of Beersele, a 190-line farce about a sex worker of Antwerp, Heile, who confounds three clients – a miller, a priest, and a smith – who all try to visit her in the same evening: the last, stuck outside a house too crowded for admittance, finds himself unwittingly kissing the priest’s ass. Being a smith, he gathers the expected arms, returns, and, well, you can guess what happens to the priest, and what to the miller, hid in a tub in the roofbeams, when the priest cries out for water. But also in 2005, Frederick Biggs argued that the traffic went the other way: Chaucer’s the source of the Dutch tale, and in 2009, Biggs proposed his own sources, a couple fabliaux from Harley 2253.^[1]

Sort of, to both Biedler and Biggs. For Biedler, I think of other stories of a lady who tricks three importunate wooers, like the Middle English “Lady Prioress” or “The Wright’s Chaste Wife”; for Biggs’ fabliaux, well, I just want to note that the elements of the Miller’s Tale are split between two of them, one with a misdirected kiss (and more), and in the other, a mother-in-law –- neither husband nor lover — hid disastrously in a basket.

This very welter of material lets me make my point, then, by sharpening the contrast between the kill me save me let me go situations, and this one, which is comic. The other tales must do what they do because the pattern’s already been laid. In this one, nearly anything could happen, because we have two tales collapsed into one. In the first case: Alison at the apex of the triangle, and Nicholas and her husband John below, and in the other, Alison again at the apex, and Nicholas and Absolon in the lower. Brought together, two male rivals become three, with Nicholas and Alison the only common elements: Absolon doesn’t know about Nicholas, nor John Absolon.

You might think of these two stories as fitting as tight as Tetris; I prefer to think of them as an interference pattern, two stones dropped in a pond and the wavelets striking each other just enough off-kilter that we can’t tell where they’re going to go next. In this uncertainty horror? Is it queer? It’s certainly open, and, for the characters, no doubt disconcerting. But facing horror, as, say, Virginia does, the surprise would be if she got out alive; facing this, the surprise is, well, actual surprise, where we don’t know in advance whose ass will be hanging out the window, and whose will get the hot poker. Given his awkwardness, we might have expected Absolon to come off the worse in this; but John does, humiliated with a broken arm, and Nicholas, with worse injuries still. Above it all, serene and satisfied, Alison. Not tragedy, but mayhem.

Conveniently enough for me, Amanda Leary and Katherine Terrell talked about the same chivalric narrative, and the same episode in each. Leary reads the notorious anthropophagy of Richard Coer de Lyon in terms of race-making, Terrell, in terms of how trauma gets transformed into a fantasy of dominance. No notes in either case: I think that this is what the story’s about.

I’m necessarily reminded of my own work on medieval anthropophagy. I came at it like so: back in my first book, I observed that whenever medieval narrative describes the taste of human flesh, it calls it the most delicious and nutritious of meats. I read this not, of course, as evidence of how humans actually taste, but as an attempt to counteract the humiliation the humans had suffered by being eaten. Like other animals, humans may be edible, however illegitimately, but we overtop them in taste and nutritional value. The Master of Game, Edward Plantagenet’s popular hunting manual, tells us that “Þere ben some [wolves] þat eten children and men, and ete non other flesh from þe tyme þat þei be acharnid with mennes flesshe, for rather þei wolde be dede. And þei be cleped ‘werewolfes,’ for men shul be war of them”;^[2] in “As the Starved Maelstrom laps the Navies,” Emily Dickinson suggests the same about tigers. We are potentially an obsessional object, and that, in a way, is our salvation. We’re not fully dehumanized.

But what I didn’t do back then was consider all this from the other side. I thought about it from the standpoint of the eaten person, or eaten people in relation to animals. I didn’t consider it, really, from the perspective of the deliberate human anthropophage. For when Richard declares that Muslim flesh is especially delicious, and we learn is that there’s nothing that can cure him quite so effectively, but in no way does his meal elevate his victims. It degrades them, while encouraging their murder, and encouraging Richard in his obscene transgression of limits.

I think of a few things. Horribly, I am reminded of a video promoted by the White House of ICE agents chaining undocumented migrants before loading them into a deportation flight, all done in the style of an ASMR clip: just listening to it, it’s a series of variously soothing noises; watching it, depending on your decency, it titillates, or it nauseates. It’s designed to coarsen us, to wreck morality by accustoming us to wickedness, or encouraging us to delight in it. But it gets our attention precisely by being so wicked. For it to work, we have to know we’re doing wrong, or having wrong done to us.

So, as with the Richard episodes, I think we go awry if we characterize the delight in this as simply dehumanization. It does of course dehumanize. Richard is treating the Muslims like meat; and the ICE agents, and above them Trumpworld, as just objects of laughter and contempt. But the delight comes precisely from doing this to people.

Here I have in mind the work on dehumanization in Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s 2020 Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. Jackson counters a liberal humanist attempt to include Black people within the regime of normative humanity, because, as she argues, “when humanization is thought to be synonymous with black freedom, or even a means to freedom, one risks inadvertently minimizing or extending the violence of ‘universal humanity.’”^[3] Instead, she emphasizes the plasticity of being human or animal. Groups targeted by the powerful are not necessarily fully stripped of their humanity. Nineteenth-century slavers in North America called enslaved people animals while exploiting their specifically human skills, knowledge, and family ties to wrest from them still more labor. The pleasures of slavers no doubt stemmed from their delighting in inflicting cruelty on people they knew to be people. They did things to people that they would never have done to animals, and not simply because people are less “tractable” than livestock: it is because they can be made to suffer in ways that animals cannot.

Some ways of being animalized elevate: Richard is the lion-hearted. Jesus is a lamb. Some ways of being human subject you to worse than you would have been made to endure otherwise. To “humanize” someone is to recognize them not as a mostly hairless simian biped, but as a thinking and feeling being, desiring and desired by others, with a sense of dignity, family, and lineage. It’s because Richard knows the Muslims have these qualities that he laughs so wildly. As I said last month about The Siege of Jerusalem, the pleasures the Richard story offers derive from him recognizing his enemies as just human enough to make that humanity something worth taking from them. There’s no point in animalizing something that’s already known to be animal. The violence of the act requires that first recognition — what we must call a kind of “identification” or even “sympathy” — that must then be waylaid in a direction we generally don’t expect identification and sympathy to go. Humanization here is no salvation; it’s the prelude to further acts of violence, a recognition followed by the cruelty of deliberate misrecognition.

It’s for that reason, I’d say, that the narrative first has Richard eat Muslims unwittingly, and then laugh. Having been liberating into new kinds of cruelty, he then does it again, deliberately, coarsened and delighted, the obscene father able to do whatever he likes, whose very horror is the “inherent support” of the violence of the normative public order.^[4] Richard’s cannibalism is medieval MAGA. It wants to be “triggering.” And if we’re reading the way the narrative wanted to be read, we are to delight in what he does to other people, and to delight in it because it’s sick. We are not being told that the Muslims are pigs. We’re meant to see them as people, and to laugh at them when they suffer, and that, for me, is a tale of undeniable horror.

Thank you. I’m looking forward to the discussion.

1. “The Miller’s Tale and Heile van Beersele.” The Review of English Studies 56.226 (2005): 497-523, and “A Bared Bottom and a Basket: A New Analogue and a New Source for the Miller’s Tale.” Notes & Queries 56.3 (September 2009): 340-41 ↑
2. The most commonly read edition is one in modernized spelling from the early twentieth century with an introduction by American President Theodore Roosevelt, an enthusiastic hunter; the best available scholarly edition remains James I. McNelis (RIP), “The Uncollated Manuscripts of The Master of Game: Towards a New Edition” (PhD diss, University of Washington, 1996). From 181. ↑
3. NYU Press, 2020, 29. ↑
4. I’m getting this from Slavoj Žižek, I don’t know exactly from where, but see, eg, “The Seven Veils of Paranoia, or, Why does the Paranoiac need Two Fathers,” Constellations 3.2 (1996): 142-43: “this obscene underworld does not ‘mediate’ between the abstract structure of symbolic law and the concrete experience of the actual life-world. The situation is rather inverse: we need a ‘human face,’ a sense of distance, in order to be able to accommodate ourselves to the crazy demands of the superego machine.” At the same time, there’s the fantasy of the one who gets away with it, the one who doesn’t have to follow the rules at all. ↑