Narrative Features of Chaucer S Dream Poetry: the Book of the Duchess (C

Huxtable

Narrative Features of Chaucer’s Dream Poetry: The Book of the Duchess (c.1369-70), The House of Fame (c. mid 1370s), and The Parliament of Fowls (c.1382)

(Unless otherwise mentioned, all quotations and page references are to Helen Philips and Nick Havely, eds. Chaucer’s Dream Poetry. London: Longman-Pearson, 1997 or to Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1988. Standard abbreviations of texts are BD, HF, and PF.)

General

Of the narrative plan in BD:

“Chaucer is using the fictional dream, a genre often associated in medieval literature, from the Roman de la Rose onwards, with unrequited desire for a beautiful lady, for a poem of mourning and commemoration, to express love and longing for a lady who is unobtainable because she is dead.” (Phillips, 30.)

Of HF as a work of translation:

“ ‘In the end all poetry’ (according to one Romantic poet and critic [F. Novalis, 1797]) ‘is translation’ – yet of these … dream poems HF is the one that, in several senses, is more of a translation than the others. To say this is not to attempt to rouse again the hoary old question of whether HF is the Daunte in Ynglissh with which Lydgate later, and rather enigmatically, credited Chaucer – but rather to suggest that the poem could usefully be seen in relation to the various translation projects of its author and its time.” (Havely, 119.)

Of PF as comic education:

“The Parliament of Fowls is surely the most delightful – and possibly the first – celebration of St. Valentine’s Day ever written. (…) with a slightly comic narrator … like the Geoffrey Chaucer in the HF, is a student, rather than a practitioner, of the art of love, eagerly reading in the hope of learning a “certeyn thing.”” (Benson, 383.)

Of Dream Theory

From C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image (1964) on dreams in the Middle Ages:

“To a modern reader what Macrobius [4th – 5th century, commentary on the Somnium Scipionis] has to say about dreams (I, iii) will not seem a very important item in his commentary; the Middle Ages must have thought differently, since it is clearly to this section that he owes the title Ornicensis or Onocresius which follows his name in some manuscripts and is there explained as quasi somniorum iudex or somniorum interpres (…) His scheme is derived from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus (first century AD). According to it there are five species of dreams, three veridical, and two which have ‘no divination’ (nihil divinationis) in them The veridical kinds are as follows:

(1)Somnium (őνειρος). This shows us truths veiled in an allegorical form. Pharaoh’s dream of the fat and the lean kine would be a specimen. Every allegorical dream-poem in the Middle Ages records a feigned somnium. Nearly all dreams are assumed to be somnia by modern psychologists, and the somnium is the ‘dreem’ in Chaucer’s Hous of Fame, I,9.

(2)Visio (őραμα). This is a direct, literal pre-vision of the future. Mr. Dunnes’s Experiment with Time is mainly about visiones. This type appears as ‘avisioun’ in Chaucer (op. cit. I,7).

(3)Oraculum (χρηματισμός). In this one of the dreamer’s parents or ‘some other grave and venerable person’ appears and openly declares the future or gives advice. Such dreams are Chaucer’s ‘oracles’ (op. Cit. I,11).

The useless kinds are:

(1)Insomnium (ένύπνιον). This merely repeats working preoccupations – ‘the carter dremeth how his cartes goon’ as Chaucer says (Parlement, 102).

(2)Visum (φάντασμα). This occurs when, not fully asleep and believing ourselves to be still awake, we see shapes rushing towards us or flitting hither and thither. Epialtes or nightmare is included in this class. Chaucer’s ‘fantom’ is clearly the visum (Hous of Fame, I,II), and his ‘sweven’ is presumably an insomnium. This is more likely than the alternative equation (‘dreem’ for visum and ‘sweven’ for somnium) in view of the contempt with which Dame Pertelote speaks of ‘swevenes’ in B 4111-13; she was a well-educated bird and knew both physic and the Distychs of Dionysius Cato.

A dream may combine the characters of more than one species…” (Lewis, 63-64.)

BD’s bewildered narrator on the necessity of sleep and his ‘sorwful ymagynacioun’:

For I have felynge in nothynge,

But as yt were a mased thynge,

Always in poynt to falle adoun.

For sorwful ymagynacioun

Ys always hooly in my mynde.

And wel ye woote, agaynes Kynde

Hyt were to lyven in thys wyse,

For Nature wolde nat suffyse

To noon erthely creature

Nat longe tyme to endure

Withoute slepe, and be in sorwe.

And I ne may, ne nyght ne morwe,

Slepe, and thys melancolye

And drede I have for to dye:

(BD 11-24, pp50-1)

In BD the narrator sets himself up as miserable and confused, but not (genre) from unrequited love. He uses and thwarts the romance poetical expectations of his audience to reach deeper levels of interest. For this poem he sets up a formula regarding sleep and dreaming: sleep is of life: healthy, natural, bodily, positive; dreaming is of death: sickly, unnatural, mental, negative. Freedom from anxiety is then a union of opposites – dreaming becoming sleeping, life becoming death. Such is the dilemma of the Black Knight:

'I have of sorwe so grete wone

That joy gete I never none,

Now that I see my lady bryght,

Which I have loved with al my myght,

Is fro me ded and ys agoon,

And thus in sorowe lefte me alone.

Allas, Dethe, what ayleth the,

That thou noldest have taken me,

Whan thou toke my lady swete

That was so faire, so fresh, so fre,

So goode that men may wel se

Of al goodenesse she had no mete.'

(BD 475-486, pp72-3)

The HF Narrator’s jovial perplexity regarding the technicalities of the subject of dreams; his dedication of them to God, and his offering of best wishes to those who might be experts in the field:

God turne us every dreme to goode!

For hyt is wonder, be the Roode,

To my wytte, what causeth swevenes

Eyther on morwes or on evenes,

And why th’effecte folweth of some

And of some hit shal never come;

Why that is an avision

And why this a revelacion,

Why this a dreme, why that a swevene,

And noght to every man lyche evene –

(BD 1-10, p126)

But that oure flessh ne hath no myght

To understonde hyt aryght,

For hyt is warned to derkly.

But why the cause is noght wot I.

Well worth of this thyng grete clerkys

That trete of this and other werkes –

For I of noon oppinion

Nyl as now make mensyon,

But oonly that the holy Roode

Turne us every dreme to goode!

(BD 49-54, p128)

The narrator’s tone is light, notwithstanding the uniquely Christian invocation (see below), setting up a very different attitude towards the mysteries of the dream world. Two themes that Chaucer follows and plays with in HF are thence the inconclusivity and interpretability of meaning in dreams – along with the importance of authoritative sources. The mixture of classical and contemporary sources that he employs serve different ends in his project. Perhaps the most straightforward end being that of setting up the vernacular as a viable medium for public art.

The PF narrator’s introduction of his dream of Love via his divorce from real ‘dedes’:

For, al be that I knowe not Love in dede,

Ne wote how he quyteth folke her hire,

Yet hapeth me ful ofte in bokis rede

Of hys miracles and of his cruelle yre.

There rede I wel he wol be lorde and sire.

I dar nat seyn – hys strokes ben so sore –

But ‘God save suche a lorde! I kan no more.

Of usage, what for luste, what for lore,

On bookes rede I ofte as I yow tolde.

But why that I speke al this? – nat yore

Agon hit happed me for to beholde

Upon a booke was write wyth lettres olde,

And therupon, a certeyn thing to lerne,

The longe day ful fast I rad and yearne.

(PF 8-21, p233)

Chaucer seems to be having a joke at his own expense, or is there a more serious point? He who reads and writes of Love has not its knowledge in he same way as that of experience – perhaps another parallel between the waking life and the life of dreams. The rewards of the life of study and poetic writing are lightly advocated (again possibly ironic) when the narrator introduces his dream conversation with Africanus as a species of Insomnium, in that his working preoccupation simply comes to haunt his sleep:

The wery hunter, slepynge in hysbed,

To woode ayeine hys mynde gooth anoon;

The juge dremeth how hys plees ben sped;

The cartar dremeth how his carte is gon;

The ryche of golde; the knyght fyght with his fone;

The seke met he drynketh of the tonne;

The lover meteth he hath hys lady wonne.

Can I not seyne, yf that the cause were

For I redde had of Aufrikan beforne

That made me to mette that he stood there, (…)

(PF 99-108, pp237-8)

Indeed, Africanus himself makes light of his ‘olde booke totorne’ as if to discredit the entire project of writing as a means of true living.

Of sinning in dreams

One last point about dream based narrative is the opportunity it (perhaps) provided for Chaucer to write material that he might have had problems with in his own conscience. He basic excuse, as such, being that one is not responsible for sinful behaviour in one’s dreams, and so by simply reporting such behaviour one is also excusable. (I am thinking of Chaucer’s retraction at the end of CT and his general Christianization of Pagan mythologies and tales and adaptation of racy Italian sources like Boccaccio.) The ‘sinless dreams’ clause can be found in here in BD:

…I swore hir this:

‘For youres is alle that ever ther ys

For evermore, myn herte swete,

And never to false yow (but I mete)

I nyl, as wysse God helpe me so.’

(BD 1231-4, pp103-4)

3. Of Beginnings and Ends

Points of interest:

Invocation of the Muses in PF. First vernacular writing this neo- classical motif (?)
Mention of Dante by name in HF (I,450)
Christian dedication of HF (1-2)
Closure of BD = narrator awakens to write up his dream
Closure of HF = unfinished, but having entered House of Renown, fools are everywhere.
Closure of PF = the decision is postponed, the narrator awakens and returns to his books.