the child's voice in the prioress's tale

(new chaucer society biennial congress, 13.6.23)

At the heart of the Prioress’s Tale is a dead child. As a text which explicitly situates itself within what critics Hannah Johnson and Heather Blurton have described as a “network” of antisemitic blood libel narratives, central to the way it reproduces Christian antisemitic ideology is by way of its instrumentalization and objectification of the child. One tradition of scholarship has emphasized the ways in which the the tale is characterized by its own inability to mourn: while the text’s “lost object” is apparently the child himself, the false attribution of responsibility for that death onto a racist caricature of a population of Jews speaks to a resistance to the acknowledgment of Christian society’s aggression towards its own children. As Aranye Fradenburg chillingly put it in her classic essay, “Criticism, Antisemitism and the Prioress’s Tale”, once we recognize the fictional and propagandistic nature of the attribution of child murder to the Jews in medieval blood libel narratives, “if the Jews were not responsible for those dead Christian children, who was?”¹

Part of what readings like those of Fradenburg or Bruce Holsinger bring into view is not only the centrality of anti-Jewish violence to the Prioress’s Tale but also the intimacy of this violence with the dark side of reproductive futurism. The function of Marian theology in the tale and others like it is to paranoiacally project responsibility for the violence Christian culture inflicts on its own children to an Other. What such propaganda brings into view with special clarity is that if within such a culture, as Lee Edelman famously put it, “the sacralization of the Child necessitates the sacrifice of the queer,”² or, for that matter the Jew, then it also requires the sacrifice of the child to the same symbolic order which sacralizes it. In the Prioress’s Tale, this sacrifice happens in large part on behalf of the voice.

Often, the “voice” is taken to be something that is more or less self-present and autonomous. The voice might be silenced or restored, or, sometimes, it needs to be “listened to,” allowed to speak for itself. Fradenburg, for instance, calls out Chaucerian scholarship for its role in “the unmaking of the voice of the Jew,” in a trend that Blurton and Johnson traced in detail in their book the Critics and the Prioress, in which critics acknowledge the antisemitism of the text but nevertheless seem to find something redemptive in its affective piety and aesthetic achievement.³ One may recall, too, Eve Salisbury’s recent work in Chaucer and the Child, which attends to what Salisbury identifies as “Child Chaucer”, that is, “the component of mind that enables the poet to breathe life into his characters, speak in the voice of the child, and lure readers into his virtual worlds.”⁴ Part of what’s discomfiting in the Prioress’s Tale, though, is precisely the way the “voice” of the child is preserved or achieves wholeness by way of its being severed from the subject it constitutes. In a sense, the child is sacrificed to its own voice.

As the prioress insists in the prayer to the Virgin that serves as the basis of her prologue, the praise of God can be “performed” even by the youngest of children. The lines here are somewhat ambiguous: “by the mouth of children thy bountee / Parfourned is, for on the brest soukynge / Somtyme shewen they thyn heriynge” (455-59). “On the breast sucking” may be invoked, of course, simply to connote a stage in a subject’s life in which sucking is mutually exclusive to speaking. But the semantics of the prioress’s wording also suggests that the act of sucking is itself a performance of praise, perhaps even an attempt at interpretation. Before she begins the tale, the prioress identifies her own voice with that of the pre-linguistic infant:

My konnyng is so wayk, O blisful Queene,
For to declare thy grete worthynesse
That I ne may the weighte nat susteene;
But as a child of twelf month oold, or lesse,
Right so fare I, and therfore I yow preye,
Gydeth my song that I shal of yow seye (481-87).

Already, a concept of childhood is being put to work by way of a theory of the voice: the pre-linguistic infant speaks to the prying apart of praise from linguistic signification. “Praise,” here, doesn’t refer to any particular speech act or performance, but is itself an object. This object, like Walter Benjamin’s puppet of historical materialism who “enlist[s] the services of the one who is operating it, who is literally pulling its strings,” speaks to the way in which praise precedes the subject who utters it, such that the latter appears as an aftereffect of the former.⁵ For Mladen Dolar, Benjamin’s parable speaks to the way in which “the thinking machine was but an extension of the speaking machine,” revealing the secret of thought itself, in a sense, to be “thoughtless.”⁶

Such is the role of the “voice object” as Dolar theorizes it in A Voice and Nothing More. The voice, rather than being a source or vehicle of meaning, is instead its ocassion. Dolar begins, with Jacques Lacan, with the example of the infant’s scream:

The first scream [he writes] may be caused by pain, by the need for food, by frustration and anxiety, but the moment the other hears it, the moment it assumes the place of the addressee, the moment the other is provoked and interpellated by it, the moment it responds to it, scream retroactively turns into appeal, it is interpreted, endowed with meaning, it is transformed into a speech addressed to the other, it assumes the first function of speech: to address the other and elicit an answer.⁷

The voice demonstrates the way in which “the presymbolic acquires its value only through opposition to the symbolic, and is thus itself laden with signification precisely by virtue of being non-signifying.”⁸ This comes into view in the dialectical relationship described by Lacan between demand and desire: desire only comes into view as the surplus of demand over need, coming to occupy the space between particular demands and their apparent fulfillment. As Lacan puts it, for the infant, a demand is a “demand for a presence or an absence;” it reveals the way in which the Other is “situated some way short of any needs which it might gratify.” But it’s precisely in this falling short that the demand’s particularity takes on meaning: for the child, the presence of the mother becomes itself a “proof of love,” and for the (m)other the scream is received as a demand, it elicits a response. The “voice itself, the scream,” Dolar writes, “is already an attempt at interpretation,”⁹ initiating an encounter whose subsequent unfolding provides its impetus.

In other words, the “voice object” speaks to the non-identity between language and its vehicle, and there is an important sense in which the meaningless objecthood of the sound of the voice itself speaks both to the limits of our ability to achieve unmediated communication with the other and the ways in which it paradoxically enables us to have meaningful exchanges in the first place. My scream doesn’t take on meaning until it is answered: my discomfort gets transformed into a demand not by me but by the one who grants their presence in response to that scream. Rather than itself testifying to the presence of a self-knowing and self-contained subject, the voice speaks to a rupture in the subject, who is never fully “present” on its own as a self-contained “being” but is always anticipating, always being pulled along the chain of signification. “We are in the world,” as Leo Bersani once described, “as the psychic droppings that will be identified as” what Lacan called the “little object,” continually occassioned by those those objects as they come stammeringly into being along the procession of discourse.¹⁰

The little clergeon’s habits precede him: every day he walks to school he passes an image of Mary, and whenever he passes an image of Mary he kneels and says his Ave Maria and goes on his way. Eventually, in school, the child begins to learn Alma redemptoris mater from his primer, studying it until he’s memorized the first verse. Not knowing what the Latin words mean, he asks an older schoolmate to explain what the song is about. The other student tells him that the song is a prayer to the Virgin but he too, doesn’t understand Latin: “‘I lerne song; I kan but smal grammeere’” (534-36). Having been taught to show particular reverence for the Virgin by his single mother, the mere mention of Mary is sufficient to goad the child into determining to learn the rest of the song.

At the center of this setup is the emphasis on routine, repetition, and ritual; the little clergeon is passionate about having a habitus, and takes to singing the song twice a day, every day, on his way back and forth from school. The poem takes a certain pleasure in repetition in the first part of this little vita in miniature: there’s the repetition of “little” – the “litel scole,” the “litel child” with his “litel book lernynge” – as well as the emphasis on habit and doing things by rote – the memorization of songs, the routine of walking through the Jewish ghetto every day to go to school.

In his essay “Pedagogy, Violence and the Subject of Music,” Bruce Holsinger in particular has called attention to how the child’s repetition of the hymn puts him at odds with the disciplinary regime of the school, as many music educators in the fourteenth century were discouraging learning song through rote memorization as opposed to the more disciplined musical study of solmization. The boy vows to memorize the song by Christmas, though, even at risk of being “beaten thrice in an hour” by his schoolmaster, in order to honor the Virgin:

His felawe taughte hym homward priveley
Fro day to day, til he koude it by rote
And thanne he song it wel and boldely,
Fro word to word, acordynge with the note.
Twies a day it passed thurgh his throte,
To scoleward and homward whan he wente;
On Cristes mooder set was his entente (544-50).

The word “throte” appears four times in the short tale; only in the stanza above is it used as an end word, rhyming, here, with “rote” and “note,” and, ironically, the song quite literally becoming stuck in the child’s throat. The Jews, apparently sick of hearing the child skipping through their neighborhood singing a hymn to the Virgin Mary, are goaded by “the serpent Satan” to kill the little clergeon, cutting his throat and throwing him in a latrine.

Eglentyne’s warning to the Jews characterizes the crime in terms of its impossibility of being contained: “Mordre wol out, certeyn, it wol not faille, / And namely ther th’onour of God shal sprede; / The blood out crieth on your cursed dede” (574, 576-8). When the child doesn’t return home, his mother searches tirelessly for him, going door to door and asking every Jew in the quarter if they’ve seen him:

They said seyde “nay”; but Jhesu of his grace
Yaf in hir thoght inwith a litel space
That in that place after hir sone she cryde,
Where he was casten in a pit bisyde (603-6).

There’s a striking temporal compression that seems to occur in these lines: Jesus whispers in the mother’s ear, we suppose, where her child’s corpse lies; this happens upon her exhausting the ghetto of Jews to implore and, presumably, walking past the latrine in which he’s been disposed. Curiously, line 605 (“That in that place after her son she cried”) – the referent of the inaugural “that,” which is presumably the revelation of the child’s location – is elided: Christ puts – something – in the mother’s thought within a “little space” which coincides exactly with her coming within physical proximity to the latrine in which her child’s corpse has been disposed. It’s at this point that she emits a cry and the cry is answered, as the child’s corpse sits upright and bursts into song despite its presumably severed vocal chords.

One thing that distinguishes the representation of the child’s death from some of Chaucer’s other death writing such as in the Book of the Duchess and the Pardoner’s Tale is that rather than being stolen from view by the scaffolding of the fiction, here it’s dramatically staged, ritualized and witnessed, as the local Christians gather around the scene and carry the singing corpse to the nearest abbey. When the abbot sprinkles holy water on the child, he recounts a vision of the Virgin placing a “grain” on his tongue, instructing him to continue singing until it is removed. Having been “translated” to a proper burial site, the abbot gently removes the grain from his tongue, allowing his soul to ascend. What Heather Blurton and Hannah Johnson have called “the ritual production of the miracle” is at least as central to the narrative as the murder itself, and both elements – miracle and murder – are inextricably linked by a body that refuses to remain hidden.

There’s an insistently circular logic at play here: the hymn serves as both the cause of the child’s death and means of his discovery, instantiating one form of sacrifice and retroactively transforming it into another. The metaphor of crying blood that can’t be contained, too, poses a notable contrast with the Prioress’s own portrait in the General Prologue, in which her prim table manners suggest an aversion to spilling and waste. It’s in this respect that the Prioress’s characterization may have as much of the maternal as the childish. Readings of the poem have often emphasized its relationship to a liturgical culture in which adults were often explicitly encouraged to identify as children in their subordination to religious authority,¹¹ but within the text, too, is an economy of circulating blood and milk and “grains.” The insistent return of the body, of the blood that won’t be silenced, excludes the Jews from this insular economy by suggesting their inability to contain – or properly consume – its circulating objects.

As Salisbury points out, in the burial of the clergion it’s the “affective puissance of the child” that comes to the fore: “the child makes the action happen, [she writes] moves the adults to pay attention to the child’s needs and remember what it was like to be a child. When one of the precepts of this culture is for adults to become like children, it signals the value of childhood by exposing the sacrificial economy in which a child lives” (106). This sacrificial economy is vividly illustrated with the initial call and response between mother and child. Here, it isn’t the child who emits the initial demanding cry, but the mother, and it’s the child’s voice which returns the proof of love in the form of the hymn to the Mother.

Part of what’s so remarkable about this scene is that the tautological economy in which God performs his own praise “by mouth of innocentz” sutures an alien voice-object to the body of the child. In psychoanalytic terms, the child functions here as the substitute for the mother’s objet a or symptom, a situation in which the child serves the function of subordinating their own particularity to the embodiment of the what the mother finds lacking in the father and, in the process, as Lacan puts it, “alienates in himself all possible access by the mother to her own truth through giving it body […].”¹² Lacan’s account of the child-as-object recalls Sándor Ferenczi’s reflection on the “dream of the wise baby” described to him by one patient in his 1932 essay on the “Confusion of Tongues between the Adults and the Child”, in which the child, perversely, survives an abusive relation with the parents by identifying herself with them, and, in a sense, becomes their psychiatrist. The child, here, is objectified insofar as she is made to be a symptom of the abusive structure of the family itself.

What I’d like to suggest here is that our perspective on the function and agency of the child may begin to look quite different when we shift our perspective back from the altar to the shitter. Part of what this entails may involve insisting on a distinction between the child’s agency and the voice-object which occasions his sacrifice.

cited