NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Writing the Rites of the Goddess Fame: The Divinely Comical Conversion of Geoffrey Chaucer

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Field of English

By

Anne Victoria Sullivan

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

December 2007

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© Copyright by Anne Victoria Sullivan 2007 All Rights Reserved

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ABSTRACT

Writing the Rites of the Goddess Fame: The Divinely Comical Conversion of Geoffrey Chaucer

Anne Victoria Sullivan

Geoffrey Chaucer’s early work, The House of Fame, is by recent critical consensus a

secular poem with secular concerns, a quirky dream vision that charts the narrator’s fantastic,

eagle-borne ascent to the “hous” of the goddess Fame (she who governs and embodies the dual

meaning of “fame”—both singular “fame” and plural “tidings”), mediating with both skepticism

and exuberance on such topics as the poet’s responsibilities, the poet’s access to truth, and the

creation and “multiplicacioun” of texts and stories through the process of reading books by

famous men and listening and participating in everyday talk (gossip or “tidings”). Although

scholars have always noted the poem’s playful allusions to Dante’s Divine Comedy, critics of the

poem have, for the most part, concluded that these allusions, occurring within a purportedly

lighthearted secular poem, suggest only a purely humorous and ironic relationship to Dante’s

lofty Christian poem. A notable exception is B.G. Koonce whose 1966 study used the moralistic

“patristic exegesis” of D.W. Robertson, Jr. to argue that The House of Fame is a Christian poem

closely modeled after Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Like Koonce’s study, this dissertation will

offer an intensely Christian reading of Chaucer’s poem; however, in stark contrast to Koonce’s

ideologically conservative Christian vision and his corresponding patriarchal hermeneutics, my

dissertation, inspired by the Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek’s radical reading of Pauline

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Christianity, will present a psychoanalytically informed, thoroughly “post-Robertsonian”

Christian interpretation of Chaucer’s poem, and, beyond that, Chaucer’s Christian vision. Like

Žižek, I conceive of the Christian subject in terms of a “breakout” from the patriarchal symbolic

order and Christian charity in terms of “feminine” subjectivity and “feminine” jouissance.

Reflecting The House of Fame’s brilliant and uncannily profound intertextuality, my book-by-

book thematic close reading of the poem will tangle out the relationship of Chaucer’s radical,

goddess-and-tidings-blessed Christianity to foundational texts such as Augustine’s Confessions,

Virgil’s Aeneid, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, the Bible, and, above all, Dante’s Divine

Comedy, with special emphasis on Dante and Chaucer’s Christian rewriting of the pagan

classical cosmos via their respectively sublime and “divinely comical” incarnational

astronomical poetics.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Heartfelt thanks to Professor Regina M. Schwartz whose courage and generous

understanding of the world and its nature carried my spirit, and to trustworthy committee

members, Prof. Edward W. Muir and Prof. Susan E. Phillips of Northwestern University and

Prof. Patricia A. Dailey of Columbia University, my sincerest gratitude. Thanks as well to other

Northwestern University and University of California at Davis professors, fellow students and

friends. A daughter’s thanks to my beloved parents, Roger and Blanche Sullivan, for nurturing

my love of learning and my curiosity of the world and beyond, and to my second mother, Lenore

Saltzman, for never doubting my ability; loving thanks to my dear sister and brother-in-law,

Janie Sullivan and Dave Gilhooly and their daughters Haley, Leslie, and Heather Flood and

family for unconditional love and renewal, as well as to Kevin Sullivan, Bill and Piper Sullivan,

Michael Sullivan, Jim Sullivan, David Saltzman and Heidi Joseph, my other supportive brothers,

brothers-in-law, and sisters-in-law and family in California and in New Jersey; thanks to my dear

and treasured friend of many years, Walter Masuda, who lightens my heart with laughter and

who frequently traveled long miles to keep me company on this journey, and to friends Erica

Kresch and Ellie Shunko, the keepers of levity, prospective and documents; to Brad Perri, kindly

reader, and to Laurie McCartan who, like an angel of providence, appeared to ensure that I

crossed the finish line; and above all, to Bobbie Saltzman whose bright hope and boundless love

make every day blessed.

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For my beautiful mother, Blanche C. Sullivan

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT 3

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 5

DEDICATION 6

CHAPTER I A Brief Introduction 9

CHAPTER II The Boy/Girl Voice of Augustine’s Confessions 27

CHAPTER III Virgil’s Dido and “Wikke Fame” 53

CHAPTER IV Chaucer’s Golden Eagle 99

CHAPTER V The Consolation and Revelation of the Goddess Fame 151

What Chaucer Knows: The Miracle of Lady 155 Philosophy’s Dark and Humble Origins

Geffrey as Christian Visionary: Love and the 188 Last Judgment of the Goddess Fame

Matristic Exegesis: Taking a Leaf from 211 Chaucer’s Fame

CHAPTER VI Chaucerian Integumentum: The Incarnational 229 Astronomy of an “Elvyssh” Poet

Geffrey’s Dreamwork “Manifesto”: 232 First Things First

As the Jovian Eagle Sets, the Goddess 251 Fame Rises: Chaucer the Star-Gazer Reads Canto 9 of Dante’s Purgatorio

Reading by the Starry Light of Chaucer’s 281 Fame: Dante’s Lucia and the End of The Canterbury Tales

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CHAPTER VII Christianizing the Pagan Milky Way: 295 The Dreamwork of Chaucer’s Whirling Wicker and the Vision of Dante’s Rose

The Proper Milky Ways of the Law: 305 Cicero and John of Salisbury’s Flight from the Scorpion

From Phaethon-Adam to Phaethon-Christ: 319 Traversing the Fundamental Fantasy with Dante and Chaucer Arrival at the Center: The Whirling Wicker, 340 the Rose, and Two Final Visions of Love

NOTES 385

WORKS CITED 406

CURRICULUM VITAE 418

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CHAPTER I

A Brief Introduction

“God turne us every drem to goode!” With this humble little prayer, Chaucer’s dream

vision poem, The House of Fame begins. But how does the Chaucerian narrator—our “dreamer”-

- speak it? Does he speak these words with faith and joyful certainty, or perhaps does he blurt

them out carelessly, desperately, with a quick, “Oh, well” sigh of resignation and little real hope

in what he says? As most readers of the poem will immediately agree, the narrator’s words that

directly--and endlessly--follow suggest a mind characterized much more by doubt than faith: in a

tour-de-force, fifty-two line sentence of rambling, obsessive-compulsive anxiety, the vacillating

narrator, as if thinking out loud to himself rather to an audience, restlessly wonders and wonders

and wonders about the meaning and current “expert” classification and terminology of dreams

(i.e. what all the “grete clerkys” say). Piling one clause on an after another, the dazed narrator is

apparently so overwhelmed and confused by his bookish knowledge about dreams that he can no

longer evaluate the worth of various dream theories or integrate what he has learned with his

own experience. Like the prototypical student cramming the night before the big exam,

everything is all a blur, a jumble of “whys” without a hope of an answer, an endless seesaw of

“ors” (tellingly, eight lines of the narrator’s sentence begin with “or”):

Why that is an avision

And why this a revelacion,

Why this a drem, why that a sweven,

And noght to every man lyche even;

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Why this a fantome, why these oracles,

I not . .. (7-12, italics mine)

As Sheila Delany observes, “One’s first reaction to this extended dubitatio may be amusement,

but the cumulative impression created by its piled-up clauses is of futility: it is hopeless to think

of ascertaining the truth about dreams” (41). What then is the point of all this unenlightening

regurgitation? Implicitly, for our poet-narrator at least, his hapless navigation of the sea of

current scholarly opinion concerning dreams is not purposeless but driven by his unspoken hope

or wish to fit his singular dream of “the tenthe day now of Decembre” (63) into an authoritative

system of dream interpretation--a wish tied to his dim recognition that he must “follow the

rules,” the “rule” here being that, as a writer of a proper dream vision poem, he must first

persuade his audience of the visionary authority of dreams.1

Yet this judgment and labeling or classification of his dream (and thus, his poem) by the

symbolic Other (the erudite “grete clerkys”) is no easy matter, for, in some sense, as the anxious

narrator recognizes, it inevitably implies the judgment and labeling or classification of the

narrator himself as subject. As the semantics of the evocative first line of the poem—“God turne

us every drem to goode”—mysteriously hints and indeed performs, the narrator’s faith in the

transformative power of God is inextricably related to its dialectical opposite, his fearful

apprehension of the lethal judgment of the symbolic Other.

To understand how this is so, I propose that we must read the words of Chaucer’s first

line fully in time, imagining them as spoken (as perhaps Chaucer’s original audience received

them) rather than taken in through the quick, masterful eye at one glance. Although “drem” not

“us” is the actual grammatical object of the subjunctive verb “turne,” we only understand the line

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this way after it is spoken in full. That is, when the first line is read out loud, one word at a

time, we first—if only for the tiniest of intervals--understand the object of “ turne” to be “us.”

Thus, by way of the “stumbling block” of mortal time—the passing of individual words through

the air—“us” and “every drem” are conflated as grammatical objects, and God’s hoped-for act of

turning or converting “us” thus becomes mysteriously intertwined with God’s act of translating

each and every particular creation or “drem” of ours to “goode.”2 How will or can this

translation “to goode” take place? The rhyme of the following line supplies an answer (an

answer that will be repeated by the narrator after his fifty-two line sentence): not simply “by

Christ,” but, more specifically and precisely, “be the roode” (or, as the narrator later says in line

57, “the holy roode”), through the saving Cross of Christ: through the incarnational cross of time

and eternity, the Passion of embodiment, God’s transformative grace—resignifying (and thus

shattering) all hegemonic distinctions--can make “every drem” and every human being an

instrument for the good. Although his faith in this transformation seems at this point only half-

hearted, the bewildered narrator nevertheless dimly understands that his simple opening prayer

holds some key to his enlightenment and redemption—both as man and poet; thus, clutching his

wondrous dream, he recites the same words (“turne us every drem to goode”) at the end of his

anxious and poorly digested summation of dream theory, his verbal talisman, as it were, against

the “grete clerkys” and their would-be tidy categories.

But just as the potential semantic ambiguity of the first line (i.e. the temporally-based

conflation of “us” and “drem” as the object of “turne”) hints at the divine cure of the narrator’s

anxiety, it, at the same time, also hints at its worldly cause. That is, the line’s ambiguous

conflation or intertwining of “us” and “drem” evokes not only the promise that God can heal and

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transform both--and indeed does so through the very intertwining of “us” and “drem”-- but

also, when the line is read without faith (i.e. without truly accepting God as the grammatical

subject of the sentence), the pernicious idea that “us” and “drem” are simply ontologically

interchangeable in some thing-like way, and, worse yet, in some manner, fixed-- in the narrator’s

case, that he is nothing more than what he creates or produces for other human subjects, or, more

precisely, nothing more than how the earthly symbolic Other (the “grete clerkys”) chooses to

label and categorize his dream. The narrator’s anxious attitude (here, and, as we see later see, in

Book I) shows that he, much like the “Fame”-fearing Dido of Book I, is much more preoccupied

with this pernicious dread of being judged by the symbolic Other than he is consoled by his self-

professed faith that, for “the goode,” God can “translate” (“turne”) “every drem”—implicitly

even the most seemingly shoddiest of people and human creations--“to the goode.” In

psychoanalytic terms, the “endless” fifty-two line sentence of the Proem in and of itself suggests

a classic obsessional strategy, the refusal to come to the end, a refusal to come to judgment.

Punctuated with passive-aggressive, rhetorical shrugs of “I not” (12) and “noght wot I” (52), the

oddly spacey ruminations of the “obtuse” narrator are, in this sense, a sophisticated stalling

tactic, a way for the anxious narrator to elude the finalizing judgment of the authoritative “grete

clerkys” via the very act of appearing to bow to the superior wisdom of their various theories and

distinctions.

Read in this way, the Chaucerian narrator’s problem—what ultimately makes him so

comically “inept” and bewildered--is thus not the impersonal, lofty philosophical problem of

ascertaining “truth in general” (as most critics of the poem claim) but something more potently

significant, something that is at once universal and lethally personal, namely, the subject’s

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anxiety in the face of the dreaded, seemingly all-powerful, final judgment of the symbolic

Other. Rather than being a stretch, this reading of the Proem-narrator as anxious about being

judged by the Other is, I submit, strongly validated by the ensuing content of the narrator’s

“dream”: The House of Fame, is, after all, a dream-vision poem that specifically meditates on the

power of “wikke Fame” (the “wicked” voice of the Other that can potentially kill names and

reputations)—and does so in part through Book III’s extended parody of the Christian Last

Judgment. More immediately, within the Proem itself, the narrator’s underlying anxiety about

being judged by the Other comes to the forefront through his defensive, comically

overcompensating, grandiose claim about the superior uniqueness of his dream (59-65), and,

even more dramatically and humorously, through the directly following Invocation to Book I, a

passage that showcases a narrator so desperate to insure the successful reception of his poem that

he haphazardly and opportunistically juxtaposes an invocation to a pagan god (Morpheus, the

god of sleep and dreams) with an apparent entreaty to the Christian God (“he that mover ys of al,

/ That is and was and ever shal,” 81-2) and even resorts to bribing and threatening his audience

with fantastically impotent blessings and curses. With his comically effusive blessings on the

“good reader” (those who “take hit wel and skorne hyt noght / ne hyt msydemen in her thoght,”

91-2) and corresponding curse on “bad readers” (those who, for example, “hyt mysdemen in her

thought / Thorgh malicious entencion,” 92-3), the narrator truly and literally plays God to allay

his anxiety, seeming to parody at least two biblical models, namely, Jehovah’s similarly over-

the-top (and similarly conditional) “blessings and curses” upon the people of Israel in Deut. 28,

and, in Revelation (significantly, the book of Judgment, the “last words” of the Christian Bible),

John’s initial kindly blessing upon well-intentioned, right-minded reader/hearer of his vision in

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Rev. 1.3 and corresponding curse, at the end of the book, upon the evil-minded reader/hearer

who distorts his vision, who “adds to” or “takes away from” his words. In short, however

comically he presents himself, the unknowing (“noght wot I”), bumbling Chaucerian narrator—

much like Jehovah and visionary John—seeks to control the wayward or “evil-minded” reader,

to render his “dream” and words inviolable from anyone who would “mysdemen” them.3

As one might expect, in a more traditionally feminist-psychoanalytic reading of

Chaucer’s poem, the narrator’s comically grandiose attempt to control the reception of his

poem—along with his obsessional attempt to elude final judgment—is typically interpreted as a

masculine strategy by which the masculine subject empowers himself and his “brothers” via the

denigration and control of “feminine” otherness (whether in terms of historical women or the

“feminine” letter). This seems to be the conclusion of Karma Lochrie, whose 1999 book, Covert

Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy, includes a chapter-length reading of the poem. As I

do, Lochrie interprets the Chaucerian narrator’s repeated statements of ignorance and confusion

(“noght wot I”) as a kind of defense mechanism; that is, rather than taking such statements

merely at face value and identifying with them as a natural response to the radical indeterminacy

of human knowledge, Lochrie argues that this pose of “unknowing” is a strategy, a way for the

narrator to block out anxiety-inducing “knowledge.” Beyond this point, however, the reading of

the narrator (and The House of Fame in general) Lochrie presents diverges significantly from the

one I will offer. Like other noted contemporary feminist critics of Chaucer (e.g. Elaine Tuttle

Hansen and Louise Fradenburg), Lochrie eyes the seeming androgyny of the Chaucerian narrator

(as well as his sympathy for women) skeptically. Tying the narrator’s bewilderment about

dreams to his later self-professed ignorance of sexual love (see lines 245-8), Lochrie proposes

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that what the anxious Proem-narrator’s desires “not to know” is not, as I have suggested, the

finalizing judgment of the patriarchal “grete clerkys,” but instead the threatening sexual

knowledge of the feminine Other; accordingly, much like Hansen, Lochrie reads the narrator as

seeking to define himself (and larger symbolic world of masculine Art) against Woman, though,

unlike Hansen, Lochrie, frames her analysis of the narrator’s masculine/masculinist stance

against Woman in more theoretical, i.e. less empirical, terms, that is, in Lochrie’s reading, the

narrator as male artist seeks at once to define his art against the “feminine” knowledge of sexual

secrets that fuels the lesser world of gossip (the world of Fame and the whirling wicker) and, at

the same time, to indulge—under cover of “sympathy”—in his own enlarging gossip about

women like Dido without taking responsibility for his own wagging tongue. Or, in other words,

beware: the Chaucerian narrator of The House of Fame (and perhaps Chaucer himself) is no

friend of Woman but a weasel and a pervert, in essence, the worst kind of masculine subject, the

cynic who, like Chaucer’s creepy and diabolical Pardoner, selfishly and hegemonically keeps up

the pretense of the Law only in order to get his “kicks,” to further his own carnivalesque “queer”

rebellion. 4

What Lochrie’s reading of course leaves out is the narrator’s repeated appeal to the

Christian God to “turne us every drem to goode.” This is no surprise, given that the

overwhelming majority of critics, just like Lochrie, take little or no stock in the Christian

valences of The House of Fame, choosing to read the poem as a fundamentally secular piece.5

Moreover, like other critics whose work is informed by an eclectic mix of ideologically

progressive theories and principles (feminist, psychoanalytic, queer, Marxist, etc.), Lochrie reads

the poem’s narrator strictly as a subject of the patriarchal symbolic order. Indeed, I would hazard

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a guess that even if Lochrie did take the Christian valences of Chaucer’s poem seriously, her

feminist critique of the male narrator would not change significantly since, in keeping with

Carolyn Dinshaw’s conflation of Christian exegesis and allegory with “patriarchal hermeneutics”

(see first chapter of Dinshaw’s Chaucer Sexual Poetics)—as well as the general tendency among

the “grete clerkys” of contemporary theory to be wary of anything that smacks of

“transcendence”—it is, I think, common for progressively minded critics to view the medieval

Christian hermeneutical paradigm (the paradigm associated with foundational male Christian

writers such as Augustine and Paul) as more or less pervasively and unassailably patriarchal, as

essentially in sync with the hegemonic, heteronormative logic (the “Law”) of the patriarchal

symbolic order.

Fortunately, there now exist a few dissenting voices among the “grete clerkys” of

progressive contemporary theory, one of which is Slavoj Žižek, a Lacanian theorist whose

radical, philosophical-psychoanalytic recovery of Christianity in recent works such as The

Fragile Absolute (2000), On Belief (2001), and The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003) has inspired

my own analysis of and indeed “defense” of the Christian hermeneutical paradigm in this

dissertation, in essence giving me the authorizing intellectual forum and tools to help me

explicate not only the nuanced language of Chaucer’s quietly radical, “divinely comical”

Christianity but also what I see as Chaucer’s profound Christian intertexuality, his peculiar,

uncanny genius for illuminating or encapsulating “après-coup” the radical Christian truth that

drives and animates the texts and textual conversions of the great Christian writers who came

before him: Augustine, Boethius, Dante. 6

According to Žižek’s reading of Christianity, Christian subjectivity (for Žižek, the

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subjectivity affirmed in the writings of Saint Paul) constitutes a radical break or “unplugging”

from the patriarchal symbolic order. As such, Christian “unplugging” is an inherently anti-

humanist act; commenting on Paul’s bracing declaration in 2 Corinthians 5: 16-17 (“From now

on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ

from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there

is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”), Žižek

associates Christian “unplugging” (or “uncoupling”) with the death drive (thereby implicitly

linking Christian love or charity not to the harmonizing, ego-based identifications of the

Lacanian imaginary but to the transpersonal, truth-speaking yet paradoxically “unpresentable”

register of trauma and plenitude that Lacan calls “the real”):

In this ‘uncoupling’, the neighbor is thus reduced to a singular member of the

community of believers (of the ‘Holy Ghost’)—to use the Althusserian –Lacanian

opposition, it is not the symbolic subject who is reduced to the ‘real’ individual, it is the

individual (in all the wealth of his ‘personality’) who is reduced to the singular point of

subjectivity; as such, ‘uncoupling’ does actually involve a ‘symbolic death’—one has to

‘die for the law’ (Saint Paul) that regulates our tradition, our social ‘substance’. The term

‘new creation’ is revealing her, signaling the gesture of sublimation, of erasing the traces

of one’s past (‘everything old has passed away’) and beginning afresh from a zero-point:

consequently, there is also a terrifying violence at work in this ‘uncoupling’, that of the

death drive, of the radical ‘wiping the slate clean’ as the condition of the New Beginning.

(The Fragile Absolute 127)7

But isn’t Žižek “death drive” Christianity—as a feminist reader may rightly ask--simply a

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recasting of the all-too-familiar barren violence of masculine transcendence into a shiny new

supposedly “radical” vocabulary? Having considered this question carefully myself, I believe

that Žižek’s Lacanian take on the Christian subject does offer something new by way of his

insistent alignment of the ethical with the radically “feminine” (i.e. not the conventional

“feminine” that ideally complements the “masculine” in the familiar opposition of the sexes but

the “feminine” that, in some sense, escapes the imaginary schema of the heterornormative

“dream of Eros”). In a chapter appropriately entitled “The Breakout” in The Fragile Absolute

(143ff), Žižek characterizes the revolutionary newness of Christianity—exemplified, in this

discussion, by Christianity’s divergence from the Judaism that came before it-- as “the passage

from the ‘masculine’ to the ‘feminine’ formulae of sexuation,” this passage being aligned with,

as Žižek goes on to say, “the opposition between the jouissance of drives and the jouissance of

the Other, elaborated by Lacan in Seminar XX: Encore” (143). Marking the Christian subject as

“feminine,” Žižek—who, in his writings on Christianity, typically emphasizes love/charity (as

opposed to faith)--thus defines the Christian subject as a subject who can be genuinely animated

and motivated by love, or, expressed in more precisely Lacanian terms, as a subject who is

capable of experiencing jouissance in a “feminine,” non-phallic way, i.e. not solely through the

“no” of lack and transgression/taboo but through the potentially boundless “yes” of sublimation

and love of the Other. 8 Above all, the Christian subject is thus, in Žižek’s reading, emphatically

not a subject structured by what Lacan calls “masculine sexuation,” that is, not a subject who is

determined fully by the “phallic function” (the Father’s No) and who can thus only be truly

animated via the inherently limited, predictable mode of “phallic jouissance” (the measurable

jouissance tied to lack that drives all ordinary human desire for both men and women and that

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Lacan associates with solipsistic, masturbatory fantasy as opposed to contact with the Other).

Evoking as it does the fundamental Augustinian distinction between cupiditas and caritas,

Žižek’s Lacanian understanding of the Christian subject is thus remarkably similar to

Augustine’s: what Lacanian theory chararacterizes as “phallic jouissance” is more or less

analogous to Augustine’s cupiditas, whereas the more mysteriously diffuse jouissance

associated--at least potentially--with “feminine” structure is more or less analogous to

Augustine’s caritas. With one key difference, of course, that being that Augustine never

explicitly links the differentiation between cupiditas and caritas to gender and Žižek does. That

said, I propose Žižek’s understanding of the Christian subject, with its emphasis on the “death

drive” and the “death” of the subject (the implicit death of the masculine subject in particular)

staunchly opposes the barren, false transcendence that is derived from the masculine subject’s

fear-based contempt or denigration of the feminine Other, replacing it with a transcendence that

is actually modeled on and celebrates the feminine subject, or, more precisely, celebrates the

generously non-phallic (or, perhaps, more accurately, a-phallic) jouissance of the Other (or

“Other jouissance”) that, as Bruce Fink puts it, exists at least as a “structural potentiality” for all

subjects defined as “feminine” (The Lacanian Subject 107). In doing so, Žižek helps to recover

the radical Christian truth of Augustine’s hermeneutics of charity, a theory that, I submit, has

been throughout the centuries much too often applied by male Christian writers in a way that

humanistically blurs Christian and worldly truth in service of the status quo, ultimately making

Christian “tidings” seem not really “new” or revolutionary but fundamentally in sync with the

standard, masculinist morality and hegemonic distinctions of the patriarchal symbolic order—or,

put in Carolyn Dinshaw’s terms, merely yet another variety of “patriarchal hermeneutics.”

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Along with this unexpected recovery of the radical truth of Augustine, I propose that

Žižek’s psychoanalytic, “feminine”-inflected understanding of Christianity also helps to

illuminate and recover something that as of yet has not been elucidated or debated within the

field of Chaucer criticism, namely, the radical Christianity of Chaucer. That said, let us return to

our earlier focus, namely, the comically anxious, befuddled narrator of the Proem--he who, as

Karma Lochrie suggests, seems to proclaim his ignorance loudly and repeatedly in order to

defend against a “knowledge” that threatens him. As mentioned earlier, Lochrie, linking this

defensive pose of ignorance to the narrator’s later self-proclaimed ignorance of sexuality,

suggests that this threatening “knowledge” is the “knowledge” of sexual secrets associated with

lowly world of gossip and the feminine Other; simply put, Lochrie ignores the narrator’s

Christian utterances for transformation (“God turne us every drem to good”) and aligns the

Chaucerian narrator qua male artist with the predictable masculine subject of the patriarchal

symbolic who fears and seeks to denigrate the feminine Other. But what happens if we do take

the narrator’s prayer seriously? How might Žižek’s understanding of a “radical” Christianity help

us re-interpret and rework those more general aspects of Lochrie’s reading that, as I see it, are

very much on target, namely, Lochrie’s reading of the narrator as neurotically defending against

threatening “knowledge,” and her accompanying intuition that this neurotic defense is connected

to or aligned with the narrator’s similar pose of ignorance vis-à-vis matters of sexuality?

What if, for example, instead of taking sides against the defensive narrator we take sides

with him? As the structure of the Proem (fifty or so lines about the dream theories of the “grete

clerkys” sandwiched by the simple prayer that God “will turne us every drem to good”) hints, the

narrator’s anxiety cannot be reduced, as Lochrie’s reading assumes, to completely worldly

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causes but is instead rooted in the fundamental tension that exists between the narrator’s

Christian intuition and his worldly knowledge, i.e. the authoritative speculation about dreams put

forth so confidently by the “grete clerkys,” the men learned in philosophy and science. There is, I

submit, good reason for the narrator to be anxious vis-à-vis the knowledge of the “grete clerkys.”

As even a superficial reading of the Proem will demonstrate, this knowledge of the “grete

clerkys” is characterized by a desire to control and repress the mysterious otherness of dreams

via an abundance of specialized terminology—the kind of terminology that, in spite of its

emptiness and overlapping categories, nevertheless functions to make the confident enunciator of

such terms sound much more impressively knowledgeable than he or she actually is. Another

key feature of this authoritative dream lore of the “grete clerkys” is its skeptical, “nothing but”

mentality, its pervasive attempt to diminish the significance of dreams by identifying as many

dreams as possible with some “lowly” physical or emotional cause, the inherently dualistic

assumption here being that any such taint of the body immediately disqualifies the dream as a

vehicle of spiritual truth, i.e. a true “visionary” dream:

As yf folkys complexions

Make hem dreme of reflexions,

Or ellys thus, as other sayn,

For to gret feblenesse of her brayn,

By abstinence or by seknesse,

Prison-stewe or gret distresse . . . (21-6)

The repressiveness of this “knowledge” is even more clearly evident in Chaucer’s primary

literary source for narrator’s discussion of dreams. As pointed out in John Fyler’s explanatory

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notes to The House of Fame, one of the primary sources for the Proem is the goddess Nature’s

discourse on dreams in Jean de Meun’s Le Roman de la Rose (lines 18299-18514); Chaucer

echoes this passage “both in its adoption of key words” and “in its phrasing” (Riverside Chaucer

978). If one goes back to this source passage, one will see that, in it, Jean de Meun, speaking

through the voice of Nature, specifically targets the would-be visionary or mystic, all those who,

according to Nature, deceitfully and foolishly take what they see in dreams to be spiritual

substances (Le Roman 18356ff.). Significantly, in this passage on dreams, Nature similarly

targets those silly old women (“foles vielles,” 18489) who recount their visions in order to prove

that witches led by “Dame Abundance” (apparently, a pagan fertility goddess) carry their spirits

off while they sleep; accordingly, through the passage’s damning logic of association, we as

readers are clearly meant to understand that certain (or perhaps most) religious visions are

“nothing but” a species of the “female superstition” that, in the contemptuous eyes of the “grete

clerkys,” so typically characterizes the peasant woman. What is, of course, ironic about Nature’s

skeptical, implicitly belittling discourse about dreams is that it appears in a poem that, following

a convention or “rule” of the medieval French dream vision genre, begins with the narrator

confidently stating his belief in the visionary authority of dreams. By using Nature’s discourse as

a source for a proem that, in stark contrast to the opening of Le Roman de la Rose, presents the

reader with a narrator full of questions and nagging doubts about dreams, Chaucer thus

humorously shows up the fundamental hypocrisy of the standard literary dream vision:

paradoxically, by his very disobedience of the rules of the dream vision genre, the “obtuse”

narrator shows that he cares enough about dreams to wonder about them and to take their

mystery seriously, that is, rather than use a literary convention cynically (i.e. in the manner of

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Jean de Meun and the sophisticated “grete clerkys” who “know better”), the Chaucerian

narrator, with the stubborn wisdom of a child, questions the meaning of dreams in light of the

most up-to-date speculation of the “grete clerkys.” In essence, he ultimately asks the nominally

“Christian” sophisticate, exposing the latter’s tidy, conveniently compartmentalized structuring

of reality: “You say that you believe in the Incarnation and the power of God’s grace to

transform all things, but do you really?” In short, Chaucer uses his narrator to perform the

paradoxical wisdom of Christianity so poetically evoked by Paul in 1 Cor. 1: 18-31: that is,

precisely by his very “folly,” i.e. his literalness and “dopey” lack of literary sophistication, the

Chaucerian narrator exemplifies the Pauline idea that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men,

and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor. 1:25).

Against the implicitly repressive patriarchal logic of such “grete clerkys,” Chaucer’s

“innocent” Christian narrator--much like Žižek’s Paul does in the above-quoted reading of Saint

Paul (2 Cor. 5: 16-17)-- takes a transpersonal stand for singularity, affirming his hope that God,

through his goodness and grace, will bless and translate not only his dream (and thus himself) “to

goode,” but, as his prayer so plainly declares, “every drem” (and thus implicitly every subject).

There is, I submit, a revolutionary edge to the narrator’s incarnational prayer, for, against the

hegemonic and dualistic “wisdom” of the “grete clerkys” that seeks to diminish or “disqualify”

the spiritual significance of dreams (especially the dreams of women) by reducing dreams to

materialistic causes, the narrator’s “every drem” implies that God’s grace inherently opposes and

shatters the hegemonic, disqualifying categories of worldly wisdom, turning all dreams “to

goode”--even (and perhaps especially) those “weak” dreams that can be linked to lowly bodily

and psychological causes.

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Lastly, following Žižek’s interrelated emphases on the Christian “death drive” and

identification of the Christian subject as “feminine,” I propose that the Proem’s ironic

ventriloquism of Jean de Meun’s Nature also hints that this revolutionary blessing of God (or,

more specifically, “the roode”) is, in some sense, tied to the subject’s revolutionary break from

the heteronormative paradigm. More specifically, Chaucer’s use of Jean de Meun’s Nature in the

Proem anticipates the trajectory of the “dream” that follows, hinting at the key themes and

preoccupations of Chaucer’s poem, in particular, the male narrator’s fundamental alienation from

masculine subjectivity and corresponding transformation and rebirth as a Christian subject and

poet via his radical, “queer” embrace of the “radically feminine” (i.e. the “feminine” that exceeds

the conventional, idealized femininity of the imaginary). That is to say, going back to Lochrie’s

intuitive linking of the narrator’s defensive “ignorance” about dreams and his later self-

proclaimed ignorance about sexual matters (or, in Lochrie’s terms, the “feminine” knowledge of

sexual secrets), we might say that what the narrator defends himself in both cases is not the

knowledge associated with the feminine Other but the narrowly compartmentalizing

“knowledge” of patriarchal authority, a knowledge implicitly linked to the heteronormative

paradigm via the haunting of the Proem’s narrator by Jean de Meun’s stridently queer-hating and

queer-fearing goddess Nature (“queer” here including not just homosexuals but, more broadly,

any person who refuses Nature’s fundamental law of procreation; as Le Roman de la Rose makes

clear, although Jean de Meun’s Nature, following Alan of Lille’s, may have a special hatred for

sodomites, Jean de Meun’s Nature also has no use for virgins, celibates and eunuchs). In other

words, the narrator’s anxious capitulation to the worldly, patriarchal authority of the “grete

clerkys” is at the same time a capitulation to Nature, the goddess of the hegemonic imaginary

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whose power underwrites and sustains the patriarchal authority of these “grete clerkys.” Tied

to both is the narrator’s earlier-noted nervous, logocentric mistrust of language, his comically

grandiose, ultimately fear-based attempt to “play God,” that is, to “play” the punitive, patriarchal

God by warding off the threat of the potential wayward reader with a fantastically biblical

combination of over-the-top blessings and curses. How then is the narrator’s incarnational wish

that God “turne us every drem to goode” to be fulfilled through a journey to the “hous” of the

goddess Fame? Put in the simplest way, Chaucer’s narrator, in order to become a true Christian

poet, in order to surrender his writing of his dream to God’s grace (the grace of “turning”

associated not with the punitive Law of the patriarchal God but with “the roode” of Christ), he

must break free from the grip of the normalizing goddess Nature and all the insidiously cynical

“grete clerkys” who worship her and falsely align her easy, pagan logic (a combination of

common senscial “wisdom” and materialistic reductiveness, accompanied by the skeptical

fideist’s polite nod to Christ) with Christian revelation, that which exists beyond the purview of

Nature and the life of the pleasure principle. To sum up, as this dissertation will show from

beginning to end, the Chaucerian narrator as Christian poet must renounce or “right” the “rites”

of the pagan goddess Nature--she who insures the smooth functioning of the earthly patriarchal

symbolic order--by pledging his allegiance to a new goddess, to Fame, that is, by “writing” the

“rights” of the radically “feminine” (the “feminine” that transcends the docile “femininity”

celebrated by heteronormative Nature), by writing the “rites” of the goddess of the word whose

“foolish,” divinely comical multiplications and transformations of earthly “tidings” (“fame”

understood in its plural sense) effectively function to “kill” the masculine subject, figuring and

promising, beyond the punitive Law of the Father and the hegemonic reign of the phallus, the

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endless bounty of the Christian community of the Holy Spirit, the joyous multiplications and

transformations of charity via the Word.

This dissertation will trace the narrator’s writing of the rites of the goddess Fame in six

chapters. To set up a “post-Robertsonian” paradigm for the narrator’s Christian breakout, the

first chapter of the main body of the dissertation (Chapter 2) will focus on Augustine’s process of

conversion in The Confessions, paralleling the young Augustine to the homosexual hero of Jean-

Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet in order to bring to light what I will call, borrowing Caroline

Dinshaw’s term, the hidden “eunuch hermeneutics” of this pivotal Father of Christian

subjectivity. The remaining five chapters (Chapters Three through Seven) will offer a book-by-

book close reading of The House of Fame, with a particular emphasis on how the poem creates

and performs its radically “feminine” Christian truth via its extensive, freewheeling

intertextuality with foundational texts: Virgil’s Aeneid, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy,

and, above all, Chaucer’s great inspiration, Dante’s Divine Comedy.

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CHAPTER II

The Boy/Girl Voice of Augustine’s Confessions

In the passage below, taken from the City of God, Augustine expresses his disgust at the

Great Mother cult, particularly, the rite of voluntary castration undergone by male initiates to her

priesthood and the ritual use of foul language; to drive home his point, Augustine manipulates

his audience’s feelings by evoking the image of the proper Roman mother as a way to shame the

Great Mother herself. As the context of the passage makes clear, Augustine feels a deep

personal enmity towards the Great Mother (or, as Augustine refers to her, “The Mother of the

Gods”) for “tricking” the great Roman hero and military leader Scipio Africanus (whom

Augustine revered) into first bringing her image into Rome in 204 B.C. Because Augustine sees

Scipio as someone who exemplifies an ideal Stoical masculinity, Augustine cannot accept the

possibility that his childhood hero would have willingly chosen to honor such a whorish goddess

with the title of “mother.” Drawing a comparison between the goddess and the personal mother,

Augustine posits that Scipio, like any decent Roman male, would feel blessed to see his own

mother accorded divine honors but would wish that same mother dead if, as a goddess, she

behaved in the scandalous manner of the “Mother of the Gods”:

Would he not cry out that he would prefer his mother to be dead, and beyond all

experience, than that she should live as a goddess, to take pleasure in hearing such

celebrations? It is unthinkable that a senator of Rome, of such high principles that

he forbade the erection of a theatre in a city of heroes, should want his mother to

be honoured as a goddess by such propitiatory rites as would have scandalized her

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as a Roman matron. He would surely have thought it quite impossible for a

respectable woman to have her modesty so corrupted by the assumption of

divinity that her worshippers should call upon her with ritual invocations of that

sort. These invocations contained expressions of a kind that had they been hurled

at any antagonist in a quarrel, during her life on earth, then if she had not stopped

her ears and withdrawn from the company, her friends, her husband, and her

children would have blushed for her. In fact the ‘Mother of the Gods’ was such a

character as even the worst of men would be ashamed to have for his mother . . .

And thus that goddess could seek the support of the best of men [Scipio] only by

trickery, seeing that she requires in her worship the kind of behavior which decent

men shrink from even in their convivial moments. (City of God 52-3, II. 5)

Although a modern reader might expect that the monotheistic Augustine would dismiss the cult

as centered on an imaginary deity, the above passage clearly shows that Augustine considers the

goddess to be a real spiritual entity. Unlike Jacques Lacan who sees the imposition of the Law as

a foregone conclusion, Augustine clearly believes that the goddess exists and is potent enough to

“trick” the greatest of Roman heroes. Indeed, the lawyer-like Augustine is so determined to vilify

the cult of the goddess, in particular, its “consecration of eunuchs,” that he even resorts to the

improbable tactic of diminishing the pagan excesses (both heterosexual and homosexual) of the

patriarchal Olympian gods. In reference to the eunuch, Augustine writes:

This was a degradation [self-castration] which outdid all the carnal excesses of

Jupiter himself. He was a great seducer of women; but he only once disgraced

heaven with a Ganymede, whereas all those professed and public perverts of hers

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were a defilement of the earth and an insult to heaven. In this kind of obscene

cruelty we might perhaps find Saturn a match for her, or even her superior; for he,

the story says, castrated his father. But in the rites of Saturn men could be slain by

the hands of others: they were not gelded by their own hands. (City of God 286,

VII. 26)

Intuitively, Augustine understands the great significance of the rite of self-castration, how the

idea of men not only undergoing castration but doing so “by their own hands” at the behest of a

goddess represents a double subversion of the patriarchal symbolic order that, through its

paradoxical resignification of the phallus and the maternal, threatens to blast its hegemonic,

heterosexist logic to smithereens. To the Bishop of Hippo, such a symbolically powerful

subversion of the Law is therefore more threateningly wicked and offensive than murder itself.

Read in this way, the above passage from the City of God would seem to offer

uncomplicated support for the “patriarchal Augustine” assumed by the theoretical positions of

both “pro-patriarchal” D.W. Robertson, Jr. and “anti-patriarchal” Carolyn Dinshaw. I will now

offer an alternative hypothesis about Augustine’s revulsion towards the eunuchs and his obvious

desire to vilify them and their goddess cult so forcefully: to what extent does Augustine react in

this way due to the fact that far from being, like some great Roman hero, so clearly distinct from

and above the eunuchs, Augustine—as a Christian---realizes that, within the gospel, Christ

himself, far from endorsing Augustine’s viewpoint of hegemonic masculinity, does not validate

Augustine’s “proper” repulsion towards goddess-loving self-made eunuchs (nor towards any

kind of eunuchs, for that matter) but instead cryptically celebrates their ecstatic self-castration as

a symbol of the highest degree of spiritual devotion? For there are eunuchs who have been so

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from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made by men, and there are eunuchs who

have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive

this, let him receive it. (Matthew 19: 12) What does it mean to be an allegorical eunuch? Even if,

as Christian exegetes do, we choose not to take Christ’s celebration of self-made eunuchs

literally, the possibility for a radical interpretation still remains, hovering at the edge of one’s

thought: does becoming a eunuch for God really mean simply adopting a celibate lifestyle whilst

keeping the privilege of your male identity or do Christ’s words demand of the masculine subject

something much more radically challenging?

This question is not as anachronistic as it seems; moreover, it is a question that has a

special relevance for Chaucer studies. According to Carolyn Dinshaw’s reading of The

Canterbury Tales, Chaucer opposes Augustinian, i.e. Robertsonian, hermeneutics with the

“eunuch hermeneutics” of the radically destabilizing figure of the Pardoner, ultimately moving

away from Christian allegory and gesturing towards a “a poetics based not on such mediations as

gender and language but, perhaps, on something unmediated” (183). Dinshaw goes on to

elaborate what this “something unmediated” might be:

And that, for Chaucer, would be a poetics based on the incarnate Word, on the

body of Christ, which is itself an embodied word; it would be a poetics founded

on the body of Christ who is God, in whom there is no lack, no division, no

separation, no difference. (183)

Although I agree with Dinshaw that the ultimate horizon for Chaucer is the incarnate Word, I

question her assumption that Christian spiritual hermeneutics only work according to the logic of

the Law, being “a model of interpretation that depends on the binary turning away from the

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literal, the carnal, the feminine and toward the figurative, the spirit, the masculine” (182). In

this model, Christian allegory is always (and nothing more than) sublimated heterosexual

passion: a lustful yet controlling male interpreter desires and then dominates the lush, female

body of the text.

The problem with this model is that it encourages the sensitive, politically-minded

modern reader to reject all Christian allegory as both oppressive and boringly predictable. And,

if that reader is also a lover of Chaucer, to dismiss whatever appears to be allegorical—or even

spiritual--within his poetry as more or less only a joke, Chaucer poking fun at the rhetorical

excesses of those friars again. Ultimately, as S.H. Rigby explains in her very useful 1996

overview, Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory, and Gender, Chaucerian criticism becomes a

battle between “allegorical and humanist Chaucer,” or, to put it another way, between

Robertsonian Chaucer and Donaldsonian Chaucer, after those two great scholars, D. W.

Robertson, Jr. and E. Talbot Donaldson, who have come to “personify the two major schools of

Chaucer interpretation” (78). As Rigby also points out, although Robertson’s “patristic exegesis”

arguably has much in common with the Foucauldian “new historicist” anti-humanist project

(both Robertson and Foucault emphasize the historically specific nature of human subjectivity),

it is the anti-allegorical/liberal humanist approach of Donaldson “recast into new vocabularies,

such as Marxist and feminist” that has continued to endure most noticeably among modern, left-

leaning Chaucerians. Ironically, even a feminist psychoanalytic critic like Dinshaw who begins

Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics by linking Robertson and Donaldson together, ends up agreeing with

Donaldson’s anti-allegorical approach.

What is missed by both Robertson and Donaldson is the revolutionary androgyny at the

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heart of Christian allegory. We see it plainly in the enigma of Origen of Alexandria (ca. 185-

254), the brilliant exegete of Christian agape and self-made eunuch posthumously deemed a

heretic in 553 C.E., yet, paradoxically, as the religious historian E. Ann Matter points out, “the

first great Christian theologian,” and one “universally acknowledged as the founder of Christian

allegorical interpretation of The Song of Songs” (The Voice of My Beloved: The Songs of Songs

in Western Medieval Christianity 20). As Matter and other scholars such as Peter Brown have

pointed out, what could easily seem dualistic and oppressively body-hating (i.e. hegemonic and

patriarchal) to modern eyes—both Origen’s self-castration and his spiritually erotic allegorical

style—may in fact indicate something quite different, namely, Origen’s radical desire to unplug

himself from the existing patriarchal order, to free himself from the masculine dominance of the

“Law” that he, as a Christian, recognized as an obstacle to the utopian, free-flowing, non-phallic

jouissance of charity. By castrating himself, Origen released himself from the limitation and

worldly privilege of his literal maleness, transforming his own body into a living allegory of

what it means to be Christian in a patriarchal world; writes Brown:

The eunuch was notorious (and repulsive to many) because he had dared to shift

the massive boundary between the sexes. He had opted out of being male. By

losing the sexual “heat” that was held to cause his facial hair to grow, the eunuch

was no longer recognizable as a man. He was a human being “exiled from either

gender.” Deprived of the standard professional credential of a philosopher in late

antique circles—a flowing beard—Origen would have appeared in public with a

smooth face, like a woman or boy frozen into a state of prepubertal innocence.

He was a walking lesson in the basic indeterminacy of the body. (The Body and

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Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity 169)

In short, alongside St. Jerome with his safely patriarchal model of allegory—what Dinshaw

presents as the origin of Christian allegory---there exists a “hidden origin” of allegory (I am

using E. Ann Matter’s pun here), a radically utopian and unsettling “eunuch hermeneutics” that

undermines this very model by marking the literal, carnal text as masculine rather than feminine.

Origen’s art of allegory thus cannot be reduced to a dull, redundant mimesis of the status quo: to

practice it is not to dominate or purify a “woman-text” but to seduce and emasculate the brutally

narcissistic, sexually objectifying father who functions as the obscene, spectral supplement of the

patriarchal Law in all its stoical restraint and patronizing, bearded sobriety. In doing so, Origen’s

eunuch hermeneutics represents a genuine Christian break from the tail-biting cycle of

prohibition and carnivalesque transgression that sustains the Law. As the theorist Slavoj Žižek

writes in his recent Lacanian recovery of radical Christianity, The Fragile Absolute, “in clear

contrast to the Fascist carnivalesque ‘unplugging’ from the established symbolic rule, which

functions as an inherent transgression of the existing order, the proper Christian uncoupling

suspends not so much the explicit laws but, rather, their implicit spectral obscene supplement”

(130).

Although it is sometimes hard to see, the radical unplugging of eunuch hermeneutics is

present even in Augustine—moreover, it is present at the defining moment in Book 8 of The

Confessions, when, in the garden with Alypius, he finally surrenders to his God. Strangely

enough, I myself came to appreciate the hidden “radical eunuch” in Augustine (and, beyond that,

Augustinian allegory) only after I came upon a passage in the writing of that modern-day

Manichean and tortured phenomenologist of shame, Jean-Paul Sartre. This passage occurs in

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Sartre’s obsessive and profoundly personal study of the Jean Genet, Saint Genet: Actor and

Martyr. Why read these two thinkers together in this way? Although I do not remember making

the connection at the time, upon recently re-reading Donald Howard’s 1976 classic, The Idea of

the Canterbury Tales, I found within its pages the possible inspiration for my Sartre-inspired

reading of Augustine-as-eunuch. In the concluding pages of his book, Howard, whose brilliant

and keenly perceptive, sympathetic reading of the menacingly enigmatic, “feminoid” Pardoner

very likely influenced Carolyn Dinshaw’s own reading, explicitly compares Sartre’s Genet to

Chaucer’s Pardoner, noting as well the “Augustinian” element of Sartre’s perspective:

The kind of figure which the Pardoner is has been described by Jean-Paul Sartre

in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. It isn’t necessary to accept Sartre’s philosophy

to accept his insight into this kind of character of archetype as a phenomenon.

Besides, Sartre’s ideas are sufficiently Augustinian; he sees that pride is the root

of such a self-realization, and that its end is nothingness. One could draw from

Sartre’s book a number of observations a number of observations uncannily

applicable to the Pardoner. (372-3)

Two pages later, Howard defends his use of a modern philosopher to interpret a medieval text,

once again justly diminishing the often exaggerated gap between modern and medieval texts:

with his Pardoner-like “Genet,” Sartre is imaginatively describing an “archetypal

phenonomenon” (as opposed to “Genet as a historical person”); moreover, Sartre’s

“philosophical underpinnings are steeped in the Western tradition: the specter of Augustine

haunts Sartre’s pages” (375).

Perhaps, it is this haunting of Sartre’s pages that, in a backward looping of time, enables

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Sartre’s pages to do the same to Augustine’s, releasing the hidden eunuch that was always

“there” but, like a childhood trauma, can only truly exist, i.e. have content, assume meaning and

speak, when reactivated and reconfigured in the present (its “future”) retroactively—“après-

coup,” as Lacan would say. Sartre, like Augustine, is not happy being a Manichean and dreams

of a way out. Through Genet, his homosexual, eunuch-like alter-ego, Sartre fantasizes about

sexually dominating a physically powerful, masculine man; paradoxically, it is in his very

submissiveness that Genet ultimately triumphs over the brutal male who is his lover:

A rigidity that melts beneath contempt like barley sugar on the tongue: the image

has deep roots. We now know the secret weakness of the handsome pimp’s

rigidity: it melts on the tongue. Thus, at the heart of his submission Genet takes

his revenge: the aim of his caresses is the softening of the male. And when the

latter, exhausted, finally collapses and comes to life again: tenderness.

Tenderness, immediate reaction of the lover to the devirilization of the beloved.

Emptied, drooping, a piece of wet rag, the virile member is no longer formidable.

It was a cannon, a tower, a torture machine; it becomes flesh, it can be stroked

lightly without springing up. (Saint Genet 145)

Although a reader might imagine that Genet’s passive yet ultimately “triumphant, maternal

superiority” (146) could be easily transferred to the female heterosexual position, Sartre makes a

point of refuting this idea—apparently on the grounds that, being a fundamentally carnal

creature, no woman ever fantasizes during sex about another lover let alone fakes an orgasm (!):

A woman receives pleasure insofar as she gives it, and whatever the violence, in

other respects, of the sexual conflict between her and her lover, she has not the

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leisure to betray him at the moment he satisfies her. But Genet precisely

because he rejects pleasure, has full latitude, at the height of the other’s pleasure,

to practice mental restriction . . . [here, Sartre goes one to quote Genet discussing

how he humiliates the dominant male by replacing him with a fantasy lover

during sex: “ . . . at the extreme moment of leaving my personality, I attract to

myself the memory of another male to whom I offer myself”] (144)

As he does throughout his work, the deeply dualistic Sartre equates mind with the male and body

with the female. Because Genet loves only men and, in a sense, feigns femininity only in order to

achieve a masculine transcendence, Sartre regards him as a super-male.

Because Sartre, unlike the more skeptical Lacan, naively rejects possibility that women

also feign femininity, it is easy to dismiss his analysis as intellectually useless in comparison to

Lacan’s. I think that this is a mistake, for it is his very narcissistic obtuseness that enables the

less guarded Sartre to tell the truth about the patriarchal symbolic order that, as many

contemporary theorists (feminist, queer, deconstructionist, etc.) have argued, Lacan sometimes

fails to do. In the passage below, Sartre poetically sums up in Genet’s achievement in a complex

and deeply evocative image cluster, one that, as I will argue, seriously undermines Lacan’s tidy

separation of the symbolic and the imaginary:

For, let us not forget, the male also represents the adult who condemned Genet to

do evil. He is the terrifying archangel whose flaming sword defends the entrance

to Paradise. The fire goes out and the sword bends: it was tin, coated with

phosphorus. A judge’s eyes close. In reducing the big chief to this sprawling

mildness, Genet has killed the law. The sacrifice of the Male puts an end to the

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Old Testament . . . With the law dead and the archangel disarmed, the murdered

child comes to life again in Genet. Delivered from adults, he can love like a

child, he can love the child in the young tough who has been reduced to

impotence. That little penis is a childhood figure, a rag doll. Genet’s tenderness

goes from childhood to childhood, and it is his own childhood that he finds in the

beloved. (146)

Here, Sartre’s Genet kills “the law,” transforming its privileged signifier of the mighty phallus

into a “little penis,” a “rag doll,” in psychoanalytic terms, an “imaginary effect,” a “part-object”--

-in short, as Judith Butler points out in her essay “The Lesbian Phallus,” everything Lacan, in his

famous essay “The Signification of the Phallus,” strenuously claims the phallus is not (Bodies

That Matter 57-91). Butler argues that there is a great deal at stake here—in a sense, everything-

--for Lacan holds fast to the penis/phallus distinction in order to keep the boundary between the

imaginary and the symbolic registers firmly in place.9 Thus, to become a serious threat to the

patriarchal symbolic, one cannot simply retreat to an imaginary place “beyond” the boundary;

one must first expose the “tin and phosphorous” origins of the flaming sword that guards that

boundary. Butler is insistent about this, and, I would argue, rightly so: although, in a footnote in

Bodies That Matter, Butler acknowledges her sympathy with feminist attempts such as Luce

Irigaray’s to challenge Lacan through the construction of a feminine or feminist alternative

imaginary, she clearly worries that such resistance remains limited because of its grounding in

the more “transient” domain of the imaginary, as the passage below indicates:

To what extent is the symbolic unwittingly elevated to an incontestable position

precisely through domesticating resistance within the imaginary? If the symbolic

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is structured by the Law of the Father, then the feminist resistance to the

symbolic unwittingly protects the father’s law by relegating feminine resistance to

the less enduring and less efficacious domain of the imaginary. Through this

move, then, feminine resistance is both valorized in its specificity and

reassuringly disempowered. By accepting the radical divide between symbolic

and imaginary, the terms of feminist resistance reconstitute sexually differentiated

and hierarchized “separate spheres.” (106)

Because Sartre’s description implies that Genet’s ultimate goal is to return to a utopian

child’s world of imaginary plenitude, some might argue that, Sartre, like the feminists mentioned

above, remains stuck in the transient domain of the imaginary and is thus guilty of unwittingly

elevating the symbolic. That this is not quite the case is suggested by the following: 1) Genet

only finds this utopian imaginary after he first kills “the law,” and 2) although the relationship

Genet creates does, to some extent, allow him to continue the master/slave dynamic, Genet’s

reversal of the sado-masochistic status quo is only a means to achieve an end, that end being an

ideal, non-hierarchical relationship between two children as opposed to the taboo incestuous,

hierarchical parent-child relationships that psychoanalysis never ceases to dangle before our

eyes. Still, the fact that Sartre’s Genet must continually repeat the act of “killing the law” –and

that he gets his kicks doing so—indicates perversion rather than a genuine transcendence of the

patriarchal symbolic.

With his characterization of the Old Testament God as the carnally sated “big chief”

(looking very much like Freud’s Ur-vater), Sartre challenges the common assumption that,

unlike “pagan” gods and the Christian Jesus, the Old Testament God is supremely transcendent,

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disembodied, or, in Lacanian terms, the idea that this God signifies the phallus, the penis

translated to the symbolic and purified of its fleshly origin. This assumption about the Old

Testament God goes along with the tendency of certain otherwise non-religious contemporary

intellectuals, for example, Jean-Francois Lyotard, to valorize Judaism over “pagan” or “savage”

Christianity for its courageous refusal to refuse the reconciliation offered by the imaginary, the

mediation of myth and ritual; below, Lyotard calls for “an unknown revolution,” expressing his

hope that he and the intellectuals of his generation can follow the Jewish (and, to some extent,

Greek) example:

The reader has no land . . . This is why we have to wait until we have stopped

being peasants, stopped being rooted by the mediation of myth or ritual, debased

as they may be, before we can become Jews or Greeks, men from nowhere who

are haunted by an alienation that is different from the alienation of savages, men

who are no longer dominated by a presence, but by an absence. (“Figure

Foreclosed” 85)

By pronouncing Judaism both the religion with a transcendent deity and the religion of noble

alienation that renounces the reconciliation between imaginary and symbolic, Lyotard is, of

course, in line with Freud and, more importantly, all those Protestants of the past, who, in their

effort to demonize “pagan” Catholicism, bypass that immediate Christian relative and

parasitically attach themselves to Judaism, the lofty grandfather.10 The alienated Sartre, in

contrast, hates reconciliation as much as Lyotard; however, unlike Lyotard, Sartre takes his

hatred of reconciliation and runs with it, refusing to idealize the intimidating all-too-phallic “big

chief” of the Bible. Rather than following the now-fashionable tendency to exonerate and

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transcendentalize the “big chief,” Sartre follows in the footsteps of the Manicheans who were

so disgusted by what they considered the obscene violence and cruelty of the Old Testament that

they simply rejected Jehovah entirely, pronouncing the deity--and the world he created—Satanic.

The most famous Manichean is, of course, the young Augustine, who, being a sensitive

intellectual type, also hated the “big chief,” so much so that he could not accept Christianity until

he met Ambrose, who taught him how to read allegorically, to find symbolic love and beauty in

what otherwise seemed to be—in young Augustine’s eyes—a primitive and brutal narrative. As

Augustine suggests in the passage below (taken from 5.14 of The Confessions), an early,

important obstacle to his conversion to the Christian faith was his inability to accept the Old

Testament as a sacred text:

I now judged that the Catholic faith, for which I had thought nothing could be said

against the Manichean objectors, could be maintained without being ashamed of

it. This was especially the case after I heard various passages in the Old

Testament explained most frequently by way of allegory, by which same passages

I was killed when I had taken them literally. Hence, when many passages in those

books were explained spiritually, I now blamed my own despair, in which I had

believed that the law and the prophets could in no way be upheld against those

who hated them and scoffed at them. (131, italics mine)

In a telling way, Augustine’s hostility towards and alienation from the Old Testament God

mirrors Augustine’s strained relationship with his own father, suggesting that the young

Augustine’s monolithic view of the Old Testament and its God was charged with the projection

of the denied “obscene father” (both in terms of Augustine’s personal father and the symbolic

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father of his culture). Looking back upon his pre-Christian life with both resentment and

sorrow, the only vivid, distinct memory of his father that Augustine recounts in The Confessions

is that of his father’s narcissistic, sexually objectifying gaze upon his naked adolescent body:

During the idleness of that sixteenth year, when, because of lack of money at

home, I lived with my parents and did not attend school, the briars of unclean

desires spread quickly over my head, and there was no hand to root them out.

Moreover, when my father saw me at the baths, he noted how I was growing into

manhood and was clothed with stirring youth. From this, as it were, he already

took pride in his grandchildren, and found joy in telling it to my mother. He

rejoiced over it in that intoxication, wherein this world, from the unseen wine of

its perverse will, tending down towards lower things, forgets you, its creator, and

loves your creature more than yourself. (2.3, 68)

For Augustine, as with Sartre’s Genet, it is the male who represents the adult who condemned

him to do evil, the obscene “big chief” whose corrupting gaze riveted him to the spot, and, in

effect, barred him from paradise. Augustine, however, sees more than Sartre: as Augustine

recognizes and takes pains to tell us, it is this gaze of the obscene father that phallicizes the

“normal” son, inflating his ego with a masculine narcissism that automatically impels him to

denigrate the feminine, to reject his mother Monica’s moral guidance (e.g. she wisely advises the

young Augustine to keep away from adultery with any man’s wife) as “only a woman’s

warnings, which I should be ashamed to bother with” (2.3, 68). Looking back as he writes his

Confessions, Augustine now corrects himself, identifying the despised voice and person of his

mother with that of the suffering Christ himself: “In her person you were despised by me, by me,

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her son, ‘the son of your handmaid,’ and your servant (2.3, 68).

Augustine will, however, have his revenge upon this father, a paradoxical revenge that

will also be a reconciliation. Like Genet who, by transforming the once-threatening “sword” into

a “rag doll” to be cherished in effect kills the law that once killed him, Augustine will also learn

to kill the law that once killed him, using the art of allegory to transform the words that once

alienated him, desirously penetrating and caressing them until their seemingly stupid, brutal

surface becomes “soft”—not with the limp abject softness of the carnal--the objectified--but the

radiant softness of the letter infused with and transfigured by charity. All that is left of the once

primitive father text will be love, the utopian Christ: the murdered child comes to life again.

Fittingly, Augustine’s great conversion in the garden is shared with a beloved male friend

and culminates with Augustine’s cathartic release of a pent-up flood of tears immediately

followed by his hearing of a child’s voice (“like that of a boy or girl, I know not which”)

chanting and repeating “over and over again” in the distance, bidding him to “take up and read.”

Stunned out of his usual mode of logic, Augustine at first wonders whether “children made use

of any such chant in some kind of game,” but then, upon giving up this final rationalization, lets

go and interprets this child’s voice “solely as a command given to me by God to open the book

and read the first chapter I should come upon” (8.12, 202)--which, in this case, turns out to be a

book of Paul’s writings, and, more specifically, a Pauline passage that commands him to put on

the utopian “garment” of Christ, thereby crystallizing for the once-vacillating Augustine his own

true desire--the desire of the divine Other that he, as a would-be “normal” masculine subject of

the patriarchal symbolic, has spent his adult life evading with all his might:

I snatched it [the volume of Paul’s writings] up, opened it, and read in silence the

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chapter on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in

chambering and impurities, not in strife and envying; but put you on the Lord

Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences” [Romans

13:13-4]. No further wished I to read, nor was there need to do so. Instantly, in

truth, at the end of the sentence, as if before a peaceful light streaming into my

heart, all the dark shadows of doubt fled away. (8.12, 202).

Dressed in the garment of Christ, his heart bathed in a gentle shaft of light, Augustine, like

Sartre’s Genet, can “love like a child again,” at long last shielded from the corrupting gaze of the

phallic father. For Augustine, God speaks not through the deep bass thunder as in the Old

Testament God but through the resurrected androgynous voice of a boy-girl child, the vocal

equivalent of Sartre’s “rag doll.” The murdered child comes to life again.

The potency of this “boy-girl voice” seems directly related to Augustine’s past

experiences with another obscene father that traumatized Augustine as a child, namely, the

schoolteachers who abused their symbolic function by routinely humiliating and beating him

(1.9, 1.14). Looking back, Augustine bitterly recalls the narcissistic rage of his male teachers:

Perhaps some fine judge of things approves of my beatings. For I played ball as a

child; by such play I was kept from quickly learning arts by which, as an adult, I

would disport myself in a still more unseemly fashion. Did the man who beat me

act different from me? If he was outdone by a fellow teacher in some trifling

discussion, he was more tormented by anger and envy than I was when I was

when beaten by my playmate in a ball game. (1.9, 52)

Augustine’s narrative implicitly ties the narcissism of his teachers to their extreme rhetorical

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vanity-- their grammatical exactitude and obsession with proper pronunciation--leaving no

doubt in the reader’s mind that such men, always fearing humiliation themselves, very likely

insulated themselves from their own fear of error by projecting inadequacy onto others, i.e. by

sadistically pouncing on and exposing the speech defects of the defenseless “rhetorical inferiors”

in their charge:

For the men set up for my models were utterly dejected when caught in a

barbarism or solecism while telling about some of their own acts, even though the

acts themselves were not bad. But if they would describe some of their lustful

deeds in detail and good order and with correct and well-placed words, did they

not glory in the praise they got?

When a man who seeks fame for eloquence stands before a human judge, with a

throng of men standing about him, and inveighs against his opponent with most

savage hatred, he guards most watchfully lest by a slip of the tongue he should

say inter ‘omines. But he takes no care lest by his furious spirit he causes a man to

be taken away from other men. (1.18, 60-1, 61-2)

Augustine recalls in particular the great difficulty he experienced trying to learn the Greek

language: “I understood none of the words, but with cruel threats and punishments they

ruthlessly pushed me on to understand them” (1.14, 47). Once again, Augustine’s narrative

suggests that a childhood trauma with an earthly obscene father insidiously impacted the young

Augustine’s relationship to God, once again killing him by making it psychically impossible for

him to trust or love God; horribly, Augustine’s humiliating speech-related failures in the

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schoolroom and the constant dread of punishment become fused with a similar speech-related

humiliation and rejection vis-à-vis an uncaring, unlistening Father God (a God obviously

validated and vividly embodied for the child Augustine through the unkind laughter of various

authority figures):

While still a boy, I began to pray to you, my help and my refuge, and in praying

to you I broke the knots on my tongue. A little one, but with no little feeling, I

prayed to you that I would not be beaten at school. When you did not hear me—

and it was “not to be reputed folly in me”—my punishments, which were then a

huge and heavy evil to me, were laughed at by older men, and even by my own

parents who wished no harm to befall me. (1.9, 52)

In light of this earlier trauma, Augustine’s conversion and healing via the “boy-girl” voice

chanting “Take up and read” rings with the uncanny fated particularity of what a Lacanian might

call a genuine “encounter with the Real”: a command (“take up and read”) once no doubt aimed

at Augustine by some bullying, contemptuous master is now instead uttered invitingly and

without pressure by some anonymous, androgynous child; the deadeningly mindless, rote-like

drills once endlessly demanded by threatening male teachers are now replaced by a chanting

repetition that instead evokes the happily mindless games of children at play; the sheer traumatic

fact of being a boy—and hence being a child who is the focus of parental narcissism, a child who

is constantly subject to schoolroom beatings—is now joyfully transcended through the hearing of

a voice “like that of a boy or a girl, I know not which.”

The hidden eunuch hermeneutics of Augustine, however, do not end here: uncannily

paralleling the goddess-loving eunuchs whom he writes so disparagingly of in the City of God,

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Augustine represents his initiation into a new symbolic order as taking place through--and

implicitly sustained by-- the inviting, encouraging “appearance” of a maternal goddess figure, in

this case, a Christian goddess he calls “continence” who is the “spouse” of the Lord. As Alypius

his friend stands by watching him, Augustine wrestles with his emotions, vividly imagining his

internal debate about chastity—as well as his melting resistance---as an encounter with a gentle

yet authoritative feminine presence:

. . .there appeared to me the chaste dignity of continence, serene and joyous, but

in no wanton fashion, virtuously alluring, so that I would come to her and hesitate

no longer. To lift me up and embrace me, she stretched forth her holy hands,

filled with various kinds of good examples. Many were the boys and girls, there

too a host of youths, men and women of every age, grave widows and aged

virgins, and in all these continence herself was in no wise barren but a fruitful

mother of children, of joys born to you, O Lord, her spouse. (8.11, 201)

As her allegorical name suggests, Augustine’s “goddess,” aligned with Mother Church, is like a

symbolic version of the Great Mother herself: although the “rite” associated with this goddess

sheds no blood, she, like the Great Mother, cherishes the men and women who “castrate”

themselves as her special children. Although her authority comes from the Lord rather than

herself, she, like the Great Mother, is strong and independent --in no way impressed by the deeds

of mortal men or needing their favor: “She smiled upon me,” writes Augustine, “with an

enheartening mockery, as if to say, ‘Cannot you do what these youths and maidens do?’” (8.11,

201). Perhaps not surprisingly, the intellectually sophisticated writer of The Confessions

arguably distances himself a bit from his “vision,” taking away its numinous aura (“This debate

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within my heart was solely myself against myself”). Still, whatever its status—whether

“merely an allegory” or something more—the appearance of this goddess called “continence”

nevertheless works powerfully upon the vulnerable Augustine, leading immediately to a cathartic

release of pent-up tears—and directly afterwards to his hearing of the beckoning, game-like

chant of the boy-girl voice.

This vision of the Christian goddess anticipates the culminating and truly revolutionary

experience of Augustine’s initiation—his experience at Ostia of a rapturously transcendent

contemplative ascent to Wisdom (9.10, 221-3). What is so remarkable about Augustine’s

mystical vision is that, unlike the great majority of reported Christian visions, this vision is

depicted as a shared experience of Platonic Love impelled and generated by conversation about

God with another beloved human being; moreover, in pointed contrast to the assumed “beautiful

boy” of homoerotic, mother-denigrating Plato, this beloved human being is both female and a

mother--Augustine’s mother, Monica. There, according to Augustine, in Ostia, as he and his

mother looked out of a window out onto a courtyard garden, they talked together about God,

speculating about “what the eternal life of the saints would be like”; as their talk grew in

intensity, the two experienced their spirits gradually ascending step by step until together they

passed into the Beyond, the “region of abundance” beyond the narrow confines of their

conscious intellects--beyond as well, it seems, the pattern of their once perpetual Oedipally

constructed dance of doting, worried mother and resisting son:

When our discourse had been brought to the point of that highest delight of

fleshly senses, in the brightest corporeal light, when set against the sweetness of

that life seemed unworthly not merely of comparison with it, but even of

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remembrance, then, raising ourselves up with a more ardent love to the

Selfsame, we proceeded step by step through all bodily things up to that heaven

whence shine the sun and the moon and the stars down upon the earth. We

ascended higher yet by means of inward thought and discourse and admiration of

your works, and we came up to our own minds. We transcended them, so that we

attained to that region of abundance that never fails, in which you feed Israel

forever upon the food of truth, and where life is that Wisdom by which all these

things are made, both which have been and which are to be. (9.10, 22)

Interestingly, Augustine refers to God as Wisdom (Sophia) in his account of his mystical ascent.

Although traditionally interpreted by Christian exegetes as Christ, the Wisdom of the Bible that

appears in the sapiential books (Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus, the Wisdom of Solomon), is, of course,

a feminine figure, and, indeed, in the specific context of Creation evoked by Augustine, a cosmic

goddess, an all-encompassing creatix: in Ecclus. 24:5, for example, Wisdom proclaims, “I came

forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist.” Augustine’s

reference to the “region of abundance” and emphasis on Wisdom’s food also specifically calls up

the sensuous Great Mother-like images of natural flourishing and fertility that the author of

Ecclesiasticus uses to evoke Wisdom, the goddess whose home, according to Ecclus. 24: 7-12, is

Israel.11 Augustine’s release from the haunting obscene fathers of his youth via the eunuch

hermeneutics of the Christian goddess and the chanting boy-girl voice thus marks the beginning

of a process that culminates in Augustine’s ecstatic ascent to the “feminine Christ” of Wisdom, a

ascent that, being shared with his mother, seems in turn inextricably connected to and marked by

Augustine’s transformed relationship to Monica, she whose words were once just “women’s

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words”: the intensity of the Ostia experience suggests that, as he and his mother talked about

God together freely and joyously, Augustine experienced something “in the Real” with his

mother that was perhaps, in some sense, akin to the transfiguration of Christ witnessed by the

apostles—encountering and overcome by Wisdom in “her” full glory and abundance through the

sudden absolute recognition of Monica as soul and subject. The full power of Augustine’s

transformation is immediately clear to Monica: her consuming, lifelong wish for Augustine now

fulfilled, Monica longs for death and states so plainly to her son: “What I can still do here, and

why I am here, I do not know, now that all my hopes for this world have been accomplished”

(9.10, 223). As it so happens, five days later she falls sick with fever and dies nine days later: for

Monica, as with Christ on the cross, “consummatum est.” As if to signal the Christic significance

of Monica’s life in relationship to him, Augustine concludes the chapter on her death by noting

“in the fixty-sixth year of my life and in the thirty-third year of mine, this devout and holy soul

was set loose from her body” (9.11, 224, italics mine).

Because Augustine’s conversion—his following of the liberating “boy-girl voice”--is

blessed and, indeed, literally enveloped by, new visions and reconfigurations of the feminine and

the maternal (a fleeting interior vision of a welcoming goddess and the culminating vision at

Ostia), Augustine, I propose, is able to drive out the obscene father that haunts him in a way that

Sartre’s Genet (and his medieval alter-ego, Chaucer’s Pardoner), for example, definitely cannot.

A sign of Augustine’s success is his changed relationship to the Old Testament and its God, his

newfold ability to read creatively, to find the Love of Christ in a “primitive” text that once only

repelled and alienated him. As I suggested earlier, there is an intriguing parallel between

Augustine’s allegorical reading of the Old Testament and Genet’s “killing” of the “big chief” by

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fellatio. Nevertheless, there are also important differences: whereas Augustine’s encounters

with the text occur at the level of the symbolic and lead to a deepening and more complex love,

the encounters of Sartre’s Genet occur at the level of the drive and are hence, perversely

predictable and repetitive, to some extent, always imprisoned within a sado-mascochistic

dynamic. To some extent, without the endlessly repeated, jouissance-producing ritualistic

resurrections and consequent murders of the obscene father, Sartre’s Genet would cease to exist.

What is decisive here, it seems, is Sartre’s unchanging contempt for the feminine—a key point of

contrast between Sartre’s Genet and Augustine. Whereas before his conversion, Augustine was

unable to identify the true obscene fathers in his psyche and so projected all their brutal carnality

onto the biblical text, after his conversion, he recognizes the truth, connecting his former

monolithic contempt for the biblical text to his own phallic pride—a pride clearly related to the

young Augustine’s attempt to identify himself with the aggressor, the “sophisticated” men of

letters around him:

When I first turned to Scripture, I did not feel towards it as I am speaking now,

but it seemed to me unworthy of comparison with the nobility of Cicero’s

writings. My swelling pride turned away from its humble style, and my sharp

gaze did not penetrate into its inner meaning. But in truth it was of its nature that

its meaning would increase together with your little ones, whereas I disdained to

be a little child and, puffed up with pride, I considered myself to be a great fellow.

(3.5, 82)

Because he only acts upon the phallic underside of the Law without and not within, Sartre’s

Genet loses his utopian moment, his beloved “rag doll,” as soon as the “big chief” awakens from

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his momentary “sprawling mildness”: “The defeat of the archangel reopens the gates of the

lost paradise . . . Not for long: the male will soon come to life again, will rise up with renewed

indifference. Genet’s tenderness is shot through with despair” (Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr

147). In contrast to the Augustine of The Confessions, Sartre’s Genet is always a tragically

isolated rebel: a eunuch without a goddess, a eunuch without a symbolic mother, a eunuch whose

jouissance is and must always be phallic.12

Of course, this more radical Augustine has little in common with the sternly patriarchal

effigy so beloved by D.W. Robertson, Jr. and the medieval exegetes. My point, however, is not

to dispute that portrait, only to show that, even in the most seemingly patriarchal of writers, the

radical, utopian impulse of Christianity can assert itself, the summons of Christ heard via a small

boy-girl voice chanting in play, mother and son ascending to fertile Wisdom as they talk of God

joyfully together as equals. Moreover, this radical Love is no futile dream of the imaginary, for it

can and does and, indeed, must occur and thrive at the level of the symbolic: Augustine’s boy-

girl voice does not just sing, it leads him to the writings of Paul, to the inexhaustible abundance

of biblical Wisdom. How does Chaucer relate to all this? As E.Talbot Donaldson long ago

suggested in his essay, “Chaucer’s Three ‘P’s’: Pandarus, Pardoner, and Poet,” the future creator

of the nihilistic Pardoner, that most famous of eunuchs, shared a great deal with his creation

(“Chaucer’s Three ‘P’s’: Pandarus, Pardoner, and Poet”). The Pardoner and the Chaucerian

persona are, in a way, two sides of the same coin: what distinguishes the two is that the self-

hating Pardoner believes in a narrow, strictly patriarchal and predictable deity, a God who, like

the older Augustine of the City of God, despises eunuchs even more than murderers, whereas the

Chaucerian persona, like the more utopian Paul and the “liminal” Augustine at the time of his

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conversion, knows what it is to be hated and judged by the Pardoner’s deity but also knows

what it is to be recognized and loved by a more ample and radically symbolic, genuinely non-

phallic deity, a God who speaks in unexpected voices and enheartens the outcast, cherishing as

his special servants those who mirror his own transcendental androgyny—the very “little ones”

bullied and despised by the obscene father, that disavowed carnal supplement which haunts the

earthly patriarchal symbolic order even at its loftiest levels. On the one hand, the Pardoner

represents a profoundly motherless soul, the marginalized male who, twisted and haunted by the

hegemonic imaginary, turns upon himself and others, full of poisonous bitterness and envy. On

the other hand, the persona represents an “elvyssh” yet mysteriously sustained soul, the

marginalized male who, nurtured and sustained through an reconfigured imaginary, feels no envy

for the “normal” and no disgust for the abject, and can therefore open his heart to all.

In short, Chaucer has a goddess to inspire and sponsor him, and the Pardoner does not.

Who is this goddess? Her name is Fame.

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CHAPTER III

Virgil’s Dido and “Wikke Fame”

In stark contrast to the rowdy whirling wicker house of tidings in which the narrator finds

himself at the end of his dream, the narrator’s dream begins in the quiet luxury of Temple of

Venus: “ymad of glas” (120) and sumptuously decorated with glittering images of gold, rich

tabernacles and many jewels and many paintings and many figures “of olde werk” (127), it is a

precious jewel itself, a fit place for a high-born lady to dwell and muse, her book of hours

clasped in her fair white hand. Appearances, however, can be deceiving: as the wide-eyed

dreamer soon perceives, this most delicately crafted precious chapel of Venus is not as inviting

to love and the feminine as one might first imagine, for on its walls are painted panels or murals

devoted to telling and celebrating no romantic stories of love but something quite different,

namely, the epic deeds of Venus’s son, Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome famed, in

Virgil’s Aeneid, for his dedication to duty —and, pointedly, not to love, not to Dido, the woman

and queen he once passionately loved and then abandoned.

With this emphatically and paradoxically pro-Aeneas Temple of Venus, Chaucer’s poem

thus expertly sets up the narrator’s Ovidian challenge to Virgil via his resurrection of the

Heroides-like voice of the abandoned, heartbroken, and righteously angry Dido. But this is not

all: what makes Chaucer’s countering of Virgil so uniquely brilliant, i.e. not simply a sentimental

Ovidian rehash, is that Dido’s complaint in lines 300-60 (a speech imaginatively “hallucinated”

by the Chaucerian narrator) focuses so intently on the problem of love in relation to language and

sexual difference. Whether or not we find her complaint persuasive or merely hysteric,

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Chaucer’s Dido is not simply expressing her own personal loss of love but is instead “opening

up the floor” to an all-encompassing, universal question and problem, namely, the possible

skewing of most of what we hear and read --from common gossip to great works of literature--in

favor of men and male desire over women and love, or, more precisely, the symbolic world’s

inevitable abjection of the troublesome, inconveniently passionate woman:

“O, have ye men such godlyhede

In speche, and never a del of trouthe?

Allas, that ever hadde routhe

Any woman on any man!

Now see I wel, and telle kan,

We wrechched wymmen konne noon art;

For certeyn, for the more part,

Thus we be served everychone.” (330-7)

Evoking Virgil’s Fama, the memorably monstrous feminine personification of the prurient

gossip that rages about the land and crudely scandalizes the love affair of Dido and Aeneas

(Aeneid 4. 173-90), Dido, with a Job-like pathos, laments against the injustice of her present and

future defamation, her perpetual victimization by “wikke Fame”:

“O wel-awey that I was born!

For thorgh yow [Eneas] is my name lorn,

And alle myn actes red and songe

Over al thys lond, on every tonge,

O wikke Fame!—for ther nys

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Nothing so swift, lo, as she is!

O, soth ys, every thing ys wyst,

Though hit be kevered with the myst.

Eke, though I myghte duren ever,

That I have don rekever I never,

That I ne shal be seyd, allas,

Yshamed be thourgh Eneas,

And I shal thus juged be . . .” (345-57)

Anticipating the most sophisticated theories of our time, Book I of The House of Fame thus

prompts the reader to think about the problem of truth and goodness in relation to language

(whose version is right—Virgil’s or Ovid’s?) not merely in the lofty, abstract terms of

philosophy but in the “lowly” terms of embodiment, of gender and sexuality. Again, whether or

not we feel we can poke holes in Dido’s hyperbolic and self-serving argument, the fact remains

that there is no omniscient narrator stepping in to correct “foolish” Dido (in fact, in this case, the

male narrator is Dido!) and thus we are left with a question to ponder: to what degree is our

access to and perception of truth within language inextricably linked to the fundamental fact of

sexual difference and to the “opposition” of masculine and feminine subject positions? 13

Before the reader has time to think about this question, Chaucer’s narrator, in his knee-

jerk fashion, of course, jumps in and emphatically sides with Dido. After Dido’s speech—

imagined by the dreamer as occurring immediately before her suicide—he briefly reports on the

queen’s tragic final moments, how “She rof hirselve to the herte / And deyde thorgh the wounde

smerte” (373-4). The narrator, however, does not linger on the actual death: in 375-82, he, with a

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kind of shambling neurotic loquacity, begs off describing it in detail, advising us to read

Virgil’s Aeneid or Ovid’s Heroides if we want to know “al the maner how she deyde, / And alle

the wordes that she seyde . . What that she wrot or that she dyde.” But not, of course, because

the narrator does not care about Dido’s death but, as the following passage suggests, because he

cares too much, because he is overwhelmed and outraged by the injustice of Dido’s plight and

cannot accept it: thus, instead of moving on with his plot summary of the Aeneid, the narrator

symbolically tries to undo her suicide, attempting to assuage Dido’s feminine despair and

alienation within language by playing Ovid, that is, by turning the literary tradition of the hero

against itself by swiftly launching into an emotional Heroides-like amplificatio and catalogue of

the many male heroes from classical myth and legend who betrayed and abandoned the women

who loved them, beginning with nine lines about “Demophon, duk of Athenys . . . [who]

“traysed Phillis wikkidly,” and her subsequent suicide (388-96), and then moving on to

enumerate Achilles, Paris, Jason, and Hercules (397-404). The narrator’s speech then culminates

and closes with the 21-line exemplum (405-26) targeting Theseus for his betrayal and

abandonment of Ariadne. Why does the narrator devote so much space to Theseus? Perhaps

because modern readers and the critics are uncomfortable with what they see as the narrator’s

(and, implicitly, certainly not Chaucer’s!) sentimental outburst, the modern tendency is to lump

all the references to “pathetic, jilted women” together—so much so that the poem’s clear

singling out of Theseus almost always goes without comment; most likely if they did comment,

most critics would come to Robert Jordan’s conclusion: “The differing lengths of treatment seem

to be a matter of quantitative whim rather than qualitative significance. The effect is that of a

glittering surface rather than meaningful depths” (Chaucer’s Poetics and the Modern Reader

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45). Against this tendency, I would argue that the narrator’s exemplum of Theseus, far from

being arbitrarily chosen (and thus implicitly lacking “meaningful depths”), is quite deliberate

and pointedly damning, for, as with Virgil’s Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, medieval

mythographers held this great city-founding Greek hero--famed for his conquest of the labyrinth

and slaying of the Minotaur— in particularly high esteem, in their allegorical readings typically

interpreting him as a figure for Christ (the labyrinth = Babylon or Hell, the Minotaur = Satan).14

In contrast to Aeneas’s “necessary” abandonment of “carnal” Dido, however, Theseus’s

seemingly egregious and uniquely callous betrayal of the good and loving Ariadne, the maiden

who saved his life (and indeed insured his everlasting “life” as famed labyrinth-conquering

slayer of the Minotaur), demonstrated such supreme ingratitude that even the medieval

mythographers found the hero’s action difficult to defend and whitewash via patriarchal allegory:

She made hym fro the deth escape

And he made hir a ful fals jape;

For aftir this, withyn an while,

He lefte her slepynge in an ile

Desert allone, ryght in the se,

And stal away and let hir be,

And took hir suster Phedra thoo

With him, and gan to shippe goo.

And yet he had yswore to here

On al that ever he myghte swere

That, so she saved hym hys lyf,

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He wolde have take hir to hys wif;

For she desired nothing ellis,

In certeyn, as the book us tellis. (413-26)15

With this story of Theseus’s abandonment of Ariadne, the narrator skillfully evokes Aeneas’s

similarly callous and cowardly attempt to “stal away,” “to shippe goo” (or, at least so it seemed

from Dido’s heartbroken perspective when she caught Aeneas in the act of preparing “to shippe

goo,” since, due to his fear of Dido’s reaction, Aeneas made his preparations without first telling

Dido of his plans to leave). And just in case the reader missed this unflattering comparison of

Aeneas to Theseus, the narrator slyly punctuates his point in the lines directly following, when,

switching back over to his plot summary of the Aeneid with the precision of an expert film

editor, he damns Virgil’s stalwart hero by merely telling the truth, speaking ironically in the

hero’s defense:

But to excusen Eneas

Fullyche of al his grete trespass

The book seyth Mercurie, sauns fayle,

Bad hym goo into Italye,

And leve Auffrikes regioun,

And Dido and her faire toun. (427-32)

With this implicit yet pointed link between Theseus and Aeneas, the narrator’s expose of famed

Theseus thus validates Dido’s complaint by casting a shadow and complicating not only on the

standard allegorical exegesis of Theseus, but also, I would argue, that of Aeneas against “carnal”

Dido, and, beyond that, any such readings of texts that function to propagate “wikke Fame” by

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too harshly and simplistically aligning the masculine with spirit and goodness and the

feminine with the flesh and sinfulness.

Nevertheless, despite the narrator’s efforts and seemingly good intentions, as I mentioned

in the previous chapter, feminist critics of the poem—generally speaking, the only critics who

take a serious interest in the question of sexual difference—are skeptical and routinely steadfast

in their mistrust and suspicion of both Chaucer and his Dido-identifying narrator: Elaine Tuttle

Hansen, the critic who first focused scholarly attention on this important question of Dido and

sexual difference, recognizes the narrator’s feminine traits as well as his gender fluidity but also

argues that the narrator’s “feminization” ultimately functions as a way for the male artist to

differentiate himself from Dido, and beyond her, all women; more recently, Karma Lochrie has

similarly argued that the male narrator’s pose of sexual and gender neutrality and sympathy

towards Dido is a self-serving strategy—a way for the deceitful (and implicitly weasel-like) male

narrator to gossip about women like Dido without taking responsibility for his actions. Ironically

and weirdly, in their shared suspiciousness towards the Dido-sympathetic narrator, Hansen and

Lochrie join hands with the conservative Robertsonian critic, B. G. Koonce, who, duly armed

with the narrowly moralistic allegorical reading of Dido found in works of medieval

mythography (most notably, the well-known twelfth-century commentary on the Aeneid

attributed to Bernard Silvestris), also refuses to take the narrator’s sympathy for Dido seriously,

viewing it also as a kind of ruse: “In Chaucer’s extravagant sympathy for Dido, we may detect

the ironic humor evident elsewhere in his praise of Love’s ‘martyrs’ . . . we may also view his

attitude as an integral aspect of his role as the misguided pilgrim, whose confusion in the temple

. . . stems from his blind devotion to Venus and Cupid and their servants” (114).16 In contrast to

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these critics, I will argue that the narrator’s sympathy for Dido--or rather, identification with

Dido--is both sincere and ethically promising; like them, however, I will argue that it is an

important step in the poet-narrator’s journey—a step towards Christ, as B. G. Koonce argues, but

not because the narrator aligns himself with “spiritual,” “rational” Aeneas against “carnal,”

“foolish” Dido but rather just the opposite: because he, as an awakening Christian “eunuch” and

poet, emphatically does not align himself with Aeneas against Dido and indeed is so genuinely

“feminine,” so alienated, that, recognizing the futile rebellion and narcissistic dead-end of his

own imprisoned Dido (Dido as “beautiful soul”), he decides to take his chances and leave the

beautiful yet brittle glass womb of the patriarchal—and ironically love-denying--Temple of

Venus altogether. Ironically, the primary source for my radical queer Christian take on the

narrator’s relationship to Dido is Virgil’s Aeneid itself: as this chapter will show, the complex

and richly intriguing “fame-focused” verbal and structural resonances within and between the

two poems suggest that Chaucer read the Aeneid (at least Books 1 and 4) directly and far from

superficially, taking in the subtle nuances of Virgil’s poetry and musing thoughtfully about the

ethical and psychic implications of the Virgilian perspective, in particular, the implications

regarding the relationship between the sexes and the representation of that relationship in art. In

the first half of this chapter, I will analyze these important “fame-focused” resonances, most of

which, to the best of my knowledge have never been discussed in the critical literature, showing

first how Virgil’s Aeneid subtly (and very likely unconsciously) sets up an opposition between

positive and negative images of a maternal “fama” and then how Chaucer’s House of Fame

critiques this opposition by bringing to the forefront the troubling implications about sex and

gender (and, more generally, power) that silently sustain Virgil’s opposition.

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As Jack Bennett pointed out in his meticulous study of The House of Fame, Chaucer’s

debt to Virgil’s Aeneid goes further than the dreamer’s summary of the epic’s plot. The Aeneid

also inspired the idea of the Temple of Venus with its panels depicting the various events of

Aeneas’ life, as well as, I would add, the idea of the narrator responding to these panels with

great emotion. In Book One of Virgil’s poem, Aeneas, having been driven off course by a great

storm to seek shelter with his remaining sea-wracked ships on the shores of Libya, leaves his

crew on the beach and bravely sets out the next morning with his comrade Achates to scout out

the unknown and potentially hostile land, anxiously wondering about what lies in store for him

and his men. After Venus (Aeneas’s mother, the goddess of desire) fills her son in on the history

of Dido, Carthage’s founder and queen, and then covers both men in a protective cover of mist,

Aeneas and Achates come upon a magnificent bronze temple to Juno that the industrious Queen

Dido is building, located symbolically at the center of the rising city. The two men enter the

great sanctuary, marveling at its opulent and finely crafted interior. A surprise awaits them: upon

the walls of this temple, the unspeakable trauma of the Trojan War is vividly painted. Aeneas’s

eyes fill with tears when he sees the heart-wrenching images of Trojan suffering, and, to his

companion, he cries out:

“Quis jam locus, “ inquit, “Achate,

quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?

En Priamus. Sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi;

sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

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Solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.” (1.459-63, italics mine)

“Achates,

where on this earth is there a land, a place

that does not know our sorrows? Look! There is Priam!

Here, too, the honorable finds its due

and there are tears for passing things; here, too,

things mortal touch the mind. Forget your fears;

this fame [or story] will bring you some deliverance. (Mandelbaum 1. 651-7; 17)

With its reference to “fama,” the above passage has key structural and thematic significance for

Chaucer’s poem. At the most basic level, there are the several conspicuous parallels between

Aeneid 1. 441-93 and Book I of The House of Fame: the main character finds himself in a temple

devoted to a goddess; after marveling at the luxurious and skillfully crafted art within the

sanctuary’s interior, he gazes at the murals on the walls depicting the epic events of the Aeneid;

as he does so, he responds with great emotion, overtaken by a flood of compassion. Although it

is tempting for modern readers and critics to read the Chaucerian narrator’s emotional expositio

on “ false male lovers” as merely Chaucer’s parody of rhetorical excess (or, in Sheila Delany’s

words, as “obvious narrative incompetence” 53), the narrator’s empathetic response does

resemble Aeneas’s in its intensity.

On another level, the passage from the Aeneid haunts Chaucer’s poem because, in this

scene, the hero Aeneas experiences, within a great matriarchal temple built and authorized by

Queen Dido herself (1. 446), that which Chaucer’s suicidal, marginalized Dido so sorely lacks: a

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kindly listening fama, a fama of mortal suffering and sorrow that, generously carried and

nurtured and sustained within the hushed sanctuary of the imagined compassionate maternal

Other, opens up the heart with its tender consolation, dispelling the fearful anxiety of the exile,

promising a haven for the refugee. As Aeneas gazes, he sees vivid “snapshots” of his people’s

suffering, a montage of poignantly empathetic images that depict not so much the mighty

heroism of the defeated Trojans, but, specifically, his people’s suffering and victimization at the

hands of the victorious Greeks. Not surprisingly, such images immediately disarm the stalwart

hero and leader, momentarily piercing and breaking down his carefully guarded stoical persona

and thus enabling him to weep. The temple’s skillfully executed art of pathos moves the reader,

too: through Aeneas’s tear-filled eyes, we see the horrific brutality of war, in particular, its toll

on the weak and vulnerable: young Troilus falling as he tries to flee the overpowering Achilles,

the disheveled Trojan women beating their breast in futile supplication to Pallas Athena, the

wrathful Achilles dragging the body of Hector three times around the city, old Priam pleading for

the body of his son with “unarmed hands” (“manus . . . inermis,” 1. 487). Bringing necessary

hope to Aeneas and Achates, defeated survivors of a catastrophic war, this consoling,

anonymously loving fama evokes human goodness and charity through its validating and

restorative empathy for the Trojan victim.

The compassionate fama of the Temple of Juno is thus the direct psychic opposite of

Virgil’s monstrous and grotesque Fama-as-gossip that can so swiftly devour and kill reputations,

scandalizing the lovers Aeneas and Dido in Book 4 of the Aeneid—the “wikke Fame” feared by

Chaucer’s despairing Dido, the fama that never rests, that delights in and feeds upon and

magnifies the supposed secret sins of others, riding on a flood of anonymous ears, mouths and

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tongues. For the reader’s convenience (and because I will be referring to it in later chapters as

well), I will quote this important passage in full:

Exemplo Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes,

Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius ullum:

mobilitate viget virisque adquirit eundo,

parva metu primo, mox sese attolit in auras

ingrediturque solo et caput inter nubile condit.

Illam Terra parens ira inritata deorum

extremam, ut perhibent, Coeo Enceladoque sororem

progenuit pedibus celerem et pernicibus alis,

monstrum horrendum, ingens, cui quot sunt corpore plumae,

tot vigiles oculi subter (mirabile dictu),

tot linguae, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit auris.

Nocte volat caeli medio terraeque per umbram

stridens, nec dulci declinat lumina somno;

luce sedet custos aut summit culmine tecti

turribus aut altis, et magnas territat urbes,

tam ficti pravique tenax quam nuntia veri.

Haec tum multiplici populos sermone replebat

gaudens, et pariter facta atque infecta canebat:

venisse Aenean Trojano sanguine cretum,

cui se pulchra viro dignetur jungere Dido;

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nunc hiemem inter se luxu, quam longa, fovere

regnorum immemores turpique cupidine captos.

Haec passim dea foeda virum diffundit in ora. (4. 173-95)

Then, swiftest of all evils, Rumor runs

straightway through Libya’s mighty cities—Rumor

whose life is speed, whose going gives her force.

Timid and small at first, she soon lifts up

her body in the air. She stalks the ground;

her head is hidden in the clouds. Provoked

to anger at the gods, her mother Earth

gave birth to her, last come—they say—as sister

to Coeus and Enceladus; fast-footed

and lithe of wing, she is a terrifying

enormous monster with as many feathers

as she has sleepless eyes beneath each feather

(amazingly), as many sounding tongues

and mouths, and raises up as many ears.

Between the earth and skies she flies by night,

screeching across the darkness, and she never

closes her eyes in gentle sleep. By day

she sits as sentinel on some steep roof

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or on high towers, frightening vast cities;

for she holds fast to falsehood and distortion

as often as to messages of truth.

Now she was glad. She filled the ears of all

with many tales. She sang of what was done

and what was fiction, chanting that Aeneas,

one born of Trojan blood, had come, that lovely

Dido has deigned to join herself to him,

that now, in lust, forgetful of their kingdom,

they take long pleasure, fondling through the winter,

the slaves of squalid craving. Such reports

the filthy goddess scatters everywhere

upon the lips of men. (Mandelbaum 4. 229-59; 87)

What is significant about the contrast between the Fama of Book 4 and the consoling fama of

Book 1 is that the two are fundamentally linked by a shared focus on the embodied human being,

the human being as mortal creature of the flesh, i.e. both kinds of fama carry, and, in a sense,

generate and sustain this same “object.” The first fama, however, seriously and lovingly takes up

the suffering body, whereas the second Fama gleefully shames and humiliates it for its bodily

weakness—in this case, the “squalid craving” that “enslaves” Dido and Aeneas—making the

sexual body seem obscene.

As summed up by the Aeneas’s comforting words to Achates in 1.463 (“Solve metus;

feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.”), Virgil’s poem associates the first fama with a genuinely

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life-saving deliverance, the rescue of Aeneas and his Trojans from danger and further trauma--

ultimately, in this case, due to their profoundly vulnerable, weakened position (they have

survived a catastrophic war, long years of wandering, and a great ship-wracking storm at sea;

they are needy strangers in a strange land), from death itself. This feminine fama, however, does

not simply deliver the masculine subject from physical death: it delivers him from symbolic

death as well. As ensuing events of the epic will show, the hero Aeneas will soon encounter and

be restored by a radiant incarnation of the consoling and “kindly listening” fama of the temple—

the lovely Queen Dido herself, a humane woman who, having endured great trauma herself (the

murder of her beloved husband Sychaeus by her own brother, her subsequent flight to a new

homeland), now generously seeks to aid others in need:

Quare agite, O tectis, juvenes, succedite nostris.

Me quoque per multos similis fortuna labores

jactatam hac demum voluit consistere terra.

Non ignara malis miseris succurrere disco. (1. 627-30)

“Thus, young men, you are welcome to our halls.

My destiny, like yours, has willed that I,

A veteran of many hardships, halt at last

In this country. Not ignorant of trials

I can now learn to help the miserable.” (Mandelbaum 1. 779-82, 22)

In Books 2 and 3, Aeneas, urged by the welcoming queen in her court, will tell his story of the

horrific last days of the Trojan War and his seven long years of wandering. Virgil’s structuring

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of his poem thus gives us the sense that this telling of his story to an empathetic, strong

feminine audience fortifies the weakened hero, restoring him to his former integrity. Tracing

over the eventful and often painful past that he and his people have endured, Aeneas constructs

himself as a coherent subject by gathering up these many sufferings and adventures into a

coherent narrative—a gathering up that is arguably only sustained and made fully real through

the all-important “glue” of the compassionate and intently listening Dido. This experience both

literally and psychically marks the end of the hero’s seven years of wandering: although Virgil,

of course, only tells us how the noble Aeneas’s telling of his story immediately caused Dido to

fall passionately in love with the hero (and, correspondingly, gives the reader no access to

Aeneas’s inner feelings of awakening desire), I propose that Virgil’s very emphasis on Dido-as-

listener might also be read as showing just as much how the act of Dido’s listening (her perfect

incarnation of the consoling, receptive fama of the temple) stabilizes and centers Aeneas as a

masculine subject--and, in so doing, implicitly opens up, for the first time since he lost his wife

seven years ago, the possibility of love and desire for the hero as well. On the morning of Dido

and Aeneas’s fateful union in the cave, the radiant aura that surrounds the hero—and clearly

dazzles the enamored Dido-- is that of a confident and fully regenerated man with hopes for the

future; indeed, the narrator’s effusive description informs us that goddess-born Aeneas, once a

stranger and mournful refugee, is now the supreme embodiment of masculine beauty and power:

as lordly as Apollo himself and--as the poem’s ordering of this description also pointedly

implies—equal in graceful beauty and splendor to Queen Dido herself (4. 129-50).

Whereas consoling maternal fama heals and delivers the subject, warding off the

possibility of both his literal death and psychic disintegration, Virgil’s second Fama, in stark

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contrast, represents a deathly force that attacks the subject, threatening the coherent subject

with his or her symbolic or social death, the ruin of his or her name. The murderous deadliness of

this particular allegorical goddess is no exaggeration: as literary critics as early as Macrobius

noted (The Saturnalia 5. 13; 340-1), Virgil’s inspiration for his shape-shifting Fama was none

other than Homer’s Hate (Iliad 4. 442-ff.), the Greek poet’s terrifying feminine personification of

the chaotic blood-lust and brutal destruction of the battlefield, the intensifying primal din of yells

of fury and screams of agony:

This great army

Ares urged on; the other, grey-eyed Athena,

Terror and Rout, and Hate, insatiable

Sister-in-arms of man-destroying Ares—

Frail at first, but growing, till she rears

Her head through heaven as she walks through the earth.

Once more she sowed ferocity, traversing

The ranks of men, redoubling cries and groans. . .

A great din rose,

In one same air elation and agony

Of men destroying and destroyed, and earth

Astream with blood. (Fitzgerald 103)

Virgil’s rewriting of Homer’s Hate as Fama has profound implications: in contrast to Homer

who links his goddess Hate with primal cries and groans and brutal physical slaughter and thus

implicitly constructs the force she represents as something primitive, something “natural”

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beyond the order of language, Virgil links his goddess with the entirely social aggression of

malicious gossip and thus implicitly constructs the destructive urge as something insidiously

embedded within the symbolic system of language itself (however degraded or renegade, Fama

still represents human speech). With an uncanny precision, Virgil’s new and singular emphasis

on the ominous, deadly, negating power of language thus intriguingly parallels Jacque Lacan’s

similarly linguistically-focused interpretation and rewriting of Freud’s famous fort/da narrative

in the closing pages of his 1953 manifesto, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in

Psychoanalysis” (Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, 102-7). Just as Virgil transforms Homer’s Hate into

Fama, Lacan, in this essay, replaces Freud’s always ambiguous, partially instinctual notion of

the death drive (or instinct) with a death drive not simply correlated with but casually related to

the emergence of speech, the birth of the subject within language; as Lacan himself states, his

intent is to demonstrate “the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the

problems of speech” (101).

As the plot of the Aeneid shows us, the deathly, negating Fama of Book 4 demonstrates

its negativity most decisively by effectively “killing off” the hitherto flourishing love

relationship between Dido and Aeneas; much as the consoling, empathetic fama of Book 1 sets

in motion the process of Aeneas’s restoration as desiring masculine subject, the destructive Fama

of Book 4 creates a chain of events that will ultimately culminate with the hero’s departure, the

end of Aeneas’s desire for Dido. In psychoanalytic terms, one might say that Virgil’s opposing

types of fama represent the “ground zero” of the subject, for, in both cases, Virgil presents us

with the subject in a weak or weakening state vis-à-vis a seemingly all-knowing, all-powerful

feminine Other. Thus, the two kinds of fama are inextricably connected: Virgil’s humane “kindly

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listening,” cherishing fama represents the necessary yet generally hidden fantasy of the

maternal that enables the subject to hope and thrive and desire, whereas Virgil’s hostile,

threatening Fama evokes the sheer power and threatening independence of the maternal Other

that must be repressed: in essence, the “hate” of the “terrible mother” that must be, to a sufficient

degree, negated by the subject, covered up and blocked out by the fantasmatic screen of

“consoling maternal fama.” As I suggested earlier, what makes these opposing yet

interconnected feminine constructions of fama specifically maternal (as opposed to merely

“feminine”) is that, as with a mother in relation to her dependent small child, both focus on and

highlight the embodied human being, the mortal creature of the flesh, and, moreover, do so from

a position of power vis-à-vis the subject.

With this maternal power, there is a certain “maternal jouissance,” a certain something

that, in its respective cherishing of or cruel delight in human embodiment, is at odds with the

patriarchal symbolic order and its “clean” ethics and standards. Thus, in the case of the Fama of

Book 4, Virgil shows us how the “filthy goddess” (“dea foeda,” 4. 195) targets the sex life of

Dido and Aeneas, rendering the noble lovers abject and obscene, whilst, at the same time, of

course, joyously and hypocritically feeding on and intoxicated by the thrill of this very obscenity.

According to Virgil’s genealogy of Fama, this goddess is the product of maternal vengeance and

resentment: born of the Earth’s anger at the Olympian gods, her genealogy implies the lingering,

always-ready-to-be-ignited hostility of the “abject mother” towards the victorious rule and Law

of the “sky Father.” And, as we see, Virgil’s Fama lives up to her genealogy, for “she” takes

special delight in the leveling exposure of the proud and the mighty, the reversal of existing

power relations by which a queen and a hero or any persons of enviable distinction can be

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mastered, degraded to “slaves of squalid craving,” prisoners of base desire (“turpique cupidine

captos,” 4. 194). One could easily apply Theodor Adorno’s incisive words about fascist

propaganda to Fama:

‘We are all in the same boat’; nobody should be better off—the snob, the

intellectual, the pleasure seeker are always attacked. The undercurrent of

malicious egalitarianism, of the brotherhood of all-compromising humiliation, is a

component of fascist propaganda and fascism itself . . . Repressive egalitarianism

instead of realization of true equality through the abolition of repression is part

and parcel of the fascist mentality and reflected in the agitators’ ‘if-you-only-

knew’ device which promises the vindictive revelation of all sorts of forbidden

pleasures enjoyed by others. (The Culture Industry 146)

With its dizzying evocation of the master/slave dynamic, Virgil’s raging Fama thus also

evokes the small child’s projection of fury and vengeance against the all-powerful mother. Often

cruelly devastating to its unfortunate victim yet, in spite of this, undeniably and irresistibly

attractive to its multitude of anonymous participants, such unkind, pointedly dirty gossip perhaps

derives its peculiar irresistibility and astonishing exponential fertility through its uncanny

circling and reactivation of the universally shared carnal renunciations of the subject’s earliest

childhood. That is, from a psychoanalytic perspective, Virgil’s depiction of Fama as feminine

rings true not so much because “women gossip more than men” but because, for anyone raised

by a mother who learns to speak (anyone who is “born” into the symbolic order of language),

gossip calls up and acts out the primordial drama of the emerging subject, the inevitable power

struggle between mother and child that inaugurates the speaking subject and which Freud and

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Lacan associate with the death drive; below, although she does not emphasize the crucial fact

of the child’s accompanying acquisition of speech, Dorothy Dinnerstein nevertheless captures

this “peculiar” dynamic well:

Woman in the will’s first, overwhelming adversary. She teaches us our intentions

can be thwarted not only by the inconvenient properties of objects but also by the

opposed intentions of other living creatures. In our first real contests of will, we

find ourselves, more often than not, defeated. The defeat is always intimately

carnal; and the victor is always female. Through woman’s jurisdiction over

child’s passionate body, through her control over what goes into it and what

comes out of it, through her right to restrict its movements and invade its orifices,

to withhold pleasure or inflict pain until it obeys her wishes, each human being

first discovers the peculiarly angry, bittersweet experience of conscious

surrender to conscious, determined outside rule. (The Mermaid and the Minotaur

166)

Read in this way, the grotesque, many-eyed, many-eared, many-tongued Fama is feminine

because, at the historical limit of our subjectivity (at the margin of the woods, as it were), there

looms the uncannily knowing and powerful, speaking mother—the first potential, deadly

“gossip” we encounter (and compulsively and unconsciously continue to fear and retaliate

against), the first witness to and “library” of our most intimate struggles, our most humbling

defeats. As Dinnerstein goes on to point out, no matter how kindly and genuinely loving the

empirical mother, “In confronting her the child faces an old, devastatingly knowledgeable

witness” (The Mermaid and the Minotaur 168). Being defeated and humbled, through Fama we

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gleefully seek to defeat and humble others, especially those others who seem to be getting

away with “it,” who seem to be having too much carnal pleasure: although most often, as Virgil

suggests, “forbidden pleasure” of a sexual kind, e.g. Queen Dido and Aeneas who, “forgetful of

their kingdoms” (“regnorum immemores,” 4. 194), “take long pleasure, fondling through the

winter” (“hiemem inter se luxu, quam longa, fovere,” 4. 193), Fama also obviously rejoices in

exposing the drunk and the glutton, and, in today’s peculiarly weight-obsessed culture, the fat

person who is obviously “lazy” and “eats too much” (what tabloid can resist the female movie

star who has gotten “ fat”?). Needless to say, as we verbally punish others for getting away with

“it,” we get away with “ it”: as Virgil’s depiction so clearly emphasizes, what gives the “filthy

goddess” such incredible swiftness and power is in large part her mindless anonymity (her

“head” is shrouded in the clouds), the intoxicating promise of a “free pass” to all who participate.

The above psychoanalytic interpretation of Virgil’s Fama, however, only tells part of the

story: as Chaucer’s House of Fame will highlight, Virgil’s construction of Fama, as well as

Dido’s incarnation of the consoling fama of the Juno’s temple, is generated and sustained by the

binary logic of the phallus, i.e. the neatly opposed ideals of sex and gender that are, in turn,

mapped onto social classes and other kinds of groups (e.g. good fama = noble male speaker,

silently supportive female audience; bad Fama = the feminized anonymous multitude recklessly

speaks about and exposes the noble subjects who are the masters). More precisely, Virgil’s

construction of both kinds of fama is ultimately complicated by the classical poet’s loyalty to the

epic ideal of masculinity and his consequent failure to come clean about the extent of

fama/Fama’s power and authority over all subjects—in particular, the Aeneid’s ideal heroic

subject (masculine, Roman, aristocratic, etc) but even more importantly, the subject who writes

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the Aeneid itself. However assiduously Virgil tries to cover it up the troubling truth that his

own poem hints at, this sheer power and pervasiveness of fama/Fama—as Chaucer’s poem will

imply—suggests that “she” is, in fact, indispensable to the patriarchal order that the Roman poet

affirms (or tries to affirm) and to the lofty poetry he writes.

Most of my support for the above claim will be presented in the following discussion of

Chaucer’s critique of Virgil in Book I of The House of Fame; however, to pave the way for that

analysis, I would like first to turn again to the temple of Juno scene from Book I of the Aeneid.

As explained earlier, in this scene the hero Aeneas responds with great emotion to “consoling

fama,” a series of vivid depictions of Trojan victimization that he and his comrade Achates see

sympathetically painted upon the walls. Although, to the modern reader, this art may seem only

“humane,” Virgil expects his audience to understand that it is “womanly” or “feminine” art, the

kind of art a Roman would expect to find in a shrine for Juno, but even more importantly, the

kind of art that would be created by the “feminine,” “maternal” Carthaginians, a people of a great

city founded and ruled by a woman, a people whose heavenly patron is Juno: or, in other words,

a people who are in some fundamental way opposite to the virile Romans (the descendants of

Trojan Aeneas), the people of a great city founded and ruled by a man, the people whose

heavenly patron is Jupiter, the great Father of the Olympians. Thus, taking care to emphasize the

pathos of the temple art, Virgil offers no depictions of heroic Trojan masculinity but focuses on

the defeated and most vulnerable Trojans suffering at the hands of the brutal Greeks.

Accordingly, as he describes Aeneas’s emotional reaction, the Virgilian narrator of the Aeneid

quietly takes care to distance himself, symbolically dissociating himself and his masculine art of

epic from this feminine, tear-provoking Carthaginian art, this art of “fantasy”: “Sic . . .animum

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pictura pascit inani / multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine vultum,” 1. 464-5 (“Thus, with

many groans and tears streaming down his face, he feeds his soul on mere pictures”). There is, I

submit, something nervous and needless about this comment, in particular, the phrase “pictura .

.. inani” (which is, in and of itself, very difficult to translate, since “inani” could also be

translated as “empty,” “vain” or “worthless”). It is needless because, as described by the narrator,

the vivid temple art, far from being weakly sentimental, hits us with the power of emotional

truth: its arresting images of war’s brutality move Aeneas and us because the suffering they

represent is simultaneously universal yet hauntingly particularized—as if lit up, as if etched

indelibly in the mind by trauma’s laser. Given that the creator of these potent images, is, of

course, Virgil himself—and, one could even say, Virgil at the height of his poetic powers—why

should the poet feel compelled to announce his detachment like this? Put another way, to whom

or for whom does he draw attention to the “merely imaginary” status of these representations, as

if somehow the rest of his poem managed to escape this status? And then, of course, Virgil’s

own audacious fantasy about the Carthaginian people creates another huge irony: although it is

easy to get caught up in the world Virgil creates, we cannot forget the utter strangeness of his

projection of an all-supportive, compassionate maternal audience onto Rome’s historical enemy

and victim, onto a people brutally conquered and indeed decimated by the Romans in 146 B.C.E.

under the leadership of Scipio the Younger (the same Scipio of Cicero’s Dream of Scipio), who

after razing the city of Carthage with its nearly half a million people, enslaved the approximately

50, 000 survivors. Nevertheless, Virgil chooses to depict Queen Dido and the Carthaginians not

only as having absolutely no interest in honoring and memorializing their own eventful history

but also exclusively focusing all their public sympathy on the sufferings of the foreign Aeneas

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and his people, the Trojans, the ancestors of the very people who will one day slaughter them.

If anything constitutes a “merely imaginary” picture, surely this is it.

Moreover, are not Roman Virgil’s fantasies of the “feminine” or “maternal”

Carthaginians merely a lofty example of the partly true and partly false “carnal” gossip that

lowly Fama herself represents? As Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian analysis below suggests, racism and

nationalism, seizing as they always do on the carnal topic of “enjoyment” (jouissance), could

very well be called subcategories of the irresistible lurid gossip that the “filthy goddess” so

happily and swiftly multiplies:

What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the

national Thing. We always impute to the other an excessive enjoyment: he wants

to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some

secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the “other” is

the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the “excess”

that pertains to this way: the smell of “their” food, “their” noisy songs and dances,

“their” strange manners, “their” attitude towards work. (Tarrying with the

Negative 203)

Of course, as Žižek goes on to say, this attribution of “excessive” or “perverse” enjoyment to the

Other (which Žižek, following Lacan, sees as a universal tendency) always gives us a secret thrill

and thus always points back to us, to how we “organize our enjoyment,” or, to put it in more

colloquial terms, how we “get our kicks”: “Do we not find enjoyment precisely in fantasizing

about the Other’s enjoyment, in this ambivalent attitude towards it? Do we not find satisfaction

by means of the very supposition that the Other enjoys in a way inaccessible to us?” (206). Read

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in the terms of Žižek, Roman Virgil’s ostensibly “Lawful” act of distancing himself and his

poem from the temple’s Carthaginian art of pathos, far from being “moral,” is actually a strategy

to enhance enjoyment, a way to make the images of suffering seem even more spellbinding and

irresistible. Moreover, the enjoyment that is produced is truly “polymorphously perverse”: on the

one hand, the reader qua “proper, Aeneas-identifying subject” experiences heteronormative

“masculine” enjoyment via the fantasy of the emotional, “womanly” Carthaginian Other; on the

other hand, the reader qua “feminine, non-Aeneas identifying subject” reaps an arguably even

more thrillingly “perverse” enjoyment by watching Aeneas (the hero, the proper male) soften and

surrender to this feminine, maternally triumphant art of pathos.

I suspect that, for Virgil himself, it is the second kind of enjoyment that is the more

prominent and intense. This leads us to an inevitable question: to what degree can Virgil’s

seemingly superfluous gesture of symbolic purification be also read as protesting too much—a

way for the poet to convince himself of his own commitment to the properly Roman patriarchal

order, in essence, a way for the poet to disavow the truth of his own sexual complexity? Just as

Virgil chooses in Book 4 to imagine love and passion only from the feminine perspective of

Dido and to ignore the inner life of his desiring heterosexual hero altogether, in the temple scene

of Book 1, the poet also clearly takes delight in the opportunity that he gives himself to imagine

“feminine art,” to write “feminine poetry” freely and unabashedly. I am referring in particular to

the longest vignette within the temple art passage—the famous lines describing poor young

Troilus:

Parte alia fugiens amissis Troilus armis,

infelix puer atque impar congressus Achilli,

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fertur equis curruque haeret resupinus inani

lora tenens tamen; huic cervixque comaeque trahuntur

per terram, et versa pulvis inscribitur hasta. (1. 474-8)

Elsewhere young Troilus, the unhappy [or “unlucky”] boy--

he is matched unequally against Achilles—

runs off, his weapons lost. He is fallen flat;

his horses drag him on as he still clings

fast to his empty chariot, clasping

the reins. His neck, his hair trail on the ground,

and his inverted spear inscribes the dust. (Mandelbaum 1. 671-7, 17)

Unlike the rest of the vignettes, this one carries its pathos with a strong erotic charge: one can

almost sense the poet slowly turning about in his mind his delicately violent fantasy, seducing

himself with his own words. With a flourish, the virtuoso poet ends his sado-masochistic,

autoerotic/homoerotic reverie, punctuating the passage with an almost too perfect motto for his

poetry: “versa pulvis inscribitur hasta” (“his inverted spear inscribes the dust,” or, lit. “the dust

is inscribed by his overturned spear”).

With this incredibly resonant phrase, Virgil seems to speak his own desire, telling of his

failure, of his inability—or rather, more likely his Dido-like suicidal unwillingness—to make his

more intensely personal, waywardly “Carthaginian” poetic desire conform to the less troubled

masculinity and more spacious objectivity of Homeric epic: perhaps, just like his “infelix Dido”

and his “infelix Troilus”--linked together with that similar epithet—sensitive, sexually alienated

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Virgil is also “infelix.” In her brief discussion about Virgil in her book Sexual Personae,

Camille Paglia comes to a similar conclusion:

Little else in the Aeneid approaches the brilliance of the Carthaginian books. The

poet probably knew it, as he ordered the unfinished poem burnt after his death—

like self-immolating Dido. Vergil is a decadent poet, a virtuoso of destruction . . .

Epic plot in the Aeneid is failed self-containment, a male scheme to bridle

transsexual reverie. At a historical crisis in sexual personae, he turns to epic to

stop it and stop himself. (130)

This “feminine” or “decadent” Virgil seems to go hand in hand with the “official Virgil” who

steps in with the needless patriarchal comment and who strenuously insists on rigidly idealized

gender roles for Dido and Aeneas. Once again, Lacan provides an uncanny modern parallel to

Virgil. Lacan, too, speaks loudly and defensively for “the Law,” similarly warding off the threat

of more complex possibilities of sexuality and gender by insisting upon the non-psychotic

subject’s necessary adherence to the binary, heteronormative logic of “having” and “being” the

phallus (“The Signification of the Phallus,” Ecrits, trans. Sheridan 218-91). Like Virgil with his

famous pair of doomed lovers, Lacan notoriously proclaims the impossibility of heterosexual

love, i.e. that the “real” of sexual difference creates an insuperable psychic deadlock or sexual

incompatibility between man and woman, making it always impossible for true intimacy

between man and woman to occur: “il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” (“there’s no such as a sexual

relationship”).17 Like Virgil with his fantasy of “infelix Troilus,” Lacan emphasizes the

powerlessness and pathos of the subject—and at times with a stylistic flourish that suggests that

he enjoys doing so: for example, whereas Freud’s famous “fort/da” narrative grants his little

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grandson the dignity of having his own emotions and some measure of agency, Lacan

dramatically and solemnly intones, “Fort! Da! It is precisely in his solitude that the desire of the

child has already become the desire of another, of an alter ego who dominates him and whose

object is henceforth his own affliction” (“The Function and Field of Speech and Language,”

Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, 104).18 And, like Virgil with his Dido, Lacan is strongly drawn to--and

clearly seems to identify with—the suicidal feminine character, most notably, Sophocles’s

Antigone whom, in his commentary of the play in Seminar VII, Lacan sets up as a model of the

ethical (the “ethical” defined by Lacan as strictly that which passes beyond good and evil,

beyond the morality of symbolic law), dwelling not—as many modern readers do-- on

Antigone’s principled “humanity” (e.g. her devotion to family) but in particular on what, in

Lacan’s view, is the true secret of our fascination with Antigone, namely, Antigone’s demonic

quality, her distinctly inhuman ethical fierceness--her implacable, ruthless, death-driven desire

(Seminar VII, trans. Porter, 241-321):

We know very well that over and beyond the dialogue, over and beyond the

question of family and country, over and beyond the moralizing arguments, it is

Antigone herself who fascinates us. Antigone in her unbearable splendor. She has

a quality that both attracts us and startles us, in the sense of intimidates us; this

terrible, self-willed victim disturbs us. (Seminar VII, trans. Porter, 247)

Note: Although Antigone does not commit suicide directly as Dido does, Lacan’s analysis

stresses how the uncannily willful Antigone chooses to act in such a way as to place herself

beyond the world of the living first symbolically and then physically.

Such parallels between Lacan and Virgil, hinting at the sexual complexity of both as well

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as a certain marked alienation from conventional masculinity, throw into question the arguably

oppressive and monolithic patriarchal paradigms that both so insistently present to us—

paradigms that I would add seem distinctly more oppressive than those constructed by their

respective textual “fathers,” i.e. Homer and Freud. Because, however, neither “infelix” Virgil nor

“infelix” Lacan is willing to drop the “patriarchal masquerade,” the potentially liberating

androgynous complexity of both remains ideologically bound and solipsistic, chained to

masochistic fantasy that is then displaced onto the feminine Other. That is, rather than directly

acknowledging or owning their fundamental sexual alienation and courageously renouncing the

perverse delight and thrill of sado-masochistic fantasy to challenge and break out of the

patriarchal symbolic, both Virgil and Lacan displace their alienation and its revolutionary ethical

possibilities onto a suicidal female character. Needless to say, the disturbing “feminine” element

is corralled and slaughtered and the patriarchal status quo remains intact—thankfully so, for both

Virgil and Lacan, since if this status quo were to be effectively challenged, each would also lose

the machine of perhaps his most exquisite pleasure.19 In the end, with Dido-identifying Virgil

and Antigone-identifying Lacan, we are left with the masculine subject who, through his art,

truly does get to have his patriarchal cake and eat it too.

What about Chaucer then? Since, in Book I of The House of Fame, the male narrator

identifies with a suicidal feminine character, shouldn’t he be critiqued along the same lines as I

have just critiqued Dido-identifying Virgil and Antigone-identifying Lacan? Is it thus fair to say,

just as Elaine Tuttle Hansen argues, that Chaucer brings Woman to life only “in order that she

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may be killed off, lost, silenced, and erased” (56)?

Although Hansen’s feminist objection may hit at the truth in regards to Virgil and Lacan

(and no doubt in regards to many other writers as well), such is not the case—as I will now

show-- for Chaucer and his Dido-identifying narrator. What makes Chaucer’s use of Dido in The

House of Fame uniquely creative and revolutionary rather than insidiously and predictably

patriarchal has all to do with his poem’s exposure and precise critique of the hidden, disavowed

motor of the Virgilian patriarchal order, namely, the “ground zero” dialectic between positive,

consoling maternal fama (a fantasy of the empathetic feminine Other that builds up, encourages

and sustains the subject, particularly, the masculine subject, filling the subject with hope and

spurring his desire and zest for life) and deathly, negating maternal Fama (a collective

manifestation of the world’s raging talk as “terrible mother,” the real voices of the Other that can

swiftly tear down names and thus kill any targeted subject by shaming his private desire,

overwhelming the targeted subject with fear and despair via the threat of ostracism or “social

death”). Again and again, Chaucer zeroes in on how this hidden dialectic of “consoling fama”

and “destructive Fama” is strongly marked by gender and sexuality and is thus inextricably tied

to the question of romantic love and the age-old problem of “the battle of the sexes” that the

Virgilian legend of Dido and Aeneas’s tragic love affair so vividly captures—and, of course, so

potently perpetuates to the disadvantage of the feminine subject, empowering and sustaining the

masculine subject at the symbolic level as it seduces and silences and indeed cripples the

feminine subject, ultimately pushing her (or him, as in the case of Chaucer’s Dido-identifying

male narrator ) into the narcissistic dead-end of hysteric complaint.

Within the Temple of Venus setting of Book I of The House of Fame, Chaucer gets at the

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heart of this knotty problem of language, love and sexual difference by synthesizing the

consoling fama of the temple art in Book 1 of the Aeneid with the “wikke Fama” of Book 4 of

the epic—and, most importantly, by doing so from the perspective of the feminine or feminine-

identifying subject, the perspective that Virgil’s epic poem must ultimately silence. As

mentioned earlier, the Aeneid clearly inspired Chaucer’s Temple of Venus with its panels or

murals depicting the events of Aeneas’s life, as well as the narrator’s heightened emotional

response to what he sees. Or, to be more precise, to what he doesn’t see: like Aeneas, the narrator

reacts empathetically to the pictures on the temple’s walls, but rather than responding—as

Aeneas does-- to the consoling maternal compassion for Trojan victims of war that the temple art

demonstrates, Chaucer’s narrator reads against the grain, responding to a glaring lack within the

temple’s art, that lack being the absence of any comparable maternal consolation for the

abandoned Dido as feminine victim of Aeneas’s thoughtless desire. (Note: Because the narrator

immediately breaks in with his effusive Ovidian material to “patch up” this lack in the temple

art, it is at first difficult to determine where the murals end and the narrator’s response begins.

Upon closer examination, however, there are clues: whereas the narrator’s response to the murals

is always emotional and exclamatory with many a “allas,” the narrator uses a matter-of-fact tone

when reporting the events depicting in the murals and often adds the signal phrase “I sawgh” to

indicate that he is looking at a mural.) That is, whereas the murals in the Temple of Juno move

Virgil’s hero to tears because they specifically depict the suffering of relatively weak and

powerless Trojans at the hands of the brutally dominant Greeks (in particular, the wrathful

Achilles) and, in doing so, exude what might be called a spirit of “maternal justice,” the Virgilian

murals in the Temple of Venus, as implied by the narrator’s signals (e.g. “There sawgh I grave”),

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tell the story of Dido and Aeneas in a way as Virgil does—with dramatic sympathy for Dido’s

“inevitable” suffering as tragic heroine (e.g. Dido falling passionately in love, her discovery of

Aeneas’s preparation to leave and subsequent suicide) but never in a way that points the finger at

Aeneas, never in a way that exposes the ethically unflattering side of masculinity and calls the

hero to justice (as, for example, the compassionate temple art of the Aenied does with its implicit

judgment against the brutal Achilles for his victimization of young Troilus and old Priam). At the

same time, the murals of The House of Fame’s Temple of Venus are also unexpectedly similar to

the murals of the Aeneid’s Temple of Juno. Just as the temple art of Virgil’s poem demonstrates

sympathy for the legendary Trojan victims of war but does so in a way that ironically draws the

contemporary Roman reader’s attention away from the suffering of the historical Carthaginian

people (the real-life losers of war and devastated victims of Rome’s fairly recent political past),

the Virgilian temple art of Chaucer’s poem, depicting the fictionalized Dido not so much as a

representative Woman abandoned by a Man but rather as one woman tragically and spectacularly

out of her senses for love, also arguably functions to draw the spectator’s attention away from

the suffering of historical women (the routine feminine casualties of the patriarchal paradigm of

love)—and, more generally, to ward off compassion for woman as a thinking, speaking subject.

Read in this way, the Chaucerian narrator’s oft-noted undermining of Dido’s grandeur

and exceptionality—his transformation of Virgil’s powerful Dido into a pathetic Ovidian

heroine--takes a new, more radical meaning. Because Virgil’s passionate Dido is such a

memorable, larger-than-life character, even feminist readers such as Hansen are unable to see

how Dido’s very exceptionality (e.g. her great passion, sexuality and power) ultimately functions

to keep the status quo intact, luring us away from questioning and analyzing the fundamental

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structuring of the patriarchal paradigm that, in essence, maps out Dido’s fateful trajectory as a

woman in love and ultimately demands her suicide. Accordingly, Hansen is also unable to

appreciate how Chaucer’s admittedly unattractive downplaying of Dido’s exceptionality (e.g. the

narrator’s comical avoidance of the topic of sexuality in lines 242-7; his rewriting of Dido as an

ordinary, mundane feminine victim of masculine seduction and betrayal) brings to the forefront

the very everyday workings of gender within the patriarchal symbolic order that Dido and all her

dark splendor obscures. In Hansen’s eyes, Chaucer’s downsizing or “leveling” of Virgil’s Dido

is nothing but a conservative ploy, a way to insure that “the reality of Woman is all the more

firmly equated with the weak” (93).

In light of the Virgilian dialectic between “consoling fama” and what Chaucer’s Dido

calls “wikke Fame,” I propose instead that the greater “weakness” of Chaucer’s Dido reflects the

poet’s clear-eyed critique of the worldly patriarchal symbolic order, Chaucer’s clear-eyed desire

to highlight the truly difficult position of the feminine subject –as opposed to romanticizing it

and thereby whitewashing the fundamental inequity of masculine privilege. As we saw in Book 1

of Virgil’s poem, the weakened Aeneas gazes at the murals within Temple of Juno and finds

consolation and indeed deliverance through his realization of the larger world’s empathetic and

maternal response to the suffering of the defeated, victimized Trojan people. Moreover, directly

after the temple episode, Queen Dido herself radiantly incarnates the “consoling fama” of the

temple, listening intently and lovingly to Aeneas as he builds himself anew by recounting his

moving story of the fall of Troy and his many long years of wandering. Virgil’s poem thus

suggests that the art of Juno’s temple and Dido function similarly to heal, encourage and

regenerate the hero and to consolidate his sense of self. But if the role of the feminine subject is

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to fortify the weakened masculine subject and provide consolation and hope for others in need,

what happens to such a subject when she falls on hard times and becomes weakened and

miserable, when she thus outlives her usefulness as man’s empathetic mirror? This is the

question Book I of The House of Fame poses.

By alluding to Virgil’s empathetic temple art and implicitly contrasting that art with the

aforementioned “ lacking” pro-Aeneas murals of The Temple of Venus, Chaucer’s poem thus

suggests that, for the weakened and psychically endangered feminine subject (in this case, the

abandoned Dido), there is no comparable experience of public consolation or validation of

suffering. Going back to my earlier analysis of the Virgilian opposition of fama/Fama, this

would mean that the weakened feminine subject, lacking the protective fantasy of “consoling

fama,” is accordingly all the more radically exposed to the real, negating, lethal force of

reputation-killing Fama—which is, of course, exactly what Chaucer shows us through Dido’s

despairing lament about “wikke Fame” (imagined by the narrator as occurring right before her

suicide):

“O wel-awey that I was born!

For thorgh yow is my name lorn,

And alle myn actes red and songe

Over al thys lond, on every tonge.

O wikke Fame!—for ther nys

Nothing so swift, lo, as she is!…

Eke, though I myghte duren ever,

That I have don rekever I never ,

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That I ne shal be seyd, allas,

Yshamed be thourgh Eneas,

And that I shal thus juged be . . . (345-50, 353-7)

This highlighting of Dido’s particular vulnerability to “wikke Fame” is Chaucer’s addition: in

Virgil’s description of the “filthy goddess” in Book 4 of the Aeneid, Fama is described as

targeting Dido and Aeneas more or less equally; the gossip that rages throughout the land

accuses both of the lovers of being enslaved by disgraceful lust and of being forgetful of their

kingdoms (“regnorum immemores turpique cupidine captos,” 4. 194), i.e. of putting their own

private pleasure above the needs of their people. Chaucer’s revision here calls into question the

sheer improbability of Virgil’s scenario: given that it is Queen Dido who rules over and who is

now “forgetting” her people, it hardly seems likely the gossiping multitude would care equally

about the fact that the stranger Aeneas is “forgetful” of his foreign kingdom—and one that does

not yet even exist. Moreover, given that Dido is not only a queen but a woman and a widow

living in a patriarchal culture that honors and indeed expects feminine chastity and wifely

devotion, it also hardly seems likely that gossip about “down and dirty sex” would harm or

punish Dido and Aeneas in the same way (as Virgil’s evenhanded description seems to suggest).

With Book 4’s improbably impartial, seemingly gender-blind Fama, Virgil’s intent seems to

create a convenient piece of epic machinery that does as little damage to his hero as possible.

Conversely, by critiquing this improbably impartial, gender-blind Fama and thereby lessening

the sense of Aeneas as a victim of Fama, Chaucer's poem does casts a shadow on the character

of Virgil’s hero, making him seem more thoughtless and callously insensitive to Dido’s more

vulnerable position.

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At the same time, however, Chaucer’s narrator brings to the forefront the causal power

of Virgil’s terrifyingly swift “death goddess” of public opinion. By “causal power” I mean the

implicit threat of social death yielded by Fama, her power to make her targets and would-be

targets conform to symbolic expectations. Within Virgil’s poem, what distinguishes Dido from

Aeneas is that Dido puts her love above the public morality that Fama represents whereas

Aeneas, who stops the love affair soon after Fama appears, implicitly does not. Indeed, right

before Fama enters the epic, the Roman poet makes a point of Dido’s all-consuming passion, her

refusal to define her relationship according to the accepted rules of society:

. . . neque enim specie famave movetur

nec jam furtivum Dido meditatur amorem:

conjugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam. (4. 170-2)

For neither how things seem nor how they are deemed

moves Dido now, and she no longer thinks

of furtive love. For Dido calls it marriage,

and with this name she covers up her fault. (Mandelbaum 4. 225-8; 86)

What about Aeneas? Does public opinion (“how things seem” and “how they are deemed”) play

any role in his decision to leave Dido? Virgil, of course, obscures the motivating power of his

“filthy goddess.” Instead of showing his hero to be directly responsive to Fama, Virgil purifies

the lowly, feminized gossip that she represents through a chain of three masculine vessels before

its shaming message touches and influences Aeneas: upon hearing the gossip about Dido and

Aeneas, the outraged King Iarbas (Dido’s rejected suitor) bitterly prays to Father Jupiter to put

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an end to the relationship; Jupiter then answers his prayer, ordering Mercury to shame the

wayward hero so that he will leave Dido and Carthage immediately and thus get back to the

business of fulfilling his glorious destiny (4. 196-237). Although Mercury says the same type of

shaming things that Fama does, Virgil engineers it so that his hero appears to be motivated

solely by commands issuing from the Father God on high, Jove (Virgil’s version of the Freudian

superego or Lacan’s “Law”) and is above being shamed by the lowly, mundane gossip that the

monstrous, feminized Fama represents.20 Perhaps because Fama never directly touches or

influences Aeneas, Virgil’s goddess seems to be, as Bennett suggests, “a quite separate piece of

epic machinery chiefly designed to account for Jupiter’s intervention later” (38).

Within Book I of The House of Fame, Chaucer reverses Virgil’s emphasis, bringing

“wikke Fame” to the forefront in Dido’s monologue (i.e. the monologue imagined by the Dido-

identifying narrator) and obscuring Jupiter’s decisive role in the narrator’s plot summary of the

Aeneid, i.e. rather than clarifying the Father God’s view of the love affair between Dido and

Aeneas, the narrator says nothing about Jupiter ordering Mercury but only states in passing that

“the book seyth” that Mercury commanded Aeneas to leave “Dido and hir faire toun” (429, 432).

This is significant, for two reasons. Given that Jupiter functioned for medieval poets as the

mythological equivalent of the Christian God, this covering up of Jupiter’s judgment takes away

Aeneas’s edge over Dido, his “moral capital,” as it were, thereby equally the playing field for

Dido and Aeneas. The end result is to magnify Fame’s power over worldly events and people,

making it seem as if Fame’s destruction of Dido’s reputation were, in some way, directly and

inextricably linked to Aeneas’s abrupt decision to leave Carthage. Thus, in Chaucer’s retelling,

we are left with the vague suspicion that what ultimately distinguishes Aeneas from Dido is not

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greater piety or strength of character (as Virgil’s narrative implies) but something much less

lofty, namely, the hero’s greater social conformity and fear of public opinion—or simply, his

opportunistic shrewdness. Shrewdness or cool calculation, after all, is a characteristic gift of the

god Mercury, the god whose influence the narrator does acknowledge (albeit skeptically); within

Virgil’s poem, it is not Mercury but Jupiter whose imprimatur proves Aeneas’s high moral

purpose. (Significantly, the god Mercury—a god associated with eloquence and the art of

rhetoric-- will play no part in the Chaucerian narrator’s ensuing Jove-blessed ascent to the

goddess Fame’s mountain and palace.)

In and of itself, this undermining of Aeneas’s ethical purity, however, is not Chaucer’s

ultimate purpose. Rather, makes Chaucer’s answer to Virgil so ethically clear-eyed (and

genuinely radical) is that, in calling into question the patriarchal assumption of masculine moral

superiority, he refuses as well to fall back upon the seductive romanticizing of the feminine

subject position. That is, rather than encouraging us to bask in the jouissance of Dido’s darkly

thrilling “love suicide,” her all-for-nothing surrender to the death drive, Chaucer, through his

Dido-identifying narrator, shows us instead the likelier, more humbly human consequences

associated with the feminine subject’s doubly disadvantaged position within the patriarchal

symbolic order (no “consoling fama” for any feminine suffering that casts a shadow on the

heroic subject, that calls into question the justice of the patriarchal privileging of the masculine

subject; the desiring feminine subject’s greater vulnerability to “wikke Fame” due to the

patriarchal expectation of feminine chastity and modesty). Instead, Chaucer’s poem suggests that

this essential symbolic silencing or poverty of the feminine subject (or, by extension, any

marginalized subject) provokes, in response, the self-defeating retreat of wounded narcissism

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and its attendant psychic obstacles: 1) a projection of the punitive threatening “wikke Fame”

onto the symbolic world at large, 2) overly simplistic, self-justifying moralizing, and 3)

resentment and fear of language for its inevitable duplicity and imperfection, a longing for

imaginary plenitude or pre-Oedipal wordlessness. Thus, the lament of Chaucer’s Dido against

“wikke Fame” reductively distorts the sex roles assumed by Virgil’s poem, crudely aligning the

masculine subject as speaker (he who tells his story) with an artful yet deceitful use of language

and the feminine subject (she who listens ) with loyalty and “rhetorical innocence” (Hansen 95).

Because listening to Aeneas’s narrative of the fall of Troy results in Dido falling in love,

Chaucer’s Dido cynically reduces Aeneas’s story to a seducer’s come-on. In Dido’s speech, the

theme of consolation is conspicuously absent: men tell stories about themselves not to illicit

sympathy from women but to seduce them, to make women fall in love with them. The role of

the feminine listener is similarly narrowed: whereas Virgil’s temple art/woman parallel arguably

dignifies Dido’s role of listener, Dido makes Dido and all “wymmen” gullible dupes of men. In

Dido’s view (and the poem’s?), however, women’s gullibility is sign of goodness rather than

foolishness: although Dido calls the rhetorically-challenged feminine sex “wrechched” (“we

wrechched wymmen konne noon art”), she clearly casts herself in the role of morally superior

victim.

What does this mean for Chaucer’s effusively Dido-identifying narrator? Not

surprisingly, the poet-narrator is ambivalent: on the one hand, the narrator strongly identifies

with Dido against the faithlessness and treachery of men and words; on the other hand, as a

writer—as a subject who, in truth, must surrender to the rough-and-tumble unpredictability and

imperfection of language--he recognizes the particular futility and complicity of this hysterical

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protest. Thus, Book I’s rhetorically enthusiastic validation of Dido only goes so far. The

placement of the Dido’s anguished complaint (and the narrator’s own enlarging response) within

the larger frame and the passage’s implicit association with the narrator’s transient, private

speech (as opposed to the visualized, “I saugh,” by which the narrator repeatedly signals the

exteriorized perspective of the temple’s murals) underscores the containing power of the official

Virgilian account and the futility of trying to overturn it. Although he is full of the hot air of

righteous indignation whilst he is responding to the plight of Dido, this impassioned mood is

fleeting, for he, like his Dido, holds to the authority of the private, wordless world of imaginary

plenitude and fears the harshly public world of “wikke fame.” He thus lacks the necessary

confidence in language that would enable him to create and materialize his own sustained,

alternative reality (as opposed to rebelling and then submitting passively to what he sees before

him). Indeed, for this narrator, Virgil’s epic, as materialized object of sight, exists so

independently and “naturally” that it has even transcended its link with a particular, human

author; thus, when the narrator leaves the Temple of Venus, he wonders who made the art, “who

did hem wirche” (353), an echo of Aeneas’s words when he leaves the temple of Juno. Because

the narrator’s own creativity, like some transient graffiti scrawled upon a public landmark, exists

as of yet only in reaction to the presumed oppressor, he falls into emptiness and disorientation

when he encounters the nothingness of the wasteland outside of the temple. Terrified, he turns to

Christ for protection—not from external foes but from his own internal ghosts: “O Crist,”

thoughte I, “that art in blysse,/ Fro fantome and illusion/ Me save!” (492-4).

Again, Virgil’s Aeneid supplies some answers to the narrator’s panic at the end of Book I.

As pointed out by Bennett, the narrator’s description of the sand “as small as men yet lye / In the

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desert of Libye” recalls “the desert that Aeneas was treading in solitary exile when Venus

found him: Ipse ignotus, egens Libyae deserta peragro (i. 338)” (48). Along with this resonance

is a very striking resemblance that Bennett neglects to mention, namely, the fact that the

narrator’s anxious plea for deliverance from “fantome and illusion” recalls Aeneas’s frustrated

words to his shape-shifting mother. After Venus deceives her son by appearing to him in the

guise of a young huntress (an episode included in the narrator’s summary of the Aeneid),

Aeneas—sounding very much like Chaucer’s Dido-- pleads with his mother to stop fooling him

with mocking false illusions (falsis ludis imaginibus) and to exchange true words (veras voces)

with him instead:

“Quid natum totiens, erudelis tu quoque, falsis

ludis imaginibus? Cur dextrae jungere dextram

non datur ac veras audire et reddere voces?” (1. 407-9)

“Why do you mock your son—so often and

so cruelly—with these lying apparitions?

Why can’t I ever join you, hand to hand,

to hear, to answer you with honest words?” (Mandelbaum 1. 581-4; 15)

On the one hand, this emotionally complex passage vividly evokes Aeneas’ maternal nostalgia,

his longing for communication between mother and son to be as untroubled and pure as the

simple, wordless gesture of holding hands. On the other hand, Aeneas’s opposition of speech

(veras voces) and visual illusion suggests the anxiety Aeneas feels in the face of his maternal

nostalgia and his desire to escape a potentially incestuous mother-son bond by turning away from

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the seductive world of the imaginary (falsis ludis imaginibus) to the symbolic world of

language. Venus’s disguise as a goddess-like young huntress with unbound hair (as opposed to,

say, an old man or woman) further strengthens this interpretation, for, instead of merely being

tricked, Aeneas finds himself in the emotionally confusing, paranoia-inducing predicament of

having encountered his mother in the guise of a fetching member of the opposite sex. Through

Dido and the narrator’s speeches, Chaucer’s poem picks up on the epic’s unsettling construction

of the seductive mother but transfers it to the relatively innocuous arena of adult heterosexual

relationships. Nevertheless, I propose that the anxiety that this sanitized transference represses

does return in the wasteland passage at the end of Book I. Similar to the way the Venus-as-

huntress episode functions within the Aeneid, the Dido episode provokes the narrator’s maternal

nostalgia and accompanying Oedipal anxiety. As shown by his emotional tirade against male

seducers, the narrator sympathizes and identifies with Dido, taking her part against the male sex

and language (“wikke Fame”)—in a sense, against himself. More importantly, he shares Dido’s

(and Virgil’s Aeneas’s) idealistic longing for presence and true voices, vera voces: whereas Dido

longs for transparent communication between man and woman, the narrator idealistically longs

for the untroubled transmission and reception of his dream from his own mind to his future

audience. We see this in the overwhelmed, comically nervous, self-doubting and defensive

speaker of the Proem and Invocation of Book I who curses all those would-be readers who

misinterpret his poem, and, more subtly, in the Dante-esque Invocation of Book II:

O Thought, that wrot al that I mette,

And in the tresorye hyt shette

Of my brayn, now shal men se

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Yf any vertu in the be

To tellen al my drem aright.

Now kythe thyn engyn and might! (523-8)

As the ambiguous wording of this passage suggests, the narrator constructs the writing of his

dream in two ways: first, as an original writing that created his dream in the first place, and,

secondly, as an original writing that perfectly transcribed the events of his dream. In either case,

the narrator imagines writing taking place first in the head and then on the page. Ultimately, this

is a self-protective gesture. Rather than taking responsibility and ownership of his writing, the

narrator makes the impersonal “Thought” the agent of writing, and he acknowledges the

potential for failure only at the point of transmission to other human beings. Just as Dido recoils

at the thought of gossip identifying her with her act and so protects herself by imagining herself

as the wronged victim of male seduction, the narrator recoils at being identified with shoddy

writing and so imagines an original writing existing within his brain’s treasury. In short, both

Dido and the narrator cling to a private or inner world of truth that they oppose to the public,

inter-subjective world signified by Fame. For the narrator/dreamer, however, this view is a

paralyzing dead-end, inhibiting his creativity as a writer, as a working writer who lives within the

world

As hinted at by the narrator’s prayer to Christ for deliverance as faces the bewildering

void of the desert wasteland at the end of Book I —and by its swift answer in the form of Jove’s

shining golden eagle suddenly appearing in the sky “as sooth as deth” (502)—the narrator’s

leave-taking of The Temple of Venus is a key turning point in the narrator’s awakening not only

as a poet but also as a Christian poet. In the end, it is not so much that the narrator, like Aeneas,

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leaves Dido behind (as Hansen, for example, argues) but that he reconfigures her physical

suicide as a symbolic suicide, the symbolic suicide of the Christian breakout from the earthly

patriarchal symbolic order, from the beautiful yet brittle hegemonic “womb” of the glass Temple

of Venus in which the conventional sexed positions represented by Aeneas and Dido are held

and propagated and kept in check. More revolutionary than Dido’s tragic suicide, this symbolic

suicide is the death of Christian conversion that clears the way for the regeneration and rebirth of

the subject. “For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake

and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35): with its archetypal, dreamlike imagery, the closing

passage of Book I of The House of Fame speaks this paradox. Upon the Temple of Venus, the

solitary narrator steps into, for one long, hushed and haunting moment, into the great blank page

of the void with its dizzying threat of madness:

When I out at the dores cam,

I faste aboute me beheld.

Then sawgh I but a large feld,

As fer as that I myghte see,

Withouten toun, or hous, or tree,

Or bush, or grass, or eryd lond;

For al the feld nas but of sond

As small as man may se yet lye

In the desert of Lybye.

Ne no maner creature

That ys yformed be Nature

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Ne sawgh I, me to rede or wisse. (480-91)

Of course, as we already know, the narrator fortunately does not fall into madness because he

wisely recognizes his absolute vulnerability before the void and thus immediately prays to Christ

to save him “fro fantome and illusion”--whereupon the golden eagle swoops down to snatch him

up to a better place. Yet, even before this decisive prayer, there is a small hint within the text that

the narrator’s entrance into the void will lead him to new life rather than death. What is this hint?

The narrator enters the vast desert wasteland through a “wiket” (477), a Middle English word

that denotes a “small gate or door” but also “the vulva”: leaving the precious yet suffocating

“womb” of The Temple of Venus, the narrator is thus—at the level of the letter-- born anew. In

its small way, the narrator’s symbolic suicide and Christ-blessed “resurrection” in the barren

void of the desert wasteland at the end of Book I calls to mind the fourteenth-century German

mystic Meister Eckhart’s description of the highest state of mystical contemplation:

The soul enters the unity of the Holy Trinity but it may become even more

blessed by going further, to the barren Godhead, activity has ceased and therefore

the soul is most perfect when it is thrown into the desert of the Godhead, where

activity and forms are no more, so that it is sunk and lost in this desert where its

identity is destroyed and it has no more to do with things than it had before it

existed. Then it is dead to self and alive to God. (The Sermons 200-1)

As this unexpected resonance with a mystical text I believe suggests, hidden within what the

majority of critics have read—and indeed dismissed--as merely a fanciful, lighthearted, busy

jaunt of a poem, there are flashing glimpses and glimmers and beckoning murmurs of something

much much deeper.

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CHAPTER IV

Chaucer’s Golden Eagle

As if in answer to the narrator’s prayer to Christ for deliverance, Book I ends with what

appears to be a sign from the heavens above: soaring “faste be the sonne” (497), a sublime

golden eagle, so bright it seemed as “yf the heven had ywonne / al newe of gold another sonne”

(505-6). What does this eagle want? What does it mean? In the opening lines of Book II, the

narrator gazes up in awe at the magnificent sight, struck by the “beaute and the wonder”; as the

eagle swiftly descends—more swiftly than a thunderbolt—the narrator, roaming alone “in the

feld” (540) like some forlorn rabbit or mouse, suddenly recognizes that he is what the eagle

wants, he is the prey:

And with his grimme pawes stronge,

Withyn hys sharpe nayles longe,

Me, fleynge, in a swap he hente,

And with hys sours ayen up wente,

Me caryinge in his clawes starke

As lightly as I were a larke,

How high, I can not telle yow,

For I cam up, y nyste how. (541-8)

As has been oft noted, Chaucer’s predatory golden eagle is taken from Purgatorio 9. 19-33, a

passage in which Dante recounts Dante the pilgrim’s intensely real, visionary dream of rapture

that occurs on the morning of his ascent to the Mountain of Purgatory. In this dream, Dante

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dreams himself another Ganymede, or, more precisely, dreams himself placed at that special

spot on earth that in some sense transforms him into beautiful Ganymede, inducing the mighty

Jove’s desire and his golden eagle to swoop down from the sky “as terrible as lighting” (terribil

come folgor):

in sogno mi parea veder sospesa

un’aguglia nel ciel con penne d’oro,

con l’ali aperte e a calare intesa;

ed esser mi parea la dove fuoro

abbandonati i suoi da Ganimede,

quando fu ratto al sommo consistoro.

Fra me pensava: “Forse questa fiede

pur qui per uso, e forse d’altro loco

disdegna di portarne suso in piede.”

Poi mi parea che, poi rotata un poco,

terribil come folgor discendesse,

e me rapisse suso infino al foco.

Ivi parea che ella e io ardesse;

e si lo ’ncendio imaginato cosse,

che convene che ’l sonno si rompesse. (9. 19-33)

I seemed to see, in a dream, an eagle poised in the sky, with feathers of gold, its wings

outspread, and prepared to swoop. And I seemed to be in the place where Ganymede

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abandoned his own company, when he was caught up to the supreme consistory; and

I thought within myself, “Perhaps it is wont to strike only here, and perhaps disdains to

carry anyone upward in its claws from any other place.” Then it seemed to me that,

having wheeled a while, it descended terrible as a thunderbolt and snatched me upwards

as far as the fire: there it is seemed that it and I burned; and the imagined fire so scorched

me that perforce my sleep was broken. 21

As the passage above suggests, Dante’s dream constructs heavenly rapture as something

terrifying and sublime, something at once intensely erotic and transpersonal—a violent and

thrilling rupture and the seizing and tearing away of the subject from all things familiar, from the

comfort of one’s human company; the dream evokes the ruthless power and electric charge of

divine desire, a desire that is twofold, consisting at once of God’s overpowering desire for the

human subject and the human subject’s terror and answering desire for God (Ganymede is said

to “abandon” his company; the dreamer imagines himself and the eagle burning together).

Although The House of Fame’s first descriptions of the eagle lack the numinous erotic intensity

of Dante’s dream (the Chaucerian narrator certainly does not “burn” with the eagle), Chaucer

does draw upon Dante’s evocation of a special place (the place that transforms one into a

Ganymede), that is, by situating the golden eagle’s descent in the blinding void of the desert

wasteland, Chaucer’s poem implies that Jove’s eagle comes to those subjects who put themselves

in the right place, who venture past the predictable, familiarly human world—in this case, past

the luxury and “safety” of the brittle glass Temple of Venus with its conventionally sexed

positions of Dido and Aeneas.

In their distinct and very different ways, both Dante and Chaucer, however, mediate and

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complicate the original visionary sublimity of their golden dream eagles, blending the

thrilling, dominating power and vertical authority of masculine spirit with the consoling comfort

and gently embodied kindness of the maternal. Dante’s dream and its following interpretation by

Virgil sets up the model for this juxtaposition and fusion of a masculine transcendence associated

with desire and a maternal immanence associated with love or tenderness. As Dante the pilgrim

soon learns secondhand via Virgil’s explanation (Purgatorio 9. 52-63), his early morning dream

of heavenly rapture, far from being “just a dream,” was a true vision, a symbolic or poetic

translation of an event that was happening in “real time” as he dreamed, this event being the

gracious Lucia’s literal, early morning transport of the sleeping pilgrim up to the gate of

Purgatory. Thus, Purgatorio 9 presents the reader with a complex, layered structure: on the one

hand, there is the dream itself which represents the heavenly rapture of a masculine subject

commanded by the desire of an unseen, all-powerful masculine God, a rapture that Dante,

drawing upon the classical past, imagines and vividly depicts in terms of the mythical

homoerotic abduction of young Ganymede by Jupiter’s eagle (9. 22-4); on the other hand, there

is the mysterious feminine Christian reality of Lucia (a feminine presence—traditionally

assumed by Dante scholars to be Saint Lucy-- who apparently represents grace or spiritual

illumination), a reality that is, from the perspective of Dante the dreamer, unseen and hidden,

something experienced and expressed only indirectly, i.e. first through the classical, masculine

“manifest content” of the dream and then mediated through the vehicle of Virgil’s speech (9. 52-

63). Along with this androgynous fusion of pagan and Christian elements, the dream and its

hidden reality place the dreaming masculine subject in a vulnerable, passive position that

implicitly undermines the patriarchal, classical ideal of the striving heroic ego; that is, as the

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object of both paternal and maternal divine desire or love, the dreamer becomes, in some

sense, both feminized and infantilized: the dream, with its allusion to--and indeed performance

of--a story of male homosexual rape, the overpowering of a male youth by a forcefully desiring

masculine God; the literal, “real time” action, with its atmosphere of feminine loveliness (Lucia

is first seen by Virgil walking amongst wildflowers) and evocation of the calming, deep-in-the-

body security of maternal protection. With the lightest of touches, Dante skillfully suffuses the

Lucia-pilgrim relationship with the numinous aura of the kinesthetically experienced mother-

child relationship of infancy and earliest childhood: not only does Lucia carry the sleeping

pilgrim to the gate of Purgatory as a parent might carry a small child who has fallen asleep away

from his bed, Dante primes the reader to make this very comparison via his preceding allusion to

Achilles being carried off, sleeping in his mother’s arms (9. 37-8). Indeed, one might even say

that Lucia’s association with the pre-Oedipal mother is, in a sense, established or performed

within Purgatorio 9 through the tantalizingly indirect, secondhand way that Dante the pilgrim

learns about and gains access to the reality of Lucia: just as we typically only learn about that

forgotten time of our earliest childhood only from the reports of others, Dante only learns of

Lucia’s loving action retroactively through the words of Virgil. That being the case, one could

also say that the unseen Lucia represents a pre-verbal or extra-verbal reality that is accessed and

brought to life within our mind not only through the visionary “translation” of fantasy or dream

but also, more nakedly, through our basic willingness or capacity to trust in and live in and

surrender faithfully to language, to open our heart and mind to the words of the Other: “Blessed

are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:29).

In Purgatorio 9, Dante depicts the pilgrim’s experience of grace, the rebirth and

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regeneration as a Christian subject--his blessed movement upward after having finally risen,

the day before, on Easter Sunday, from his profoundly sorrowful and nightmarish descent into

the dark labyrinthine circles and horrible pouches of Hell. Through the shimmering tension

between the opposing and seemingly contradictory images of grace—the interlocked realities of

the eagle and Lucia--Dante forces the reader to think outside the box and thus makes both ideas

more uncannily powerful than either would be alone; unsettling and destabilizing any fixed or

conventional imagery or schema of the Christian God, Dante pushes the reader out of the mental

prison of mundane morality and its tedious ego, enabling us to glimpse and grapple with the

beauty and sheer “all-ness” of divine love, both its burning violence and its quiet lovely

tenderness. Moreover, with these two very different but equally arresting images simultaneously

operating at different levels of experience, Dante both invites and frustrates the kind of reductive

or overly controlling patriarchal allegorical interpretation that would seek to resolve the tension

between the images by positing one reality (typically the “spirit” over the “ letter”) as more

“real” and “valid” than another: indeed, if anything, by making Lucia’s literal, physical transport

the pilgrim the event that is hidden beneath or within the inner vision of the dream, Dante

performs a transvaluation of values of sorts, elevating the mystery of embodied reality and

infusing the literal with the glow of the divine (both in the sense of material historical reality, i.e.

“what literally happened,” as well as the letter through which Lucia becomes known to the

pilgrim). In doing so, I propose Dante creates what might be called an incarnational Christian

allegory, that is, rather than using allegory as a way to distance himself from material, historical

reality and the body and, in essence, deny its unique wisdom and drain away unruly or

embarrassing emotion, he uses allegory to represent the Word-made-flesh, the revolutionary

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fusion that is at the heart of Christian devotion. As Augustine implicitly suggests in 15.11 in

The Trinity, the embodiment of speech--its “incarnation” of our inner thoughts—in its own

humble way, mirrors the great sacred mystery of the Incarnation, and, in so doing, proves its

spiritual value and dignity, hinting at its special link to the generously shared and sharing love

that is charity: “For just as our word in some way becomes a bodily sound by assuming that in

which it may be manifested to the senses of men, so the Word of God was made flesh by

assuming that in which He might also be manifested to the senses of men, so the Word of God

was made flesh by assuming that in which He might also be manifested to the senses of men”

(477).

Indeed, one might even say that Dante graphically—and perhaps intentionally--performs

the very sign of Christ, namely, the Cross, through the intersection or fusion of the visionary

dream of vertical, heavenly transport of Dante by the eagle with the material reality of Lucia’s

horizontal, earthly transport of the embodied Dante to the gate of Purgatory. How or why should

we appreciate Dante’s eagle-Lucia juxtaposition and fusion as a distinctly Christian poetic act?

To answer this question—or rather to begin to answer it—I turn to Erich Auerbach’s general yet

illuminating remarks about Christian writing in Mimesis. Dwelling at length on the moving scene

in the gospels in which the agonized Peter betrays his beloved Christ, Auerbach draws the

reader’s attention to the New Testament’s revolutionary fusion or crossing of high and low, the

sheer startling newness by which it infuses and lights up the random, socially diverse everyday

world and all its humble particularity with the transpersonal sublimity of eternity; this elevation

of the everyday, plebian world, as Auerbach repeatedly points out, stands out in stark contrast

against the classical writer’s more or less unvarying tendency to either completely ignore or look

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down on this world and its lowly inhabitants, to reduce it to the merely comic:

. . .it [the New Testament] portrays something which neither the poets nor the

historians of antiquity ever set out to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in

the depths of the common people, from which the everyday occurrences of

contemporary life, which thus assumes an importance it could never have

assumed in antique literature. . . . What we see here is a world which on the one

hand is entirely real, average, identifiable as to place, time, and circumstances, but

which on the other hand is shaken in its very foundations, is transforming and

renewing itself before our eyes. For the New Testament authors who are their

contemporaries, these occurrences on the plane of everyday life assume the

importance of world-revolutionary events, as later on they will for everyone. (42-

3)

Auerbach’s appreciation of the revolutionary power of Christianity provides a welcome

alternative to the ultimately Freud-derived bias against Christianity among some contemporary

psychoanalytically-oriented critics and theorists, to be specific, the all-too-easy assumption that

Christianity, in contrast to the implicitly more ethical, courageous truth of Judaism, represents a

falling back on the idolatry of pagan myth and ritual, or, in the terms of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s

argument in his essay “Figure Foreclosed,” a “false reconciliation,” an infantile regression to

imaginary plenitude that is only fitting for “peasants” and “savages” (in Chapter Two, I briefly

refer to and quote from Lyotard’s essay). Instead of judging Christianity as “primitive” or

“’vulgar” from the hierarchical, individualistic, inherently emotion-fearing perspective of the

patriarchal symbolic, Auerbach, however, views Christianity more as fighting fire with fire,

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defying the pagan regression of “magical intoxication” not through “the weapon of

individualistic, aristocratic, moderate, and rational self-discipline” but through the creation of a

new kind of “human magic” that effectively dismantles the old model entirely by elevating the

vulgar emotion of the imaginary to the subjective dignity of the symbolic level:

For in the fight against magical intoxication, Christianity commands other

weapons than those of the rational and individualistic ideal of antique culture; it

is, after all, a movement from the depths, from the depths of the multitude as from

the depths of immediate emotion; it can fight the enemy with its own weapons. Its

magic is no less a magic than is bloodlust, and it is stronger because it is a more

ordered, a more human magic, filled with more hope. (69-70)

In literary terms, Auerbach suggests that one of the key signs of this “human magic” is the

Christian writer’s inspired violation of classical rhetorical standards:

In antique theory, the sublime and elevated style was called sermo gravis or

sublimis; the low style was sermo remissus or humilis; the two had to be kept

strictly separated. In the world of Christianity, on the other hand, the two are

merged, especially in the Christ’s Incarnation and Passion, which realize and

combine sublimitas and humilitas in overwhelming measure. (151)

In Auerbach’s opinion, this revolutionary Christian style—the hallmark of the gospel

narratives—does not characterize the Christian writing of all historical periods, but instead

“comes to life again in the theological and particularly the mystic literature of the twelfth

century” (151), culminating in the thirteenth figure of Saint Francis of Assisi and the populist

religiosity of late-medieval Christian drama, both of which flamboyantly exemplify an

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“ecstatically sublime immersion in God and humbly concrete everydayness” (162).

Although Chaucer transposes Purgatorio 9’s numinous and intensely serious Christian

fusion of sublimitas and humilitas into his characteristic more easy-going, ironic and self-

deprecating “key,” I propose that something similar begins to happen in Book Two of Chaucer’s

House of Fame, the section of the poem most clearly indebted to Dante. As I will show in the

following pages, Chaucer creates his own revolutionary and “divinely comical” Christian fusion

of high and low in a variety of ways: through plot and characterization, through the eagle’s

scientific lecture on the physics of sound, and, even more subtly, through the hidden tension

between eagle’s patriarchal exemplum of Phaethon and the celestial, “feminine” mystery of the

Milky Way that it purports to explain (and, as we shall see, “tame”).

Like Dante, Chaucer gives us in Book Two a dream episode that is emphatically

masculine (the lofty world of unseen Jove and the professorial eagle’s erudite world of scholastic

science) relative to other parts of the poem (the Dido-dominant Book One and Book Three, with

its central feminine “characters,” the goddess Fame and the whirling House of Rumor). Indeed, it

could be argued that Chaucer, in comparison with his Dantean source, goes further in the

direction of conventional masculinity. Removing all traces of homoerotic passion, Book Two

pointedly rejects any suggestion of the unseen Jove desiring the narrator for himself (unlike

Dante who depicts eagle and pilgrim burning together) and instead gives his unseen Jove a

generous, gregarious, “Big Daddy” persona: like a well-intentioned, kindly patriarch concerned

about his nerdy, yet dutiful son, Jove has, according to the eagle, benevolently rewarded the

narrator (a socially-challenged, loveless bookworm love poet) for his apparently celibate

devotion to “love’s folk” by offering him the trip of a lifetime to a fun-filled place “which hight

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The House of Fame” (663). There, hopes Jupiter, the isolated narrator will broaden his

perspective and learn some new things, particularly the kind of faithful, life-affirming

“tydynges” that never seem to come to him:

Jupiter considereth this,

And also, beau sir, other thynges:

That is, that thou has no tydynges

Of Loves folk yf they be gade,

Ne of noght elles that God made;

And noght only fro fer contree

That ther no tydynge cometh to thee,

But of thy verray neyghebores,

That duellen almost at thy dores,

Thou herist neyther that ne this. (642-51)

Presumably, the bookish narrator has devoted himself to writing love poetry in the tragic, high-

octane style of the Dido section of Book One. Jupiter wants the narrator to enlarge the narrator’s

views about love, to get him out of the rut of a narrowly conventional, aristocratic style that

fawningly aims to please only a select, narcissistic few, completely ignoring the diversity of

God’s creation, particularly, the voices of the social class to which he and his neighbors belong.

Rather than celebrate the solely material abundance of the aristocratic class, Jupiter wants the

narrator to experience what this aristocratic, “Temple of Venus” style presumably stifles: the

boisterously abundant life-energy that circulates throughout humanity, signified by the ceaseless

movement of tidings. To underscore this contrast, Chaucer has the narrator emphasize the

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different types of abundances with a structural parallel: whereas in Book One, the narrator

uses “mo” repeatedly to describe the luxurious objects of Venus’s temple, in Book Two, the

eagle uses “mo” repeatedly to describe the amazing diversity of love tidings that one can find in

The House of Fame. Rather than one story—that of a good noblewoman wronged by a man—the

narrator will hear all kinds of tales about love in The House of Fame. In short, this big-hearted,

manly—and joyously populist-- Jupiter wishes to rescue the neurotic narrator from his narrow,

self-alienating and self-castrating role as a lady-pleasing love poet; rather than hysterically

clinging to “Dido” and her position as morally superior victim (or falling into the void of

madness or psychic paralysis) the narrator will instead spread his wings and learn to write a new,

more expansive, universal kind of poetry.

In psychological terms, Jupiter and his eagle thus seems to function to expedite the

“wikke Fame”-fearing, feminine-identifying narrator’s happy transition from the Temple of

Venus and the void of the desert beyond it to the larger, public world that the figure of the father

traditionally introduces. Throughout Book II, the golden eagle asserts his masculine, patriarchal

authority over the narrator in two ways: through the confident, authoritative voice of scholastic

science and through the sober, moralistic voice of medieval mythographers. He uses the first

voice when he dazzles the narrator with his lecture on the physics of sound and the second voice

when, after pointing out the Milky Way, he recounts the exemplum about Phaethon, the prideful,

disobedient son who came to a bad end. In short, to quote Elaine Hansen, “The golden eagle

speaks “In mannes vois” and with all the authority of those “grete clerkes” from whom the

narrator dissociates himself in the Proem” (101). This clerk-like authority greatly impresses his

timid “prey,” for the narrator is, as Hansen points out, “all but silenced by eagle’s authoritative

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discourse and responds to his captor/mentor’s long speeches mostly in monosyllables” (101).

Although I agree with Hansen that the eagle exerts a kind of patriarchal power over the narrator,

Hansen’s reading of the eagle oversimplifies the eagle, making him sound more like an emissary

of Virgil’s very Roman Jupiter than of Chaucer’s more fun-loving, expansive deity. Yes, the

eagle speaks “in mannes vois”; however, within the context of the poem, this “mannes vois”

eludes any simple representation, reaching the ears of the narrator not as the deep-toned,

universal masculine voice of some patriarchal voice-over but as the distinct, humorously

unsublime voice of someone intimately known by the narrator:

Thus I longe in hys clawes lay,

Til at the laste he to me spak

In mannes vois, and seyde, “Awak!”

And called me tho my name,

And for I shulde the bet abreyde,

Me mette “Awak,” to me he seyde

Ryght in the same vois and stevene

That useth oon I koude nevene;

And with that vois, soth to seyn,

My mynde cam to me ageyn,

For hyt was goodly seyd to me,

So nas hyt never wont to be. (lines 554-66)

By pairing the sublime appearance of the eagle with the humorously humble “that vois”,

Chaucer mirrors Dante’s complex layering of imagery at the beginning of Purgatorio 9. Like

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Dante’s dreaming pilgrim whose violent, Ganymede-like experience of rapture overlays the

infinitely gentle, maternal reality of the heavenly grace signified by Lucia, the narrator’s

encounter with the golden eagle is described as violently transcendent at first, then comfortingly

familiar. As in Dante’s passage, the Chaucerian passage aligns this first experience of violent

sublimity and transcendence with the masculine (“in mannes vois”) and the familiar, immanent

“translation” of this universal “mannes vois” into a humbly particular “that vois”: although

Chaucer teasingly leaves the gender of “that vois” unspecified, the context of the passage implies

the voice belongs to someone who, whether wife, or, less plausibly, male servant, functions in a

mother-like, domestic capacity vis-à-vis the snoozing Geffrey. The eagle’s duality, however,

differs from the duality of Purgatorio 9 in one important respect: whereas the Ganymede and

Lucia images evoke a similarly wordless experience beyond language, something visualized and

kinesthetically felt (albeit, in the case of Lucia, consciously accessed by the pilgrim only through

Virgil’s speech), Chaucer’s poem contrasts Geffrey’s two experiences of the eagle, aligning the

first with vision and wordlessness and the second with sound and language. With this contrast,

Chaucer thus sets up his poem to move in a new direction from its more visionary prototype:

rather than elevating and cherishing visionary wordlessness over the sounded voice, Chaucer’s

poem seeks a balance, granting the visionary its place yet emphasizing (as opposed to hinting, as

I suggest Dante does) the necessity of sound in its role as mediator of the visionary.

Seen in this light, the eagle’s lecture on the physics of sound becomes much more

meaningful. Because of his comically pompous, loquacious persona, many critics understandably

do not take the lecture of Chaucer’s eagle very seriously. Kathryn Lynch, for example, points out

the eagle’s faulty use of syllogistic reasoning. Sheila Delany argues that the eagle’s lecture

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shows up the limitations of Aristotelian science. Although I agree with these critics that the

eagle’s lecture does parody the scholastic persona of the “grete clerkes,” I nevertheless take the

content of his lecture seriously. I am especially interested in the placement of a lecture on sound

in the context of a dream vision poem, especially given Chaucer’s many allusions to serious

philosophical and religious representatives of this genre, from Dante to Alan of Lille to Cicero,

with his very influential Dream of Scipio (Chaucer will use all three sources again in another one

of his dream vision poems, The Parlement of Foules).

In contrast to more experiential visions of, for example, many late-medieval female

mystics, the literary visions that inspired both Dante and Chaucer were products of a

sophisticated, academic, Latinate culture inspired more by Neo-Platonic philosophy rather than

homely Christian piety. Whereas both Hebrew scripture and Christian devotional texts seem to

give all the five human senses their due, Neo-Platonic philosophy presumes a hierarchy of the

senses based on each sense’s supposed greater or less proximity to the divine. In this hierarchy,

the sense of sight reigns supreme, with the inferior senses including not only the more obviously

carnal senses of touch, taste, and smell, but also, less obviously, the sense of hearing. The

ultimate source for this “ocularcentrism” is, of course, the writings of Plato, as explained by

Martin Jay in his landmark study of Western philosophical attitudes concerning vision:

The importance of sight is evident throughout Plato’s writings. In the Timaeus,

for example, he distinguished between the creation of the sense of sight, which he

grouped with the creation of human intelligence and the soul, and that of the other

senses, which he placed with man’s material being [Jay cites Timaeus 61d-68e for

this idea]. For Plato, truth was embodied in the Eidos or Idea, which was like a

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visible form blanched of its color. The human eye, he contended, is able to

perceive light because it shares a like quality with the source of light, the sun.

Here, a similar analogy holds between the intellect, which he called “the eye of

the mind,” and the highest form, the Good. (26)

We see this hierarchy of senses clearly at work in Augustine’s discussion of Genesis in 11.6 of

The Confessions. Following the classic philosophers, Augustine recognized that sound was a

time-bound and thus fundamentally embodied sense. In this passage Augustine wonders about

the meaning of God’s speech and concludes that God’s speech, being eternal, could not have

been something spoken or heard like human speech because spoken words require time both to

be heard and to be understood fully in context. To clarify his analysis, Augustine contrasts God’s

voice at the Creation (an event necessarily outside of time) with God’s voice heard at the

historical baptism of Christ:

But how did you speak [at the Creation]? Was it the way the voice came out of

the cloud, saying, “This is my beloved Son?” That voice went forth and went

away; it began and ceased. The syllables were sounded and they passed away, the

second after the first, the third after the second, and the rest in order, until the last

one came after all the others, and silence after the last. Whence it is clear and

evident that a creature’s movement, a temporal movement, uttered that voice in

obedience to your eternal will. These words of yours, formed for a certain time,

the outer ear reported to the understanding mind, whose interior ear was placed

close to your eternal Word. Then the mind compared these words with your

eternal Word in its silence, and said, “It is far different; it is far different. These

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words are far beneath me. They do not exist, because they flee and pass away.

The Word of God abides in me forever.” (282)

Augustine’s contempt for audible and passing words continues throughout his work. In his

expositions on the Psalms, for example, Augustine transforms the Psalmist’s occasional

preference for silent prayer into a mandate. For Augustine, even the Psalmist’s emphatically

vocalized prayer must be imagined as silent, as exemplified below in Augustine’s rather forced

interpretation of verse 5 of Psalm 3:

I have cried to the Lord with my voice: not with the physical voice which

produces sounds by vibrations of the air, but with the voice of the heart, which

man cannot hear but which rings out to God like a cry . . . with this voice our Lord

himself has instructed us to pray in a room with closed doors, or rather,

noiselessly in the secret place of the heart. (St. Augustine on the Psalms, Vol. 1,

32-3)

Although Augustine’s ostensible reason for preferring silent prayer over audible prayer is that

silent prayer is more sincere—-less tainted by social hypocrisy-- his fundamental aversion to

spoken prayer seems just as much due to the lowly physics of sound, its materialization in

passing “vibrations of the air.” It is important to note that, in this passage, Augustine is not

defining “silent prayer” as necessarily wordless prayer but rather as prayer which is merely not

spoken. This distinction suggests that he considers even unspoken interiorized language to be

superior to exteriorized speech. Unlike modern theorists, Augustine, at least in this passage, does

not seem concerned by the problem that silent thought, in that it is verbalized, is also tainted by

time.

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Of course, it may be that, in the above passage, Augustine’s “voice of the heart” has

nothing to do with what we usually call “thinking” but instead refers to meditation or essentially

wordless prayer, the experience of mystical contemplation or union with God—a very different

affair! Such a reading of the “voice of the heart” would be supported by Augustine’s poetic and

moving meditation in The Confessions in which, after recounting the mystical ascent to Wisdom

that he and his mother experienced at Ostia, he writes of his and his mother’s yearning to return

to the ecstatic state of mystical silence—a silence past not only spoken words but also “dreams

and all imagined appearances”--that the two of them shared for a brief time before returning to,

as Augustine puts it, to “the noise of our mouths, where a word both begins and ends” (The

Confessions 9. 10, 223). 22Still, even in this instance where Augustine is referring a kind of

absolute emptiness, a mystical receptivity that is beyond vision, beyond even the images within

the mind, I would argue that his philosophical (and perhaps partly personal) bias against sound

nevertheless seems to push him to depict his and his mother’s traumatic return to mundane

reality (i.e. after the bliss of their mystical experience) in a distinctly aural way, as a turning back

“to the noise of our mouths.” There is, I submit, something ironically ungrateful about

Augustine’s bitter phrase “the noise of our mouths,” that is, if one thinks about it, Augustine and

his mother would never have experienced their ecstatic ascent to Wisdom without the “foreplay”

of their spoken words, their desire-fueled and desire-inciting conversation about God. This

ingratitude towards sounded speech in particular suggests that, although Augustine-as-mystic

passionately yearns for the Word of God Who transcends words but also images and thoughts,

Augustine, wearing his philosopher hat, traces sounded speech and then writing back to their

origin, the original thoughts or pure concepts or “things” within our mind that transcend the

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particular national language which we speak; thus, in The Trinity 15.10, he writes:

For the thought formed from that thing which we know is the word which we

speak in our heart, and it is neither Greek, nor Latin, nor of any other language,

but when we are speaking, then some sign is assumed by which it may be made

known . . . But letters have also been found by which we can speak to those who

are absent; but the letters are signs of words, while the words themselves in our

speech are signs of the things of which we are thinking” (476).

In this sense, Augustine’s internal words or “words of the heart” seem to refer to pre-linguistic

ideas or truths, that is, images or intuitions of things that are first contemplated by our mind’s

eye and only afterwards verbalized in speech; in other words, an internal word is comparable to

Plato’s Eidos. This is the view of the twelfth-century theologian Hugh of St. Victor; in the

passage below, Hugh imagines a Platonic chain of being with God’s words first, followed by

human pre-linguistic ideas, and ending with external, spoken language:

The unsubstantial word is the sign of man’s perceptions; the thing is a

resemblance to the divine idea. What, therefore, the sound of the mouth, which all

in the same moment begins to subsist and fades away, is to the idea in the mind,

the whole extent of time is to eternity. The idea in the mind is the internal word,

which is shown forth by the sound of the voice, that is, by the external word.

(Minnis 73)

Similar to the way Augustine’s thoughts about sounded language draw upon the physics of

sound, Hugh’s metaphysical reasoning that “ideas” transcend time draws upon the physics of

light. In other words, Hugh privileges ideas over “words” primarily because he assumes interior

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vision resembles exterior vision. Within the sanctuary of the mind, we can see images of

things, as well as our thoughts (Hugh’s “internal words”); before they are spoken and thus “fall”

into time, these internal words stand before us as clear and immediately present as objects seem

to do before our physical gaze. Thus, in part, perhaps in large part, Hugh’s dismissal of the

“unsubstantial word” is due less to an “anti-language” position than to a “pro-vision” position

stemming from his culture’s scientifically-supported bias that vision is superior to hearing as and

because light travels more swiftly than sound. Whereas physical sound takes time to travel, light

(that which allows us to see) travels at a seemingly infinite speed: we open our eyes, and the

physical world appears instantaneously and all-at-once. Because of light’s transcendence of time

and its consequent “all-at-once-ness”, human vision seems to be the most divine of the senses,

the one human sense that approaches God’s timeless knowledge and mastery over the world:

Intrinsically less temporal than other senses such as hearing or touch, it thus tends

to elevate static Being over dynamic Becoming, fixed essences over ephemeral

appearances . . . “The very contrast between eternality and temporality,” Jonas

claims, “rests upon an idealization of ‘present’ experienced visually as the holder

of stable contents against the fleeting succession of nonvisual sensation.” (Jay 24)

Not surprisingly, within the Neo-Platonically-inspired visionary genre, contact with the divine is

emphatically defined in terms of light: in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, the destination of blessed

souls is the radiant Milky Way; the souls that approach Dante in Paradiso are spheres of light

and God is a point of light; in Anticlaudianus, Alan of Lille imagines the divine origin as a

celestial river of light.

By having the eagle, the time-honored symbol of Saint John and the visionary mode,

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lecture on sound rather than light, Chaucer’s poem thus humorously defies centuries of

Western light metaphysics. But there is more, for, unlike the more trivial parody that clearly

remains beholden to what it ostensibly parodies, The House of Fame challenges the visionary

mode by giving sound its due; instead of giving sound a marked second-class status, the eagle’s

lecture on the physics of sound assumes the common nature of sound and light. The eagle does

this by explaining sound using the very scientific concepts and vocabulary employed by

influential medieval theorists, most notably, Roger Bacon, to explain the process of light

radiation. The eagle’s mechanistic explanation of sound as “eyr ybroken” “multiplyinge ever

moo,” as well as his later seemingly fanciful idea about sound carrying the likeness of the

speaker, rely on Bacon’s authoritative theory that light propagates itself via the multiplication of

species (the eagle’s “lyknesse”) moving from one part of the air to another. The following

passage is taken from Robert Burke’s translation of Bacon’s Opus Majus:

But the species is not a body, nor is it moved from as a whole from one place to

another; but that which is produced [by an object] in the first part of the air is not

separated from that part, since form cannot be separated from the matter in which

it is unless it should be mind; rather, it produces a likeness to itself in the second

part of the air, and so on. Therefore there is no change of place, but a generation

multiplied through the different parts of the medium; nor is it body generated

there, but a corporeal form that does not have dimensions of itself but is produced

according to the dimensions of the air; and it is not produced by a flow from the

luminous body but a drawing forth out of the potentiality of the matter of the air.

(Vol. 2, 489-90)

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In his application of Bacon’s theory of vision to the phenomenon of sound, Chaucer’s eagle

makes an imaginative but reasonable leap, for, although Bacon himself never explained the

physics of sound, according to David Lindberg, a noted scholar of Bacon and medieval optics,

Bacon believed that “there is a general multiplication of power or species throughout the

universe, of which visual species is a single instance” (113). Another scholar, Aleksander

Birkenmajer, has pointed out how Bacon’s belief in a general multiplication of species contrasts

with the usual Neoplatonic tendency to valorize light in an absolute way over all other natural

forces or influences:

The main thrust of Birkenmajer’s argument is that whereas the great host of

Neoplatonic authors regarded light as the mediator of all natural influences in the

world, Witelo, following Bacon and Grosseteste, regarded light merely as one

special case of natural action that reveals (in its laws of propagation) the mode of

all other natural actions: light is a particular instance which, by analogy, enables

us to comprehend the general law. (Lindberg 119, italics mine)

As Thomas Kuhn might predict, this new, more Aristotelian view of light as “one special case of

natural action” corresponds nicely with the late-medieval—and perhaps particularly English—

movement away from the hieratic and more rigidly patriarchal culture of earlier centuries. More

specifically, the Baconian view of light, like the Aristotelian view of gender, resists Platonic

dualism and thus inadvertently opens up a space to challenge absolute categories by blurring the

boundaries between traditional, hierarchical oppositions (male/female, mind/matter, soul/body,

etc.). Instead of placing the paradigmatic term and its opposite on a vertical axis, these theories

place the paradigm at one end of a horizontal continuum, thereby creating space for a potentially

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infinite number of variations. Citing the important work on pre-modern ideas of gender by

Thomas Lacquer and others, Caroline Walker Bynum notes this paradoxical and generally

overlooked subversiveness of Aristotelian science:

Medieval scientific ideas, especially in their Aristotelian version, made the male

body paradigmatic. It was the form or pattern or definition of what we are as

humans; what was particularly womanly was the unformedness or physicality of

our humanness. Such a notion identified woman with breaches in boundaries,

with lack of shape or definition, with openings and exudings and spillings forth.

But this conception also made men and women versions of the same thing. Men

and women had the same sex organs; men’s were just better arranged. These

assumptions made the boundary between the sexes extremely permeable.

(Fragmentation and Redemption 220) 23

Similarly, Chaucer’s eagle, building on Bacon’s idea of the general multiplication of species,

explains sound via concepts and terminology taken from Bacon’s theory of light; light, like the

paradigmatic male of gender theory, is indeed a “special case” but not so much because it is the

be-all and end-all of the universe but more because light reveals the general law, the common

nature that makes the paradigm and all its copies fundamentally alike, “versions of the same

thing” rather than absolute opposites. Given light’s role as paradigm in Bacon’s theory, it is thus

perfectly reasonable for the eagle to conceptualize the previously imagined, wave-like auditory

species as transforming into the visual species when sound reaches its destination, The House of

Fame:

Whan any speche ycomen ys

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Up to the paleys, anon-ryght

Hyt wexeth lyk the same wight

Which that the word in erthe spak,

Be hyt clothed red or blak;

And hath so verray hys lyknesse

That spak the word, that thou wilt gesse

That it the same body be,

Man or woman, he or she.

And ys not this a wonder thyng? (1074-83)

Just as the chain of visual species generated through the air functions to reproduce and reveal the

original object from whence the generation of light commences, the generation and

multiplication of the wave-like auditory species ultimately reproduce and reveal the original

object from whence the generation of sound commences. In other words, according to the eagle,

once a person’s speech, propelled by its desire to seek its “natural place” (explained earlier by

the Aristotle-savvy eagle in lines 823-52) gravitates upwards to its inevitable destination at “the

Hous of Fame,” this particular kind of sound can do what paradigmatic light itself does!

Although the eagle never clarifies whether this “wonder thyng”—the visual revelation of the

source of the sound--applies only to speech, the fact that he only mentions speech in the above

passage (in contrast to his earlier mini-lecture on “natural place,” where he discusses speech and

sound together) hints that this may be a power that distinguishes human speech from all other

kinds of sounds. In The Trinity 15.11, Augustine makes a similar distinction between speech and

sound when he presents his analogy between human speech (the “incarnation” of our thoughts

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within and through language) and the great Christian mystery of the Incarnation. This

distinction hinges on the difference between “assuming” flesh or sound and “being consumed” in

them: “And just as our word [our “inner word”] becomes a sound and is not changed into sound,

so the Word of God indeed becomes flesh, but far be it from us that it should be changed into

flesh. For by assuming it, not by being consumed in it, this word of ours becomes a sound, and

that Word becomes flesh” (477).

Another possible source or inspiration for the poem’s conversion of spoken words into

images is Dante. According to Bennett, “the shapes embodying human speech correspond to

those shades in Dante that embody the mental state of men in life” (98). The allegorically-

minded B. G. Koonce takes the Dantean resemblance further, arguing that these shapes

appearing at the House or “paleys” of Fame prepares the way for Book III’s “elaborate inversion

of the Last Judgment,” enabling “Chaucer to explore the deepest ramifications of the Christian

contrast between earthly and heavenly fame” (158). Although I agree with Bennett and Koonce

that Chaucer’s shapes parallel Dante’s shades (as well as Koonce’s idea that Book III performs

an “elaborate inversion of the Last Judgment”), I reject their easy assumption that Chaucer, like

Dante, refers here not just to vocalized or written words but also to something like Augustine’s

“internal words”: such an assumption trivializes the poem’s stubborn focus on sound and spoken

words, rendering it essentially meaningless and thus denying the important, albeit subtle ways

that Chaucer’s poem works to build an alternative to the Neoplatonic ocularcentrism of the

visionary genre. Rather than bringing internal words into the picture, Chaucer keeps the focus on

external words, using Dante’s general idea of the shades to suit his own paradoxical purpose of

creating a speech-based visionary universe. Like the spirits of the unsaintly dead who take on

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their earthly appearance or shade when they arrive at their destination (either Hell or

Purgatory), words take on the appearance of the embodied speaker when they reach their

destination.

At this point, the reader might still contest that the eagle’s reduction of auditory species

to visual species exposes the eagle’s capitulation to Platonic “ocularcentrism” (Martin Jay’s

term), or, in other words, the philosophic presumption that the sense of vision, due to its seeming

transcendence of time due to the seemingly infinite speed at which light travels, is superior to the

other time-bound human senses--nearer to the divine, closely associated with the soul and its

intelligence (as opposed to man’s material being). Similar to the way Augustine or Hugh of St.

Victor’s “internal words” are not really words but visualized, pre-linguistic ideas that preserve

the supremacy the sight over the necessarily time-bound transmission of spoken words, might

not the eagle conceptualize auditory species in terms of visual species in order to purify language

and speech, to deny their essential link to time and the lowly immanence of sound? To answer

this question, we need to look again at Roger Bacon’s theory of light since it is this theory that

appears to be the primary source of the eagle’s lecture on sound. How does Bacon’s theory of

light differ from those of his Neoplatonic predecessors, and what are the philosophical

implications of this difference? As I have discussed above, one important difference is that, as

the scholar Aleksander Birkenjamer points out, Bacon stresses the common nature of all natural

actions, making light a specific, albeit paradigmatic, instance of the general multiplication of

species throughout the universe rather than the mediator of all natural influences; thus, there is,

as it were, a “whiff” or implicit strain of democracy or egalitarianism to the English friar’s

science. Another key difference is that Bacon, as can be seen in the previously quoted passage

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from Bacon’s Opus Majus, flatly rejected the Platonic idea of light as emanation, writing that

“it [the visual species] is not produced by a flow from a luminous body but a drawing forth out

of the potentiality of the matter of the air”; as David Lindberg explains in his discussion of this

same passage, Bacon’s theory emphasizes representation over direct contact: “He [Bacon] argues

emphatically, against Plato and the atomists, that this species [visual species] is not a material

emanation or effluence; rather, an object produces its likeness or species in the adjacent

transparent medium, which in turn produces a further likeness in the next part of the medium,

and so forth” (113).

With this idea of a chain reaction, Bacon denies the mystical possibilities inherent in the

Platonic theory of vision. Although scholars such as Hans Jonas have argued that the Greek

visual bias encouraged the concept of objectivity, others, notably the philosopher Hans-Georg

Gadamer, have emphasized the opposite, namely, “that theoria was not as completely

disengaged and spectatorial as was more modern scientific epistemology” (Jay 31).24 That is,

according to Gadamer, the theoria celebrated by the ancient Greeks implied a reciprocity

between the viewer and the viewed, thereby giving it an inherent sacral quality that distinguishes

it from the modern scientific ideal of Cartesian, disinterested contemplation with its implication

of the spectator’s dominating gaze:“Theoria is a true sharing, not something active, but

something passive (pathos), namely being totally involved in and carried away by what one sees.

It is from this point that people have tried recently to explain the religious background of Greek

reason” (Truth and Method 111; quoted and cited by Jay, 31). As Martin Jay explains, closer

examination of Plato’s theory of vision offers support for Gadamer’s position:

If Plato argued that the eye and the sun are composed of like substances, and the

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Greeks believed that the eye transmitted as well as received light rays (the

theory of extramission) then there was a certain participatory dimension in the

visual process, a potential intertwining of viewer and viewed. (Jay 30)

By denying that visual species emanate from the object, Bacon in effect denies the possibility of

this “intertwining of viewer and viewed,” and, in so doing, undermines that which is arguably

one of the fundamental pillars of Platonic ocularcentrism, namely, the key link between intuition

(or mystical contemplation) and the sense of sight. Because Bacon’s ghostly corporeal forms of

visual species are never directly apprehended or transmitted but are always mediated and indeed

generated by the air (in Bacon’s words, through “a drawing forth of the potentially of the matter

of the air”), they are really no better or purer than other species, no closer to the point of origin.

Thus, to return to the hypothetical question I posed earlier, Chaucer’s eagle’s seeming

capitulation to Neoplatonic metaphysics is, in fact, an illusion. By reducing sound to visual

species, the eagle is not performing an “upgrade” but merely showing his understanding of the

general law of nature, how, according to Baconian physics, sound, just like light, propagates and

multiplies via the multiplication of species. Light may be paradigmatic, but, like the

paradigmatic male of Aristotelian gender theory mentioned earlier, it exists on a continuum with

other mortal things such as hearing and touch; thus, since light, too, must suffer the mortal gap

between viewer and viewed that is implied by the representation of species, vision is no longer

superior in a radical or absolute sense. In short, vision, just like its more obviously time-bound

sibling sound, cannot give us direct, immediate access to the object (and thus to “truth”);

consequently, it has no special pass to the divine.

In the larger context of The House of Fame, this rejection of Platonic emanation is

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significant, for, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the Platonic ideal of immediacy and

empathetic understanding through vision (“the intertwining of viewer and viewed”) and its

consequence—the spiritual elevation of light and vision above time-bound sound and hearing

and ultimately speech--subtly recalls the Chaucerian narrator’s self-defeating identification with

despairing Dido in the Temple of Venus and her “beautiful soul” stance of victimized “rhetorical

innocence,” or, put in more specifically Lacanian terms, the feminine Dido’s (or the Dido-

identifying narrator’s) hopeless longing for an earthly imaginary plenitude of love and

consequent fear-filled, resentful protest against the jarring, uncontrollable and indeed

intimidating “masculine” reality that language represents with its inherent division of the subject

as well as its implicit connection to the Law. As we saw in Book I, the Dido-identifying

narrator’s feminine protest or complaint against “wikke” patriarchal language is futile and

impotent, because instead of being genuinely radical and revolutionary the very way that this

protest is framed and presented reveals that “Dido” herself is complicit with the very order that

she pathetically protests against: a willing participant in the ego-based drama of the “battle of the

sexes,” “Dido” is ultimately as psychically imprisoned as “Aeneas” (the glory-seeking,

thoughtlessly selfish male “seducer”) by the fantasies and rules associated with the traditional

sexual and gender categories ordained within the brittle glass Temple of Venus. Book I

illustrates and underscores this fundamental problem of feminine complicity--of not being

radical enough--through Dido’s self-righteous, narcissistic assumption that feminine goodness

and truth and purity of soul exists in childlike simplicity and trusting innocence in stark, gothic

opposition not only to the wickedness of masculine rhetorical sophistication and verbal duplicity

(e.g. smooth-talking Aeneas) but also to that which validates and sustains masculine symbolic

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power—the perpetual gossip of “wikke Fame” (who, as Chaucer’s Dido monolithically sees

it, always sides with men against women, hypocritically pouncing on and trumpeting the

supposed carnal sins of women like herself while at the same time whitewashing the treachery of

men who use and then abandon the women who faithfully love them).25

That said, it is not to say that we should scorn “Dido” because she, marginalized and

silenced as a feminine subject, remains hooked on the beguiling “perfect pictures” of the

imaginary (perfect feminine goodness and truth, perfect love between man and woman)—or, for

that matter, the introverted Platonist who, pained by the fragmented, flickering world of

mundane reality, similarly dreams that vision can grant him the blessing of the “intertwining of

viewer and viewed”: rather, I believe Chaucer empathizes in particular with all such alienated,

passive, essentially good-hearted subjects who dream of perfect love and truth and goodness and

thus intends for us to be compassionate. As the Book I suggests, without grace, i.e. without

divine assistance, it is extremely difficult and moreover psychically dangerous for the alienated

feminine subject or the feminine-identifying “beautiful soul” to take the radical, destabilizing

step of leaving the luxurious prison of the Temple of Venus and surrendering whatever precious

illusion of Venusian harmony holds the subject’s identity together and makes life bearable for

the subject. Although Book I ends with the narrator implicitly recognizing the futility of his

narcissistically feminine protest and thereupon taking leave of this suffocating “womb” of the

Temple of Venus, the “beyond” that our unlikely hero immediately encounters is, as we saw, a

bewildering and barren void endlessly stretching before him, a place of blinding nothingness

where there is nothing to see and seeing is nothing-- a madness-inducing place, so Chaucer

implies, a ghostly “place” that can only be endured and transcended through the divine guidance

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and protection of Christ.

As I suggested at the end of the last chapter, the narrator, by taking leave of the Temple

and entering the void, commits a symbolic suicide that, in contrast to Dido’s literal suicide,

opens the way up to the rebirth of the subject—and indeed to the reconfiguration and divinely

comical expansion of the subject’s universe. In simplest terms, the bossy yet comfortingly

familiar eagle and “Big Daddy” Jupiter serve to embolden the timid narrator, to give him the

necessary “breathing space” and “wings” of faith (Jupiter being the planet astrologically

associated with the enlarging states of faith and optimism) to move him from the narrow, fearful

perspective towards Dido-killing “wikke Fame” and consequent position of guilt and baffled

impotence (how can poetry be written that is not “wikke,” that does not “kill” Dido?) towards a

new and liberating, truly incarnational experience of language. I propose that a large part of the

joyfulness of Book II comes from the alienated narrator coming in contact with masculine

authority figures (a scholastic eagle and Father Jove who sent him) who offer a refreshing

alternative to the narrator’s experience of monolithic, oppressive patriarchal authority in Book I.

What makes this alternative so refreshing stems from the eagle and Jupiter’s unexpected

association with and validation of “feminine” immanence: instead of giving light and vision their

customary top billing—as a properly visionary eagle should---the eagle’s lecture on the physics

of sound challenges and quietly unsettles the deep-set assumptions of Western ocularcentrism,

democratizing the traditional Platonic hierarchy of the senses; instead of a Virgilian Jupiter who

endorses Roman imperialism and the stoic morality of “pius Aeneas,” the narrator hears of a

generously populist Jupiter who cares about—and wishes to reward!--a seemingly bumbling,

unimpressive, loveless poet for his thankless service to Love and lovers and who vigorously

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endorses the “lowly” art of storytelling and indeed, the ever-circulating gossip of the street so

despised by the typical philosopher and moralist. Going back to what I see as the key inspiration

for Book II—Purgatorio 9’s incarnational fusion of the thrillingly sublime dream of vertical,

homoerotic rapture with the sweetly gentle hidden literal earthly transport of maternal Lucia—

one might thus say that Chaucer’s primary way of “using” Dante in Book II is to recreate

Purgatorio 9’s “Christian cross” not by cleanly separating masculine sublimity and feminine

humility (as Dante does) but by androgynously mixing these categories or principles together

within the ostensibly masculine or pro-patriarchal characters and topics of Book II.

There is, however, yet another way in which Book II hints at the Christian mystery of the

Incarnation, another way that its seemingly patriarchal content metaphorically plays out (or at

least gestures towards) what Auerbach referred to as the Christian transformative “violation of

classical rhetorical standards”—or, what might be called in more general, psychoanalytic terms,

the Christian “violation” of the Law, that is, the symbolic order’s silent carving up and

constitution of intersubjective “reality” through the grid of hierarchical binary pairs. As I will

explain in this last section, Book II opens up the way for the Christian deconstruction of the Law

via the scientific eagle’s unexpectedly unscientific telling of the story of young Phaethon and his

Fall (recounted at length by Ovid in Metamorphoses 1. 750-2. 329).

Like Genesis’s narrative of the Fall of Adam and Eve, Ovid’s narrative of Phaethon, the

mythical son of the Sun, tells of the disastrous consequences that stem from transgression against

a celestial father. Abbreviating Ovid’s lengthy narrative to exemplum size, Chaucer’s eagle,

verbally gesturing towards the Milky Way, tells the narrator beneath him (the bird is carrying

Geffrey in his talons) the basic plot, namely, how Phaethon one day recklessly tried to drive his

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father’s chariot through the heavens, but the young upstart failed miserably, setting both

earth and air on fire and thus creating a great scar in the heavens--the Milky Way. The eagle ends

his exemplum pointedly, with a moral formulated as a rhetorical question:

Loo, ys it not a gret myschaunce

To lete a fool han governaunce

Of thing that he can not demeyne? (957-9)

Given that the once-scientific eagle ostensibly tells this story to explain the origin of the Milky

Way (which he has just pointed out to the narrator), how are we to read the eagle’s sudden foray

into the world of myth? According to Sheila Delany, the exemplum clarifies Book Two’s

hitherto implicit critique of classical, Aristotelian science, warning the narrator about the

potential for hubris, overestimating one’s talents and skill, overreaching the limit. So that the

fledgling philosopher’s newfound knowledge about the laws of nature will not intoxicate him

with delusions of grandeur, the eagle, writes Delany, “provides a good-natured warning in the

moralitas with which he ends the story of Phaethon” (83). As Delany points out, Book II further

drives this warning about hubris home by alluding, in lines 922-ff. to the tragic flight of “nyce”

(foolish) Icarus, that other well-known presumptuous and ill-fated young man of myth ( “nyce

Ykarus, / That fleigh so highe that the hete / Hys wynges malt . . .”). Not surprisingly, as B.G.

Koonce and Jane Chance have pointed out, the eagle’s use of story of Phaethon in this way (i.e.

as a warning against presumption or vainglory) is in keeping with how medieval mythographers

typically interpreted the myth (Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame 164-6; The Mythographic

Chaucer 64-5).

Although all this makes perfect sense, this reduction of Phaethon’s Fall to a moral about

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“obeying the limit of the Law” does not do justice to the myth’s strange and unexpected

richness, its complex and seemingly contradictory implications. First, if one looks again at the

eagle’s rhetorical question (quoted above), one will see that the question, instead of implying

free will and placing the moral responsibility squarely on Phaethon (as one would expect if we

are to judge him for the sin of “presumption”), oddly focuses on the factor of bad luck

(“myschaunce”) and even seems to raise the possibility that the “fool” may be less to blame for

this catastrophe than whoever “let a fool han governaunce / Of thing he can not demeyne

[control].” Thus, if we read the relationship between Phaethon and the Sun as parallel to the

relationship between man and God (as the mythographers typically do), we are left with an

unsettling sense that the celestial Father is not up to snuff, not quite doing his job. Actually, one

fourteenth-century mythographer, Pierre Bersuire, clearly did place blame upon the Sun for his

role in Phaethon’s fall and did so in a way that leads the reader to question and challenge the

wisdom and authority of a very important “celestial father”—the Pope, the head of the Church

and supposed “vicar of Christ”: “Bersuire,” notes Jane Chance, “in an unconventional gloss,

relates Phaethon to the imprudent and ambitious prelate without a call whom the Pope sets over

the church” (The Mythographic Chaucer 65).26 But at least Bersuire’s reading gives us

something or someone to blame: what is perhaps even more unsettling about Ovid’s narrative is

that, even though it seems to be a kind of pagan myth of “Original Sin” (and thus should, to use

Milton’s phrase, “justify the ways of God to men”), it ultimately insidiously defeats the natural

human desire for closure via blame, placing the reader in a situation in which it becomes

impossible to judge either Phaethon, the reckless son, or the Sun, his divine father (what

happened was simply a “myschaunce”). If so, then we find ourselves in a situation in which the

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justice of the Law has a certain irrelevance, for, if there is no one to blame, the only valid

ethical response to the story would seem to be an all-embracing compassion for Phaethon and his

divine father--clearly a response that transcends the Law and its clear-cut notion of justice.

Interestingly, in Ovid’s full recounting of the myth, we see how and why Phaethon’s

story cannot be so easily wrapped up as a simplistic patriarchal exemplum. Although one

wouldn’t know it by reading the abbreviated versions of the mythographers, young Phaethon’s

reckless desire to drive his father’s chariot stems not so much from pure vainglory or ambition

(i.e. a rebellious son’s desire to usurp his father’s role and power) but from Phaethon’s longing to

identify himself with a father that he has never known or even met. Ovid shows us this by

framing the myth’s central story of father and son with a narrative that emphasizes the mother-

son dyad of Clynene and Phaethon and the corresponding absence of the father in the boy

Phaethon’s life. The story begins with another youth insultingly dismissing Phaethon’s proud

claim to be the son of Helios. Full of shame, wounded pride and indignation, Phaethon goes

home to his mother and begs her for proof of his high parentage. She, of course, cannot resist

intervening into Phaethon’s schoolyard battle, so, she tells Phaethon to go and ask the sun

himself, upon which “Phaethon leaps up in joy at his mother’s words, already grasping the

heavens in imagination” (“emicat extemplo laetus post talia matris / dicta suae Phaethon et

concipit aethera mente”) (1. 776-7, Loeb 56-7). Thus, before we encounter Phaethon the “bad

son” who presumptuously defies the warnings of his celestial father, we meet Phaethon the

mama’s boy without a father, the narcissistic puer whose drive for transcendent glory is

inextricably linked to his close, symbiotic relationship to the mother—that is, to the fact that he

has never had the privilege of knowing his father, never known or experienced the psychically

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nurturing intimacy of the personal father nor the psychically grounding prohibition of the

father created via the process of triangulation. Even when Ovid moves on to his central father-

son plot, the poet takes pains to emphasize Phaethon’s fundamental uncertainty and alienation

from his father, his de-realizing “ontological doubt” due to his having grown up without

knowing his father’s presence: although he is “the son of the Sun,” when Phaethon arrives at the

great glittering palace of the Sun, he is intimidated by his father’s too dazzling appearance and

overwhelmed by the strange new sights (2. 31-2, Loeb 63), and when his lofty father asks him

why he has come, Phaethon answers with the following request:

. . . “o lux immensi publica mundi,

Phoebe pater, si das usum mihi nominis huius,

nec falsa Clymene culpam sub imagine celat,

pignora da, genitor, per quae tua vera propago

credar, et hunc animis errorem detrahe nostris!” (2. 35-9)

“O common light of this vast universe, Phoebus, my father, if thou grantest me

the right to use that name, if Clymene is not hiding her shame beneath an unreal

pretence, grant me a proof, my father, by which all may know me for thy true son,

and take away this uncertainty from my mind” (Loeb 63).

Although the Sun immediately embraces his son and offers him kindly words of assurance, there

is a sense in Ovid’s story that these fatherly words are simply too late. The Sun himself seems to

recognize this immediately—and so the tragedy begins in earnest: in his rush to forge a bond

with his son and satisfy his son’s hunger for certainty, the Sun rashly overcompensates, unwisely

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opening the door to catastrophe (and ultimately his son’s death by Jove’s thunderbolt) by

telling Phaethon he will grant him anything that his heart desires.

Thus, once again, simplistic patriarchal morality is thrown into question for, try as we

might, there is no easy, clear-cut way to judge Phaethon for his reckless act; we are back to the

moral conundrum posed by the eagle’s “simple” rhetorical question, “Loo, ys it not a gret

myschaunce / To lete a fool han governaunce / Of thing he can not demeyne?” This inability to

squeeze Phaethon and his story into a tidy patriarachal moral recalls the tension experienced by

the Dido-identifying and similarly “father-alienated” narrator in the Temple of Venus of Book I.

That is, just as Book I strongly challenges the reductive, moralistic reading of “carnal Dido” or

“foolish Dido” not by idealizing Dido as singularly “strong” (as feminists such as Hansen would

prefer) but by showing instead how her common “weakness”—in this case, her “beautiful soul”

moral vanity--is directly tied to her marginalization as a feminine subject, Ovid’s story of

Phaethon (when read in full) complicates the standard, simplistically judgmental reading of

Phaethon as “ambitious” or “vainglorious” by implicitly tying the youth’s presumptuous,

“narcissistic” desire to that which is beyond the youth’s control, namely, the “myschaunce” of

his essential traumatic “fatherlessness” and consequent need and wish not so much as to outdo

his divine father but, ironically, to break out of the narcissistic mother-child dyad by identifying

himself with certainty and confidence as his father’s son.

Fittingly, in the “scientific” Book II of The House of Fame, the nebulous and mysterious

Milky Way—the enduring celestial sign of Phaethon’s Fall—repeats this implicit challenge to

patriarchal tidiness, though in this case, not the tidiness of patriarchal morality but the tidiness of

the Ptolemaic universe and the classical and medieval science and logic that goes along with it.

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That is, there is, as Chaucer would know, a very practical (and humorous) reason why the

enthusiastically scientific eagle, eager to explain the Milky Way to his “student,” suddenly turns

off his customary, self-confident “scientific mode” and adopts the language of poetry and myth--

that reason being this feathered philosopher is smart enough to know (and smart enough to hide

from his student!) that, ultimately, his bright and shiny science is powerless to make sense of the

Milky Way. Throughout the classical and medieval high culture of Latinate learning that

Chaucer’s House of Fame so imaginatively draws upon, the Milky Way represents a sphinx-like,

ever-fascinating, ultimate mystery for men of science and philosophy—most notably, as I will

shortly explain, the great Dante himself. Unlike the clockwork mathematical precision of the

planets, the Milky Way bewildered the best minds of science (as it continues to do to this day),

stimulating various theories and hunches but always eluding the eager grasp of scientific logic.

The Milky Way, however, did not only elude scientific certainty: its strange, flowing mystery

eroded the fundamental perfection of the Ptolemaic universe. The Roman poet Manilius, author

of Astronomica, a long didactic work in five books, has left us with a survey of some of the

different theories about the Milky Way current during the first century C.E.; as the examples

below demonstrate, some of the speculation is frankly unsettling, as if the Milky Way functioned

as the disillusioning underside of masculine omnipotence, insidiously hinting the heavens to be

much less ably governed than commonly believed, the batched work of a shoddy carpenter:

. . resupina facit mortalibus ora,

dum nova per caecam mirantur lumina noctem

inquiruntque sacras humano pectore causas:

num se diductis conetur solvere moles

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segminibus, raraque labent compagine rimae

admittantque novum laxato tegmine lumen;

quid sibi non timeant, magni cum vulnera caeli

conspiciant feriatque oculos iniuira mundi?

an coeat mundus, duplicisque extrema cavernae

conveniant caelique oras et segmina iungant,

perque ipsos fiat nexus manifesta cicatrix

suturam faciens mundi, stipatus et orbis

aeriam in nebuluam densa compagine versus

in cuneos alti cogat fundamina caeli. (1. 716-28, Loeb 60, 62)

. . . it [the Milky Way] draws the gaze of mortals upwards, as they marvel at the strange

glow through night’s darkness and search, with mind of man, the cause of the divine.

Perchance, they wonder, the firmament is seeking to split into separate segments; with

the slackening of the frameworks cracks are opening and admit new light through a split

in the ceiling: what would men not fear might befall them, when they behold the great

framework damaged, and hurt done to heaven strikes their eyes? Possibly the skies are

coming together and the bases of two vaults meet and fasten the rims of celestial

segments; out of the connection is formed a conspicuous scar marking a suture of the

skies, and transformed by its dense structure into ethereal mist the compressed seam

causes the foundations of high heaven to harden into a solid joint. (Loeb 61, 63)

Upon opening the door of his mind to such unnerving speculations, the Roman poet, not

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surprisingly, immediately shuts it in the lines directly following, wisely turning—much as

Chaucer’s eagle will do centuries later—to the myth of Phaethon’s Fall for a better, i.e. less

unsettling, explanation: “Perhaps that belief is more justly held . . .” (“an melius manet illa

fides”) (1. 729; Loeb 62-3).

In Chapter 14 of Book 2 of The Banquet (Il Convivio), the astronomically-minded Dante

also discusses the various opinions about the Milky Way held by philosophers, though, as might

be expected of a medieval Christian poet, the above unsettling speculations are conspicuously

absent from his erudite survey. Instead, Dante leans towards Aristotle’s reassuringly prosaic

opinion that the mysterious Galaxy is “nothing but a multitude of fixed stars in that region, so

small that we are unable to distinguish them from below” (74). In his appropriation of Aristotle,

however, the poet acknowledges the absolute mystery of the Galaxy; following his meticulous

yet strained scheme of equating different heavenly spheres and objects with different sciences,

Dante compares the Galaxy to the lofty science of Metaphysics, reasoning that, like Metaphysics,

the Milky Way can only be understood by its effects:

Consequently, since the Galaxy is an effect of those stars which we cannot see,

except that we understand these things by their effects, and Metaphysics treats of

the primal substances, which we likewise cannot understand except by their

effects, it is clear that the Starry Heaven bears a great resemblance to

Metaphysics. (75)

Given the reverence Dante shows for the Galaxy in the above passage, one would expect the

writer of The Divine Comedy to devote at least a canto or two to such a godlike mystery, for,

according to The Banquet’s ingenious hermeneutics, the Galaxy ranks higher in meaning than

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both the planets and the sphere of the fixed stars; only the Crystalline and Empyrean Heavens

encompass it. Dante, however, seems to have decided against granting an explicit place for the

Galaxy within his poem’s well-ordered, more mathematical model of the universe. Unlike the

equinoctial colure and other intimidating, arcane objects of astronomical erudition sprinkled

throughout the Comedy, the mystery of the Milky Way humbled and overwhelmed Dante.

Significantly one of the Galaxy’s rare appearances in the poem signals the moment of great

mystical awe and desire, when, in Paradiso 14, the pilgrim Dante experiences a vision of Christ

and the Holy Cross:

Come distinta da minori e maggi

lumi biancheggia tra ’ poli del mondo

Galassia sì, che fa dubbiar ben saggi;

Sì costellati facean nel profundo

Marte quei raggi il venerabil segno

che fan giunture di quadranti in tondo.

Qui vince la memoria mia lo ’ngegno;

ché quella croce lampeggiava Cristo,

sì ch’io non so trovare essempro degno;

ma chi prende sua croce e seque Cristo,

ancor mi scuserà di quel ch’io lasso,

vedendo in quell’ albor balenar Cristo. (97-108)

As pricked out with greater and lesser lights, between the poles of the Universe,

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the Milky Way so gleams as to cause even the wise to question, so did those

beams, thus constellated, make in the depth of Mars the venerable sign which

joinings of quadrants make in a circle. Here my memory outstrips my wit, for that

Cross so flashed forth Christ that I can find for it no fit comparison; but he that

takes up his cross and follows Christ shall yet forgive me for what I leave untold

when he sees Christ flash in that dawn.

Here, still clinging to his own sage-like, geometrical diction (though perhaps ironically

acknowledging the inevitable failure of such diction), Dante compares the inexpressibility of his

vision of Christ with the bewilderment that sages feel when they contemplate the Milky Way.

For Dante, the Milky Way thus represents the realm of the ineffable, a wordless visionary

experience that was once powerfully felt but now exists only as a shadowy memory beyond the

grasp of the conscious intellect. Dante’s introduction of the Galaxy at such a key moment

underscores the poet’s continuing fascination and reverence for this heavenly phenomenon, his

abiding belief that its veiled mystery, like his memory, “outstripped” his wit, encompassing some

ultimate spiritual truth, some sacred state of being that flooded beyond the borders of his poem’s

neatly and masterfully envisioned ten spheres of heaven.

Perhaps, here, is the inspiration for Chaucer’s eagle in Book II of The House of Fame. Is

it merely a coincidence that Chaucer has his previously scientific eagle suddenly abandon his

theorizing and turn to the poetic world of myth to explain the one object of astronomical

knowledge that “outstripped” Dante’s dazzling and at times intimidating posture of scientific

erudition? The eagle’s following speech supplies further evidence that Chaucer is poking fun at

the Italian poet’s penchant for astronomical exactitude when, having moved on to a more

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scientifically knowable topic, namely, the precise location of various constellations in the

night sky, the eagle proudly reverts to his scientific mode, even going so far as to scorn the use

of the very kind of poetic cosmology that he himself has just relied on to explain the Milky Way.

Like the erudite Dante, the eagle seems to have a scientific explanation for everything in nature,

everything, that is, outside of the Milky Way.

If he is poking fun at Dante’s scientific exactitude here, Chaucer, however, does so

affectionately and with a coinciding profound respect and indeed love for the Italian poet--not

from the hostile, shallow position of the cynic. Moreover, as will become clear in the last chapter

of this dissertation, I believe that Chaucer both shared and was inspired by Dante’s reverence for

the Milky Way, for, like Dante, he linked this phenomenon to the mystery of Christ, intuitively

recognizing that this ultimate astronomical mystery functioned, at the same time, due to its

varied, rich associations in classical myth, Neoplatonic philosophy and medieval popular culture,

as a kind of all-encompassing incarnational symbol—like the “tree” of medieval Christian

iconography, simultaneously functioning as a sign the Fall and a sign of Redemption, the saving

power and promise of the Christic fusion of the Cross. Within classical myth alone, we see a

glimpse of this incarnational significance; similar to Dante’s eagle-Lucia juxtaposition and

fusion of paternal and maternal principles in Purgatorio 9, classical myth offers two very

different etiological narratives about the Milky Way—one associated with a divine father and the

fatal consequences of trespassing against his Law (the myth of Phaethon’s Fall), and another

associated with a divine mother and pre-Oedipal plenitude, the milk of the maternal breast. After

recounting the story of Phaethon in his Astronomica, Manilius mentions this other, gentler

(“mollior”) legend:

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nec mihi celanda est vulgata fama vetusta

mollior, e niveo lactis fluxisse liquorem

pectore reginae divum caelumque colore

infecisse suo; quapropter lacteus orbis

dicitur, et nomen causa descendit ab ipsa. (1. 750-4; Loeb 64)

Nor must I conceal an ancient legend less tragic than the well-known one, that from the

snow-white breast of heaven’s queen [Juno, wife of Jupiter and matriarch of Olympus]

there flowed a stream of milk which left its colour upon the skies; wherefore it is called

the Milky Way, and the name derives from its actual origin. (Loeb 65)

What is fascinating about these opposing etiological myths is that, ultimately, the night sky itself

“proves” the two stories to be equally true—similar to the way, for us, the universe “proves” that

light is both particle and wave (or, for Dante the pilgrim, the truth of his transport to Christ

occurs simultaneously through the violent eagle dream and the gentle physical reality of Lucia):

according to the father-focused Phaethon myth, the Milky Way is a linear phenomenon,

something moving forward like a path or road, whereas, according to the mother-focused

Heracles/Juno myth, the Milky Way is amorphous and flowing, something more like the

spreading, curved movement of spilled milk. As anyone who has ever looked up at the Milky

Way knows and as Manilius so beautifully captures in the passage below, the two myths

complement each other, for the Galaxy does appear to be simultaneously static yet moving

against the blackness of the night--a starry white road that one can trace over the heavens but

whose dynamically created borders and flowing contents seem somehow to arise from the

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depths, make it impossible to define with precision:

ut freta canescunt sulcum ducente carina,

accipiuntque viam fluctus spumantibus undis

quam tortus verso movit de gurgite vertex,

candidus in nigro lucet sic limes Olympo

caeruleum findens ingenti lumine mundum. (1. 708-12; Loeb 60)

As the sea whitens where a vessel draws the furrow of its wake, and, whilst the waters

foam, the surge forms a road which churned eddies have roused from the upturned

depths, so the track shines bright in the blackness of heaven, cleaving with a huge band of

light the dark-blue sky. (Loeb 61)

Further discussion of the Milky Way’s significance for both Dante and Chaucer,

however, will have to wait because, as will also become clear in the final two chapters, one of

my beliefs or indeed convictions about Chaucer’s House of Fame is that, more so than most

literary works (and more so than Chaucer’s other poems), it follows a associative, generally

sound-driven, crazy yet brilliant dream-logic that folds back upon itself, echoing and

recombining literal bits from earlier sections and thereby--as Freud suggests often happens in the

multiple dreams of one night—creating and performing the amplitude of its truth retroactively.

The eagle’s lecture on sound thus turns out to be wonderfully apt since, as I will argue later, it is

through the unconscious and uncannily “providential” play of sound that The House of Fame

creates its “wish,” its final, transformative destination. Fittingly, the catalyst for the poem’s

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creative transformations and fusions is none other than Chaucer’s great goddess Fame,

Chaucer’s “Lady Philosophy” and divinely comical (and by most critics, dastardly maligned)

goddess of the word—to her, I will turn in the next chapter.

Having been rescued from the void and buoyed by the sound-loving, professorial eagle

and the story-loving Father Jove who sent him, the narrator is now ready to encounter the

goddess whom he once, channeling tragic Dido, fearfully called “wikke Fame.” We see this

readiness—this emerging faith in language--in the Invocation to Apollo at the beginning of Book

III, a humorous and self-effacing imitation of the illustrious Dante’s lofty invocation to Apollo

(Par. 1.13-27). Whereas, in the Invocation of Book I, the seemingly overwhelmed narrator, a

bundle of comically neurotic doubt, self-defensiveness and overcompensating grandiosity,

absurdly attempted to control the future reception of his poem with over-the-top Deuteronomic

blessings and curses, in this final Invocation, he seems to have happily relaxed into his project,

the telling of his wondrous dream—indeed, so much so, he no longer even calls it a dream, as if

he no longer cares to keep up the “scribe of the dream” pretense that earlier he so awkwardly

tried to adopt. There is, as well, a change in the narrator’s attitude towards writing from the

Proem of Book II to the Invocation of Book III. As I pointed out in an earlier discussion, in the

Proem of Book II, the narrator shows a reluctance to take ownership of his language: using the

disembodied persona of the would-be visionary, he mystifies the labor of the writing process,

calling upon the scribe-like “vertu” of “Thought” to recover and reproduce “Thought”’s original

perfect transcription of the events of the dream. In the Invocation to Book III, however, he takes

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ownership of his writing, using “I” openly rather than obscuring his responsibility and

agency through the use of impersonal subjects such as “Thought.” With this emerging “I,” the

narrator takes leave of the protected inner world of Book II ’s Proem, cautiously stepping into

the public arena of poetic standards and competition for “maistrye” which he, in a gesture of

modest disclamatio, denies desiring. (Such gestures of modesty are, of course, poetically

conventional; in this case, though, I would argue the pose of modesty clearly meshes with the

Chaucerian narrator’s persona—not only what D.W. Robertson, Jr. would have characterized as

his “English” unwillingness to blow his own horn but also, more importantly, his marked

tendency to identify with feminine values and characters, and, in particular, his conspicuous

alienation from the “taking” of glory-seeking heroic masculinity.) 27

This is not to say that, with this new “I,” the narrator abandons his visionary persona--

following Dante, he calls upon “devyne vertu” to help him ‘shewe now” what in his head

“ymarked ys” (1101-3). Now, however, he presents this visionary persona with humor (to show

his gratitude to Apollo, he exuberantly pledges to run out and kiss the next laurel tree he see) and

a light touch that suggests a willingness to trust in or surrender to the “aventure” of the writing

process--the fortune and providence of words. In particular, there is a new sense of the

spontaneity of divine inspiration: whereas the narrator of the Book II’s Proem places his ideal in

the dusty past, imagining it as already written--shut up and locked away and hoarded in the

“tresorye” of his brain--the narrator of Book III’s Invocation does not conceptualize writing as a

past event nor does he reduce the working of divine inspiration to an act of recovery of some

fully envisioned ideal that he already knows and possesses. Instead, his words merely imply that

he, as a writer creating in the present, seeks and is open to intuitive guidance from Apollo to help

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him “shewe” a general thing, namely, “The Hous of Fame for to descryve” (1105). What is

“ymarked” in his head is not some static picture but something that exists through or within the

grace-filled “now” of “devyne vertu” that reveals it.

More specifically, with his humor and modesty, Chaucer also self-consciously positions

himself vis-à-vis the boldly self-assertive, heroic and intensely serious Dante whose Invocation

to Apollo inspired his own—so closely, in fact, that some might call Chaucer’s Invocation a

parody of Dante. I myself prefer to think of it as a revision or rewriting of Dante: to my mind,

“parody” implies a poking fun at a target merely for the sake of poking fun; in this case, though,

I propose that Chaucer is more interested in rethinking Dante’s Invocation, that is, instead of

being merely motivated by the desire to deflate Dante’s pretensions, Chaucer is motivated

primarily by the desire to figure out what really bothers him about Dante’s Invocation—which, I

propose, in this case, happens to be that which is perhaps for most readers (and no doubt was for

Chaucer) the most striking and memorable element of Dante’s Invocation, namely, his startling

and unsettling use of the story of Marsyas, taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 6. 382-400. In

Ovid’s brief yet gruesomely bloody account, Marsyas, a flute-playing satyr, one day foolishly

challenged Apollo to a musical contest; the god, of course, defeated him soundly, and, to punish

the satyr for his presumption, he flayed him alive. In his Invocation to Apollo, Dante, reading the

story against the grain, alludes to the horrific flaying of Marsyas to evoke the ruthless, terrifying

beauty and violence of divine transformation and transcendence—a spiritual violence that the

poet passionately embraces with an intense homoerotic abandon:

Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue

sì come quando Marsïa traesti

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de la vagina de le membra sue. (Paradiso 1. 19-21)

Enter into my breast and breathe there as when you drew Marsyas from the sheath

of his limbs.

As Jane Chance points out, Dante here “adopts a feminine position . . . in relation to the

masculine, swordlike power of God infusing and ravishing him” (The Mythographic Chaucer

74); though, to Chance’s description, I would emphasize that Dante puts himself in a “feminine”

position because he longs to merge completely with this dazzling “swordlike” power of Apollo,

to become one with the divine Phallus, i.e. to become the perfect instrument of Apollo-Christ,

through the god’s swift, razor-like act of drawing him out of the feminized “sheath” [“vagina” in

the Italian] of the human, “satyr-like” skin that encases him—the spirit-dulling flesh that encases

the visionary Apollo-like spirit within. Once again, as in the “re-enactment” of the rape of

Ganymede in Purgatorio 9, Dante envisions divine power as an emphatically masculine,

dominating, sublimely phallic force, a force of pure spirit that exists in terrifying, thrilling

opposition to the human vulnerability and frailty of our “feminine” embodiment. With, however,

an important difference: whereas, in Purgatorio 9, the pilgrim was still on earth and just

beginning his Christian ascent, here, invoking Apollo to tell of the “transhumanizing” world of

Paradise, the poet speaks his desire to pass beyond the human even more ruthlessly.

Accordingly, with his startling image of himself as would-be Marsyas, there is no comparable

“Lucia” to create an incarnational fusion, no Lucia to balance and temper the dominant,

ravishing spiritual force that Dante associates with the masculine divine.

In his Invocation to Apollo, Chaucer pointedly omits the Italian poet’s unconventional

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reference to Marsyas. His omission is pointed because, later on in Book III, the poem will

refer to Ovid’s story of the satyr directly when the narrator, with undeniable black humor,

describes the macabre figure of poor “Marcia” as she stands gruesomely skinless and chinless

among the other musicians and assorted entertainers outside the palace of Fame (Chaucer

apparently thought the satyr was female):

And Marcia that loste her skyn,

Bothe in face, body, and chyn,

For that she wolde envien, loo,

To pipen bet than Appolloo. (1229-32)

Clearly, Chaucer reads the story of presumptuous Marsyas traditionally and rejects Dante’s

unusual use of it; for him, the horrible image of the flayed satyr is a sign of divine punishment—

period. At a deeper level, I propose Chaucer rejects Dante’s “divine flaying” because he found

its implicit violence towards the embodied human being profoundly alienating rather than

sublimely inspiring. As if to keep Dante’s violent Apollo-Christ away from his own, always

more humbly Incarnational Christ, Chaucer even orthographically separates the “Appollo” of his

Invocation from the cruel “Appolloo” who so ruthlessly excoriated the foolish “Marcia.”

Chaucer perhaps also rejects Dante’s “divine flaying” because, as the narrator’s

humorously self-deprecating Invocation suggests, he, as a feminine-identifying writer of a poem

of “lyght and lewed” rhymes that sometimes “fayle in a sillable,” identifies with the position of

the lowly “feminine” satyr-- and perhaps, to some degree, does so unconsciously in relation to

the fierce and intimidating “Appolloo”-like Dante. That is, Chaucer, playing the role of

“bumbling Everyman,” identifies with the buffoonish Marsyas first literally and concretely and

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then symbolically, whereas the proud, laurel-seeking Dante—who implicitly does not

personally or literally identify with Marsyas qua satyr--evokes and uses Ovid’s story of the

flayed satyr in a more impersonal, abstract, purely symbolic way. There is, however, a key

difference between Ovid’s Marsyas and Chaucer’s comical narrator: whereas Marsyas absurdly

believed he could pipe better than the god of music and poetry, Chaucer’s narrator openly

acknowledges that his work is unpolished, lacking Dante-esque evidence of “maistrye” of “art

poetical.” Moreover, in contrast to “envious” Marsyas, this lack does not seem to bother the

narrator overmuch: not, however, because he has low standards or because he does not really

believe that the lack exists (and is thus trying to manipulate his audience with false modesty).

Instead, I propose the narrator is not bothered by the lack because, alongside his clear-eyed

assessment of his failings in “craft,” his words at the same time imply a new more grounded faith

in the essential worth of his project, a sincere belief that, through his constant effort to serve his

poem by infusing it with meaning or “sentence” (“I do no diligence / To shewe craft, but o

sentence”), he, too, identifies himself as a Christian poet, i.e. one who, in spite of the “Marcia”-

like “unlikeliness” of both poet and poem, may faithfully and freely and trustfully call upon the

“devyne vertu” of Apollo-Christ to aid him. Read in this way, the Chaucerian narrator’s blend of

comical self-effacement and faithful confidence performs the breakthrough paradox of Christian

humility so succinctly expressed by the defiant Paul in 2 Corinthians 12: 11: “For I am not at all

inferior to these superlative apostles, even though I am nothing.” As Slavoj Žižek suggests in his

reading of Paul’s famous “paradigmatic” passage on love (1 Corinthians 13), to become a

Christian subject is to become “as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing

paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being

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is capable of love . . .” (The Fragile Absolute 146-7).

Thus, perhaps it is not “in spite of” of his and his poem’s imperfections but only because

of his implicit recognition of his “Marcia”-like “unlikeliness” that the narrator becomes ready to

receive Apollo’s “devyne power.” If so, this would be in keeping with the divinely comical

incarnational resonances at the end the Invocation. I am referring in particular to the narrator’s

exuberant pledge to show his gratitude towards Apollo by immediately kissing the next laurel

tree he sees: although seemingly merely goofy and ridiculous, this pledge actually alludes to the

love-crazed Apollo’s chase of the maiden Daphne and, specifically, his passionate, “crazy”

embrace and kiss of the laurel tree after Daphne’s transformation into the tree (Metamorphoses

1.555-6). This Apollo, in stark contrast to Dante’s fiercely transcendent, satyr-flaying Apollo, is

a vulnerable god whose passionate love for a girl so humbles him and so fully possesses him

that, bereft of her presence, he continues to love and wildly desire the material tree that she

becomes—the “letter” she leaves behind. Accordingly, although some mythographers, reading

Apollo in malo, saw here only an image of “foolish” or “sinful” love for worldly goods such as

fame, at least one mythographer, the fourteenth-century writer Pierre Bersuire, found in Apollo’s

wild kiss and embrace of the laurel tree an image of another, much greater Passion, namely,

Christ’s rescue of a doomed humanity via his passionate embrace of the humbling Tree of the

Cross (Medieval Mythography, Volume 2, 337). Perhaps, in a small way, through his abdication

of linguistic “maistrye” and surrender to language, through his clear-eyed “kiss” of the

imperfect, lowly form and style of his poem, the narrator of the Invocation pays a fitting tribute

to the kiss of this Christ-Apollo.

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CHAPTER V

The Consolation and Revelation of the Goddess Fame

Having been dropped off by the eagle at his destination at the end of Book II, Book III

begins with the portly Geffrey reluctantly yet matter-of-factly embracing the adventure that

awaits him, climbing, as he tells us, “with alle payne” and though it “greved” him to do so

(1118-9), up the high rock of ice atop which, with wondrous precariousness, stands the glittering,

crystalline palace of the goddess Fame. As he makes his laborious way up the mountain, he sees

how the mountain, “writen ful of names of / Of folks” (1153), is itself an emblem of the

mysterious, seemingly chance-like workings of Fame, of the great divide that exists between

transitory and lasting fame: on the southern, sunlit, warmer side of the mountain, he sees names

etched in the ice that are losing letters “oon or two” (1144), inexorably melting into oblivion

before his very eyes; on the northern, shady, colder side, he sees, in stark contrast, names of “of

folks that hadden grete fames” that are easy to read and freshly preserved—“As fresh as men had

written hem here / The selve day ryght, or that houre” (1156-7).

With this icy mountain of names, Chaucer’s poem thus seems to reverse or at the very

least complicate the traditional, “natural” association of sunshine and warmth with goodness and,

consequently, the opposite—shade or darkness and cold-- with evil: here, the “good” that is

enduring fame is associated with cold and shade rather than warmth and sunshine. How should

we read this surprising symbolic reversal? Should we assume, as the Robertsonian critic B. G.

Koonce suggests, that Chaucer is not in any way reversing or inverting traditional symbolic

associations here but is instead using Christian irony to indicate (via “the Christian norm” of

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Scripture that links the Holy Spirit and charity to heat and the Sun of Justice and the “north”

to Satan and his chilly ilk) that the “good” of lasting fame is not only illusory but also something

worse-- a sign of evil and spiritual ignorance? According to Koonce’s strenuously Robertsonian

reading, Chaucer is making a contrast between the Old Law of cupidity and the New Law of

grace: that is, the “folks that hadden grete fames” whose names are written on the shady,

northern side of the mountain (and are thus preserved and easy to read) signify those people who

“achieved renown as Gentiles or as Jews under the Old Law,” whereas the melting names written

on the sunlit, southern side signify “those in whom the ice of cupidity or the desire for renown

has been removed by the heat of the Holy Spirit” (193). In short, “the shadow of Fame’s the

spurious protection of Satan, who tempts men with the false security of worldly renown” (194).

There are, however, serious problems with this “Holy Spirit” reading, not the least being

that, within the context of the poem, the image of melting names clearly signifies the lack or loss

of fame--not the lack or loss of desire for fame. Once this problem is corrected, this “exegetical”

reading pretty much falls apart since, to keep the “heat of divine grace” idea, one is ultimately

forced into the dubious position of linking holiness or grace to the mere absence of enduring

fame: although it is logical to assume that many saintly, pure-souled people die unknown or

never win lasting fame, to conclude that anyone or everyone whose name melts into oblivion is

somehow good or holy (touched by the “heat of the Holy Spirit”) is absurd; moreover, as the

example of the Christian saints clearly demonstrates, extraordinary grace and holiness, perhaps

because it is so conspicuous to those in its presence, can and does sometimes coincide with

lasting earthly fame.

We have, however, seen this negative reading of fame before. With its simplistic,

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moralistic opposition to fame and the famous and corresponding elevation of the unknown or

transiently famous (those names unprotected by the chill of “Satanic” Fame), Koonce’s

Robertsonian reading, ironically enough, bears a striking resemblance to the Chaucerian Dido’s

lament, in Book I, against “wikke Fame,” in particular, Dido’s (and the Dido-identifying

narrator’s) morally self-righteous linking of feminine goodness to woman’s linguistic impotence

or innocence (“We wrechched wymmen konne noon art”) and subsequent victimization by Fame

and the rhetorically-savvy, treacherous male sex. Much as Koonce implies (not only in the above

reading but throughout his book-length study of The House of Fame) that Fame is wicked

because she speaks only the Old Law and never the New, from Dido’s perspective, the goddess

Fame is “wikke” because, being as it were a mouthpiece for the desires and values of the

“wikke,” symbolically dominant male, she always denies or whitewashes the sins of men against

women, always elevates the reputations of callous, smooth-talking heroes such as Aeneas at the

expense of the reputations of good, loyal, loving, trusting women such as herself. The narrator,

however, finds this view of Fame as predictably “wikke” humorously and seriously challenged

when he finally visits the palace of Fame and sees, in person, how unpredictably—and without

clear malice—the colorful, feisty goddess responds to the nine representative groups of

petitioners who arrive at her court. The goddess herself is a host of contradictions and paradoxes,

a weird blend of Virgil’s monstrous Fama, Boethius’s lofty Dame Philosophy, and the visions of

St. John’s Revelation. Although, on the one hand, she seems to live up to Dido’s accusation,

bearing on her shoulders the coats of arms of two great male heroes, Alexander and Hercules, the

fact that her right-hand man is Aeolus immediately calls to mind the vengeful Juno of Book One

of the Aeneid who bids Aeolus to whip up a storm at sea that almost succeeds in killing off

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Juno’s arch-enemy, Aeneas, the future founder of patriarchal Rome, the destined conqueror

of Juno’s beloved, woman-friendly Carthage.

As I will show in various ways throughout this chapter, the goddess Fame of Book III

troubles the binary logic and tidy separations of the patriarchal symbolic, mixing lofty fame with

lowly gossip, Boethius’s enduring matriarch, Lady Philosophy, with the flirty and changeable

Fortuna and Virgil’s “foeda dea” (filthy goddess), fusing the sublime (and conventionally

patriarchal) Christian God of the Last Judgment with an imperious, temperamental goddess

whose whimsical use of power mocks conventional morality. Faced with this bewildering

bricolage, many critics take a negative view of Fame: some, taking a standard feminist view, see

her as just another masculinist projection of feminine evil; others, more in the Robertsonian vein,

read Book III as moralistic satire, viewing Fame as an emblem of worldly evil that a properly

“Christian” Chaucer “obviously” scorns. Against both of these positions, I will argue that 1)

Chaucer’s mocking goddess gloriously and gleefully transcends the morality assumed by her

both her conservative and liberal critics, and, in doing so, 2) Chaucer’s goddess of words reveals

herself to be a true Christian goddess, for her true “target” is the Ego—not Goodness, not

Charity, not Woman. Indeed, I will go even further and boldly claim that Chaucer, in creating his

seemingly “wikke” goddess Fame, reveals, après-coup, the hidden blazing revolutionary

Christian truth of Boethius and his Lady Philosophy that I propose drives and, as it were,

psychically authenticates, The Consolation of Philosophy, namely, the clanging skeleton in the

august Philosophy’s genealogical closet, Virgil’s Fama. To that closet, I now turn.

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What Chaucer Knows: The Miracle of Lady Philosophy’s Dark and Humble Origins

As alluded to above, Chaucer’s description of the goddess Fame in lines 1368-92 of Book

III of The House of Fame is a curious hodge-podge, drawing most obviously upon Virgil’s

grotesque portrait of the goddess Fama in Book IV of the Aeneid, yet, at the same time,

unexpectedly evoking the most sublime and honored of Christian texts, “th’Apocalips” and

Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. The Boethian echo occurs in the passage describing

the goddess Fame’s miraculously changing stature:

Me thoughte that she was so lyte

That the lengthe of a cubite

Was lengere than she semed be.

But thus sone in a whyle she

Hir thos so wonderliche streighte

That with hir fet she erthe reighte,

And with hir hed she touched hevene,

Ther as shynen sterres sevene . . . (1369-76)

With these lines, Chaucer’s medieval audience would likely call to mind Boethius’s description

of his sublime visitor at the beginning of The Consolation (1. pr. 1. 8-13), translated by Chaucer

himself below:

The stature of hire was of a doutous jugement, for somtyme sche constreyned and

schronk hirselven lik to the commune mesure of men, and somtyme it semede that

sche touchede the hevene with the heghte of here heved. And whan sche hef hir

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heved heyere, sche precede the selve hevene so that the sighte of men lokynge

was in ydel. (Riverside Chaucer 398)

Given, however, that Virgil describes his goddess Fama (Rumor or Gossip) in an almost

identical way, a few of Chaucer’s readers might also appreciate the complexity and hidden wit of

the allusion, recognizing with amusement and surprise how the shared detail of a miraculously

changing stature bridges the comically yawning gulf between Boethius’s sublime Lady

Philosophy and Virgil’s monstrously voracious “dea foeda” (“filthy goddess”), revealing in a

flash how Chaucer’s improbable yoking of Boethius’s Lady Philosophy and Virgil’s Fama—far

from being merely arbitrary and fanciful-- in fact uncovers and bids us to ponder a hither-to

unnoticed connection that was already literally there in Boethius’s text in the first place.

Chaucer’s poem thus leads us to the intriguing possibility that, in some way, Boethius’s

vision of Lady Philosophy sprung forth at least in part from the imprisoned and exiled Boethius’s

literary and personal memory of Virgil’s “dea foeda.” Support for this hypothesis comes from

both literary history and from within The Consolation itself, from Boethius’s autobiographical

account of his own calamitous political fall and continued public disgrace at the hands of “wikke

Fame,” i.e. his unjust imprisonment on the trumped-up charges of treason and sacrilege (black

magic). 28

First, the literary evidence: commenting upon representative motifs or schemas found

within the Latin classical and medieval allegorical goddess tradition, Ernst Curtius notes two

used by Boethius, the old-young woman motif (Lady Philosophy, notes Curtius, appears to

Boethius as a dignified matron “full of vitality, though very old,” or, in Latin, “inexhausti vigoris

. . . aeva plena”), and the miraculously changing stature motif (European Literature and the

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Latin Middle Ages 101-5). We learn from Curtius that the old-young woman motif

(exemplified by either the supernatural feminine figure who is simultaneously old and young or

who is first old and then rejuvenates) appears in late classical pagan and Christian visionary

writings, “degenerated into a rhetorical cliché” by the fifth century, whereupon it re-gained

“religious consecration” with Boethius and was later revived within the medieval allegorical

goddess tradition that flourished from the twelfth century onwards, being a special favorite of

Alan of Lille, who uses it repeatedly in De planctu Naturae, as well in Anticlaudianus. As for the

motif of the supernatural feminine figure whose stature alternates between human and gigantic

proportions, Curtius cites multiple post-Boethius examples from medieval allegorical literature

but only two that actually predate the writing of The Consolation of Philosophy, Homer’s

allegorical personification of Hate or Strife in the Iliad (IV, 442f), and, of course, Virgil’s Fama;

Boethius, it seems, is the first known visionary or religious writer--as well as the first Christian

one—to make use of this particular motif. Moreover, Boethius’s use of this motif is striking and

unique for another reason: as Curtius’s examples clearly indicate, the changing stature motif in

pre-Boethius literature—in sharp contrast to the life-affirming, rejuvenating associations evoked

by the simultaneous age and youth of supernatural redemptresses in pre- and post-Boethius

visionary literature---has a strongly negative charge, being associated with death, destruction and

chaotic violence, either symbolic or metaphorical, in both Homer and Virgil (as I previously

discussed in Chapter 3). Curtius’s examples also suggest that, in varying degrees, this negative

charge continued even after the pioneering Boethius used the motif to describe his redemptress:

post-Boethius writings either associated changing stature with feminine figures or allegorical

goddesses whose ethical vision and spiritual understanding, relative to Lady Philosophy’s, is

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inherently limited or inferior (e.g. Brunetto Latini’s Natura, the Sibyl in Bernard Silvlestris’s

commentary on Virgil, Dialecta in Anselm of Bestate) or with scary allegorical goddesses who

literally harm and kill human beings (e.g. under the year 968, the Annales Palidenses records that

someone dreamed of a woman with superhuman stature who identifies herself as Dysentery).

Clearly unsettled by the motif’s negative, lethal associations, Guillaume de Lorris in the Roman

de la Rose thus self-consciously departs from Boethius’s innovation, choosing to depict his Lady

Philosophy-like goddess Reason with a perfectly moderate stature (“ne trop haute ne trop

basse”) that, for this modern reader at least, unfortunately evokes the distinctly unsublime image

of little Goldilock’s search for the perfectly middling bowl of porridge or bed.

How are we then to read what I have suggested Chaucer’s depiction of the goddess Fame

unobtrusively yet impishly bids us to ponder, namely, Christian Boethius’s unusual choice to

imagine the sublime redemptress of his vision not just with the positive rejuvenation motif

favored by Christian visionaries of the past but also with a motif that had hitherto been strongly

associated with death and destruction—and not just death or destruction “in general” but the

distinctly human murderous aggression that emanates, in the form of war (Homer’s Hate) or

malicious rumor-mongering (Virgil’s Fama), from the heart of civilization itself, wreaking its

blind, uncannily joyous, dehumanizing, anonymous violence upon physical bodies (Homer’s

Hate) or reputations and names (Virgil’s Fama)?29 As the reader may recall, in my earlier

discussion of Virgil’s Fama in Chapter 3, I drew upon the work of Freud and Lacan to interpret

these two memorably lethal allegorical goddesses of classical epic and to analyze the relationship

between them, proposing that Homer’s Hate could be paralleled with Freud’s partially instinctual

notion of the death drive and Virgil’s Fama (a rewriting of Homer’s Hate) with Lacan’s boldly

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non-instinctual, linguistically-focused interpretation of Freud’s famous fort/da narrative and

his ensuing rewriting of the Freudian death drive that first appears in his 1953 essay, “The

Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, 102-7);

in this essay, Lacan puts forth his claim that the death drive is casually related (as opposed to

being merely correlate with) to the emergence of the speaking subject, the traumatic birth of the

subject within language. Building on Lacan’s speech-related death drive and the work of

Dorothy Dinnerstein, I then suggested that the femininity of Virgil’s grotesque “filthy goddess”

(“dea foeda”) ultimately derives from something far more profound and compelling than

commonplace sexist prejudice (e.g. “women gossip more than men”), that something being the

psychic grounding of Virgil’s “death drive” goddess of gossip in a more or less universally

shared, repressed memory that haunts the limit of the historical subject, namely, the traumatic

recognition of maternal will and independence that occurs in early childhood—or, in other

words, the necessary, inevitable power struggle between small child and the all-powerful, all-

knowing, speaking and word-feeding (m)Other that inaugurates the speaking subject and the

trajectory of desire that he or she will follow, “murdering the thing,” as Lacan so evocatively

puts it, through the primordial losses and alienating divisions necessarily generated via the

linguistic ordering and carving up of reality that the non-psychotic acquisition of speech assumes

(e.g. the divisions between mother and child, mind and body, subject and object, conscious and

unconscious).30 Besides Fama’s feminine gender, this psychoanalytic reading, as I suggested

earlier, also sheds light on the titillating “dirt” or “obscenity” that gossip as a collective force, as

Virgil suggests, so irresistibly—and lethally-- embodies. That is, Fama’s voracious appetite for

scandal, or, to be more precise, the goddess’s distinct delight in exposing other people’s

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supposed secret carnal sins, in particular, the “disgusting” taboo carnal pleasures of the high

and mighty (e.g. the secret, “slave-like” lust of Queen Dido and her foreign lover, Aeneas) can

be read as a collective expression of the return of the repressed, in this case, as the return of or

attempt to get back the forbidden jouissance associated with the intimate renunciations and

inevitable carnal humiliations of early childhood, the mother’s necessary disciplining or

socialization--coinciding with the emergence of the child as speaking subject--of the child’s

unruly,“polymorphously perverse” body. Because of its “return of the repressed” character,

Fama gives its multitude of participants a rich, complex, intoxicating blend of pleasures. On the

one hand, gossip, in gleefully exposing the secret carnal sins of the enviable “masters,” gives

each of the members of this profane “body” a chance (however illusory) to even the score, to

reverse the power dynamic of earliest childhood by taking the place of the all-powerful, all-

knowing, invasive masterly mother who “robbed” us of our jouissance (epitomized perhaps most

clearly by the mother’s judgment and inevitably always somewhat invasive control of the small

child’s “dirty” treasure, “the excrement,” to quote Dinnerstein, “that is so continuous with its

innards and so symbolic of all control and possession,” Mermaid and the Minotaur 167). On the

other hand, gossip, with its anonymous “dishing of the dirt,” at the same time gives the members

of Fama a thrilling chance to rebel against the morality of the patriarchal symbolic order and to

be the gleefully unruly child again—to get close to and to revel in the taboo “dirt” of the flesh

(and to do so with a relative anonymity that offers a “free pass”).

As I shortly explain, this Fama and the psychoanalytic truth that she represents has a

direct, seeringly personal relevance for the imprisoned Boethius and the sublime Lady

Philosophy, a relevance that I propose illuminates and make sense of that shining Lady’s

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surprisingly dark and humble literary genealogy--the telltale sign of her wondrously

fluctuating stature that, as Chaucer’s poem helps us to see, so oddly links her to Virgil’s

monstrous, deathly Fama. First, however, since Boethius and Philosophy’s relationship to Fama

cannot be understood without it, I would like to complement the above discussion with a

recapitulation of Chapter 3’s analysis of the other half of the Virgilian dialectic of fama—the

maternally compassionate consoling fama represented in Book 1 of the Aeneid by the empathetic

murals in the Carthaginian Temple of Juno (and in turn incarnated by Queen Dido herself when

she plays or, perhaps more accurately, fully inhabits the role of the supporting, raptly attentive

feminine listener vis-à-vis speaking Aeneas as he tells his long story of his and his people’s

many sufferings and adventures). As I suggested in this earlier discussion, Virgil’s opposing

types of fama, taken as a dialectical unit, represent the “ground zero” of the subject, both

similarly evoking the mother/child power dynamic of early childhood (the dynamic through

which the speaking subject first emerged) by constructing the subject in a weakened vulnerable

and/or dependent state vis-à-vis a powerful, seemingly all-knowing maternal Other—a “carnal”

vulnerability that, in both cases, entails an intense focus upon the subject as embodied, suffering

or helplessly impassioned human being, the human being as mortal creature of the flesh. The key

difference is that, in Book 1 of Virgil’s epic, “good” fama--the humanely compassionate,

consoling, maternal fama that the war-traumatized, shipwrecked Aeneas encounters via the

temple art--wards off the threat of danger and death and fills the hero with the fortifying hope of

deliverance, enabling him to mourn the losses of the past and thereby setting in motion the hero’s

restoration and regeneration as desiring masculine subject via his passionate romance with Dido;

in contrast, the “bad” Fama in Book 4, threatening the heroic subject with public disgrace-- the

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“murder” of his or her name through carnal humiliation--in essence, his or her death or

banishment from the patriarchal symbolic order—effectively destroys the hero’s hitherto-

flourishing desire for Dido, setting in motion the chain of events that leads to Aeneas’s abrupt

departure from Carthage. Since, however, Dido, according to the epic, is an “obstacle” for the

hero and his quest (the founding of Rome), this dialectic of fama/Fama ultimately serves the

hero and his interests well: good fama gets him back on his feet again via the grounding,

soothing balm of Woman’s love, whereas the threat of bad Fama pushes him back on the right

track to masculinist glory, telling him when it is time to move on from Woman. In short,

however Virgil tries to obscure it (by, for example, purifying Fama’s message through masculine

channels), the humble “feminine” dialectic of fama/Fama plays a substantial, very powerful role

in sustaining and maintaining the integrity of the heroic subject: indeed, it is fair to say that

without fama/Fama, Virgil’s Father Jupiter would have no real authority over his human

subjects, and Aeneas as heroic subject would cease to exist—or, to be more precise, would not

even be possible in the first place.

In Book I of The House of Fame, Chaucer, of course, through his Dido-identifying

narrator, brings the Virgilian dialectic of fama/Fama out of the shadows into the forefront. In

doing so, he exposes how this powerful, far-from-impartial dialectic serves to keep the

heteronormative status quo intact, unjustly sustaining the ego and, in turn, the symbolic power or

efficacy of the masculine subject to the distinct disadvantage of the feminine subject. Through

Chaucer’s brilliant synthesis of the scene of “consoling fama” of Book 1 of the Aeneid with the

monstrous, “wikke” Fama of Book 4, the poet shows or anticipates what the world of Virgilian

epic must hide or leave out in order to preserve the fiction of the ethically superior heroic

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subject, namely, 1) the feminine subject’s (i.e. Dido’s) greater vulnerability—due to the

patriarchal expectation of feminine chastity--to the scandalously carnal exposure that “wikke

Fame” represents, a vulnerability that is further intensified by 2) the absence of “consoling

fama,” within the pro-Aeneas murals of the Temple of Venus, for the abandoned Dido as

feminine victim of Aeneas’s opportunistic masculine desire (thus prompting the narrator’s

effusive yet ultimately futile attempt to fill up the void of the temple art). As demonstrated by the

content and placement of Dido’s speech—the narrator imagines it as occurring directly before

her suicide—Chaucer’s poem shows how Dido’s vulnerable, doubly disadvantaged position vis-

à-vis Virgilian fama/Fama leads not only to the obviously tragic consequences of despair and

suicide but also, more subtly (and also more typically), to the crippling retreat of the “ordinary”

feminine subject into the domesticated imaginary of the “beautiful soul,” a private world of

“pure” love and innocence in which the feminine subject (or feminine-identifying subject) can

make good her losses at the symbolic level by glorying in her feminine goodness and indulging

in simplistic, self-righteous moralizing against the interconnected evils of rhetoric (or, more

broadly, language itself) and male seduction and betrayal.

Recognizing the self-defeating impotence of this language-fearing retreat, the poet-

narrator, as we saw, takes leave of the precious glass womb of the heteronormative Temple of

Venus altogether, gingerly stepping through the “wiket” to find himself face to face with the vast

nothingness of a desert wasteland—a madness-inducing place without the aid of Christ upon

whom he calls. Through this act, as I proposed earlier, the narrator is not—as some critics have

argued--identifying with Aeneas, i.e. replaying the hero’s either righteous or opportunistic

abandonment of Dido; rather, the dreamer-poet is identifying with suicidal Dido in her

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“unbearable splendor” (Lacan’s phrase for “death-driven” Antigone) but replaying her literal

suicide as a symbolic one: the truly revolutionary “suicide” of Christian conversion, the breakout

from the earthly patriarchal symbolic order not through physical death but through the death of

the subject defined by and produced through the schemas of the Temple of Venus--the death of

the subject bound and gagged by the “Old Law” of masculine privilege, or, more precisely,

trapped within the hegemonic imaginary of Virgilian fama/Fama that insidiously and

hypocritically sustains the patriarchal status quo, blocking off the possibility of a genuine

transformation of the subject. By “genuine transformation” I mean a transformation that occurs

at the level of structure as opposed to a more superficial improvement, in other words, a

dismantling and reconfiguration of the subject in accordance with the fundamentally non-

hegemonic reality of Christian charity.31

Having carefully traced over the psychic steps leading from the Aeneid’s dialectic of

fama/Fama to Chaucerian narrator’s leave-taking of the Temple of Venus at the end of Book I of

The House of Fame, we are now ready to return to our earlier question concerning The

Consolation of Philosophy’s weird and unexpected linking of Boethius’s sublime Lady

Philosophy to Virgil’s lethal “filthy goddess” (and beyond her, Homer’s equally lethal Hate) via

the shared “genetic marker” of their miraculously fluctuating stature—a linking that, as I earlier

emphasized, The House of Fame’s description of the goddess Fame repeats and thus helps us to

see. As it turns out, the Lady-Philosophy-guided spiritual textual journey of Boethius (i.e. the

character Boethius who is the narrator of The Consolation) is deeply relevant to Chaucer’s

critique of Virgilian fama/Fama and its crowning moment, namely, what I have described as the

Dido-identifying poet-narrator’s “symbolic suicide,” his entrance into the deathly void beyond

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the “natural” or normalizing Temple of Venus (“Ne no maner creature / That ys yformed be

Nature / Ne sawgh I,” 489-91) and consequent regenerating turn towards Christ for deliverance

(“O Crist . . .Fro fantome and illusion / Me save!” 492-4). How so? Simply put, Book 1 of The

Consolation of Philosophy presents us with the spectacle of a formerly highly privileged

masculine subject who, much to his great moral outrage and suffering and bewilderment, now

finds himself, in middle age, suddenly silenced and stripped of his former symbolic power, status

and privilege, in essence, transformed from the position of a honorable Virgilian Aeneas to a

dishonored, Chaucerian Dido. Accused, like Chaucer’s Dido, of secret shameful behavior (in his

case, the dark “perversion” of sorcery), he who once shone in society as a leader and wealthy

Roman “philosopher king,” now languishes in exile and in prison under a sentence of death,

disgraced, abandoned, an impotent and embittered victim of “wikke Fame.” 32 As the prisoner so

bitterly recognizes, the “wikke Fame” that now buzzes around his name is only too glad to judge,

“analyze” and destroy him—as demonstrated by the tragic irony that, rather than responding with

compassion or any desire to look carefully at the facts and larger context of a particular situation

(i.e. to reserve judgment), common opinion, with the jubilation of a resentful slave who suddenly

finds himself in the master’s place, instead swiftly and gleefully pounces upon whomever fortune

has deemed the “loser”:

. . . I know that common opinion looks not at the true deserts of any case but

regards only the outcome of fortune, and judges only such things well foreseen as

success commends. The result is that their good reputation is the first thing the

unfortunate lose. I hate to think what tales are going round among the people, how

many different opinions, about my case. This only I would say, that the final

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burden imposed by adverse fortune is that while any poor wretch is charged

with some crime, he is thought to deserve all that he suffers. (1. Pr. 4. 154-63;

Loeb 157, 159)

Nevertheless, in spite of his present Dido-like position vis-à-vis “wikke Fame,” there is a key

difference between Boethius and Chaucer’s Dido—a difference that, once again, proves to be

specifically relevant to Book I of Chaucer’s poem: in contrast to Dido whose nakedness and

existential dread vis-à-vis “wikke Fame” ultimately pushes her to suicide, the Boethius we meet

in the opening poem of The Consolation is not quite as naked or utterly forlorn since, as a

formerly (highly) privileged masculine subject, he is now desperately trying his best to recover

his former privileged subject-position by calling up a variation of the masculine fantasy of

consoling maternal fama that, in Book 1 of the Aeneid, marks the end of Aeneas’s seven long

years of wandering, setting in motion the restoration of Virgil’s fortune-weary, weakened,

anxious, endangered hero to the status of a strong, confident, desiring masculine subject. Lady

Philosophy, of course, will have none of it: like her ancestress, Virgil’s Fama, she, too, is a lethal

lady—a “death drive” goddess who haunts the limit of the historical subject, a mother of the

word/ Word who can, with ruthless precision, joyfully shatter the egos and narcissistic fantasies

of those whom she “targets.” As will soon become clear, she, however, in stark contrast to

Virgil’s Fama, is a truly revolutionary “death drive” goddess, for, unlike the classical “filthy

goddess,” this distinctly Christian goddess does not facilitate perversion in the subjects who join

her “body” (i.e. participate in her “substance”), nor is she aligned with the spirit of collective

resentment that exists as the necessary or inevitable lining of the patriarchal symbolic order, i.e.

her goal is not simply destruction, the mere gleeful destruction of the subject. Instead, as

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Boethius’s use of the visionary old/young regeneration motif suggests, Lady Philosophy’s

destruction generates the rebirth of the subject. Put in the psychoanalytic terms of Žižek, what

she and her “talking cure” embodies (or at the very least hopefully gestures towards) is the

tapping of the bracing, North Wind-like force of the death drive in order to “unplug” the subject

from the patriarchal symbolic order and its hegemonic imaginary thereby creating a new kind of

subject--not a psychotic subject (as some might claim) but rather a reconfigured subject, one who

is no longer solely driven and animated by phallic jouissance (ordinary human desire or, in

Augustinian terms, “cupiditas”) but is instead in touch with and activated by the “feminine,”

non-phallic jouissance of Christian charity.33

Returning to the Boethius of the opening poem of The Consolation, we find, however, a

self-pitying masculine subject who thinks he desires “death” but whose fantasy shows that he

really doesn’t: what he wants above all is to recapture “life,” his former potency as a masculine

subject. Broken, exhausted, wretched, slack-skinned, trembling, embittered, the speaker tells us

that he is old before his time due to his terrible misfortunes. Like the mysterious old man of

Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale –surely one of his literary descendants--he states that he longs for

death to end his misery, yet death cruelly does not heed his cries. Identifying himself as a once

flourishing poet in the first line, he now tries to cope with his profound losses through writing

poetry, telling us that the faithful muses—his lifelong companions--comfort him, mirroring his

pain, his wounds (he calls them “lacerae,” i.e. lacerated) and bidding him (“dictant scribant”) to

express his woe by writing elegies—which he is able to do with great intensity (in line 4, he

vividly depicts the elegies themselves as mourning, literally moistening his face with tears). Still,

he is a man that I suspect most readers--especially those reading The Consolation for the first

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time (i.e. who aren’t anticipating Philosophy’s harsh reaction)--would sympathize with

immediately. As with the defeated, similarly broken Aeneas in the Temple of Juno who renews

himself through the cathartic healing of “good fama,” finding solace through the fantasy of the

empathetic, maternal Other, who could begrudge this poor man the venting of his pent-up sorrow

or judge him for mourning—or even for indulging in the consolation of self-pity?

Lady Philosophy, of course, could and does, imperiously ordering the muses to depart at

once: in her fiercely blazing eyes, the muses who attend the wretched Boethius are nothing but

prostitutes, common little whores (she uses the contemptuous diminutive, “meretricula,” in

reference to them):

“Who let these theatrical tarts [“scenicas meretriculas”] in with the sick man?

Not only have they no cures for his pain, but with their sweet poison they make it

worse. These are they who choke the rich harvest of reason with the barren thorns

of passion. They accustom a man’s mind to his ills, not rid him of them . . . Get

out, you Sirens, beguiling men straight to their destruction! Leave him to my

Muses to care for and restore to health.” (I, Pros. I, Loeb 135)

Why does Philosophy scornfully refer to the muses as “theatrical”? According to Boccaccio, a

humanist poet who clearly wished to have Boethius on his side, Boethius intends us here to read

Philosophy as showing contempt only for vulgar comic poets; in 14.20 of his Genealogy of the

Gentile Gods, he writes:

The other [the low “species” of the muses in contrast to the honorable one that

inspires classical poets and presumably, their humanist descendants] is she who is

seduced by disreputable comic poets to mount the stage, preempt theatres and

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street-corners: and there for a fee she calmly exhibits herself to loungers in

low compositions, destitute of a single commendable grace. It is not hers to

relieve or heal the sufferings of those who languish, with the consolations of

goodness, and with holy remedies of salvation; she only enhances their suffering

even unto death amid groans and complaints, and strangles them in the toils of

sensual delight. (95-6)

This reading, however, would seem to illuminate only Boccaccio’s properly humanist, Petrarch-

like contempt for the vulgar, popular poets of his day. As Boethius clearly indicates and

demonstrates through the use of a specific meter, these muses inspire the writing of elegiac

verse, which, in classical terms, translates to poetry of mourning or loss written in alternating

hexameters and pentameters (or, in the words of the poem, “maestos modos,” melancholy

measures). Instead, I propose that “theatrical,” applied to muses of elegy, aptly evokes the idea

of narcissism. With this word, Lady Philosophy implies that there is something negatively

“theatrical” about the way the elegiac poet, through and within his fantasies, is able to act out, to

vent his feelings, and to watch himself doing so--as if he were simultaneously actor and spectator

in the play of his sad life, a passive spectator who identifies so fully and narcissistically with the

“tragic” actor on stage (the ego) that there is no contact with any truth beyond, no insight (e.g. in

the psychoanalytic terms of the 1950s Lacan, no contact with the truth of the subject--the truth of

the subject’s symbolic relations with the Other that the ego and its talk always seeks to cover up

with its politician-like strategies). In The Enneads, the third-century Neoplatonist philosopher

Plotinus similarly uses a theatrical metaphor to critique the empirical ego and the “life” it creates

through its ongoing theater of self-pitying, self-aggrandizing fantasy (though, as I will shortly

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explain, Lady Philosophy’s uniquely “literal” method of diagnosis and cure suggests that,

although she cherishes Plato as her dear son, she does not quite hold to Plotinus’s chilly,

spookily derealizing view of history and material reality that is implied in the passage below):

Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be to

us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a play; all is but varied incident

of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and lament. For on earth, in all

succession of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic

man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which

men have dotted with stages of their own constructing. All this is the doing of

man knowing no more than to live the lower and outer life, and never perceiving

that, in his weeping and in his graver doings alike, he is but at play . . . (The

Enneads 3. 2. 15; MacKenna 151)34

And, as we saw in the Temple of Juno episode in Book 1 of the Aeneid, the narrator Virgil steps

in (albeit, to my mind, hypocritically) to imply a similar judgment against the spectatorial

passivity associated with the “empty and vain” imaginary, in this case, the “theatrical” staging of

pathetic scenes of Trojan victimization that triggers spectator Aeneas’s powerful emotional

response, the hero’s letting go of his usual manly, stoical restraint: “Sic ait animum pictura

pascit inani / multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine vultum” (“Thus, he fed his mind with

empty/vain/ useless pictures, and, sighing often, he drenched his face with streaming tears”).

Lady Philosophy’s critique of the imaginary, however, adds something new—something

that I believe sets her critique apart from the uncritically masculinist critiques of the imaginary

exemplified above by the passages from Plotinus and Virgil. By referring to these “theatrical”

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muses as prostitutes, Lady Philosophy injects into this “theatrical” staging of grief a sexual

dynamic that is not present at all in the ethereal Plotinus and is only subtly revealed in the

Aeneid; this dynamic implies the specific way that Boethius consoles himself through his fantasy

of the muses is not gender-neutral but is instead directly related to the specific way, he, as a

masculine subject, desires. Although it is true that Philosophy directs her angry scorn at the

muses--as opposed to Boethius directly—the fact that she calls them prostitutes implies a

judgment upon Boethius, the metaphorical “john,” as well. According to the Boethius of the

opening poem, the wounded muses (“lacerae . . .camenae”) that console him in his present

wretched state do so with the stalwart courage and honorable devotion of true faithful

companions, the implication being that—as P.G. Walsh’s translation makes clear—that, in

sticking by him, the faithful muses stand out against others who have cowardly “jumped ship”:

“Yet they at least were not deterred by dread; / They still attend me on the path I tread.” (1. m. 5-

6, italics mine). Yet, if we take Philosophy’s word for it, Boethius is sorely mistaken in his belief

about the muses, for, according to Philosophy’s implicit analogy, the bedridden Boethius is a

man who naively believes that the prostitutes or “little whores” who hover about him servicing

him genuinely love him—in other words, he is a narcissistic fool (and, of course, this goes

double for the white-haired, slack-skinned “old man” such as the speaker presents himself to be

in the opening poem). As to the question “what do these common streetwalkers get in return for

gamely servicing and fussing over such a pathetic and physically unattractive and implicitly

impotent old man?,” the answer is simple: Boethius, no longer inspired by the naturally joyous,

flourishing poetic zeal of his youth (the poetry he once wrote “florente studio”), i.e. no longer

capable of spontaneously or naturally attracting the love or desire of the muses, furthers the

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“business” of the prostitute muses, and, in a sense, insures their continued power and literal

survival—pun intended, of course—by docilely obeying them, that is, by writing and circulating

not so much the technically bad, unsophisticated poetry of the “common people”—as the

humanist Boccaccio would have it—but rather, bad poetry in terms of being flabbily self-

indulgent, ethically stupid elegiac poetry.

Even more specifically damning of Boethius, the fierceness of Lady Philosophy’s

reaction to the “prostitute muses” can also be read as arising from the proud Philosophy’s

shocked and dismayed recognition that her cherished son/lover/student, in his moment of

anxious worry and desperation, has so thoughtlessly forgotten and indeed shamefully abandoned

her. Lady Philosophy herself implies as much when, after imperiously banishing the muses, she

bitterly laments, in her first poem (1 m. 2.), Boethius’s fall from his former philosophical power

to his current state of wretched self-pity and self-absorption, and then, in the following prose

section, peppers the now-dumbstruck, terrified Boethius (who at first cannot even recognize

Philosophy) with a ruthless volley of incriminating questions:

“Are you the same man who was once nourished with my milk, once fed on my

diet, till you reached your full manhood? And did I not furnish you with such

weapons as would now keep you steadfast and safe if you had not thrown them

away? Do you recognize me? Why do you say nothing? Were you silent

because you were ashamed and stupefied? I should like to think that you were

ashamed, but I can see that you are quite stupefied.” (1. pr. 2; Loeb 139) 35

A late-classical version of the once-faithful man who cheats on his wife due to his “mid-life

crisis,” Boethius has turned from the deep truth created via committed love and searching, one-

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to-one intellectually vibrant dialogue with his Lady to the shallow, predictable blah-blah-blah

monologue created via a promiscuous surrender to the ego-flattering muses—the multiple muses

of poetry here transformed via the male poet’s self-pitying masculine fantasy into a theatrical

“chorus” of mirroring (“poor Boethius!”), essentially interchangeable, nameless women.

Moreover, to make matters worse, this Boethius has just cloddishly verbalized his absolute

forgetfulness of Lady Philosophy: gratified by the easy attentions of the muses who now console

and fuss over him, the speaker of the opening poem immediately forgets the One Lady of his life

and instead rhetorically crowns the muses as the true faithful companions of his journey through

life. Read in the way I am suggesting, Lady Philosophy’s fierce condemnation and banishment of

the muses, ultimately arising from Philosophy’s hurt and anger at Boethius’s infidelity and

ingratitude, thus bears a certain resemblance to the similarly “jilted” Dido’s more directly

expressed condemnation of the language-related unfaithfulness and treachery of men in Book I

of The House of Fame. There is, of course, an important difference: Chaucer’s purely human,

pre-Christian Dido, equating language itself with masculine seduction and betrayal as well as

“wikke Fame”’s patriarchal oppression of women, despairs and retreats from the symbolic order

and the risk of language altogether, adopting instead the ego-based, self-righteous stance of

feminine purity and linguistic innocence; Boethius’s sublime Lady Philosophy, fiercely attacking

and “killing” the narcissistic, solipsistic fantasy of feminine consolation that silently functions to

prop up and sustain the earthly masculine subject, evokes instead the possibility of a new view of

language, a new kind of subject—a subject who is open to charity as opposed to only or

primarily “run” by selfish desire (cupiditas). Recast in the Lacanian terms implied by Slavoj

Žižek, this new subject would be one whose “sexuation” has shifted from the masculine to the

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feminine: no longer structured and animated solely by measurable phallic jouissance (the

jouissance generated via the narcissistic fantasy of the hegemonic imaginary), the newly

reconfigured Christian subject has access to an immeasurable “feminine” jouissance associated

with language and speech, to a kind of genuinely Other-welcoming, non-solipsistic jouissance

that occurs at the intersubjective level of the Other (the symbolic order)—and, as such, has

nothing to do with the insidious superego dialectic of transgression that produces and sustains

most human desire.36

Read in this way, the phallic consolation that Boethius originally seeks via the muses of

poetry is rooted in and generated by “masculine” solipsistic fantasy, whereas the symbolic

(“symbolic” as in “symbolic order”) consolation Lady Philosophy offers comes through the

destruction of Boethius’s fantasy and Boethius’s consequent (or at least potential)

reconfiguration or rebirth as a Christian subject who is open to a jouissance beyond the ego--the

“feminine” jouissance of the word: to borrow ur-patient Anna O’s famous “naming” of

psychoanalysis, what Lady Philosophy offers Boethius qua “sick” earthly masculine subject is

indeed a “talking cure.”37 This distinction between the “masculine” consolation of fantasy and

the “feminine” consolation of speech provides a fresh, intriguingly gender-linked way to

interpret the well-known passage in Book I of The Consolation in which the imprisoned Boethius

laments to Philosophy the loss of his books and the leisurely hours of study spent in the luxury of

his ivory and glass library (as I will explain in the following section of this chapter, this passage

is especially relevant to The House of Fame, since Book II’s description of the introverted

Geffrey dazed amidst his books plays upon the passage from The Consolation, depicting the

narrator as a struggling, comically humble version of Master Boethius in his library). In this

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passage, Boethius expresses his exasperation at Philosophy for her seeming obliviousness to

his plight; to “enlighten” the Lady, he reminds her of the many wonderful hours they used to

spend together, in particular, how, guided by her “rod,” he sought out the treasured knowledge of

the stars not only as a way to revere the perfection and order of the universe but also, as his last

sentence implies, to investigate and contemplate the secret of his own fate and destiny:

Was this how I looked, was this my expression, when I used to seek out with you

the secrets of Nature? When with your rod you drew for me the paths of the

stars? When you shaped my character and the whole manner of my life according

to celestial models? (1. pr. 4. ; Loeb 147)

When it is her turn to speak, Lady Philosophy, however, pointedly says nothing to validate the

loss of Boethius’s astronomical studies with her but instead calmly rebukes her exasperated

student for what she views as his misguided attachment to his ivory and glass library:

I seek not so much a library with its walls ornamented with ivory and glass, as the

storeroom of your mind [tuae mentis sedem], in which I have laid up not books,

but what makes them of any value, the opinions set down in my books from times

past. (1. pr. 5; Loeb 163)

Of course, Philosophy’s main point is to emphasize the favorite classical and medieval idea that

learning is only valuable if it has been internalized and ordered by memory, i.e. put in places or

“sedes” so that it can be easily accessed; however, given the star-gazing Boethius’s conspicuous

obsession with the arts of astronomy and perhaps astrology (the specific books he apparently

seems to miss the most), her words may perhaps also be interpreted as a specific check to

Boethius’s tendency to associate philosophy, the love of wisdom, too closely with his favorite

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private “masterly” joy of searching out and contemplating the secrets of the stars--an activity

that, being dependent on certain instruments and mathematical tables (e.g. ephemerides), he

obviously can no longer pursue in a scientifically precise way without his library. 38 Given that

the term “sedes mentis,” like Aristotle’s topoi, is particularly associated with rhetoric, the art of

discourse, the “feminine” Philosophy is thus giving the brilliantly erudite yet nevertheless

obtusely “masculine” Master Boethius another wake-up call, similar to the kind that an

exasperated, lonely, talk-hungry wife gives her husband as he sits fixedly watching yet another

football game on television in his solitary jouissance. 39 That is, although he claims to

Philosophy that his lost library was the place where he once enjoyed wonderful conversations

with her “discoursing on the knowledge of all things human and divine” and even that the two of

them happily sought out the “secrets of Nature” together, I cannot help but wonder that, after she

taught Boethius all the basics “with her rod,” Boethius, immersed in his solitary numbering of

the sky, somehow forgot about talking to her, somehow forgot about the deep connection

between her wisdom and the word. After all, with Philosophy supposedly standing there in all

her glory right before him ready to converse with him about “all things human and divine,” why

does he miss his library?

As Lady Philosophy’s rebuke hints to Boethius, Boethius’s cherished ivory and glass

library has, in some sense, ironically functioned as an obstacle to her student, leading him away

from her by encouraging him to immerse himself in solitary jouissance of his specialized studies

at the expense of losing sight of the human foundation of philosophy in speech and dialogue.

That is, perhaps Philosophy comes to Boethius because, in truth, he knows too much –

dangerously so. Having become accustomed to the godlike role of Master of the Universe (he

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who can read the heavens, discerning the secrets of character and destiny) in the private

cocoon of his library, Boethius seems to have forgotten the basic truth that philosophy (the love

of wisdom) springs forth from the fundamentally intersubjective, generous activity of listening to

and participating in and incorporating an ongoing conversation and dialogue with the Other, i.e.

it has nothing to do with gaining or securing mastery or status or power (i.e. the fantasies of the

hegemonic imaginary) since, like Love (charity), it is ultimately not a possession or “secret” that

can be privately or selfishly owned, i.e. hoarded over and against other lesser human beings.

Hence, Philosophy’s explanation, in 1 pr. 3 for the ripped and sorry state of her gown: the crowd

of false philosophers, thinking that they can “possess” her as a man “possesses” a woman

sexually (phallic jouissance), have throughout the ages shown their foolishness by trying to rape

Philosophy, grabbing at her with rapacious hands, tearing off bits of her gown and then running

off with these compartmentalized bits to boast like teenage boys of their supposed “intimate”

knowledge of Philosophy.40 That is, it is not that the false philosopher is not worthy to “possess”

Philosophy (i.e. the implicit idea being that some men do “know” and possess her): his mistake is

that he conceives of Philosophy in terms of phallic jouissance in the first place. In short, I

propose that The Consolation of Philosophy calls up but implicitly rejects for Philosophy the

sexualized, “gnostic” hermeneutic famously evoked by Macrobius in the Commentary on the

Dream of Scipio in his defense of fabulous narrative (narratio fabulosa); whereas Philosophy

calls up only a negative, brutal image of sexual desire in relation to herself, refusing to titillate

the reader with the hope that there exists a man exceptional enough to possess her (i.e. as a

skilled and welcome lover—not a rapist), Macrobius, in his seductively pagan conception of

“veiled Nature,” does just that:

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. . . open exposition of herself is distasteful to Nature . . . Accordingly, her

sacred rites are veiled in mysterious representations so that she may not have to

show herself even to initiates. Only eminent men of superior intelligence gain a

revelation of her truths; the others must satisfy their desire for worship with a

ritual drama that prevents her secrets from being common. (1. 2. 18; Stahl 86-7)

Philosophy’s magnanimously “feminine,” language-driven opposition to the Macrobian elitist

ideal of “phallic secrecy” is also subtly present in her opening poem. There, praising her son and

student, she characterizes the Boethius of the past as one who not only gained access to but also

told (reddere) the secret causes of Nature (1. m. 22-3; Loeb 136). As Seth Lerer points out, “Her

word reddere literally means the ability to give back in language, to translate or interpret from

one language to another, or from symbols to speech” (101). To Lerer’s observation I would add

that reddere used in relation to Nature pointedly opposes Macrobius’s belief—illustrated through

the negative example of the philosopher Numenius—that those who boldly tell the secrets of the

goddess Nature to the world commit sacrilege against her and all the gods. According to

Macrobius, Numenius committed an outrage against the gods through his impious act of

“reddere,” in this case, “by proclaiming his interpretation of the Eleusinian mysteries” and

thereby “prostituting” the two great Eleusinian goddesses (the mother-daughter pair of

Demeter/Ceres and Persephone/Proserpina) who embody Nature via the sacred rites of the

Eleusinian mysteries (1. 2. 19-20; Stahl 87). Philosophy’s praise of Boethius thus implies an

opposite view of Numenius, namely, that his interpretation and “wording” of the pagan

Eleusinian mysteries was an ethical act rather than a sacrilegious one.

With these examples of Philosophy’s “feminine” speech-driven opposition to masculinist

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fantasy, we once again return to the mystery of the letter that Chaucer, “as wise as a serpent

and as innocent as a dove,” reveals via his description of Fame’s miraculously changing stature.

Perhaps now we can more clearly understand how and why Boethius (the writer) might have

been intuitively driven to “sign” his sublime goddess with a motif linking her to Virgil’s lowly

Fama, the lethal goddess of words whom I have interpreted as a goddess of Lacan’s language-

associated death drive (Homer’s Hate, Virgil’s inspiration for Fama, being more a goddess of the

Freudian death drive). To sum up in the most simple terms, Boethius qua earthly patriarchal

subject is on life support when we meet him, a devastated victim of “wikke Fame” who, as is her

wont, has gleefully destroyed his name by ruthlessly exposing and scandalizing his private

passion (his astronomical pursuits), calling it “sacrilege” and “sorcery” much in the same way

Fama in the Aeneid lethally shames the private passion of Dido and Aeneas, calling it squalid

lust; although the wretched Boethius is clinging with all his might to salvage his former

masculine identity via ego-driven fantasy, Philosophy is there to pull the plug, to finish him off

so he can become a new kind of subject. Unlike the conventionally feminine, silent “veiled

Nature” imagined by Macrobius in heteronormative terms as penetrated by at least a chosen few

wise men, Fama and Philosophy are not goddesses of the imaginary and, as such, cannot be

dominated or possessed or controlled, for, in their different ways, both inhabit “ground zero” of

the subject beyond the pleasure principle, speaking the lethal words of the Other that no one who

desires to live as an earthly subject really wants to--or can bear to--hear. Thus, in a sense, much

like Virgilian “consoling fama” and the muses in Boethius’s opening poem function to block out

the intrusive voice of the Other that Fama herself represents, one might say that the Macrobian

fantasy of silent, beguiling, tantalizingly penetrable Nature functions to ward off or at least

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soften the potentially threatening intrusions of the vocal Philosophy. As Slavoj Žižek

suggests, “desire itself is a defense against desire: the desire structured through fantasy is a

defense against the desire of the Other, against this ‘pure’, trans-phantasmic desire (i.e. the

‘death drive’ in its pure form)” (Sublime Object 118).

The radiant Lady Philosophy’s alliance with lethal “wikke Fame” has very important

implications for the interpretation of Christian medieval texts and, in particular, “Chaucerian

Christianity.” Through this “beauty and the beast” alliance of the “feminine” beyond the

heteronormatively defined “feminine,” Philosophy points the way to a radically nonhumanist

Christian critique of the imaginary (the world of the ego) that cannot be easily reduced to the

patriarchal hermeneutical paradigm that, according to both D.W. Robertson, Jr. (whose Preface

to Chaucer and consequent ideologically conservative “school” of exegetical criticism happily

accepts and endorses the paradigm) and Carolyn Dinshaw (who offers a psychoanalytically

informed feminist critique of it in her Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics), more or less monolithically and

inevitably characterizes the writing of the Fathers of the Church and the male medieval

Christians who supposedly obediently followed them (the partial exception for Dinshaw being

Chaucer who, according to Dinshaw’s readings of The Canterbury Tales, struggles with and

brilliantly critiques the paradigm, ultimately creating texts that accept “defeat” but nevertheless

hopefully point--via the destabilizing “eunuch hermeneutics” of the Pardoner--to an non-

hegemonic, utopian Christian reality that may perhaps exist beyond language).41

As Dinshaw emphasizes in the introductory chapter of Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, one of

the essential characteristics of “patriarchal hermeneutics” (or, in Lacanian terms, of “masculine

sexuation”) is to conceive of the letter and the phenomenal world in terms of a veil that hides or

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clothes the truth: driven by the fantasy of the desirous masculine interpreter, the secret and

ever-fascinating “truth” of the text becomes “a body figuratively represented as female” (21). To

illustrate and support her thesis, Dinshaw specifically points to the example of Macrobius,

implicitly presenting Macrobius’s sexualized, elitist, heteronormative hermeneutic (described

above) as a kind of paradigm that characterizes the conventionally gendered way that male

writers and readers as widely diverse in intellectual gifts and spiritual commitment as Augustine,

Boccaccio and Richard de Bury all presumably inevitably approach and interpret texts in general,

or, as Dinshaw puts it, “the allegorical text” (20-1). Although I readily concede that the two-

tiered, predictably heteronormative (and unabashedly pagan) Macrobian model may very well

apply to many male writers, especially to an emphatically secular writer such as Boccaccio (or to

a man like Richard de Bury who, though noted for being a great bibliophile and great patron of

learning, was not himself a creator of new works), I will go out on an old-fashioned limb and say

that I do not believe the model can be presumed to fit the male Christian writer of genius (e.g.

Paul, Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Chaucer, etc.). As I have just suggested, Boethius, via his

Lady Philosophy, engages with yet pointedly resists and frustrates the Macrobian model,

implicitly praising the “sacrilegious” act of Numenius and metaphorically associating the sexual

objectification or would-be “possession” of Philosophy only with the brutish, doltish, arrogant

false philosopher.

Moreover, against the all-too-easy assumption that Lady Philosophy’s banishment of the

muses of poetry represents nothing but a classic example of standard patriarchal repression (i.e.

the spirit vs. the letter, Philosophy as Virgin Truth banishes the “wanton” signifier-as-prostitute),

Philosophy’s first, fundamentally poetic act vis-à-vis her “patient” points to a different concept

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of truth, one that poses that truth, rather than being somehow “behind” phenomenal reality—

the veil of the letter--is actually spoken by and through the letter. Philosophy, in short, is

ultimately inseparable from her gown, as she herself hints by the symbols of practical and

theoretical philosophy—the Greek letters pi and theta—that she has woven into the lower and

upper hem, joined together by a “steps marked like a ladder, by which one might climb from the

lower to the higher” (as the prisoner later learns, Philosophy wove this symbolic gown of “very

fine, imperishable thread” and “delicate workmanship” herself) (1 pr. 1. 13-22; Loeb 134-6). As

the passage quoted below demonstrates, Philosophy’s startling diagnosis of Boethius hits at truth

by zeroing in on the particular signifier(s) that potently figure and incarnate the reality of

Boethius’s present relations with the divine Other. Jolting him out of his inert “reality” of the

muse-encircled womb of his elegy-writing (the supposed truth of Boethius’s “emotional

sincerity”) into the brave and bracing truth of her own more potent muses, she, with a

psychoanalyst’s laser-like skill, discloses the poetic truth of the word/Word, a truth that appears

neither at the level of “ordinary reality” or “behind” it but instead through the relationship

between the two mediated by language. Specifically and significantly, in the case of her patient,

Philosophy’s symbolic potency as a healer and analyst derives from her uncanny ability to ignore

almost all of what Boethius says about himself in his long autobiographical speech and to pounce

on and highlight the precise word—“exile” (exilium)—that is most charged with trauma for

Boethius, i.e. the very word of the Other’s condemnation that Fama carries and gleefully

multiplies throughout the world, the very word of annihilation (death by defamation) that the

nostalgic Boethius of the opening poem, who says he wants to die but really doesn’t, is trying his

best to block out via the narcissistic fantasy of the consoling muses and an accompanying weakly

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generalized yearning for his lost youth:

When I saw you weeping in grief I knew at once that you were banished; but how

remote was that banishment I should not have known if your speech had not told

me [spoken like a true psychoanalyst]. But how far from your homeland you have

strayed! Strayed, not driven, I say; or if you prefer to be thought of as driven,

then how far have you driven yourself! For in your case it could never have been

rightly possible for anyone else to do this. You must remember what your native

country is: not one like that of the old Athenians, governed by the rule of many,

but “there is one ruler, one king,” who delights in associating with his subjects,

not in driving them out; to be guided by his hand and obey his justice is true

freedom. Surely you know the ancient and fundamental law of your city, by

which it is ordained that it is not right to exile one who has chosen to live there?

No one who is settled within her walls and fortifications need ever fear the

punishment of banishment: but whoever ceases to desire to live there hash thereby

ceased to deserve to do so. (1. pr. 5. 2-21; Loeb 163)

Thus, instead of comforting Boethius by shooing away the painful reality of exile (as no doubt

most well-meaning human comforters would try to do), Philosophy paradoxically begins her

“talking cure” by bringing to the forefront and fully agreeing with the ruthless letter of the

world’s judgment: “Yes, Boethius you are indeed an exile—and not only that, an exile of the

worst kind, namely, a willful exile from God’s city, your soul’s true country!” (There is perhaps

an element of dark humor here . . .).

Here, with her first and fundamental poetic act, Philosophy emerges at the unexpected

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intersection of the Christian truth of the gospels and truth of psychoanalysis, calling to mind

the “literal” birth of each (respectively, the opening chapter of the gospel of Mark, the first

gospel, and Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria). The Jesus of the gospels begins his

preaching ministry—his verbal healing of the world--with a similar kind of poetic act by which

Philosophy begins hers, calling out to two literal fisherman toiling with their nets in obscurity

and sweat, “Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men” (Mark 1:17). “Fishermen”

is, as it turns out, is exactly the right word--the keenly soul-fitting word that produces the healing

metaphor and hence, conversion--for, as the story tells us, upon hearing Jesus’s poetic invitation,

Simon and Andrew immediately dropped their nets and followed him: wonderfully, Jesus breaks

up the word, “literally” converting and “resignifying” Simon and Andrew by locating the true

object of their desire (and thus the true identity of the men) not in the fish-filled sea but within

and at the end of the very name of the humble occupation that identifies the two men in their

earthly labor, their suffering. Like Lady Philosophy’s diagnosis of Boethius, Jesus’s poetically

precise interpellation of Simon and Andrew thus reveals a truth that glows and dances about the

signifier as opposed to hiding paranoically behind or peering down superciliously above it, a

truth or “holy spirit” that exists “right before our eyes,” enhancing phenomenal reality and

gracing the letter rather than riding roughshod over it. To borrow Goethe’s wonderfully inspired,

“anti-Macrobian” tribute to the goddess Nature, such truth constitutes a “mystery in broad

daylight.” (Not surprisingly, Goethe’s inspiration for his revision of the Macrobian hermeneutic

takes us back to the New Testament: with the phrase “mystery in broad daylight,” Goethe alludes

to the passage in Romans (16: 25) in which Paul characterizes Christian revelation as a “revealed

mystery” (Hadot 255).42

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Similarly, Freud’s science of psychoanalysis—the “talking cure” of the psyche—

emerges with what might be called “the poetics of hysteria,” or, in Freud’s more clinical terms,

“hysterical conversion by symbolization,” best represented in the case studies of Studies in

Hysteria not by famous ur-patient Anna O. but by a less known older woman patient seen by

both Freud and Breuer (for Freud, his “most difficult and most instructive case of hysteria”) who

had suffered from hysterical symptoms on and off for thirty years, whom Freud refers to as Frau

Cacilie M. As Freud and Breuer came to realize, the mysterious physical symptoms of Frau

Cacilie M. (an “unusually gifted” woman “whose highly developed sense of form was expressed

in some perfectly beautiful poems”) physically “spoke” her various verbally induced traumas and

did so with wondrous precision and power, making the suffering woman a kind of living poem

for Freud--and indeed, the world at large—to read, a poem that, once it was read and heard with

careful attention and respect, resulted in the dissolution of the woman’s now longer necessary

bodily symptom. 43

Instead of diminishing Frau Cacilie M. as “crazy” or her mysterious physical symptoms

as “arbitrary” or “all in her head,” Freud—a modern-day Lady Philosophy--appreciates and

honors the profound truth of his patient’s “poetics of hysteria,” arguing, in her defense, that

many common, now weakened figurative expressions of emotion (e.g. “That was a slap in the

face,” “I have to swallow that,” “It made my heart bleed,” “Something is stuck in my mind,”

etc.) very likely have only come to make sense to us because, at one point in time, they were

literally true, that is, such expressions, far from being arbitrary or fanciful, speak truth by

revealing the natural (now repressed) link between certain physical sensations and certain

emotional situations. In short, writes Freud, “hysteria is right to express its stronger innervations

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by restoring the original meaning of words” (184, italics mine). Thus, one might say that

hysteric conversion, specifically, “hysteric conversion through symbolization,” is a conversion of

the subject, the leading of the subject—by means of a particular, as it were, “destined,” traumatic

signifier (s) –out of dichotomous world of “mere words” (the world of “ordinary reality”

structured by the binary logic of the patriarchal symbolic) into the new-yet-old incarnational

truth of the Word.

What is so fascinating and peculiarly potent about Boethius’s Lady Philosophy—and

perhaps what makes her the true exemplar of the Christian goddess--is that she is at once a

producer and product of this incarnational truth of language. That is, on the one hand, within the

story of The Consolation, she “exists” as a character who sets in motion the poetic “talking cure”

of Boethius by first correctly reading and speaking the traumatic signifier (in this case, “exile”),

yet, on the other hand, in terms of the literary genesis of The Consolation, she herself—as

suggested by the telling “genetic marker” that links her to Virgil’s lethal Fama (and thus to the

historical Boethius’s traumatic “death by defamation”)—comes into her existence and splendor,

i.e. is “incarnated” as an embodied universal, only through the keenly specific, profoundly

“ownmost,” inexorable truth of the historical Boethius’s transformation and fulfillment of the

traumatic signifier. 44 (As the older Yeats, in the last stanza of “The Circle Animals’ Desertion,”

concludes about the visionary “masterful images” of his poetry, one might say that Boethius’s

sublime Lady “grew out of pure mind” but began “where all ladders start / In the foul rag-and-

bone shop of the heart”). As it turns out, according to the historically based speculation presented

by one eminent scholar of Boethius, my psychoanalytic reading of the “birth” of Lady

Philosophy via the traumatic signifier (and, in turn, my reading of Lady Philosophy as a “death

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drive” goddess) may have its own uncanny validation in the concrete, historical particulars of

Boethius’s imprisonment. In his 1981 study, The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and

Philosophy, Henry Chadwick writes:

The Theta on Philosophy’s dress may have been suggested to Boethius by a Theta

on his own. The Carolingian theologian Prudentius of Troyes, in an attack on

John the Scot’s dangerous treatise on divine predestination, prefixes to each

censured excerpt from John a Greek Theta ‘because some have used this letter to

mark those condemned to death’ (PL 115, 1012 AB). Accordingly a prisoner on

whom the death sentence had been decreed was required to wear regulation prison

clothing marked with the initial letter of thanatos, intended either to increase his

sense of humiliation or to safeguard the executioners from mistaken identity in

their victim. An early allusion to the practice occurs in one of the epigrams of

Martial (vii, 37, 2) which establishes the certainty that this was Roman custom

with condemned criminals. It seems to follow, then, that if Boethius was in the

‘condemned cell’ and wearing some old torn sacking inscribed with a fateful

Theta [thereby mirroring Lady Philosophy’s Theta-inscribed gown which,

according to Boethius’s text, is both sooty and torn] he is likely to have been

enduring more severe custody than the mild house arrest sometimes claimed for

him on the presupposition that so elegant and urbane a work as the Consolation

can hardly have emerged from a dank subterranean gaol. (225-6

Where does Boethius “end” and Lady Philosophy “begin”? Like the early mother-child

relationship that characterizes the limit of the historical subject, that, in Lacanian terms, mediates

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the “death” of the Thing and the birth of the subject within language, the relationship

between Boethius and Philosophy, as played out by Boethius the historical subject and Boethius

the literary character, is neither merged nor separate but always somewhere in between. Although

the power of this “mother of words” is not his, he, the subject literally and symbolically

condemned to death via the signifier, participates in her godlike substance and flies with her

“wings” (The Consolation 4. m. 1. 1-2) when, like Chaucer’s Geffrey, he takes leave of the

luxurious yet narrowing fantasies of the imaginary, and “dies,” opening himself to the aid of

Christ and to a consolation beyond the ego—the “Holy Spirit” of the feminine jouissance of

speech.

Geffrey as Christian Visionary: Love and the Last Judgment of the Goddess Fame

How then does the relationship between Chaucer-Geffrey and the goddess Fame compare

to the relationship of Boethius (man and character) to Lady Philosophy? Of course, there are the

conspicuous differences: whereas the tone and style of The Consolation of Philosophy, despite its

occasional dark humor, is more or less “serious,” The House of Fame is, for the most part,

lighthearted and playful; whereas the Boethian persona participates in a dialogue directly with

Philosophy, Geffrey, who never once speaks to Fame or is spoken to by Fame, experiences his

goddess more indirectly and subtly, i.e. first by watching her in her court interact with other

subjects (Fame as the judging God of Revelation) and then by entering into a space, the whirling

wicker, that embodies the feminine jouissance of the goddess (Fame as communal, as Holy

Spirit).45 Nevertheless, in spite of these differences, the two texts and two personae are united by

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a fundamental similarity: being a writer/poet and therefore one of Fame’s implicit “agents,”

Geffrey’s relationship to his goddess is therefore analogous to Boethius’s to Lady Philosophy.

Like the Boethius in The Consolation, Geffrey does not crudely objectify the goddess who

represents his calling, his life, grabbing at her with rapacious hands; instead, there is, I would

argue, a mystical participation that unites the narrator with his tutelary goddess through the doing

of the deed, whether that deed is philosophy or telling stories.

Or, more accurately put, there is a potential for mystical participation: as I alluded to in

the previous section, Chaucer, in Book II’s portrait of dazed Geffrey amidst his stack of “Great

Books,” humorously recalls the passage in which Boethius calls up the masterful image of

himself happily studying away in the privacy and leisure of his aristocratic, ivory and glass

library. Like the solitary, obsessive Boethius who has lost sight of the foundation of philosophy

in speech—equating Philosophy too narrowly with her lofty aspect, i.e. astronomy—the similarly

solitary, obsessive Geffrey has lost sight of the foundation of his storytelling art in everyday

speech (“fame” as plural tidings), equating Fame with her lofty aspect (“fame” as singular fame,

reputation) by concentrating all his energies or “love” on reading and studying books—implicitly

books of import and “matter” written by the poets of great fame whom he, a would-be master of

words, struggles, in his non-aristocratic never-quite-good-enough workaday manner, day in and

day out to emulate. Pointedly complementing Lady Philosophy’s poetic, Christian diagnosis that

Boethius’s literal exile from Rome figures his spiritual exile from his true country, Chaucer

suggests a similar, poetic Christian diagnosis of his narrative persona by calling up the idea of

Christian charity (“thou has no tydynges / Of Loves folk yf they be glade”) and then going on to

depict bookworm Geffrey as so self-absorbed that he is literally unable to hear “tydynges” of his

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“verray neyghebores”—thus implying, when read in a spiritual sense, that the isolated

Geffrey is, in some sense, spiritually deaf or oblivious as well, unable to hear the fundamental

biblical command that one must love one’s neighbor as oneself. As the eagle of Jupiter tells

Geffrey:

. . thou hast no tydynges

Of Loves folk yf they be glade,

Ne of noght elles that God made;

And noght oonly fro fer countre

That ther no tydynge cometh to thee,

But of thy verray neyghebores,

That duellen almost at they dores,

Thou herist neyther that ne this;

For when thy labour doon al ys,

And hast mad alle thy rekenynges,

In stede of reste and newe thynges

Thou goost hom to hy hous anoon,

And, also domb as any stoon,

Thous sittest at another book

Tyl fully daswed ys thy look . .. (644-58)

In short, although Boethius in his library represents a confident master of knowledge at leisure

and Geffrey only an anxious “middle class” would-be master, both are similarly “sick” and cut

off from the communal “body” of words--in need of the “feminine” consolation of speech and

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the Other that, in each case, participation in the goddess promises her “children.” Indeed, as

is often the case with our dreams and fantasies, the truth that is not apparent to us at the level of

empirical reality (namely, Geffrey’s resemblance to Boethius) speaks clearly in dream: although

Geffrey in “real life” has no patrician “ivory and glass library,” he nevertheless finds himself in

just such a place at the beginning of his dream--the precious, aristocratic glass Temple of Venus

with its “page-like” murals that tell the story of Virgil’s Aeneid.

The Christian mystic, of course, provides the medieval exemplar of participation,

merging through love with the God who is Love. In a profound way, Chaucer, carrying Boethius

and Philosophy (the love of wisdom) in his pocket, thus links the “lowly” business of storytelling

to “lofty” mysticism, Fame to Caritas: like the mystic who loves God selflessly and freely

without thought of reward, spreading love for the sheer joy of God-as-Love, the writer or

storyteller spreads fame for the sheer joy of fame/Fame---not because he wants or needs fame

personally. As shown by the fame-bearing statues of the great writers in Fame’s palace, Chaucer

imagines the great writer as driven by the need to tell a certain story; unlike the ordinary man

who is narrowly preoccupied with acquiring good fame for himself, the writer’s desire is to

uphold the fame of something grander and larger than his empirical self. Like the mystic, he thus

becomes most himself by losing himself. Fittingly, Ovid, the poet who bears the “the grete god

of Loves name” partakes most fully in Fame’s miraculous magnifying power; like Fame herself,

whose size, like Lady Philosophy’s, can, within a moment, grow from tiny to cosmological

proportions, Ovid’s poetry is so astoundingly potent that the Love he bears up enlarges the very

Hall of Fame, increasing it a thousand-fold. Given that Ovid is the poet who takes Dido’s side

against Virgil’s Aeneas, Dido’s belief that “wikke Fame” is against her and all women therefore

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stands corrected. The very energy that fueled the gossip that led to the end of a love affair

also fuels the writing and reading of Ovid’s pro-Dido poetry. Virgil’s stolid bearing up of the

more circumscribed topic of Aeneas’s fame seems dull and lifeless by comparison, capable of

eliciting only the detached, quiet appreciation one reserves for public monuments and glass-

enclosed museum pieces. The fame of Aeneas, though steady, is no match against the fame of

Love.

This subtle, dreamlike mingling of writing and love and writing and mysticism suggests a

fresh interpretation of Book III’s puzzling allusions to the Last Judgment and St. John’s

Revelation: this will be the focus of this section of my chapter. As Bennett notes, one of

Chaucer’s most “clearly deliberate” and significant changes to Virgil’s Fama is the elevation of

tone by way of a simile comparing Fame’s bizarre appearance to the prophetic visions in

Revelation (131):

For as feele eyen hadde she

As fetheres upon foules be,

Or weren on the bestes foure

That Goddis trone gunne honoure,

As John writ in th’Apocalips. (1381-85)

Bennett goes on to describe other resonances between Revelation and the narrator’s description

of Fame, all of which, I would add, serve to distinguish the poem’s richly nuanced view of Fame

from Virgil’s narrowly denigrating perspective:

So when Chaucer seats Fame on a ruby whilst making her sky-high he may well

have expected us to think of that throne set up in heaven whose occupant was like

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a jasper and a sardine stone with a rainbow round about him like to an

emerald (Rev. iv. 2-6). Not identity of detail but a partial likeness of awesome,

indeed beautiful, effect is involved. And the reverence accorded by the muses

(the very muses invoked at l. 520) in their ceaseless praise before Fame’s throne

undoubtedly recalls the perpetual adoration of the four and twenty elders before

the throne of the Lamb. These scriptural postures denote neither irreverent parody

nor an arbitrary recasting of Fame’s traditional character. (132)

Other critics have noticed more sweeping parallels, pointing out how Fame’s arbitrary treatment

of the multiple groups of apparently dead petitioners that come before her throne ironically

inverts God’s just judgment of the seven churches (Rev. 2-3) and, more generally, of all

humanity at the end of time. 46 As in Chaucer’s poem where some of the groups elicit Fame’s

generous support and others her derision and where the narrator quotes Fame, enabling us to hear

her speech directly, in Revelation, the seven churches elicit a mixture of God’s benign approval

(“I know your works—your love, faith, service, and patient endurance” 2.19) and wrathful,

contemptuous indignation (“So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about

to spit you out of my mouth” 3.16), and the visionary author similarly quotes the deity rather

than delivering his message in third-person narrative. More specifically, both Fame and God

express their judgments upon humanity via trumpet-bearing messengers.

How are we to read these biblical allusions and parallels? Bennett’s sensitive comments

notwithstanding, the few critics who do discuss them conclude that they are “ironic.” 47 This

reading, however, only works if we assume that Chaucer sees the Biblical God as completely

different from Fame: as with the ironic (yet sadly humorless) readings so favored by the

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Robertsonian critic, we must assume that a sober-minded judgmental (and need we say

male?) Christian exists “behind” the mask of the non-judgmental, “foolish” persona of the

narrator, i.e. although the narrator might see a connection between God and Fame, we, in our

superior knowledge and moral clarity, know better. Somewhat similar to the way Lacan assumes

that a clearly defined boundary exists between the narcissistic, mother-linked imaginary and the

supposedly non-narcissistic patriarchal symbolic, the Robertsonian reading assumes that we can

separate good from evil, spirit from flesh, and ultimately, male from female, that fundamental

opposition that seems to govern all the others; more problematically, the Robertsonian reading

assumes that such clearly patriarchal, moralistic distinctions exhaust the meaning of the Christian

faith. Obviously, this is not the case. As the seminal work of historian Caroline Walker Bynum

has shown, late medieval Christian devotion highlighted the suffering, embodied Christ,

imagining Christ as a more or less psychologically androgynous figure, the universal mother-

father to whom all could come for guidance as well as compassion. And, of course, apart from

own psychoanalytic reading of Boethius’s Lady Philosophy, there are the many goddesses who

populate the pages of medieval visionary philosophical poetry and theological/devotional

writings, most recently explored in Barbara Newman’s comprehensive study, God and the

Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (2003): although some of these

goddesses are cardboard cutouts that can be easily reduced to their allegorical title, others (e.g.

Lady Holy Church in Piers Plowman of Lady Love in Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light

of the Godhead), as Newman emphasizes, evoke numinous, commanding presences that cannot

be allegorized away in the Robertsonian fashion. Another example of this medieval resistance to

“tidy allegory” is provided by Chaucer’s dream vision, The Parlement of Foules. In contrast to

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Boccaccio who, following medieval iconographers and exegetes, split Venus into chaste and

unchaste versions--thereby eliminating the “pressure” of Love’s “disturbing ambiguity"—

Chaucer frustrates such easy clarification, choosing instead “to probe a ‘Love’ that is a

paradoxical unity, undifferentiated and ambiguous” (Fyler 36). Even more boldly, Parlement

evades or blurs what was perhaps, for the “orthodox” medieval Christian, the ultimate

distinction---that between the saved and the damned. There, within the Chaucerian narrator’s

clearly serious summary of Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, we find the controversial idea of universal

salvation put forth without comment or corrective:

“But brekers of the lawe, soth to seyne,

And likerous folk, after that they ben dede,

Shul whirle aboute th’erthe alwey in peyne,

Tyl many a world be passed, out of drede,

And than, foryeven al hir wikked dede,

Than shul they come into that blysful place,

To which to comen God the sende his grace.” (ll. 78-84, italics mine)

This passage suggests that Chaucer, like Origen and his contemporary Julian of Norwich, found

it difficult to reconcile the existence of hell with an all-loving God. If so, it seems likely that he

would found Dante’s tremendous imaginative zest for hell more than a little alienating,

especially the Italian poet’s ease at precisely assigning his own contemporaries to their supposed

destined circle in hell. (Given that a belief in universal salvation would seem to go hand in hand

with humility, a deep awareness of human imperfection and a corresponding reluctance to judge

and rank other human beings, it also seems likely that he would have found the worldliness of

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Dante’s aristocratic heaven similarly alienating.)

Chaucer’s attraction to the idea of universal salvation in Parlement, I would argue, casts

“reasonable doubt” on the typically Robertsonian interpretation of The House of Fame’s

eschatological resonances. As is often the case, those readings that are the most strenuously

Robertsonian are characterized by an impressively erudite analysis of the “trees,” i.e. although

such readings provide a multitude of useful observations, the thought-provoking glitches among

them are generally always ironed down, thrown away to support a predictable, ideologically

correct conclusion. For example, according to Koonce’s scrupulously exegetical, allegorical

analysis of the poem, Book III’s presentation of Fame’s court is ironic in two ways; writes

Koonce:

The irony stems not only from the implied contrast between Christ’s eternal

judgments and the willful judgments of the goddess, who, as she herself admits,

has no “justice” in her, but also from the attitudes of the suppliants, who appeal to

her variously on the basis of their “werkes.” In each instance the Christian norm

behind the irony is the fact that true fame has nothing to do with the goddess’s

temporal decrees. (235)

Although, at first glance, Koonce seems to provide a persuasive synthesis of the two ironies he

finds, closer examination of Koonce’s argument shows that the two propositions ultimately

cancel each other out, i.e. for the first irony to work, we must view the goddess’s treatment of the

petitioners as negatively arbitrary, but, to do this, we cannot at the same time hold to an ironic

reading of the petitioners’ fairly typical notions of divine justice (as Koonce does) but must

instead agree with or at least respect the petitioners’ commonsensical expectation that God, like a

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good human authority figure, predictably and logically rewards punishes his subordinates

according to their deeds. Koonce, however, wants to have his cake and eat it too. According to

him, those petitioners who expect a reward of praise or good fame for their good deeds are full of

vainglory and are therefore deserving of Fame’s contempt—which they do indeed incur.

Nevertheless, although Koonce acknowledges that Fame here and elsewhere mysteriously

delivers what he himself believes to be the true Christian verdict (even going so far as to refer to

“Fame’s seemingly willful awards” 244, italics mine), he, at the same time, argues that Fame’s

prototype is none other than the Whore of Babylon herself, drunk on the blood of the saints. But

what kind of Whore of Babylon figure behaves like Chaucer’s Fame? In stark contrast to how

her supposed prototype would likely behave, Fame never once sides with the genuinely evil

petitioners (groups eight and nine) and grants her greatest reward to the God-loving

contemplatives who shun her (group five).

In all fairness to Koonce, his idea about the Whore of Babylon does not come out of

nowhere, for, as usual, he supports his conclusion by offering the reader multiple several

exegetical allusions -- all of which, I might add, I find persuasive in themselves even if, as I will

explain, I reject Koonce’s Robertsonian reading as to how we should read these allusions.

Koonce, for example, carefully notes that Chaucer’s goddess Fame, like the Whore of Babylon

(Revelation 17:4), is described as bedecked in jewels: “But Lord, the perry and the richesse / I

saugh sittyng on this godesse” (1393-4), and that Chaucer’s ordering of the groups outside

Fame’s palace echoes a similar catalogue in Revelation 18; there, an angel with “great authority”

prophesizes about the Fall of Babylon:

…“the sound of harpers and minstrels, of flute players and trumpeters, shall be

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heard in thee no more; and a craftsman of any craft shall be found in thee no

more . . . for thy merchants were the great men of the earth, and all nations were

deceived by thy sorcery.” (18:22-3).

Given that Chaucer’s goddess Fame is not only a queen who sits “in a see imperiall” (l. 1361)

but also a temperamental “diva” with abundant “attitude,” I would add Revelation 18:7 to the list

of Fame’s Whore of Babylonish attributes; there, the stern angel (a “he”) castigates the

metaphorical Babylon for her lack of proper feminine submissiveness and decorum: “she

glorified herself and played the wanton . . . Since in her heart she says, ‘A queen I sit, I am no

widow, mourning I shall never see.’” As I see it, though, the question is not “Does Chaucer

allude to the Whore of Babylon?” (like Koonce, I believe it is clear that he does), but “What is

Chaucer’s purpose in doing so?” and, more precisely, “Why does Chaucer mingle allusions to

the profane Whore with allusions to the sacred (Boethius’s Lady Philosophy, “Goddis trone .. .

as John writ in th’Apocalips”)? Rather than assuming in Robertsonian fashion that Fame can

only be read in ironic contrast to a soberly masculine divine judge who somewhere offstage

replicates the logic of the Law, why not take the word of Jove, the heavenly father figure

Chaucer’s poem actually does supply? If Fame is really a Whore of Babylon, why does Jove

want the narrator to visit her house? Why does Jove seem to believe that a vision of this goddess

will inspire the narrator to tell new stories, stories of happy love and stories in praise of God’s

creation? Could it be that the goddess Fame, far from being radically opposed to the Christian

God, is, like Boethius’s Lady Philosophy, his mediatrix, the fitting mother for the Christian exile

(or “eunuch”), one whose imperious mocking yet nevertheless mysteriously good-willed

presence “kills” the egoistic worldly subject, yet, at the same time, paradoxically nurtures and

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inspires her exiled “children,” giving them the courage to leave their self-protective, “Dido”-

like nest of victimhood, to exist boldly at the symbolic level by creating a viable alternative to

the hegemonic imaginary of the patriarchal symbolic? In short, rather than reading Chaucer’s

goddess as the Whore of Babylon, might it be better to read her as the Whore of Heaven, the

irreverent outlaw “mother of the word” whose humorously hyperbolic and thus ultimately

harmless narcissism works to further the Christian goal of charity by opposing or rather

deconstructing the hegemonic logic and “gravitas” of the phallus—thereby giving heart and

symbolic presence to the necessarily marginalized Christian subject, and, at the same time,

exposing and frustrating the insidious and therefore more morally dangerous narcissism of the

smugly conventional? In contrast to the conventionally feminine mother figure of the hegemonic

imaginary whose likes and dislikes function to create and sustain proper patriarchal subjects (a

good example of such a figure, cited at the beginning of Chapter Two, is the properly ladylike

Mother of Heaven imagined by Augustine in his City of God diatribe against the effeminate

goddess-loving eunuchs), such a goddess gleefully shatters the hypocrisies of patriarchal

morality and would thus be the perfect “mother” to promote the “foolishness” of the radically

Christian agenda envisioned by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:

For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly

standards, not many of you were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God

chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in

the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world,

even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human

being might boast in the presence of God. (v. 26-9)

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Unlike the envious, joyless Christian priest who endorses Pauline “weakness” only as a way

to control others (imagined and rightfully rejected by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals),

such a mother, I submit, would promote a radical and more authentically Christian transvaluation

of values, ridding her marginalized “children” of the tail-biting fury of ressentiment with its

secret, festering narcissism and all the hidden forms of cruelty and violence that spring from it.

Of course, I am reading Paul against other Pauls here, for example, the repressive and

profoundly patriarchal Paul of Timothy 1 who directly contradicts the radical utopian yearnings

of 1 Corinthians, enforcing a strict gender hierarchy among church members (“I permit no

woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent”) and admonishing his

followers, among other things, to “honor widows who are real widows” (i.e. old widows, women

“not less than sixty years of age”) and to bar membership from younger widows, who, in Paul’s

eyes, are simply too prone to mischief and even wickedness. Because the target of Paul righteous

indignation reads like a combination of Chaucer’s Dido and Fame in her “House of Rumor”

mode (and, of course, the Wife of Bath, the most wanton widow of all), it is worth quoting in

full:

But refuse to enroll younger widows; for when they grow wanton against Christ

they desire to marry, and so they incur condemnation for having violated their

first pledge. Besides that, they learn to be idlers, gadding about from house to

house, and not only idlers but gossips and busybodies, saying what they should

not. So I would have younger widows marry [damned if you don’t and damned if

you don’t?], bear children, rule their households, and give the enemy no occasion

to revile us. For some have already strayed after Satan. (v. 11-15, italics mine).

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What is revealing about this strict, patriarchal Paul is the degree to which his rules and

warnings are motivated less by a fear of God’s judgment than the purely human fear of his group

incurring social ridicule from “the enemy.” Thus, after giving his warnings about young widows,

he goes on in the next chapter to advise slaves in a similarly gossip-fearing way:

Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all

honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be defamed. Those who

have believing masters must not be disrespectful on the ground that they are

brethren; rather they must serve all the better since those who benefit by their

service are believers and beloved. (6:1-2, italics mine).

Unfortunately, the utopian impulse that “mystic Paul” articulated so poetically in 1 Corinthians

goes by the wayside when it comes to the business of building up and running a church. Rather

than being genuinely immune to the scorn of the world, the practical and institutionally minded

Paul of Timothy clearly lets his fear of social ridicule become a guiding force in making church

policy. This is not, of course, what the official church would say about Paul’s motivations: as

with Virgil’s Aeneas, Paul’s fear of “wikke Fame” cannot be openly acknowledged but instead

must be purified, translated into a heavenly male authority (for Aeneas, Mercury; for Paul, the

Holy Spirit).

As Book III’s parade of petitioners before Fame shows us—Chaucer’s parody of the

Christian Last Judgment--this contradiction is not lost on Chaucer: in Chaucer’s poem, even the

most spiritually minded of all—the contemplatives who vociferously protest to disdain fame--are

depicted as falling down “anoon” on their knees before this goddess. By splicing the Last

Judgment before God with a parallel Last Judgment before Fame, Chaucer’s poem thus asks the

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reader not only to see the obvious ironic contrast between the sacred and the profane (the

desire for worldly glory versus the desire for heavenly glory) but also to move beyond that

relatively easy truth to the more subtle, harder truth that, like Jacob and Esau struggling within

Rebecca’s womb, the two are possibly always intertwined within the human psyche. Perhaps it

can even be argued that the very desire for heavenly prestige or a heavenly reward, insofar as

that reward shines against the implicit backdrop of those who did not make the cut, is absurdly

self-contradictory within a Christian paradigm: if it is true that the spiritually blessed are, by

definition, those who are the most humble (“he who is last shall be first”), wouldn’t it therefore

be impossible for the spiritually blessed to identify with or anticipate any reward of heavenly

glory that presupposes a scarcity of divine favor? Otherwise, wouldn’t they immediately lose the

very humility that supposedly defines them? Can a person remain truly “last,” that is, humble,

once he or she views this “lastness” as a temporary stage, a mere appearance that will be

sloughed off at the end of time to reveal the true “firstness,” that, Cinderella-like, hides beneath

the ashy rags of “lastness,” waiting to be vindicated in fairytale splendor?

To modern readers versed in Nietzsche or psychoanalysis, such ruthless skepticism of

Christian humility (and, beyond that, Christian charity or altruism) goes hand in hand with an

irreligious or atheistic imagination. In response to such readers, I would argue that Chaucer

remains a Christian because, unlike modern thinkers who rage against the narcissistic,

“idolatrous” ego (e.g. the 1950s Lacan), Chaucer—like his contemporary, Julian of Norwich--

accepts human imperfection so fully that he is able to transform the patriarchal symbolic if not

break out of it altogether. Rather than turning away in disgust at human dependency —brushing

it off oneself like some vile insect—Chaucer, like Julian, chooses instead to renounce that which

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renders this dependency as something so contemptible that it cannot be faced and so becomes

instead a secret obstacle that lives on and on, insidiously blinding the soul and blocking the flow

of Christian charity: the masculine model of the heroic striving ego and, its complement, the

figure of God as Almighty Judge. Within Book III of The House of Fame, Chaucer does this by

humorously parodying the Last Judgment, or, to be more precise, by parodying what one might

call the “score-card” view of Christian virtue, the conventional, egoistic expectation that God

runs—or, at least, should run--his heaven according to a legalistic or rule-based ethical system

that promises rewards and punishments corresponding exactly to our good and bad actions.

Through the very different voice of her profoundly reflective mysticism, Julian similarly

overturns this view of God as Judge (or, better yet, Policeman); below is a representative quote

taken from the beginning of the forty-eighth chapter of Showings (Long Text):

. . .for I sow no wrath but in mannys partie, and that forgevyth He in us; for wreth

is not ell but a forwardness and a contrarioste to peace and to love. And eyther it

commyth of faylyng of myte or of fayling of wisdam, or of faylyng of goodnes,

which faylyng is not in God, but is on our partie, for we be synne and wretchidnes

have in us a wretchid and continuant contrariuste to peace and to love, and that

shewid He full often in His lovely chere of ruth and pety . . . (Shewings 98)

For I saw no wrath except on man’s side, and he forgives that in us, for wrath is

nothing else but a perversity and an opposition to peace and to love. And it

comes from a lack of power or a lack of wisdom or a lack of goodness, and this

lack is not in God, but is on our side. For we through sin and wretchedness have

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in us a wrath and a constant opposition to peace and to love; and he revealed

that very often in his lovely look of compassion and pity. (Showings 262)

As wrath only exists “in mannys partie,” so does condemnation; at the beginning of the fiftieth

chapter, Julian makes her point through a carefully worded nuance, drawing a contrast not

between earthly and heavenly judgment but between an earthly judgment that comes and goes

based on what others currently perceive to be our worth and a heavenly salvation that is both

universal and always present and therefore has nothing at all to do with merit or judgment:

And in this dedly lif, mercy and forgiveness is our wey and evermore ledyth us to

grace. And be the tempest and sorow that we fallen in our parte, we be often dede

as to manys dome in erth, but in the syte of God, the soule that shal be save was

never dede ne never shall. (Shewings 100)

And in this mortal life mercy and forgiveness are the path which always leads us

to grace; and through the temptations and sorrow into which on our side we fall,

we often are dead by the judgment of men on earth. But in the sight of God the

soul which will be saved was never dead, and never will be. (Showings 265)

Although, taken out of context, this quote could suggest otherwise, Julian does not

narcissistically believe that she can separate herself from “men on earth,” as if she alone were

somehow immune to the plague of “killing judgment”: what makes Julian--and Chaucer’s--

break-out or unplugging from the patriarchal symbolic genuine (that is, not simply another

instance of ressentiment or a regressive “retreat to the imaginary”) is the fact that both writers

acknowledge that, while on earth, this process can never be complete or pure; the false image of

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God as Judge keeps its hold on us. Moreover, what makes their breakout a distinctly

Christian one is that, along with their acknowledgement of earthly limitation, comes the felix

culpa intuition that God--as the narrator at the beginning of The House of Fame so earnestly

hopes he will do to his and “every drem”--accomplishes his purposes less in spite of than

through our very imperfection, “turning” our false images of him “to goode.” Thus, Julian, at the

end of forty-seventh chapter of Showings, struggling to make sense of her inability to sustain her

vision of a loving, non-wrathful God, writes:

And yet in al this I beheld in the shewing of God that this manner syte of Him

may not be continuant in this lif, and that for his owen worship and for encreas of

our endles joy. (Shewings 97)

And still in all this I contemplated in this revelation by God that this kind of

vision of him cannot persist in life, and that is for his own glory and for the

increase of our endless joy. (Showings 261)

As Jesus so memorably reveals to her in the twenty-seventh chapter when she boldly wonders

why sin ever had to exist at all, “It is sothe that synne that is cause of all this peyne, but al shal

be wele, and al shall be wele, and all manner thing shal be wele” (Shewings 72); “Sin is

necessary, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well”

(Showings 225).

Within Book III of The House of Fame, Chaucer best expresses the paradox of felix culpa

through the goddess Fame’s whimsically disparate treatment of the fourth and fifth groups of

petitioners (ll. 1689-1726). These are the two groups of virtuous petitioners, both of which, we

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are told, shun the reward of worldly reputation, having been motivated to do good solely for

altruistic or spiritual reasons: the fourth group “for bounte” (goodness, virtue) or the fifth group

“for contemplacioun / And Goddes love.” Fame grants the fourth group’s wish to have no fame

(“I graunte yow all your asking”) but disregards the fifth group’s similarly humble request for

anonymity, granting them the opposite---great worldwide fame for goodness. What is going on

here? Is Fame’s contrasting treatment of groups four and five to be read simply as yet another

example of her arbitrary will, or, as in the case with other groups, does Fame’s “madness” cloak

a hidden sanity and justice?

One possible answer to this question is Bennett’s: groups four and five are rewarded

differently because they are not the equals that they seem to be but are, in fact, analogous to

Langland’s “active Dowel” and “contemplative Dobet” (159). To make a case for this

interpretation, Bennett insinuates that there is more style than substance to the group four’s

virtue:

Standing upright in line, they claim that they have done with their might what

their hands found to do, but for virtue’s sake alone (‘for bountee’, 1968) and are

professedly content to be as they had never been. Yet they address Fame as ‘lady

briht,’ and there is a touch of ostentation in their stance. Fame takes their plea at

its face value, and for once the trumpets are silent. This sort of virtue does indeed

die without memorial as often as do the deeds done out of desire for glory. (158,

italics mine)

Bennett goes on to contrast group four with group five accordingly: “Here the longing for

anonymity is intense and deep,” and, instead of showing “ostentation” in their speech, “they

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tersely express their contemptum mundi: ‘they yeven noght a leek for Fame’” (158). Because

of group five’s superior virtue, Bennett writes, “their fame, then, and theirs alone, reaches and

rests in that heaven where Dante had found those exemplary contemplatives St. Benedict and St.

Peter Damian” (160).

Although Bennett’s interpretation offers us the comfort of conclusiveness, such comfort

comes at the price of ignoring what appears to be a deliberate strategy of ambiguity on the part of

Chaucer. First, Bennett’s belittling implication that group four represents those of commonplace,

mediocre character (“this sort of virtue”) is not supported by any evidence within the text; in

fact, the poem implies just the opposite by having the narrator distinguish them for the rarity of

their character: whereas the narrator only describes group five as a “route,” he says of group four

“But certyn they were wonder fewe” (l. 1691). Moreover, the fact that they stand and do not

kneel before Fame distinguishes its members as being the only petitioners who show by their

actions (and not just their words, as with the contemplatives in group five) that they alone are

completely detached from the vicissitudes of public opinion that Fame represents. By standing

and not kneeling “anoon” before the goddess as all the other petitioners do, the poem once again

perhaps alludes to Revelation, here, the repeated incident in Revelation in which an angel of the

Lord admonishes the visionary for similarly kneeling “anoon” before him in adoration, the clear

message being that to kneel in such a manner before any being short of God constitutes idolatry:

Then I fell down at his feet to worship him [the angel], but he said to me, “You

must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brethren who hold the

testimony of Jesus. Worship God.” (Rev. 19: 10)

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I John am he who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw

them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed them to me; but

he said to me, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your

brethren the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship

God.” (Rev. 22: 8-9)

As with their standing posture, their speech stands out from the rest of the petitioners, and, it

does so not only because, they, along with group five, are the only petitioners who ask for no

fame, but also, more subtly, because of the unusually emphatic repetition of “certes.” They state

that they are certain about two things in regards to their earthly lives, namely, that they used all

their power or ability to do well, and that whatever good deeds that they accomplished were done

strictly on behalf of “bounte” (variously translated as “goodness,” “charity,” “kindness” or

“virtue”); in regards to the latter, they are doubly emphatic, as shown by the hyperbolic presence

of both “certes” and “certeyn” in one sentence:

“Certes, lady bright,”

We han don wel with al our might,

But we ne kepen have no fame.

Hyde our werkes and our name,

For Goddys love; for certes we

Han certeyn doon hyt for bounte,

And for no maner other thing.” (ll. 1693-99, italics mine)

How are we to read this conspicuous certainty? Should we simply mistrust their emphatically

certain humility (methinks they doth protest too much), pronouncing the “s”s of their “certes”

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with the flatterer’s serpentine hiss and taking Bennett’s view that “there is a touch of

ostentation about their stance,” or, given the last-chance-moment-of-truth context in which it

occurs, should we simply trust that their petition is sincere, an earnest plea for anonymity that

issues not from the vanity of pride or moral hypocrisy but from the certainty of faith?

My own sense is that Chaucer is setting up a hypothetical “impossible situation” here,

that is, instead of prompting us to judge group four as common, garden-variety hypocrites,

Chaucer is, in a sense, poking fun at a certain kind of reader, namely, the essentially pagan

ethical idealist (present in some degree in all of us) who, believing firmly in the tidy separations

and distinctions of the patriarchal symbolic, projects dependency onto a feminized Other and, in

so doing, imagines the ideal humble hero who answers only to the Good and, full of certainty,

stands apart from the herd in courteous, perfectly poised self-satisfaction. Chaucer’s depiction of

Fame’s response here is a master-stroke, for, instead of having the goddess respond unfairly and

irresponsibly, i.e. “like a woman” or “like a commoner” (thus proving the patriarchal view of her

a correct one), Fame forgoes her usual fun-house mirror and honors their request exactly, thereby

mirroring back to them what they have so honorably saluted throughout their lives--the sober,

austere justice of the perfect patriarch (It sounded so good, why do I feel so empty?). Here, with

a kind of “elvyssh” mischief, Chaucer forces the ethical idealist in us to “get real,” exposing the

ideal of a patriarchal Christian humility as oxymoronic by depriving us of its usual prop of

“heavenly fame”: despite what the morally earnest patriarchal reader wishes to see, Chaucer

gives us no indication that a sober masculine God stands behind or above Fame ready to correct

her by compensating group four with a high rank in heaven. In fact, the poem blocks this wish

for compensation: after all, why should God correct the goddess when she is, for once, behaving

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herself, dutifully mirroring His justice by honoring a honorable request so perfectly?

When group four is read in the way I suggest, the unexpected mediocrity and self-

contradiction of the contemplatives—the fact that they comically “doun on knes anoon to falle”

before Fame whilst protesting to care “noght a lek for fame”—takes on a different meaning.

Chaucer’s contemplatives kneel “anoon” like everyone else before Fame not because Chaucer

cynically wants us to reject contemplatives as “hypocrites all,” but because he wants us to

recognize them not as dignified, ever-so-polite angels who stand apart from humanity—as the

fourth group of petitioners do--but as vibrant, passionate, and therefore necessarily imperfect

men and women who rush into Fame’s court just like everyone else and, without realizing their

own “mistake” of kneeling before a goddess, declare their desire for anonymity in the kind of

zestful colloquial speech that characterizes that of Fame herself. Chaucer’s depiction of

contemplatives as flawed “ordinary folk” may seem counterintuitive; however, it shows an

insight into contemplative experience that is often missed, namely, the fact that, alongside the

more flamboyant, intensely erotic mystics with seemingly no desire to share their love for God

with others, there exist those such as Julian of Norwich whose love for God only seems to

heighten their sense of cosmic unity with other human beings, filling them with a desire to

dissolve the very barriers that create exclusiveness and jealousy. In the passage below, Thomas

Merton, a twentieth-century Trappist monk and contemplative, emphasizes this paradoxical ever-

multiplying “endless society” of the seemingly solitary contemplative:

. . . even here [on earth, that is, as opposed to heaven] the more we are one with

God the more we are united with one another; and the silence of contemplation is

deep, rich, and endless society, not only with God but with men . . . The more we

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are alone with God the more we are with one another, in darkness, yet a

multitude. (New Seeds 65)

In keeping with this idea of the contemplative’s essential solidarity with other human beings, the

fact that Chaucer’s contemplatives kneel “anoon” before Fame like everyone else becomes a sign

of goodness rather than a sign of “idolatry” (as the possible allusion to the angel of Revelation

suggests): after all, by falling down on their knees before Fame they may be making a stupid

mistake in the eyes of an angel of heaven but doing so they are also mirroring the actions of John

himself, the “eagle” of Christian visionaries, who falls down on his knees “improperly” not once

but twice. Perhaps there is an issue of heavenly etiquette here: although the angel sternly

commands the visionary to get up off his knees, wouldn’t perhaps the angel have been even more

alarmed if John hadn’t needed any invitation at all but had stolidly stood before him “man-to-

man”? Without John’s prior “mistake” of kneeling how would we be able to distinguish a

standing tall rooted in mere egotism from a standing tall rooted in Christian charity?

Matristic Exegesis: Taking a Leaf from Chaucer’s Fame

There is, however, yet another, distinctly language-centered way to read Chaucer’s

kneeling contemplatives: the contemplatives kneel before Fame because they are in fact not only

the servants and lovers of God but also the servants and lovers of this goddess whether they

know it or not, that is, given the essentially private nature of contemplation, how except through

their writings could someone gain lasting fame as a contemplative? Or, interpreted less literally

and more theoretically, they are lovers of Fame whether they know it or not because, being

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contemplatives and thus radically Christian subjects, they are “feminized” subjects, subjects

who hunger for the word of the divine Other, or, in other words, subjects who are able to

experience non-phallic “feminine” jouissance, jouissance at the level of the Other. Seen in this

light, the example of Chaucer’s contemplatives zeroes in on what I take to be the fundamental

question at the heart of Chaucer’s poem: “What is the relationship between language and the

Christian God?” Within the poem, this question is formulated and worked through via the central

dialectic that structures the dream vision and drives it forward: fame as Fame, which finds its

ultimate expression in the rewards and punishments of the Last Judgment, and fame as “tidings,”

which finds its ultimate expression in the “good news” of the gospel and the stories that Jove

hopes that the narrator will someday be able to write—in the words of the golden eagle, tidings

of “Loves folk yf they be glade,” of God’s creation, and of his “verray neighebores” (in short, all

that that the reclusive and wearily laboring narrator shuts himself against through his unrelieved

routine of work and study). Although the poem does not make the connection explicit, we can

gather from Book I that the narrator has been hitherto unable to experience this second sense of

“fame”—the creative plenitude of “tydynges”--due to the pressures created by obsession with

“killing judgment” of the first sense of “fame”: like the Dido of his imagination who curses

“wikke Fame,” the narrator at the end of Book I is a floundering soul--overwhelmed and

intimidated, caught between a vague wish to challenge the patriarchal symbolic and a despair

that tells him his wish is futile.

As the narrator’s anguished yet clearly effective prayer to Christ for deliverance strongly

suggests, Chaucer frames the poem’s dialectical relationship between the two meanings of

“fame” in distinctly Christian terms. Sometimes this tension between God’s authoritative,

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singular fame and God’s joyously plural tidings works out in subtle, very likely unconscious

ways that are nevertheless powerfully emblematic in their specific context. One small but

illuminating example of this is the poem’s motif of the eagle of deliverance; another is the

poem’s seemingly offhand, humorous reference to a two-mile pilgrimage to “corseynt Leonard,”

the shrine of Saint Leonard. Let me first unpack the eagle motif: as Koonce points out, although

both Dante and Chaucer explicitly refer to the Ganymede myth, the imagery of heavenly

deliverance via an eagle’s wings has a strong biblical precedent within the Canticle of Moses

(Deut. 32: 10-12), as well as in Exodus 19:3-6 (131). Moreover, as with Chaucer’s narrator, this

deliverance—the Lord’s deliverance of Israel out of Egypt—takes place in a desert wasteland,

and, as with Chaucer’s humorous eagle, this biblical eagle represents, for the most part, a

paternal guidance from above that is more maternally familiar and accessible than

imperialistically sublime. With the last line of the passage, however, the biblical writer alters his

tone and style, barging in on the tender and lyrical scene he has just created by sternly injecting

what appears to be a gratuitous declaration of exclusive monotheism:

He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness; he

encircled him, he cared for him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. Like an eagle

that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching

them, bearing them on its pinions, the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no

foreign god with him. (Deut. 32: 10, italics mine).

Yet, perhaps not so gratuitous: as Regina Schwartz, in her book Curse of Cain: The Violent

Legacy of Monotheism, suggests, there are “two broad understandings of identity in the Bible:

one grounded in Negation (scarcity) and another in Multiplicity (plenitude)” (19). In Schwartz’s

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definition below, her two categories nicely correspond with the two senses of God’s “fame”

(the threat of patriarchal authority/judgment versus the promise of “tidings”) whose conflict I see

as the motor that drives Chaucer’s poem:

To be Israel is to be not-Egypt [or, in the language of The House of Fame, “To be

Aeneas/Rome is to be not-Dido/Carthage”]; identity is purchased at the expense

of the Other. But that is not the whole story. The logic of negation should be

distinguished from one of multiplicity, a logic that sustains contraries without

obliteration, that multiplies difference, and that foregrounds the provisional

character of identity. (19)

Unfortunately, given the exclusive monotheism demanded by a emphatically patriarchal God

throughout the Bible, it is the logic of negation that often sets the predominant tone; thus, often

even when a biblical writer gestures with one hand towards the vision of plenitude, he takes the

vision away with his other hand. Schwartz’s remarks below--in reference to a passage from

Isaiah—could just as well apply to the writer of the “schizophrenic” eagle passage quoted above:

But even his vision of endless giving is caught up in that dark universalism that

turns other gods into idols . . . It is though the writer feared that his assertions of

divine plenitude were not compelling enough and that he had to add, just for good

measure, warnings to coerce singular devotion rather simply invite assent to his

ideal of boundless giving. (36)

Sadly, no matter how much smaller on the literal page, this warning voice has the power to

drown out the other voice: in their interpretations of the eagle passage, for example, traditional

Christian exegetes (the kind favored by D.W. Robertson, Jr. and Koonce) repeat and arguably

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intensify the biblical writer’s ending move of trumping plenitude in favor of scarcity:

scrubbing off all traces of maternal consolation within the passage and foregrounding the

implicit threat of its concluding statement, Rabanus Maurus “following earlier commentators . .

.interprets the desert as the world or Babylon and connects it with idolatry” (Koonce 131). This

kind of exegesis, of course, favors Koonce’s strongly pro-Aeneas/anti-Dido reading: here is

proof—solid Christian proof—that the narrator’s sympathy for Dido (and corresponding feelings

of alienation towards the patriarchal symbolic) are simply and totally wrong. Spirit is masculine,

and flesh is feminine: just as Israel must reject all those whorish pagan fertility gods, we as

readers must like good and dutiful Aeneas soundly reject Dido and her world of carnal love.

Faced with this kind of reductive and supposedly “Christian” reading, many readers take

the Donaldsonian route of simply chucking the whole business of Christian allegory and exegesis

altogether. This is, I feel, a mistake—not so much because Koonce is wrong, but rather because

this kind of reaction feeds into the idea of that Koonce’s Robertsonian exegetical analysis is

objectively true in some absolute way that “closes the book” rather than being—as the arguments

of all mortals are—selectively presented to support his viewpoint. Koonce’s exegesis of the eagle

deliverance motif is a case in point: although one might assume it to be an exhaustive account of

how this motif works within the Bible, it is not, for it leaves out an important and very interesting

repetition of the motif that occurs in Chapter 12 of Revelation, a book that clearly seems to have

been in Chaucer’s mind as he wrote this poem. There, John recounts his famous vision of a

goddess-like “woman clothed with the sun” and her flight into the wilderness from a Satanic

male dragon/serpent who is intent on devouring her infant son. In describing the woman’s

rescue, John draws upon the eagle deliverance motif of the Pentateuch, thereby making a parallel

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between the woman and Israel, between her flight from persecution and the Exodus—or, in

other words, between God’s People as the Church and God’s Chosen People:

And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued

the woman who had borne the male child. But the woman was given the two

wings of the great eagle that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to

the place where she is to be nourished for a time, and times, and half a time.

(12:13-4).

Given John’s preoccupation with and ceaseless condemnation of idolatry throughout

Revelation—an evil that John strongly associates with feminine carnality through his image of

the seductive Whore of Babylon--his use of the eagle motif seems, in part, to merely reinforce

the oppressively patriarchal perspective that I have just been describing. John’s woman “clothed

with the sun,” however, does not fit so easily into the patriarchal frame, for instead of being

merely carnal or pure spirit, John’s woman, imagined in his vision as an embodied goddess,

represents an emphatically female version of Christ’s fusion of divine power and the Passion of

embodiment. Unlike the medieval schoolmen who would later author the extreme yet ultimately

orthodox Catholic position that the Virgin Mary’s hymen remained miraculously intact during

the birth of Jesus, the visionary John has no puerile obsession with literal, physical virginity and

thus has no problem reconciling the celestial with the “lowly” female body: his holy star-

crowned woman “clothed with the sun,” like Jesus himself, suffers in the flesh, “crying out in

birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth” (Rev. 12:2). With this insistence on the heavenly

woman’s earthly pain, a pain that brings forth saving life through the birth of a Messiah (Rev.

12: 5), John makes a precise parallel between the woman and Jesus Christ: just as Christ lifts the

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curse of mortality --God’s curse upon Adam in Genesis 12:19--not by denying it but by

blessing it through his Passion, the heavenly woman similarly “resignifies” the pain of childbirth

--God’s curse upon woman in Genesis 3:16—blessing the specific agony of female embodiment

by making it the site of a holy deliverance.

Within a Christian context, this drama of the feminine Passion becomes the Passion of

language itself, ceaselessly repeated at the site of its seemingly cursed feminine body through the

prophet or preacher’s divine labor of the birthing or bringing forth of the saving Word. In this

sense, the birth-pangs suffered by John’s woman call forth less the miraculously pain-free

delivery of the Messiah envisioned in Isaiah 66: 7 (as John’s laboring woman is typically

glossed) than the earlier passage in Isaiah where the prophet, speaking as the Lord God himself,

compares the urgency of his need to communicate to Israel to a the urgency of a woman in labor:

For a long time I have held my peace,

I have kept still and restrained myself;

Now I will cry out like a woman in travail,

I will grasp and pant. (Isaiah 42:14).

Thus writes “mother Paul,” literally grappling with words as he writes his letter to inspire the

wayward Galatians (“See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand” 6:11):

“My little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!” (4:19).

Fittingly, in the verses that directly follow 4:19, “mother Paul” lives out or performs his own

metaphor with his famous allegory of Sarah and Hagar. Rather than rejecting or scorning the

sacred histories of the Bible (as a Manichean myth-maker might), Paul chooses instead to give

birth to a radical Christian language of utopian inclusiveness and promise by laboring with and

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through the biblical text that is, for Paul, a former devout Jew, not simply a holy book but a

memory indelibly written upon his very flesh. Being thus wrought from a real body, that is, a

body profoundly marked by the Law, his new language is no feeble fantasy but something truly

revolutionary, rivaling the Law in its power to mark and create bodies, to sustain identity; “let no

man trouble me,” declares Paul, “for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” (Gal. 6:17).

Simply put, Paul seeks to deliver the body marked by the Law—both the biblical text and his

own—not by dualistically flying above or beyond it but by delivering a new body through it.

Likewise, through his small but powerful “riff” on the eagle deliverance motif of the Pentateuch,

John creates the perfect emblem of Christian transformative writing: instead of making the

rescued Israel male --and thereby implicitly figuring godliness as a masculine flight from the

feminine, John gives voice to the maternal resonances within Deuteronomy 32:10-12, rewriting

his rescued Israel as a child-bearing woman in flight from a evil masculine persecutor who seeks

to devour her child; moreover, in a further challenge to the patriarchal status quo, he empowers

female Israel by giving her eagle’s wings so she can fly away to safety herself. And where she

flies with her wings is telling: not out of but into the wilderness “where she has a place prepared

by God” (12:6, 12:14).

Caught between his need to separate from Dido and his strong identification with her, his

wish to give her a voice, Chaucer’s narrator lives out the Bible’s eagle deliverance motif in all its

richness. What seems at first to be only a patriarchal flight from the feminine—the eagle’s

deliverance of male Israel out of the wilderness of Babylon—carries with it the radical promise

of a flight with the feminine, of an embodied deliverance that opens up the symbolic to those

once marginalized by the hegemonic logic, or, in the terms of the poem’s primary dialectical

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tension, the promise of a new language that praises God through the birthing and

multiplication of “fame,” i.e. tidings, that mirrors the “yes” of God’s ceaselessly loving

productivity and the diversity of his Creation as opposed to a patriarchal reduction of language

that mirrors the “no” of God’s judgment, the Punitive Oneness of God’s exclusive and jealously

guarded Fame. Fittingly, as I mentioned in an earlier discussion, Chaucer’s narrator begins his

journey of embodied deliverance by entering into the desert wasteland through a “wiket” (l. 477),

a Middle English word that denotes “a small gate” but also “the vulva”: prior to the vertical

flight of the narrator’s Exodus-like deliverance by the eagle, the narrator, paralleling the woman

in Revelation who gives birth to a son within the wilderness and who flies with eagle’s wings

into the wilderness, is horizontally born again through his movement out of one womb--the

enclosed, literary womb of The Temple of Venus within which conventionally sexed positions

are nourished and held--and into another far more mysterious: not feminine “Carthage” or “the

sterile desert of carnal love,” as Koonce’s Robertsonian exegesis demands, but the dizzyingly

open, menacingly undifferentiated, seemingly barren womb of the desert of the Real, the

impossible to say that exists outside of or beyond the patriarchal symbolic. The narrator’s ascent

via the eagle thus cannot be easily equated with Aeneas’s abandonment of “carnal Dido,” or, in

other words, with that standard patriarchal plot that defines the hero’s quest in terms of the

abjection of the feminine: summoned through the grace-note of allusion, John’s woman offers

the hope of a new story.

A fuller exegesis of the narrator’s reference to a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Leonard

in lines 115-19 reveals a similar “hidden” hope encoded within an allusion that seems, at first

glance, to offer ringing exegetical support for Robertsonian logocentrism. As Koonce explains

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below, this simile that the narrator constructs between himself and to the pilgrim to Saint

Leonard’s shrine—occurring as it does right at the beginning of Geoffrey’s narration of his

wondrous dream--encapsulates and sets in motion what Koonce sees as the poem’s Dante-esque

theme of a sin-burdened, confused pilgrim who, with the help of his spiritual guides, is gradually

delivered from the dark forest of the flesh and set back on the right track to God:

The motif of captivity . . .is here particularized in St. Leonard, the patron saint of

prisoners, whose power to liberate sinners of all sorts from their chains is a

recurrent symbol in medieval literature of the spirit’s release from the prison of

the world or flesh. In this role Leonard is the proper object of appeal by those who

are caught in the chains of any temporalia, such as carnal love, fame, or riches,

which divert the pilgrim from his heavenly goal. (71).

Moreover, in addition to exemplifying the poem’s theme of spiritual liberation, the reference to

Saint Leonard neatly integrates this theme with the poem’s central subject of fame: as Koonce

points out, Leonard’s name is etymologized in The Golden Legend as “a symbol of good fame—

the fame that draws men by its sweet odor to the praise of God” (71). In short, Leonard seems to

be the perfect patron saint for The House of Fame--a Robertsonian House of Fame, that is. But is

he really? As with the eagle deliverance motif, we must not forget that Koonce’s exegesis of the

Saint Leonard reference is not objective or exhaustive but selectively presented to support his

overall argument. By over-emphasizing the idea of a purely symbolic “prisoner” of the

world/flesh, Koonce has seriously distorted the Saint Leonard tradition, leaving out the very this-

worldly deliverances that led to this sixth-century saint to attract such widespread and fervent

devotion after the twelfth century. First, there was Saint Leonard’s reputedly infallible power to

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liberate literal prisoners, those whose chains and fetters were not symbolic but made of iron;

according to The Golden Legend, “any prisoner who invoked his name saw his bonds loosened

and went free with no one interfering” (244). This power made him the favorite saint of not only

of crusaders and knights due to their vulnerability of being captured in a foreign land and held

for ransom but also of anyone unfortunate to find himself victimized by feudal tyranny. Thus, in

The Golden Legend, we find several stories of how an invocation to Leonard miraculously freed

some poor innocent man from the clutches of some arrogant and sadistic noble; below is a

typical example:

In order to strike terror into miscreants, the viscount of Limoge had had a very

heavy chain made, and ordered it hung from a beam that jutted from the wall of

his tower: anyone who, with that chain around his neck, was left exposed to the

vicissitudes of the weather for very long, died not one but a thousand deaths. It

happened, however, that a man who had been in service to Saint Leonard was

shackled with this chain though he had done no wrong. When he was about to

breathe his last, he put his whole heart into a plea to Saint Leonard, begging him,

who had freed many others, to come to the aid of one who had been his servant.

At once the saint, clad in a white robe, appeared to him and said: “Don’t be afraid,

you are not going to die! Get up, and carry that chain with you to my church!

Follow me, because I will lead the way!” The man got to his feet, gathered up the

chain, and followed Saint Leonard, who went ahead to his church. As soon as

they came to the door, blessed Leonard left him. He went into the church that the

saint had caused to be built, told everyone what had happened to him, and hung

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the huge chain in front of Leonard’s tomb. (245)

Such literal chains as these, created and imposed by a brutal and unjust male authority figure, are

thus very different from the metaphorical, inevitably feminized “chains of temporalia” or “chains

of carnal love” evoked by Koonce. Seen in this light--as the product of an abuse of masculine

political power--such chains also invite an alternative metaphorical interpretation, one that, as I

will soon explain, is vividly relevant to the narrator’s feelings of victimization and impotence in

Book One of The House of Fame.

But before doing so, I would like to discuss the other key this-worldly deliverance

associated with this emphatically compassionate saint, namely, Leonard’s patronage of pregnant

women, a tradition based upon a humble story, recounted in The Golden Legend, of how the

reclusive Leonard, wandering in the forest one day and moved with pity by the cries of a woman

in labor, was led to a queen whose agonizing labor made her family fear for her life; through his

prayers, Leonard helped the queen survive and safely deliver her child (The Golden Legend,

Volume II, Chapter 155, page 244). Thus, as with the eagle deliverance motif, the reference to a

pilgrimage to Saint Leonard’s shrine joins together the fundamentally vertical, body-negating

wish for a purely symbolic/spiritual deliverance, the flight/liberation of masculine spirit from the

feminized flesh of the world, with the fundamentally body-affirming, horizontal wish for an

emphatically literal/physical deliverance of both mother and child through the trials of pregnancy

and labor. As the fused word “corseynt” (“holybody,” i.e. relic) so eloquently evokes, Leonard’s

intercessory power to bless both kinds of deliverances is considered to be especially strong at his

shrine because, being a saint, i.e. a beloved person whose personal fame is inextricably linked to

God’s fame as realized through the “tidings” of the gospel, his “holybody” transcends the

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patriarchal order in such a way that, in Lacanian terms, the division between the imaginary

and the symbolic is no longer operable: neither simply a shell or burden to be discarded nor

simply “the body of a holy man” that should be revered (or sentimentally cherished), his

“corseynt,” like the miraculously fertile body of Mary, is a site at which heaven and earth meet.

The narrator of The House of Fame resembles the pilgrim he evokes in his simile in a

number of ways. As a writer who begins his dream vision with the hope that God (and, a few

lines later, “the holy roode”) might “turne us every drem to goode,” he, too, journeys towards the

fullness of “corseynt,” in this case, the “corseynt” of a poem that is not simply an account of his

dream but a poem that materializes God’s “turning” of his dream “to goode.” More specifically,

he resembles a pilgrim to “corseynt Leonard” in the attitude he takes towards language and the

writing of his dream. To some degree, as suggested by his literal gendering of the pilgrim as “he”

at l. 115, the narrator is like the prototypically masculine, metaphorical pilgrim described by

Koonce: like the latter who hopes that his spirit will be delivered from the chains of the flesh, the

narrator, through the mouthpiece of Dido, decries the gossip of “wikke Fame” and hopes for a

perfect, i.e. transparent, transmission of his dream. There is, however, a vulnerability that

separates the Chaucerian narrator from Koonce’s metaphorical pilgrim, for, far from evoking the

trauma of a genuinely felt oppression, such a pilgrim, I would argue, presupposes a level of

comfort and security within the patriarchal symbolic that the narrator arguably lacks. As I

explained in my earlier analysis of Book I, the narrator’s anxiety about language takes on both

comic and tragic proportions, leading him in the Proems of Books I and II, i.e. when he is outside

the actual telling of his story, to overcompensate with grandiose claims of uniqueness and

Jehovah-like threats against would-be detractors of the future, and, when he is inside the telling

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of his story, to feel persecuted, along with the imagined Dido, by “wikke Fame,” yet

ultimately intimidated and hemmed in by the disembodied voice of paternal authority transmitted

through the Law-like, seemingly author-less writing engraved on the tables of brass. In short,

although the narrator at the beginning of the poem may wish he were more Aeneas-like, more

like Koonce’s metaphorical pilgrim, his marginalized position vis-à-vis the patriarchal symbolic

makes him more Dido-like, more like the poor male captives in The Golden Legend who call

upon Saint Leonard, for, like those captives, he, along with his imagined Dido, are the “literal”

victims of patriarchal authority. Being a victim of the letter rather than its calm and confident

master, the narrator’s tragicomically desperate logocentrism is therefore suspect, lacking the

necessary anchor of an ego more or less happily situated within the world of the patriarchal

symbolic.

That the narrator is unhappily situated can be seen by looking more closely at the form

and style of the passage containing the reference to “corseynt Leonard.” Like Koonce, I read the

simile at the beginning of the narration of his dream as foreshadowing the trajectory of his dream

poem, though not because I think that the simile works well (as Koonce seems to believe), but

because, in its failure to function as a proper simile, it comically undermines the very kind of

patriarchal reading that its reference to Saint Leonard might otherwise invite. The narrator puts

forth his simile in order to express the weariness he felt that made he fall asleep so quickly on the

night of his dream:

Whan hit was nyght to slepe I lay

Ryght ther as I was wont to done,

And fil on slepe wonder sone,

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As he that wery was forgo

On pilgrimage myles two

To the corseynt Leonard,

To make lythe of that was hard. (112-18)

As no doubt pointed out by many a puzzled reader, the humorous brevity of the pilgrimage

(“myles two”) as well as the obscure specificity of reference does suggest that Chaucer may have

been indulging here in a private joke with his immediate audience. Accordingly, we learn from

one sleuthing critic that Chaucer did actually live “approximately two miles from St. Leonard’s

nunnery of Stratford-atte-Bowe” (Riverside Chaucer 979), the same nunnery that Chaucer would

later memorialize in his affectionately satirical General Prologue portrait of the Prioress who

spoke French “after the scole of Stratford atte Bowe.” Instead of comparing two distinct items

(as similes usually do) and instead of using his simile to clarify the particular weariness he felt

that night by comparing it to something more universally experienced, the Chaucerian narrator

thus seems to collapse himself with the hypothetical “he,” thereby barring his own metaphorical

translation and making his weariness on that night seem more rather less private and obscurely

particular. Rather than being a sign of poetic imagination and freedom, the narrator’s “as” seems

only to separate the narrator from his past self, suggesting that the narrator feels so bound to a

strictly literal version of the truth, that he is incapable, on the one hand, of achieving the

necessary distance of a metaphoric substitution, and, on the other hand, of “lying,” of knowingly

creatively dismembering his past experience and recombining its scattered elements in new ways

to make poetry.

Yet, at the same time, there is a humor in the narrator’s insistent literalness, a wise

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stubbornness that gleefully mocks and sabotages the standard patriarchal metaphor’s all-too-

easy, self-serving tidying up and occlusion of the literal: rather than the metaphorical weariness

of Koonce’s sin-burdened pilgrim, the narrator evokes literal weariness, the kind of happily

uncomplicated, literal exhaustion that makes one fall asleep as soon as one’s head hits the pillow;

rather than evoking the trials of pilgrimage in a general, dignified way that facilitates a

metaphorical reading, the narrator evokes a truncated two-mile pilgrimage, thereby calling up

instead of a gracefully disembodied Platonic spirit struggling “manfully” against his

metaphorical chains a very earthly pilgrim who can barely manage to walk two miles, being so

literally and awkwardly burdened by flesh: either by the humbling excess of his own body (the

chubby Geoffrey comes to mind), or, resurrecting those physically vulnerable, intensely literal

captives of the body that the legendary Saint Leonard delivered from harm, the soul-crushing

weight of shackles unjustly imposed, or the cumbersome yet infinitely delicate, infinitely

responsible weight of a pregnant body.

Rather than spurring moralistic self-improvement and inspiring us with lofty thoughts of

contemptum mundi, such humbly literal pilgrims evoke compassion, our empathy with other

human beings. At the beginning of the narrator’s telling of his dream, his hobbling and

inarticulate simile, like the composite pilgrim it evokes, thus begs not for patriarchal correction

but for a transformation and deliverance that, gesturing towards the pilgrim’s utopian yet

surprisingly local goal of “corseynt Leonard,” modestly deconstructs the Law’s hegemonic

splitting of body and soul to create a new kind of subject—one who hearkens after the inclusive

promise of tidings rather than the exclusive prize of heavenly fame. In the spirit of such pilgrims

who find their deliverance by treading a short distance over a well-worn path, I return once again

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to find radical hopes buried within the seemingly closed and dusty book of patristic exegesis.

According to the folk etymology of Leonard’s name that begins the narration of his life within

The Golden Legend, Leonard’s name—as Koonce pointed out—symbolizes heavenly fame;

however, as the quote below indicates, the fame that Leonard’s fame has nothing to with the

patriarchal hierarchy of Robertsonian “heavenly fame” and all to do with a love that dissolves

such hegemonic distinctions:

Leonardus means the perfume of the people, from leos, people, and nardus, which

is a sweet-smelling herb; and Leonard drew people to himself by the sweet odor

of his good renown. (243)

Blurring the boundaries between the saint and the people so that, like a perfume whose source

cannot be localized and which, as it diffuses, becomes less and less distinguishable from the

surrounding air, Leonard’s fame beautifies the people; unlike a heroic glory that is created and

maintained through competitive rivalry and the abjection of others, Leonard’s fame, being rooted

in and fueled by charity, is totally positive, abasing no one. Seemingly charmed by the fragrant

syllables of a beloved saint’s name, the writer of The Golden Legend lives out this ethic of

plenitude with a proliferation of etymologies and exempla: unlike the modern, scientific

etymologist whose ideal etymology is singularly perfect, the medieval writer has no desire to

reduce the mysterious flesh of words to an absolute minimum; rather than privileging one of his

etymologies of Leonard’s name over another, he offers them all, serving them up to the reader as

a kind of banquet: “Leonardus means the perfume of the people . . .Or the name comes from

legens ardua, one who chooses the hard tasks or again, it comes from leo, the lion. The lion has

four characteristics . . .”

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Just as, according to Judith Butler, mere gender proliferation is not enough to create

and sustain “bodies that matter,” mere proliferation of stories, however, is not enough to create

and sustain “tidings that matter,” tidings here meaning writing or stories that enact the utopian

promise of the Christian pilgrimage, traveling in travail towards the hope of the healing

“corseynt”---not by mere subversion or rebellion or retreat but by genuinely deconstructing the

hegemonic logic of the Law in and through the service of charity. How then can tidings

“matter”? How else, suggests Chaucer, but through our willingness to surrender to the “matristic

exegesis” of the subject, i.e. through our participation in the “body” of the divinely comical

goddess Fame, she who “kills” the self-important ego not because she is “wikke” but only in

order to set tidings free—and with that, the Christian subject, the subject defined and animated

not by the phallic consolation of worldly status and power but principally by his or her access to

the Holy Spirit, the Love of Tidings?

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CHAPTER VI

Chaucerian Integumentum: The Incarnational Astronomy of an “Elvyssh” Poet

With its Jovial exuberance and rambunctious plenitude, its crowded and noisy multitude

of tale-telling rascals—shipmen, pilgrims “with scrippes with bret-ful of lesinges/entremeddled

with tydynges” and pardoners “with boystes crammed ful of lyes”—Chaucer’s whirling,

carnivalesque, labyrinthine house of multi-colored twigs invites us to ponder its uncanny

relationship to the continuously living “fama” (both stories and “name”) of a long-dead poet; at

once ridiculous and sublime, the mysterious wicker womb that is poet Geffrey’s final destination

seems not only to look forward specifically to The Canterbury Tales but also, in some intuitive

way, to encapsulate “what Chaucer is all about.” Thus, in a marvelous way, Chaucer, by going

on to write The Canterbury Tales, proves to himself and to us that Geffrey’s dream of “the tenthe

day now of Decembre” was indeed prophetic and thereby decisively puts to rest the endless

hesitations and worries of the overwhelmed narrator of the Proem who, for over 50 lines,

wanders befuddled in the labyrinth of dream interpretation, defensively clutching his wonderful

dream.

In the whirling wicker of Chaucer criticism, the scholar who most explicitly emphasizes

this connection is John Leyerle. In his 1971 essay, “Chaucer’s Windy Eagle,” Leyerle seized

upon line 1979 of The House of Fame, the narrator’s statement that “hyt [the wicker house] was

sixty myle of lengthe”:

It is sixty miles long and goes round. This is the approximate distance between

Southwark and Canterbury, the path that Chaucer’s pilgrims were afterwards

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intended to go round. Many lament that the poet did not finish The House of

Fame, but where he left off, he possibly begun The Canterbury Tales, a much

finer House of Rumour where ‘love tydynges’ are related under a ‘man of gret

auctorite,’ Herry Bailly, the Host. The House of Rumour was to be transformed

into the Tabard Inn; throughout Chaucer’s poetic career the pressure to turn

concepts into actuality continues. (260)

In this same wide-ranging essay, Leyerle, with a similar zest, also put forth his highly original

astronomical reading of the golden eagle of Chaucer’s poem. Perhaps because Leyerle’s

playfully bold “figura and fulfillment” seems too naïve (too concrete, too direct), most Chaucer

scholars, however, have not embraced the interpretation quoted above, choosing instead to make

more cautious, academically reasonable claims about this mysterious connection between the

whirling house of twigs and The Canterbury Tales. As for Leyerle’s astronomical interpretation

of the eagle, there has been very little comment. I will hazard a guess that, for most critics, it is a

“curiosity,” something that amuses momentarily but does not generate further discussion or

analysis. I will hazard a second guess that Leyerle himself would have readily agreed with this

assessment. Much like J. D. North, the erudite historian of astronomy who wrote Chaucer’s

Universe (a book that offers multiple—albeit sometimes strained--astronomical readings of

Chaucer’s poetry), Leyerle focuses on mapping out the concrete specifics of Chaucer’s clever

and ingenious play with the stars and shows little interest in speculating upon or arguing for any

deeper significance to what he finds.

As for myself, I believe that Leyerle’s astronomical reading, despite its seeming quirky

irrelevance and whimsicality, points us to something about Chaucer and his poetry that generally

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eludes the more sophisticated, ever-skeptical, “postmodern” reader. This something has to do

with Chaucer’s unique philosophical humor, what Leyerle, in the quote above, vaguely refers to

“the pressure to turn concepts into actuality.” It also has something to do with Chaucer’s hidden,

generally neglected mathematical or scientific side, his truly “elvyssh” attraction and devotion to

comprehensive symbolic systems such as astronomy and astrology and his corresponding

Boethius-like, Dante-like desire to use both the “hard” science and mytho-poetic language of the

stars to think and creatively dream about Reality, in particular, about the relationship of the

words to the Word, the relationship of his relatively humble art of poetry and storytelling—and

language in general-- to Christian truth and the cosmos, the divine ordering of the universe. (As

Chaucer scholars will recognize, the Middle English word “elvyssh,” meaning something like

“abstracted” and “otherwordly,” is the word that, in the Prologue to Sir Thopas, the extraverted

“man’s man” Host of the Canterbury pilgrimage uses to describe the mysteriously introverted

ways of the Hobbit-like “Chaucer the pilgrim.”) This “elvyssh,” free-thinking and conceptually

brilliant, quietly Christian Chaucer is all but lost in the prevailing tendency to stress either a

predominantly this-worldly, carnivalesque, warmly compassionate, “humanist” Chaucer or some

variety of its less popular opposite—the narrowly patriarchal, moralistic and sometimes

downright sneering “Christian” Chaucer imagined by D.W. Robertson, Jr.

My goal in this and the following chapter of this dissertation is to resurrect this “elvyssh”

Chaucer. To do so, I will first revisit Leyerle’s astronomical reading of The House of Fame and

then offer a more developed and very different astronomical reading of my own, one that

ultimately connects The House of Fame to The Canterbury Tales and brings into play and

crystallizes many of the themes of the preceding chapters, showing once again how Chaucer

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creates his own queer and quietly radical Christian poetics by responding to Dante’s Divine

Comedy and working through its immensely powerful and inspirational influence. United to his

great predecessor by a newly awakened, shared love and reverence for the heavens, this future

writer of the first English treatise on the astrolabe finds a way to make music with Dante as

opposed to competing with him or merely reacting to or against him. Like a jazz musician whose

turn has come, Chaucer steps into the light and follows his fellow poet’s astonishingly sublime

and masterful poetic incarnation of the pure, heavenly music of the stars with a simultaneously

responsive and original riff of his own upon his own comically sublime instrument. But that is

not all, for, as with Chaucer’s divinely foolish reading of Boethius’s Lady Philosophy, this

revelation of the hidden astronomical play and structuring of Chaucer’s poem creates an après-

coup effect in relation to Dante’s Divine Comedy, opening up and revealing an astronomical

poetics at work in the two parts of the Comedy that I believe most influenced Chaucer as he

composed his own “divine comedy”-- Dante’s dream in Canto 9 of Purgatorio and the love-

filled, light-filled Rose of Heaven in Paradiso (this latter relationship will be the focus of my

final chapter).

Geffrey’s Dreamwork “Manifesto”: First Things First

Before explaining the nuts and bolts of The House of Fame’s comical yet sublime riff

upon the heavens, I would first like to set out the philosophical and psychological groundwork

for my astronomically based interpretations by turning to what arguably functions as the poem’s

“center of gravity,” the memorably powerful yet strangely opaque passage where, for many

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readers I think, Chaucer the poet seems to speak seriously (albeit somewhat anxiously) in his

own voice, for a moment seeming to drop the mask of Geffrey the bumbling narrator. At this

point in the poem, the voyeuristic Geffrey finds himself suddenly interrupted in his solitary,

“invisible” observation of the goings-on at the court of the goddess Fame, put on the spot, as it

were, by the pointed queries (“Frend, what is thy name? / Artow come hider to han fame?” 1871-

2) of a mysterious male voice that, as he tells us, spoke “goodly” (1870) to him and seemed to

belong to “oon that stood right at my bak” (1869). Below is the narrator’s—and seemingly

Chaucer’s—emphatic response:

“Nay, for sothe, frend,” quod y;

“I cam noght hyder, graunt mercy,

For no such cause, by my hed!

Sufficeth me, as I were ded,

That no wight have my name in honde,

I wot myself best how I stonde;

For what I drye, or what I thynke,

I wil myselven al hyt drynke,

Certeyn, for the more part,

As fer forth as I kan my art.” (1873-82)

One way—perhaps the most common way—to read the narrator’s speech is as an artistic

manifesto, that is, as Chaucer the poet’s sturdy assertion of his artistic independence and

enduring worthiness vis-à-vis the whim of popular opinion and ephemeral fame. Alluding to the

great poets and historians whom he saw standing atop the pillars in the palace of Fame, Geffrey

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places himself among that illustrious company, identifying with their noble and egoless

project of transmitting the fame of others. The narrator’s statement thus carries with it an implicit

pride: “As long I remained focused on perfecting my art, that is, focused upon the project of

bearing up and transmitting fame rather than receiving or hoarding it for myself, I, too, deserve

to stand atop one of those pillars” (“I wot myself best how I stonde”).

When the passage is read like this, Chaucer seems to express an artistic manifesto

strikingly similar to that propounded by T.S. Eliot centuries later in his influential 1919 essay,

“Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot used this essay to propound his impersonal or

depersonalized theory of poetry against the prevailing aesthetics of the day based on the

Romantic cult of personality. As Chaucer seems to do implicitly in the passage above, Eliot

opposed the impersonal process of artistic creation to spontaneous emotional expressiveness

and/or personal charisma/genius, linking the idea of the poet’s selfless devotion to poetry via the

continuous study of the works of the past to the idea of the poet’s continuous sublimation or

transmutation of his private, ordinary human emotions. Authenticating his theory by appealing to

the impersonal world of science, Eliot famously compared the mind of the mature poet to “a

shred of platinum” that functions as a catalyst of a chemical reaction when introduced into a

chamber filled with oxygen and sulphur dioxide—these latter two gases being analogous to the

poet’s ordinary, otherwise insignificant human “emotions and feelings”:

When the two gases previously mentioned [oxygen and sulfur dioxide] are mixed

in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This

combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly

formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently

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unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. It may partly or

exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect

the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and

the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the

passions which are its material. (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” 2296-7,

italics mine)

Although Chaucer’s passage is much more elliptical and hard to pin down in his reasoning, could

this perhaps be the narrator’s point when, in the midst of two statements expressing an almost

serene confidence in the objective, impersonal standards of art--a confidence tied to his earnest,

self-sacrificing desire to learn all he can-- he suddenly and with a touch of defiance insists that,

in regards to his personal experiences and suffering, “I wol myselven al hyt drynke”? Such a

reading would also be keeping in with the last scene of The House of Fame: like Eliot’s ideal

poet whose mind functions as a catalyst and who thus expresses not a personality but “a medium

. . in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” (2298),

Chaucer’s narrator is a unique presence within the whirling wicker (Eliot’s “chamber”)— active

and receptive and even seemingly convivial in his busy gathering of tidings yet, at the same time,

mysteriously intact and solitary, a contemplative set apart, like Eliot’s “shred of platinum,” from

the combustive and chaotic scene taking place around him.

“For the more part”—to borrow a phrase from Chaucer’s narrator—I would argue that

this reading of lines 1873-82 in The House of Fame through the lens of Eliot’s “Tradition and the

Individual Talent” works, especially if, like the majority of critics, one assumes that, in this

passage, the narrator is expressing a qualified confidence (‘”I wot myself best how I stonde”),

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implying that he is not only fairly certain and secure but, to some degree, proud of—or at

least not worried about--“how” he stands within the hierarchical set or order of poets past,

present, and future, i.e. his placement within, as Eliot would put it, “the tradition.” Closer

examination of the passage’s nuances, however, complicates this reading, suggesting instead that

the passage, in keeping with its cryptic sound and ambiguous, awkward syntax, represents not so

much the poet’s fully self-conscious artistic manifesto but something more akin to what a

psychoanalyst would call the dream-work. I am referring in particular to how the narrator’s

speech repeats bits of earlier speeches within his dream verbatim. Because these repetitions are

not obviously artistic in any way, they bring to mind instead one of the most common, essential

mechanisms of dream-work (and in the workings of the unconscious in general), namely,

displacement. As Freud often observed, in our dreams words and phrases that were once attached

to an emotionally charged memory are separated from their original context and transferred to an

the entirely new situation, thereby enabling the unconscious mind, in essence, to mask its

workings from other parts of the mind so that it can express and think about its unresolved

conflicts and repressed wishes freely and creatively.

In the case of the narrator, the displacement seems clearly related to the poem’s as-yet-

unresolved conflict and tension between transcendence and immanence, as shown by the fact that

the narrator ironically constructs his “declaration of independence” by cobbling together sound

bites lifted from the earlier speeches of two more or less symbolically opposed characters: the

confident and blithely philosophical Jove-sent eagle of Book II who comes to rescue the hapless,

loveless Geffrey with a flight to the palace of Fame, and the imaginary feminine victim of

masculine predatory, manipulative rhetoric with whom the sensitive Geffrey identifies, the

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despairing Dido of Book I who curses “wikke fame.” The first repetition occurs when the

narrator states his wish that no one circulates his name after his death:

Sufficeth me, as I were ded,

That no wight have my name in honde.

I wot myself best how y stonde. (1876-8)

These lines echo the eagle’s earlier chiding of the narrator for his ignorance of the stars as real,

astronomical objects, or, more generally speaking, the narrator’s tendency to accept the fables

and the words of other men rather than trying to pierce through the veil of language and seek out

celestial truth directly for himself:

For when thou redest poetrie,

How goddess gone stellifye

Brid, fish, best, or him or here,

As the Raven or eyther Bere,

Or Arionis harpe fyn,

Castor, Pollux or Delphyn,

Or Athalantes doughtres sevene,

How alle these arn set in hevene;

For though thou have hem ofte on honde,

Yet nostow not wher that they stonde. (1001-10, italics mine)

The second repetition occurs in the second half of the narrator’s speech, when, in implicit

opposition to the random dictates of fickle fame, he, miming the cautious diction of the

philosopher, he asserts that, to the degree that he learns and perfects his art, he is certain—

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apparently of his worth (how he stands) but, also perhaps, as the ambiguous syntax suggests,

certain of the meaning of his interior acts and suffering:

For what I drye, or what I thynke,

I wil myselven al hyt dynke,

Certeyn, for the more part,

As fer forth as I kan myn art. (1879-82)

These lines repeat the imaginary Dido’s statement in Book I that, as she sees it, due to their

innocence and trust in others, their inability to read and interpret masculine rhetoric, women are

doomed “for the more part” to be routinely victimized, duped and slandered and defamed by the

lying words of not only their heartless male seducers but ultimately, by all those who will

inevitably credit and further propagate these lies:

Now see I wel, and telle kan,

We wrechched wymmen konne noon art;

For certeyn, for the more part,

Thus we be served everychone. (334-7)

In his speech, the narrator thus brings into play a polarity, yet, as can be easily seen, a polarity

that is united by a similar contempt for language and its arts (rhetoric and poetry): the eagle,

opposing the inferior literary creations of human beings to the infinitely superior creations of

God, dismisses the narrator’s knowledge of the mythological stories about the constellations,

pointing to the dazzling pure, reality of the stars; Dido correlates women’s lack of rhetorical skill

or sophistication with the loving goodness of the feminine soul, and, correspondingly, men’s

mastery of the arts of language with their heartless opportunism and lack of charity, their

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egocentric desire to manipulate and dominate particular women as well as to enlarge the

fame of their own name at the expense of woman, i.e. women in general.

How are we to read these curious repetitions? According to Elaine Tuttle Hansen’s

feminist reading, the repetitions of Dido’s speech signal the feminized narrator’s strong desire or

need to distance himself from victimized Dido, in essence, to use her to purge his persona of

unwanted femininity by using her as a foil to construct his own newly emancipated subjectivity:

The dreamer’s claim . . . affirms his autonomy and subjectivity as an individual,

whatever his gender or whatever the uncertainty thereof. Thus he differs from

Dido and claims, that, feminized as he is by circumstances and perhaps by

predilection, he is finally not a woman, and not like women / any woman /every

woman . . . the evasive narrator cannot and will not be seduced and abandoned or

subjected to judgment; he alone remains covered in a truly enabling, self-created

mist. (106)

To some extent, I agree with Hansen: yes, the narrator’s repetition of Dido’s speech does imply a

desire to distance himself from Dido’s stance of victimization. But, in contrast to Hansen’s zero-

sum reading, I would argue that the narrator distances himself from Dido not so much to elevate

himself against Dido and all women but to elevate himself and Dido at the same time, i.e. there is

nothing in his speech that implies that the narrator believes that he “alone” can transcend

suffering and victimization. Moreover, as he narrator’s defensive anxiety about the circulation of

his name after his death clearly indicates, he continues to identify himself with Dido and her fear

of “wikke fame.” And he does so even though, as suggested by Ovid’s incredible magical

presence in the Hall of famous writers, Dido’s fatalism in regards to her reputation is clearly

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proven wrong: because love is mysteriously tied to the workings of the goddess Fame, the

Dido who sacrifices herself for love will never be so harshly or finally judged by prosperity as

she so fearfully imagines; rather, through her champion, Ovid, she and the whole-hearted love

she represents will eventually receive as much or more sympathy than Virgil’s “pius” yet love-

denying hero. Dido's changing fortunes of course do grant her any sense of agency (she is still at

the mercy of male poets); however, given this revelation of Ovid’s (and thus Love and Dido’s)

miraculously expanding fame, the fact that Geffrey continues to identify and emphasize with

Dido's fear of “wikke fame” shows I think a much stronger, enduring relationship to his “inner

Dido” than Hansen’s feminist argument implies. Against Hansen, I would argue that, in a way

that I shortly explain, the narrator’s desire to know and perfect his art, far from egotistically

canceling Dido out, necessarily co-exists with the southern queen and the mortal suffering she

represents.

Clearly, one reason Hansen reads the narrator’s repetition of Dido in this zero-sum way is

that, like most critics, she believes that the narrator’s concerns have to deal only with literary

authority, that is, when the narrator ties his certainty of how he “stands” to his knowledge of

what he calls “myn art,” he is referring only to literary fame and literal expertise in the art of

reading and writing texts. I propose, however, that the narrator’s other repetition—his repetition

of the eagle’s speech (which Hansen significantly does not mention)--challenges and complicates

not only Hansen’s specifically feminist reading but also, more generally, the exclusively secular

understanding of the passage advanced by almost all critics.48 As I noted earlier, the eagle, in his

chiding of Geffrey’s ignorance of astronomical realities, expresses a strongly logocentric view of

poetry, implying that those who only know the stars and constellations via the mythopoetic

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narratives handed down from generation to generation have little or no understanding of

reality: rather than trying to understand and appreciate the divine order of the cosmos—to know

where stars really stand--the narrator blindly follows the crowd and accepts these trivial

fairytales, never lifting his head from his books to make connections, to wonder about the starry

sky above him. Not surprisingly, the narrator-poet disagrees with the eagle’s slighting view of

his knowledge and vocation, and, citing his age and weak eyes, begs off his feathered teacher’s

offer to teach him about the stars directly. Here, the poem brings into play a favorite literary

theory of medieval intellectuals, a hermeneutic derived from Macrobius’s idea of narratio

fabulosa and further developed by William of Conches, Bernard Silvestris and others in the

twelfth century, namely, the idea of reading pagan mythopoetic narrative as integumentum (Latin

for “covering”), that is, as philosophy veiled with the covering of fiction. In Jean de Meun’s

continuation of Le Roman de la Rose, after the obtuse, overly literal Lover rashly accuses Lady

Reason of lewdness for openly using the word “coilles” (“cullions” or “balls”) referring to

Jupiter’s castration of Saturn, the goddess enlightens him by telling him of the hermeneutics of

integumentum:

Bien l’entendras se bien repetes

Les integumens as poetes.

La verras une grant partie

Des secrés de philosofie

Ou mout te vorras deliter,

Et mout y porras profiter;

En delitant profiteras.

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En profitant deliteras;

Car en lor geus et en lor fables

Gisent profit mout delitables,

Sous qui lor pensees covrirent

Quant le voir des fables vestirent. (7167-78, Poirion 215)

Recall Ovid’s [the poet’s?] book Integuments,

And you will understand; for there you will find

Much of the secret of philosophy,

Which will give you great profit and delight.

In profiting you will enjoyment gain,

And your enjoyment will be profitable;

For in the myths and fables of this sort

Philosophers their speculations hide.

‘Tis thus they cover many a useful truth

Which you must see if you would understand. (Robbins 147)49

More specifically, according to both Macrobius and William of Conches, mythopoetic narrative

often functions to cover up in particular the truths associated with natural philosophy (what we

today would call science), e.g. astronomical and astrological knowledge, keeping such truths

hidden—as they must be—from the ignorant who would “profane” it (the implication being that

the ignorant, like children, would misuse such knowledge or, in some way, become dangerously

confused by it). This two-tiered hermeneutic is compatible with the star-gazing eagle’s dismissal

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of Geffrey’s inferior, “secondhand,” purely poetic knowledge of the constellations: from the

eagle’s perspective, he (the eagle) is the elite visionary philosopher, a would-be William of

Conches, who, having access to a truth above and beyond language, regards mythopoetic

narrative merely as a veil that covers up the higher truth of astronomical reality, Geffrey, the

blithely ignorant, vulgar consumer of these narratives who, completely absorbed and entertained

by the letter of the integumentum, renders himself blind to the dazzling reality these fictions

cover up.

According to this reading of the narrator, he is simply a clay-footed, story-loving

worldling who has little or no desire to connect himself with the transcendent reality represented

by the stars. The narrator’s later repetition of the eagle’s speech, however, strongly challenges

this interpretation, suggesting instead that the narrator rejects the eagle’s astronomical lesson not

as a worldling but, paradoxically, as a Christian, that is, because he intuitively opposes and

seeks to transcend the eagle’s logocentric hermeneutic with a more nuanced, incarnational one.

In the later passage, Geffrey calls up and critiques the medieval theory of integumentum,

ingeniously applying it to the analogous tension between the hidden, and, to some degree, always

somewhat inaccessible, dazzling reality of his eternal soul and the “veil” of empirical Chaucer,

the named mortal being whom future others will presume to know and judge via the stories and

reports that others have circulated about him:

Sufficeth me, as I were ded,

That no wight have my name in honde.

I wot myself best how y stonde. (1876-8)

When this is understood, the narrator’s answer to the mysterious “frend” becomes much less

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cryptic, for now the narrator’s claim “I wot myself best how y stonde,” as well as his wish

that no person have his “name in honde,” being related more to the all-encompassing question of

his spiritual status or soul (as opposed to the narrower question of his literary fame), bears a

much more logical relation to the statement about the independence and privacy of his interior

acts and suffering that directly follows. Moreover, this reading also makes better sense in relation

to the narrator’s previously reported adventures in the palace of the goddess Fame. There,

seriously challenging our standard idea of literary fame, he sees writers on pillars defined not by

the fame of their own name but by how well they carry and bear up the fame of their topics, with

Ovid’s magical topic of love clearly breaking any sense of hierarchical paradigm ordered by

literary quality. Later on, he sees that those who do petition the goddess Fame are universally

concerned about their personal fame and reputation, how the world will “read” and judge their

empirical deeds. Identifying themselves completely and naively with their empirical ego (or, in

Lacanian terms, the narcissistic level of the imaginary), the petitioners are thus, for the most part,

totally yet unknowingly self-alienated, ironically “proud” of a self that is actually totally defined

and constructed by not by the words of the divine Other (e.g. the Word, the living truth of the

gospel) but by the words of the earthly Other of language. What the narrator sees in Fame's

palace alerts him to the great paradox of humility: the strongest, most fully actualized, genuinely

confident, “real” souls are those with no concern for their personal fame--the writers, those who

self-effacingly serve language, bearing up the fame of others and/or their topics. Within the

universe of Fame, the writer of the past who has the most power is not Virgil but Ovid, a male

writer who humbly effaces his masculine ego, bearing up the fame of Love and, implicitly, the

feminine point of view against patriarchal epic.

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Hence, for the poet-narrator, his devotion to his art is, in fact, a spiritual exercise,

something that ceaselessly trains him to recognize that, as with a text with its multiple layers of

meaning, he—or anyone else, for that matter--cannot be reduced to the purely literal level of his

empirical acts. In principle, the narrator’s confidence as to how he stands is open to all, that is, to

anyone who believes that each and every human being is a complex text or weaving of body and

soul, a named, embodied, ontologically humble being who lives upon the earth yet who is

nevertheless at all times mysteriously connected to a larger, divine “starry reality.” Moreover,

because the passage evokes the geographical “stonde” of the eagle’s speech, the meaning of

narrator’s phrase “how I stonde” takes on a new, unexpectedly inclusive, non-hierarchical

meaning, a pure “standing” that refers only to the literal, physical location of an object in

space—as opposed to a metaphorical standing that assumes superiority and inferiority, a

evaluation or judgment of one object vis-à-vis others grouped within the same class.

Accordingly, instead of seeming somewhat deluded in his “certainty” about how he stands

(having seen for himself how Fame works, how can he be certain about his literary fame?), the

narrator’s declaration points to a “certainty” grounded more in charity than personal ego, in the

mystery of Being and beings, his faith in a “standing” that evokes the dazzling plenitude of the

star-filled sky, a loving knowledge of the soul in its uniqueness that, transcending all petty

competition and rivalry, requires no elevation or diminishment of any other soul.

Thus, to a significant—and perhaps even greater degree-- the narrator aligns himself with

the transcendent, starry reality evoked by the eagle: how then does the dream work of the

passage imply a critique of the eagle’s two-tiered hermeneutic? One way is through the

narrator’s quietly sturdy insistence upon the mediation of the letter--the living interdependence

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of body and soul. According to the narrator, he knows “best” how he stands, i.e. rather than

asserting an eagle-like absolute, visionary certainty about his “star-self,” he humbly concedes a

certain necessary degree of mystery, claiming only to be the best reader of himself as

integumentum. Nevertheless, as he earlier implicitly disagreed with the eagle’s slighting of

mythopoetic narratives, he now emphatically grounds his partial, shadowy knowledge of his

eternal soul in his continuous, loving attention to the lowly “letter” of his soul, in his lover-like,

hungry desire to drain the cup of experience dry, to drink up all the particular acts of his

subjectivity (“For what I drye, or what I thynke, / I wil myselven al hyt drynke”) (1879-80).

Instead of adopting or rebelling against the eagle’s hierarchical hermeneutic, instead of defining

himself as either “for” or “against” transcendence—in essence, as either blithely masculine

(“soaring eagle”) or vulnerably feminine (“despairing Dido”)--he chooses a third, more creative

path, asserting the incarnational promise of Christianity. For the many reasons I have suggested,

the poet-narrator realizes this promise through his ceaseless humble desire to perfect and practice

his art as best he can: “as fer forth” he travels faithfully on his path, the more steadfastly he

“shines” in the fullness of body and soul.

Other subtle biblical nuances enhance this incarnational sacralization of language and

embodiment against the golden eagle’s logocentric hermeneutic, suggesting that, as with the

Jesus of the gospels and the visionary writer of the Revelation, Geffrey realizes himself most

fully through his objectification and emasculation. First, with the narrator’s words at line 1880

(“I wil myselven al hyt drynke”), there is a possible allusion to the Passion, to Christ’s full

acceptance of the “cup” of his awful destiny, the will of his Father that he must cruelly suffer and

die; as Christ chides Peter when the loyal disciple aggressively tries to protect him, “Put your

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sword into its sheath; shall I not drink of the cup which the Father has given me?” (John

18:11). Through his inherently vulnerable position vis-à-vis mysterious, masculine “frend,”

Geffrey’s “holy objectification” is further enhanced and, moreover, “queered.” According to

Koonce’s extensive, Robertsonian exegesis of this passage, the mysterious male voice that

speaks from behind “has both a good and evil significance in Scriptural commentary” (244). As

Koonce points, one example with “good significance” can be found in Revelation 1:10:

Christ is . . . identified with the Apocalyptic angel whose voice John hears behind

his back, admonishing him to record all that he sees and hears: “I was in the spirit

on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet.” (245)

Koonce, however, quickly dismisses both a positive or even ambiguous interpretation of

Geffrey’s “voice from behind,” arguing instead that the voice represents the voice of Satan and

temptation. To support this idea, Koonce refers to Christ’s stinging rebuke of Peter in Matthew

16:23 (“Get behind me, Satan!”), arguing from this that the voice from behind represents “the

position of subjection to which Christ consigned Satan and all his followers who would tempt

men with fame and other temporalia” (245). Out of context, this sounds reasonable enough and

may have in fact been the way many medieval people understood it. Closer study of the context

of Christ’s mysterious words, however, seriously undermines this simplistic association of evil

with subjection, with being “behind”:

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and

suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and

on the third day be raised. And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying,

“God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” But he turned and said to

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Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance [Greek, “stumbling

block”] to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” (Matthew 16: 21-

3)

This strange passage is rich in paradox. Christ’s rebuke, “Get behind me, Satan!,” associates

Satanic temptation not with a “voice from behind” but with the exact opposite: the voice of

powerless, worried Peter who literally becomes a “stumbling block” by standing in front of—

under the gaze of--his beloved Lord; in his paradoxical position, Peter represent the hero-

worshipping, seemingly loyal follower who stands in the way of his Lord by his very act of

following, by his very attempt to avert his leader’s destined subjection. Conversely, Christ’s

solution represents another paradox: Christ orders “Satanic” Peter to get “behind him,”

symbolically linking this new position “behind Christ” with Peter’s acceptance of his leader’s

future subjection and death. Thus, to serve Christ truly, to get metaphorically “behind” his

leader, Peter must transcend his human ideas of good and evil and accept the literal

objectification of Jesus, placing himself in a position of visual power by observing his beloved

leader “from behind.”

I believe this reading of the position “from behind” is directly relevant to Geffrey’s

situation when he is accosted suddenly by the voice of the “frend.” The “voice from behind”

represents a turning-point for the narrator, as well for the poem: ever since the eagle dropped

Geffrey off at the palace of Fame, Geffrey has existed as the eye “behind,” watching the events

unfold before him from a position of privileged invisibility. Suddenly, a mysterious male voice

from behind puts him on the spot, creating a comical aural version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s all-

powerful, objectifying, shame-inducing “Look” of the Other that suddenly mortifies and fixes us,

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instantly robbing us of our freedom and transcendence—a Look that, as Sartre suggests in his

phenomenological analysis of the childhood of Jean Genet, in its extreme form (being caught “in

the act” from behind), can feminize and queer the would-be masculine subject, more or less

freezing him for life in the position of object. The incarnational world of The House of Fame,

however, makes peace with the shame and humiliation of embodiment that Sartre so often in his

writings recoils from in horror and disgust, suggesting that, far from being the thief or murderer

of transcendence, “the Look,” spoken by a “frend,” becomes that which grants us our only

genuine access to it, enfleshing us, as it were, and thereby enabling us to move beyond false,

Icarus-like transcendence of masculine narcissism to glimpse and anticipate—through the very

“blindness” of the flesh-- the unseeable mystery and fullness of the “star-like” Real of the soul.

Abruptly forcing Geffrey to renounce his seemingly accustomed mode of self-protective and a-

historical neutrality and invisibility (in Boethian terms, the intellectual comfort of the ivory-and-

glass library), the sudden, objectifying voice calls upon the narrator to take a position in regards

to the wondrous events of his dream, thereby sparking the “dream-work” transformative,

synthesizing repetitions of the eagle and Dido. Ultimately, as with the voice who speaks from

behind in Revelation 1:10, commanding John to “write what he sees,” the voice that objectifies

and incarnates the narrator of The House of Fame is simultaneously the voice that inspires both

vision and writing, performing the necessary fulfillment of vision by the word by fusing

transcendence and immanence in one final marvelous revelation of the generation of tidings.

Having now examined Geffrey’s manifesto—what I earlier called the poem’s “center of

gravity”—it is now time to turn to the main business of this chapter, namely, to my proposal that

Chaucer, inspired by his reading of the astronomically erudite Dante (and, of course, Boethius as

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well), playfully creates his own sublime-ridiculous Christian integumentum, grounding and

performing the incarnational poetics revealed by the narrator’s dream-work-like repetitions via

his own poetic transformations and mediations of lofty celestial objects of the star-filled eighth

heaven, the sphere of the fixed stars. There is, however, a both a general and particular

significance to Chaucer’s poetic re-creations of fixed stars. First, the general: as the bookish,

fledgling astronomer would have known from his reading and study of writers such as Dante and

Boethius, this sphere and its objects, unlike the seven spheres of the “wandering” planets below

them, traditionally signified the sacred “beyond” of charity and the mysterious, steadfast,

absolute reality of the human soul—its divine intelligence.50 More particularly, as I stated earlier,

I propose that the celestial objects with which Chaucer plays, far from being randomly chosen

(or, as Leyerle suggests, being determined primarily by the astronomical situation in the sky on a

particular day in history), ultimately derives from his reading of two parts of Dante’s Divine

Comedy: Dante’s visionary dream of the eagle at the beginning of Canto 9 of Purgatorio, and

Paradiso’s love-filled radiant Rose of Heaven in which Dante the pilgrim ecstatically ends his

long journey to God.

As I alluded to earlier, Chaucer’s incarnational astronomical poetics and its implications

will be focus of this and the following chapter. For the reader’s ease and convenience, I offer the

following road-map: in the next section of this chapter, I present an astronomical reading of the

eagle and the goddess Fame that is tied to Dante’s dream in Canto 9 of Purgatorio; I will then

follow up this reading with a discussion of how Chaucer’s playful integumentum of his goddess

Fame may shed light on the mystery of Dante’s Lucia as well as upon the question of the

relationship between The House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales, offering the reader

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intriguing new evidence that suggests that, just as John Leyerle once so boldly claimed, the

whirling wicker is indeed the great figura of Chaucer’s poetry—and, I will add, the great figura

of Chaucer’s quietly radical, profoundly Christian quest. In the following, last chapter of the

dissertation, I will present an astronomical reading of the whirling wicker of Book III of The

House of Fame, showing how the poem’s crazy but brilliant astronomical “dreamwork,” set in

motion by Chaucer’s reading of the closing cantos of Paradiso, unifies Chaucer’s fantastical

grab-bag of a poem in ways unseen by previous critics--and perhaps unknown by the “dreaming”

author himself.

As the Jovian Eagle Sets, the Goddess Fame Rises:

Chaucer the Star-Gazer Reads Canto 9 of Dante’s Purgatorio

To begin, I would first like to discuss and respond to the astronomical reading that

inspired my own interpretation—that proposed by John Leyerle over thirty years ago in his essay

“Chaucer’s Windy Eagle.” In this easy, John Leyerle speculated that Chaucer chose to date the

narrator’s visionary dream on December 10 not for merely whimsical or ironic reasons (as most

critics believe) but because, in fact, the poet did “dream,” i.e. create, this poem in response to the

specific astronomical situation of not only December 10 but December 10 of 1379, a year which

corresponds nicely with Robinson’s generally accepted dating of the poem, 1379-80. To support

his original reading of the poem, Leyerle pointed out the following astronomical facts: 1) during

the month of December, the sun approaches the constellation of Aquila, the Eagle, specifically,

the eagle sent down by Jove to abduct Ganymede (Ganymede is immortalized in the sky by the

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constellation of Aquarius that directly follows), 2) given that the winter solstice (in

astrological terms, the entry of the sun into the Saturn-ruled sign of Capricorn) sometimes

occurred in Chaucer’s time in the last hours of December 11, Chaucer chose the night of 10-11

because on that night “the sun is then closest to the eagle but still in the sign of Sagittarius, the

night domicile of Jupiter” (249), and 3) during the years 1379-80, the planet Jupiter was in the

signs of Capricorn and Aquarius and therefore close to Aquila, thus giving an astronomical basis

for the eagle’s statement “that he is ‘dwellynge with the god of thonder, / Which that men callen

Jupiter’ (608-9)” (249-50).

As will soon become clear, my own astronomical reading of the poem builds on

Leyerle’s ingenious linking of the eagle with the constellation of Aquila but not on his argument

for the December 10 date of the poem. My reason for not accepting the latter is that I believe a

stronger and more likely—as well as stylistically elegant--alternative explanation for this date

exists, one that, as I far as know, no one has yet noticed, namely, the simple fact that, in choosing

December 10, Chaucer is following in the fashionable footsteps of Guillaume de Machaut, the

French poet of dream visions who is arguably Chaucer’s strongest early influence. In his

explanatory notes to the poem’s mysterious and seemingly “random” December 10 date, John

Fyler mentions Machaut as a possible influence but only on the general grounds that Machaut

also dated two of his dream visions in the same inexplicably precise way that Chaucer does: the

Dit dou lyon dream vision occurs on April 2, 1342, and that of Jugement dou Roy de Navarre

occurs on November 9, 1349 (Riverside Chaucer 979). What Fyler fails to see here is that these

dates of Machaut are not arbitrary but are instead linked to each other through their shared

symmetrical pattern of numerical doubling. With this pattern, Machaut matches the date of the

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month to the number that represents the month within the year according to the common

medieval, perhaps biblically based and/or astrologically based tradition of deeming March (as

opposed to our January) the first month of the year: as the Nun’s Priest of The Canterbury Tales

reminds his audience, March is “the month in which the world began” (VII. 3187). Thus,

Machaut’s April 2 represents the second day of the second month, his November 9, the ninth day

of the ninth month. Accordingly, perhaps since Machaut hadn’t yet taken up number 10, Chaucer

chose for his dream vision December 10, the tenth day of the tenth month. That Chaucer has

adopted “the Machaut pattern” here seems beyond doubt in light of another Chaucerian mystery,

namely, the poet’s puzzling fascination with May 3 (as readers of Chaucer know, this date is

highlighted in Troilus and Criseyde, The Knight’s Tale, and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale).51

Applying “the Machaut pattern” to this date, we see that May 3, as the third day of the

third month, represents a doubling of three--hence, for Christian love-poet Chaucer, a date of

particular symbolic resonance given that its doubling of three fuses together Love (Venus is the

third planet) and the Christian God (the Trinity, the age of Christ when he died and rose from the

dead). As for the December 10 of The House of Fame, it doubles ten, the number of completion

(e.g. The Ten Commandments), and thus once again links Chaucer’s poem to Dante’s Divine

Comedy (10 circles of Hell, the Tenth Heaven of the Empyrean). According to Augustine’s

Christian numerology, ten, along with three, is a particularly holy number, a number that

“signifies the knowledge of the creator and creation” (On Christian Teaching 2. 25; Bettenson

45). Lastly, the emphatic ten of Geffrey’s dream flight to Fame’s mountain and House adds a

biblical resonance to “the Machaut pattern,” suggesting a comical transformation of a famous

biblical vision: according to Ezekiel 40:1, the prophet’s visionary ascent to God’s mountain and

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Temple occurs on “the tenth day of the month” (Koonce 64).52

That said, I do not believe a symbolic December 10 in any way rules out the idea the

possibility that, with this date in mind, Chaucer then turned his attention to the concrete

astronomical situation of December 10—though not to one exclusively linked to a particular

year, as Leyerle suggests (although Chaucer borrows Machaut’s doubling pattern, he, in contrast

to the more historically minded Machaut, does not tie his symbolic date to a specific year). This

is not to say that I reject out-of-hand Leyerle’s ingenious astronomical reading of the Eagle’s

reference to dwelling near Jupiter, only that I regard it more along the lines of an invaluable clue

or signpost. That is, rather than viewing the purely concrete aspect of Chaucer’s use of

astronomy as “the whole thing,” I propose that, like Dante, Chaucer finds his deepest poetic

inspiration in contemplating and thinking creatively about the stable ordering of the heavens

(where and how things “stonde”); rather than creating a poetic astronomy that is narrowly topical

and transient, i.e. dependent for its meaning on the changing movements of the planets, Chaucer,

I believe, creates poetry in The House of Fame in response to a more or less universally

meaningful astronomical situation, in this case, one primarily based on the fixed stars that

anyone might see on a clear winter night in December—anyone living even today, six centuries

later.

So, what, then, does Chaucer find as he gazes up at the December sky? As Leyerle’s

reading suggests, he finds the golden eagle of Dante’s dream, in the form of the constellation of

Aquila, swooping down upon him, made golden by its nearness to the approaching winter sun.

According to Leyerle, this nearness of the Sun to the celestial Eagle would have rendered the

constellation invisible, “seen in December only in the imagination” (249). Commenting on

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Leyerle’s remark, Marijane Osborn, author of Time and the Astrolabe in The Canterbury

Tales, points out that the constellation Aquila can be seen in December “on the astrolabe” as

well, as Osborn explains below:

If Chaucer has the constellations, or the alpha stars [the term “alpha star” refers to

the brightest star of a particular constellation] of many of them “on honde” on a

recently acquired astrolabe, and if he has consulted it, he will have seen that, as

the Sun rises over the horizon on December 10, Altair [the alpha star of Aquila],

at a latitude of 29° N, will appear above the horizon . . .Altair will remain in the

sky above for the whole of that brief, seven-and-a-half-hour day (Eisner,

Kalendarium 131). The Eagle star Altair is marked on the rete of the astrolabe.

(Osborn 50)

Altair’s prominent presence on the medieval astrolabe can be easily seen in several of the many

detailed drawings Osborn includes in her informative study; the name (“Althair”) and pointer of

this star can also be seen etched on the rete of “late Gothic astrolabe” photographed on the

frontispiece of Chauncey Wood’s Chaucer and the Country of the Stars. With such an

instrument, Chaucer would have little problem locating Altair (as well as perhaps fifteen or so

other “astrolabe stars”) in the heavens—or, for that matter, determining, in a fairly precise

manner, what time the star would rise, culminate, and set, as well as its altitude.

What, however, Osborn—perhaps out of scholarly politeness or because it is not germane

to her own argument—neglects to point out is that Leyerle’s statement about Aquila’s December

10 invisibility is, in fact, incorrect: as Chaucer would have known from his astrolabe, the star

Altair and its constellation Aquila would have actually been visible on the night of December 10

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for nearly two hours after the end of twilight, or, in other words, when “true night” officially

begins and the sky becomes dark, dark enough to see, on a clear-enough night, whatever stars

can be seen from one’s location (In II. 2. 6 of his A Treatise on the Astrolabe, Chaucer defines

“verrey nyght” (true night) as beginning when the sun has passed eighteen degrees below the

western horizon. Accordingly, dawn begins when the sun is eighteen degrees below the eastern

horizon.) Actually, due to its brightness (the star is the thirteenth brightest in the sky, and, from

Chaucer’s latitude, the sixth brightest), the alpha star of Aquila would have been one of the first

to appear in the heavens, visible, like nearby Vega (the third brightest star in Chaucer’s English

sky), in the deepening blue sky at 5 p.m., a full hour before the end of twilight. The Eagle star

would have then, due to natural obstacles (e.g. trees, hills) likely disappeared from Chaucer’s

view by 8 p.m., setting—or, in the dreaming Geffrey’s case, swooping down---around fifteen

minutes later (at this time, our narrator would have fallen asleep since, as he tells us at lines 112

and 114, “whan hit was nyght,” e.g. around 6 p.m. on December 10, he “fil on slepe wonder

sone”). The astronomical fact of Altair’s setting can be easily verified by consulting a

reproduction of fourteenth-century astrolabe (the model I use has been precisely keyed for 1390,

Oxenford) and then, if one wishes further validation and precision, with a modern computer

astronomical program.53 Along with the constellation of the Eagle, Chaucer would have seen in

the western sky the constellation of Aquarius, the stars that immortalize beautiful Ganymede, the

Jove-sent Eagle’s prey.54 Significantly, with the exception of “the Raven” (Corvus), he would

have also been able to see—before the setting of Altair—all of the constellations that the Eagle

blithely points out to Geffrey in the night sky:

For when thous redest poetrie,

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How goddess gonne stellifye

Bridd, fish, best, or him or here,

As the Raven or eyther Bere [Ursa Major and Ursa Minor}.

Or Arionis harpe fyn [Lyra],

Castor or Pollux [Gemini], or Delphyn [Delphinus]

Or Athalantes doughteres sevene [the Pleiades] . . . (1001-7)

(Although, on December 10, the Raven or Corvus would be visible only several hours later --

after 2 a.m.--I suspect Chaucer, who will later retell Ovid’s story of the tale-telling Crow in The

Manciple’s Tale, couldn’t resist the constellation’s inclusion because of the gossipy mythological

Raven’s obvious symbolic tie-in with the subject of The House of Fame.)

The astronomical fact of Aquila’s visibility on December 10, however, does not answer

what seems to me the fundamental question, namely, “Why might Chaucer be inspired to link the

Aquila of the sky to the golden eagle of Dante’s visionary dream in Canto 9 of Purgatorio?” In

passing, Leyerle seems to suggest that Chaucer may have done so because he linked Dante’s

dream eagle (the immediate literary source of his own eagle) to the heavenly, speaking eagle of

Paradiso:

This eagle [Dante’s dream eagle] is a foreshadowing of the heavenly eagle of the

just rulers in the sphere of Jupiter in Paradiso, cantos XVIII through XX; like

Chaucer’s eagle, it is the constellation Aquila (252).

Leyerle’s bold declaration that Dante’s heavenly Eagle is Aquila will, of course, come as a

surprise to many a Dante scholar. Still, however dubious Leyerle’s claim may seem in relation to

the Divine Comedy, the idea that the eagle of Paradiso may have inspired Chaucer, the fledgling

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astronomer, to think of Aquila seems much more plausible: after all, the starry souls that

make up the heavenly Eagle do arrange themselves in patterns, suggesting something like a

metamorphosing constellation; moreover, at the beginning of Canto 20 of Paradiso, Dante calls

up an image of stars suddenly emerging in the sky after twilight in order to help the reader

envision the sudden intensification of the “living lights” (vive luci, 10) that make up the Eagle.

At best, though, I think the heavenly emblem-like Eagle would have only inspired Chaucer in a

general way. What Leyerle did not realize is that the most likely source for Chaucer’s

astronomical “translation” of the golden eagle is the very text in which Dante describes his early-

morning dream of rapture, Canto 9 of Purgatorio. Once one looks more carefully at this text

from an astronomical perspective (a perspective that Dante’s insistent astronomical “snap-shots”

surely encourages), the idea of Chaucer’s poetic transformation of Aquila no longer seems so far-

fetched or whimsical.

According to Dante, his dream of being a Ganymede abducted and ravished by a golden

eagle occurs on the second morning of his arrival on the island of Purgatory, or, within the

calendar of the poem, on the Monday after Good Friday. This dream, the poet tells us, was quite

long, beginning dawn or an hour before sunrise (the appropriate time for visionary dreams and

the time in which all three of Dante’s dreams occur while he is on the island) and ending when

he woke up in terror over two hours after sunrise. Below is the account of the dream of rapture

itself—significantly ending on line 33, the number of Christ (although I quoted this passage

earlier in Chapter Four, for the reader’s convenience, I will quote it again):

in sogno mi parea veder sospesa

un’aguglia nel ciel con penne d’oro,

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con l’ali aperte e a calare intesa;

ed esser mi parea là dove fuoro

abbandonati i suoi da Ganimede,

quando fu ratto al sommo consistoro.

Fra me pensava: “Forse questa fiede

pur qui per uso, e forse d’altro loco

disdegna di portarne suso in piede.”

Poi mi parea che, poi rotata un poco,

terribil come folgor discendesse,

e me rapisse suso infino al foco.

Ivi parea che ella e io ardesse;

e sì lo ’ncendio imaginato cosse,

che convene che ’l sonno si rompesse. (9. 19-33)

I seemed to see, in a dream, an eagle poised in the sky, with feathers of gold, its

wings outspread, and prepared to swoop. And I seemed to be in the place where

Ganymede abandoned his own company, when he was caught up to the supreme

consistory; and I thought within myself, “Perhaps it is wont to strike only here,

and perhaps disdains to carry anyone upward in its claws from any other place.”

Then it seemed to me that, having wheeled a while, it descended terrible as a

thunderbolt and snatched me upwards as far as the fire: there it is seemed that it

and I burned; and the imagined fire so scorched me that perforce my sleep was

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broken.

Unbeknownst to most readers, the timing of Dante’s dream creates a marvelous microcosm-

macrocosm effect, for the events of the pilgrim’s sublime dream are not limited to Dante’s

subjectivity but are, as he dreams, simultaneously unfolding in the story-filled heavens above

him. How so? Whether Chaucer calculated the date of the dream according to a symbolic Good

Friday (March 25) or the Good Friday of 1300 (April 8), he would know, even using his

astrolabe set for his English location, that Dante’s three-hour visionary dream occurred at the

same time that the constellation of Aquila, followed by Aquarius (Ganymede) passed over the

meridian, ascending to their highest point in the heavens. My guess, though, is that Chaucer,

remembering Canto 1’s beautiful dawn scene of Venus rising with the trailing stars of Pisces,

would have chosen to date Dante’s dream according to a 1300 Good Friday (hence, on the dawn

of April 11, when the faint stars of Pisces would be further from the rising Sun and thus more

likely to be visible). Come to think of it, Canto 1’s dawn scene alone would have given the poet

enough contextual information to recognize the microcosm-macrocosm parallel between Dante’s

dream and the similarly “scorching” ascent of the celestial Eagle and Ganymede being played

out in the sky above the island of Purgatory. If, though, Chaucer by chance had access to an

astrolabe plate keyed to Jerusalem’s latitude (32 degrees North), he would have been able to gain

further astronomical precision.55 This is true because the world-clock that Dante uses throughout

Purgatorio is mathematically idealized, with the island of Purgatory in the southern hemisphere

precisely mirroring the latitude of Jerusalem in the northern hemisphere—32 degrees South. Of

course, Dante knows that the two skies are different, as he takes pains to inform us: in Canto 1,

the pilgrim gazes at four stars that are impossible to see in the northern hemisphere, and, in

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Canto 4, he learns, much to his amazement, that, in Purgatory, the meridian (the location of

the Sun at noon) is located in the North as opposed to the South of the northern hemisphere.

Nevertheless, since all the constellations of the Zodiac as well as many other constellations

(including Aquila) are visible in both hemispheres, the idealized mirroring of Dante’s world-

clock makes the morning sky of Purgatory similar in many ways to a morning sky over

Jerusalem. Using an astrolabe outfitted with the appropriate plate for Jerusalem’s latitude,

Chaucer would thus be able to “see” the morning sky of Purgatory that arched above the

sleeping, dreaming Dante on April 11, Easter Monday of 1300. What he would see there on his

astrolabe would confirm the link between Aquila and the golden eagle of Dante’s dream,

underscoring both the golden color of the eagle’s wings as well as the burning sensation and

imagery of fire that Dante associates with his eagle-borne ascent: on April 11, Altair, the

brightest star of Aquila, is tied closely to the rising Sun, reaching its culmination at the meridian

precisely as the sun rises over the horizon!56 As it so happens, due to the effect of precession,

this celestial pattern of Altair culminating within minutes of the rising of the sun occurred over

Jerusalem during the historical week of the Resurrection: on March 28, 34 (a Sunday, but,

according to tradition, what would be the Monday after Christ’s March 27 resurrection), Altair

culminates five minutes after the sun rises, and on the morning of March 29, 34 (a Monday, so,

for those who care more about making the Resurrection fall on a historical Sunday, the true

“Monday after the Resurrection”), Altair culminates two minutes after the sun rises.57 Although

Chaucer probably did not know about this uncanny repetition, the fact that, in Canto 1 of

Purgatorio, Dante represents his and his poem’s journey from Hell to Purgatory as a

resurrection suggests that he himself did know that his Purgatory dawn “cited” that most

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important dawn of all history not only symbolically but also, in a wonderfully precise way,

literally, physically. (Even if Dante did not know this, I think it is safe to say that this great

Christian poet and lover of the stars would be pleased by the revelation of his poem’s “holy

synchronicity”).58

The divine, Christic associations of Dante’s golden eagle, however, are not lost on

Chaucer: we should not let the humor of Book II make us lose sight of the fact that Chaucer, in

the closing lines of Book I of The House of Fame, also clearly links his bird to Christ and to the

Sun: before the bird opens its beak to speak, Chaucer’s golden eagle is a genuinely sublime,

Dante-esque figure, swooping down from the height of the sky “sooth as deth” directly after the

bewildered and frightened narrator utters his cry to Christ and casts his eyes up towards the

heavens. For many readers, perhaps, the eagle’s immediate descent into comedy is a sure sign of

Chaucer’s absolute distance from the fearsome transcendence of Dante, that Chaucer means for

us to revise our first visionary/visual impressions of the bird drastically, more or less canceling

out its earlier, Christic sublimity. As I suggested earlier, though, the narrator’s speech to the

“frend,” complicates this dismissive view of the eagle, showing how the literal phrases of the

eagle’s astronomical lesson—along with the literal phrases of his imaginary Dido’s protest--

reverberate and jumble together in the head of passive Geffrey, inspiring the blocked poet to

cobble them together so that he take a position beyond the gender-linked impasse of

transcendence and immanence—and, ultimately, so that he can write Christ in his own unique

ironical, comically sublime, late-fourteenth-century English way. (That Chaucer’s golden eagle

should lecture on sound rather than light thus makes perfect sense in this poem: it is ultimately

what Geffrey literally hears and unconsciously remembers that “saves” him, not what he sees.)

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Within Canto 9 of Purgatorio, Dante, of course, much more memorably and vividly

stages this incarnational fusion of masculine transcendence and feminine immanence via the

temporal and symbolic fusion of the transcendently passionate and homoerotic scenario of the

pilgrim’s dream (his terrifying, thrillingly violent, vertical abduction; divine rape by Jove’s

golden eagle) and the simple, gently maternal event that occurs while the pilgrim is dreaming

(Lucia’s literal, horizontal carrying of the body of the sleeping pilgrim to the steps of Mount

Purgatory). As I suggested in Chapter Four, Chaucer to some degree incorporates Canto 9’s

eagle-Lucia polarity within his eagle and Jove characters, making both less distinctly and

conventionally masculine and patriarchal by aligning both with the sphere of immanence (the

eagle speaks with a comically familiar or domesticated voice and, defying his own status as a

traditional emblem of visionary experience, lectures on sound rather than vision; the kindly Jove

with his implicit approval of storytelling and the goddess Fame). Moreover, if one reads the

eagle as Aquila as Leyerle and I do, the eagle’s status as visionary emblem undergoes a further

“desublimation” through a hidden joke at the expense of the astronomically erudite eagle:

directing the overwhelmed Geffrey to the blinding reality of the stars, the eagle dismisses

Geffrey’s immersion in the letter of mythopoetic integementum—all the while blissfully unaware

that he himself owes his very “eagle” identity to one of these “silly stories” he so confidently

dismisses (i.e. the myth of Ganymede’s Jove-commanded abduction that he is now comically

replaying with the narrator).

Besides these parodic touches in Book II of The House of Fame, there is, however,

perhaps yet another, ingeniously astronomical way that Chaucer responded to Canto 9’s sublime

fusion of transcendence and immanence. As I will now explain, certain mysterious particulars

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about the goddess Fame and her palace suggest that Chaucer may have structured his own

“divine comedy” by finding an apt astronomical parallel not just for Dante’s dawn dream of

heavenly ascent to a male god but also for his esteemed predecessor’s temporal juxtaposition of

the perhaps psychologically necessary fantasy or dream of the eagle and that which this fantasy

mediates, namely, the retroactively ontologically privileged “real” Lucia (whom the pilgrim

significantly never sees but only hears about later), she who performs the miracle of divine grace

by literally taking the pilgrim up and carrying him in her arms as a mother would a child who has

fallen asleep far away from his bed, that is, not through a sublime divine rape via masculine

force and spirit but through the radiantly lovely yet, to the spiritually unregenerated or dead

subject of the patriarchal order, relatively unimpressive or “invisible” action of the feminine,

through the embodied humility of “the letter.”

So far, I have proposed that Chaucer, grounding the comical events of his poem in how

things “stonde” in the heavens, created his own integumentum by paralleling the descent of his

dream eagle with the night descent/setting of Aquila and the star Altair. Having viewed and

performed the descent and setting of the heavenly eagle on his astrolabe, Chaucer would have no

doubt noticed—and perhaps been inspired by-- an intriguing temporal polarity playing out on the

brass microcosm that he held in his hands: right around the time that Altair sets, Sirius or the

Dog-Star, the brilliant alpha star of Canis Major and indeed the brightest star in all the heavens,

rises over the eastern horizon in Chaucer’s English sky.59 He would have no doubt noticed this

fortuitous coincidence for two reasons: 1) on medieval astrolabes, both of these stars would have

pointers, with the pointer for Sirius, the alpha star in the mouth of the celestial dog, being

particularly prominent and conspicuous (along the edge of the instrument, there would be a fairly

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large dog’s head with a tongue that points to Sirius), 2) in both classical and medieval

didactic astronomical poetry, i.e. poetry that tells about the placement of the fixed stars as well as

the myths associated with them, the most common structuring and mnemonic device is the

pairing of temporally opposing stars, stars or constellations that have contemporaneous rising

and setting times, e.g. “When the Eagle descends in the West, up rises the burning star of the

Dog in the East.”60 As turns out, however--unlike the great majority of rising-and-setting pairs--

the temporal polarity of these two stars is also, to an uncanny degree, symbolically apt. On the

one hand, Aquila is the “stellified” Eagle of Jove of Greek and Roman mythology, the fierce

royal bird of prey that loyally carries out the desire and will of the Sky Father, carrying Jove’s

thunderbolts and immortalized in the sky for his abduction of Ganymede; the eagle is also, of

course, the favorite symbol of imperial Rome.61 Sirius, on the other hand, although ostensibly

and innocuously known and referred to throughout the Western tradition as only the Dog-Star

(“Orion’s dog”), was for centuries also strongly associated with the Mother Goddesses of the

great pagan mystery religions: the Egyptian goddess Isis and Ceres (Demeter), the ever-fertile,

life-nurturing goddess of the grain whom, along with her daughter Proserpina (Persephone),

throngs of ecstatic devotees worshipped each year by taking part in the secret Eleusinian

mysteries (these mysteries being the same secrets rites of Nature that Macrobius reverently and

metaphorically refers to in order to defend the philosopher’s use of narratio fabulosa). Indeed,

this ancient and long-persisting link between Sirius and Ceres (the fertility of the earth) was

apparently such a “given” that we find it alluded to in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a

work well-respected throughout the Middle Ages for its Christian wisdom as well as its natural

philosophy; similar to the way the Egyptians believed that the heliacal rising of Sirius (the

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resting-place of the soul of Isis) insured the yearly, life-giving inundation of the Nile,

Boethius’s praise poem to God in Book 1 implies that, in some mysterious way, the helical rising

of the star Sirius (the “dog-days” of summer) ripens the crops, making the grain golden and

heavy under its burning rays:

Tua vis varium temperat annum

Ut quas Boreae spiritus aufert

Revehat mites Zephyrus frondes

Quaeque Arcturus semina vidit

Sirius altas urat segetes.

The changing year is ordered by your power,

So that the leaves the north wind strips away

The west wind brings in gentleness,

And what Arcturus saw as sleeping seed

As tall crops under Sirius burn dry. (1. m. 5. 18-22; Loeb 158-161)

Thus, in contrast to the more purely symbolic linking of Aquila with the Jovian Eagle of myth,

this assumed relationship between the dazzling Sirius and the Great Mother was thus something

numinously Thing-like, a real manifestation within the world of the awesome, life-sustaining

power of the Goddess. In a way that would have pleased the elegant cosmological sensibilities

of many a star-gazing Neo-Platonist, this polarity between the “upward divine” of patriarchal

transcendence and “downward divine” of matriarchal immanence is also fortuitously literally

mapped out in the heavens. As Chaucer may have also recognized by locating Aquila/Altair and

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Canis Major/Sirius on his astrolabe and in the sky, each of these constellations, located either

fully or partially in the Milky Way, is aptly positioned close to one of the important opposing

“portals of the sun” described below by Macrobius in his influential Commentary on the Dream

of Scipio:

The Milky Way girdles the zodiac, its great circle meeting it obliquely so that it

crosses it at the two tropical signs, Capricorn and Cancer [as Stahl notes in his

translation, this intersection, due to the effects of precession, had actually moved

into the opposing constellations of Gemini and Sagittarius by Macrobius’s time;

Macrobius is following Porphyry here.]. Natural philosophers named these the

“portals of the sun” because the solstices lie athwart the sun’s path on either side .

. . Souls are believed to pass through these portals when going from the sky to the

earth and returning from the earth to the sky. For this reason one is called the

portal of men and the other the portal of the gods: Cancer, the portal of men,

because through it descent is made to the infernal regions; Capricorn, the portal of

gods, because through it souls return to their rightful abode of immortality, to be

reckoned among the gods. [Stahl 133-4]

Needless to say, the constellation associated with heavenly ascent and Jove’s Ganymede-

abducting Eagle “soars” near the “portal of gods,” and the star associated with the immanent,

downward rays of the life-sustaining Mother Goddess shines near the incarnational “portal of

men.” That Chaucer would notice these two opposing bright stars specifically in relation to the

Milky Way is not as whimsical as one might first imagine: several centuries later, in his first

published work, the 1755 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, Immanuel Kant

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would focus on the relationship between the constellation of the Eagle and Sirius to support

his hypothesis that the dazzling Sirius was, in fact, the center of our Milky Way galaxy (and,

thus, according to the astronomy of Kant’s time, the great “sun” of the one and only universe

that, through its gravitational pull, held Everything together). (Although, as it turns out, Kant was

on the right track with his focus on these two stars, astronomers now know that the brilliant

philosopher had it backwards: it is actually the Eagle rather than Sirius that is close to the center

of the Milky Way, that center being located in the constellation of Sagittarius.) 62

Keeping in mind the intriguing astronomical fact that, for Chaucer’s location, the rising

of Sirius coincides with the setting of Altair, what specific evidence within the poem suggests the

central character of Book III--Goddess Fame upon her throne in glory--is at least in part

Chaucer’s poetic incarnation of the rising “goddess star”? The first hint is the composition of the

palace of Fame: as the narrator remembers with wonder and admiration, the magnificent building

is entirely made of beryl, a precious stone prized for its brilliant translucence:

But natheles al the substance

I have yit in my remembrance;

For whi me thoughte, be Seynt Gyle,

Al was of ston of beryle,

Bothe the castle and the tour,

And eke the halle and every bour,

Wythouten peces or joynynges. (1181-7)

As Koonce points out, beryl, a stone that is mentioned in the Bible, had a highly positive

symbolic meaning within the medieval exegetical tradition, being correlated with holy

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contemplation, the mind infused with the light of grace and charity (195). What, however, the

narrator finds most marvelous about the beryl is not its translucence per se (the quality admired

by the exegetes); rather, as he later takes pains to tell us, he is particularly amazed at the magical

effect of this brilliantly translucent stone, its wondrous power to do physically what Fame does

symbolically, namely, make everything under her influence appear “wel more than hit was”:

And eft imused longe while

Upon these walles of berile,

That shone ful lyghter than a glas

And made wel more than hit was

To semen every thing, ywis,

As kynde thing of Fames is . . . (1287-92)

What source if any did Chaucer draw upon when he described beryl’s magical magnifying

effect? In his explanatory notes to l. 1184 in The Riverside Chaucer, John Fyler refers the reader

to two medieval texts that refer in some way to beryl’s power to magnify: the first, a medieval

Italian text refers to beryl’s powers of magnification, in particular its reputed power to make love

grow (“Per sua vertude fa crescer l’amore”), and 2:837 of Trevisa’s translation of

Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s encyclopaedic On the Properties of Things that similarly associates

beryl with love (in this case, marriage) but also implies beryl’s power to magnify a man’s status

or perhaps political power/influence: beryl “maketh a man gret of state, and loueth wel loue of

matrimonie” (986). In terms of Chaucer’s poem, both of these beryl-associated “magnifications”

are, of course, relevant, though, of the two, it is only the magnification of Love that Chaucer

takes pains to describe explicitly and concretely: although the goddess Fame does bear on her

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shoulders the arms and name of two men “gret of state,” the world-conquering Alexander

and the heroic Hercules of myth (1410-4), within the Hall of Fame of Writers, the amazed

narrator witnesses the process--as opposed to the product--of magnification, seeing with his own

eyes how the great hall miraculously expands a thousand-fold in order to accommodate the

exponentially multiplying fame of “the grete god of Loves name” that Ovid “bar up wel” on his

pillar (1490-6).

At this point, a reader may wonder, “All this is well and good, but what does this stone

and its magical magnification of love have to do with the star Sirius?” The answer to this

question lies in recognizing that what might first appear to be only one of those random, “source-

less” statements of folk wisdom (“beryl makes love grow”) is actually rooted in the hermetic

tradition, in this case, a fairly sophisticated type of astral magic that requires some astronomical

expertise since it involves making talismans out of certain materials in order to draw and channel

the influence of a particular planet or fixed star—generally speaking, when the chosen planet or

star is particularly powerful or well-placed in the heavens, e.g. rising or culminating, in

conjunction or in favorable aspect to a beneficial planet.63 Chaucer, however, would not have

needed to go very far to learn or hear about beryl’s association with natural and astral magic: as

we learn from Confessio Amantis, John Gower knew enough about it to know that the love-

magnifying beryl was, upon the authority of “Hermes in his bokes olde” (7. 1437), associated not

just with astral magic but, more to our purposes, with a specific star that he refers to as being “of

magique, /The whos kinde is Venerien,” or, in other words, as a star uniquely and powerfully

linked to the practice of love magic. This star is—you guessed it—Sirius, here referred to as

Canis Major, the name of its constellation:

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And Canis Major in his like

The fifte sterre is of magique

The whos kinde is Venerien,

As seith this astronomien.

His proper ston is seid berille . . . (VII. 1345-9)

[Since this passage appears in Book 7’s catalogue of fifteen important fixed stars,

Gower is clearly referring here to Sirius, the brightest star of Canis Major, rather

than the constellation as a whole. As to why Gower gives this goddess-related star

a masculine gender, Gower refers to all fifteen stars this way.]64

Given that the palace of Fame is entirely made of beryl, it functions as a kind of giant talisman

that draws upon and channels the great influence of Sirius, the great goddess that inhabits it.

And, just as a magician would consider the time of Sirius’s rising to be a perfect time to channel

the rays of Sirius into magnifying beryl in order to make love grow and multiply (and/or to make

men “gret of state”), I propose that the “elvyssh” Chaucer times the movement from Book II to

Book III of his poem with a similar precision: as the first words of Book III’s narration so clearly

tell us (“Whan I was for thys egle goon,” l. 1110), Geffrey’s arrival at and climb up to Fame’s

magical mountain-top beryl palace of jouissance occurs directly after the golden eagle disappears

from view—or, in astronomical terms, after Altair sets and the powerful Sirius rises over the

horizon. (Significantly, just as Chaucer would not be able to see Altair and Sirius in his English

sky at the same time, Geffrey never sees the eagle and Fame at the same time; he will only see

the eagle again at the whirling wicker--after Fame-as-Goddess has exited the poem.)

Besides this hermetic association of beryl with Sirius, there is, however, another peculiar

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yet revealing detail in Book III’s representation of the goings-on in the goddess Fame’s

palace and court. This detail occurs at the end of this section of the poem, when the narrator tells

us about the last group of petitioners (1823-67). Represented by a man with a fool’s cap and

bells, this group is comprised of those who, knowing that they could never achieve fame

honestly, i.e. for good deeds, perversely committed evil deeds in order to win at least lasting

notoriety. Fame grants them their wish, but she is curious to know more about their

spokesperson, asking “But what art thow that seyst this tale?” (1839). Below is his response:

“Madame,” quod he, “soth to telle,

I am that ylke shrewe, ywis,

That brende the temple of Ysidis

In Athenes, loo, that citee.” (1842-5)

Fame then asks him why he did it, and he plainly tells her that he did it for the sole purpose of

winning notoriety for himself—this being the only way that he, an envious “shrew,” could rival

his fellow Athenians who have such fame for virtue:

“By my thrift,” quod he, “madame,

I wolde fayn han had a fame,

As other folk hadde in the toun,

Although they were of gret renoun

For her vertu and for her thewes.

Thoughte y, as gret a fame han shrews,

Though hit be fore shrewednesse,

As goode folk hand for godnesse;

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And sith y may not have that oon,

That other nyl y noght forgoon.

And for to gette of Fames hire,

The temple sette y al afire.” (1847-58)

As John Fyler’s note for line 1844 explains, a probable (and, I would add, respected and well-

known) source exists for the shrew’s story of burning a temple to gain notoriety, yet, for some

strange and inexplicable reason, Chaucer veers from his source:

. . this [the shrew’s story] is probably a reference to Herodotus, who in order to

win fame set fire to the temple of Diana at Ephesus. The story is told by John of

Salisbury (Policraticus 8.5), who takes it from Valerius Maximus, Facta and

memorabilia 8:14. Why the temple of Isis at Athens is substituted is unknown.

(The Riverside Chaucer 989)

Since this unusual reference to the exotically Egyptian “Ysidis” occurs only once in all of

Chaucer’s poetry, I propose that the substitution is a deliberate one, a playful way for the poet to

hint at the hidden magical and astronomical meaning of his goddess Fame, punctuating, as it

were, the section of the poem that deals with her by inserting her “true name” into John of

Salisbury’s exemplum of Herodotus. As John Gower indicates in his star list, his source for his

knowledge about Sirius and beryl is “Hermes, in his bookes olde,” that is, the great legendary,

god-like Egyptian mage known throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance as Hermes

Trismestigus (Hermes the Thrice-Great); given that Isis figures strongly in the lore of Hermes

(Isis, in later traditions, became identified as the daughter and pupil of Hermes), it seems entirely

possible that ever-curious Chaucer would correctly relate fertile Isis to the Sirius of Hermes

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associated with beryl and love-magic. 65

Although I am not sure how Chaucer could have known this (perhaps by osmosis?), his

choice to link his capricious Fortune-like goddess Fame to magical Sirius/Isis is, as it turns out,

uncannily serendipitous: according to a recent study of the Isis tradition, Isis was “early

identified with the Roman Fortuna” (i.e. the goddess that Lady Philosophy ventriloquizes in

Book 3 of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy], and, more specifically, “as Isis-Fortuna, the

goddess referred to in the context of the Sothis, or Sirius, the Dog-Star with which she was

identified” (Donalson 19).

What, however, perhaps intrigued Chaucer most about this Egyptian goddess was that,

much more than Ceres (the Roman Sirius-associated goddess of the grain whom she resembles),

Isis represents a divine feminine figure whose nature is so formidably all-encompassing that she

arguably rivals the monotheistic God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.66 From John Gower’s

Confessio Amantis, Chaucer would know of Isis as the Egyptian goddess of women and

childbirth, as well as Isis’s legendary--and similarly fertile--role as the great teacher of the art of

farming:

Bot Ysis, as seith the cronique,

Fro Grece into Egipte cam,

And sche thane upon honde nam

To teche hem for to sowe and eere [to cultivate],

Which no man kenw tofore there,

And when th’ Egipciens syhe [saw]

The fieldes fulle afore here yhe,

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And that the lond began to greine [bear grain],

Which whilom hadde be bariegne [barren]

For th’erthe bar after the kinde

His due charge—this I finde—

That sche of berthe the goddesse [birth, childbirth]

Is cleped, so that in destresse

The women there upon childinge

To her clepe, and here offringe

Thei beren, whan that thei ben lyhte [have given birth]. (5. 816-31)

Unlike Gower, however, Chaucer also seems to known that this Egyptian, Ceres-like goddess of

natural fertility was also linked to the fertility of the mind and spirit: as suggested at by The

House of Fame’s reference to a temple of Isis in Athens (the city famed for its philosophy),

Chaucer, unlike Gower, seems to have been aware of Isis’s traditional, Athena-like association

with wisdom and philosophy—and, along with this, Isis’s symbolic relevance to the poet’s own

art of language and writing. For example, from sources as authoritative as Augustine, he may

have very well learned that Isis—as opposed to Plato’s masculine Thoth--was credited with the

invention of the Egyptian alphabet. 67 With his typical lawyer-like flair, Augustine draws upon

this legend in his City of God to undermine Egyptian boasts concerning the supposed anteriority

(and therefore greater authority and originality) of their learning and wisdom:

For not even Egypt, whose habit it is to plume herself, falsely and idly, on the

antiquity of her learning, is found to antedate the wisdom of the patriarchs with

any wisdom of her own, of any quality. In fact, no one will have the hardihood to

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assert that Egyptians reached a remarkable level of cultural attainment before

they became familiar with reading and writing, that is, before Isis arrived and

taught those accomplishments (Book 18, Chapter 39; 814).

Perhaps, like his near-contemporary Christine de Pizan, Chaucer may have also been aware of a

tradition naming Isis as the inventor of both Egyptian script and the agricultural technique of

grafting (Chaucer being the literary grafter par excellence). 68 Inventor of writing and grafting,

the goddess Isis, embodying Derrida’s notion of the textual graft (and supplanting Thoth,

writing’s assumed “father,” according to Plato), thus appears to be the perfect goddess for both

the twentieth-century French philosopher and the fourteenth-century Chaucer, the feminine-

identified master grafter. The antidote to Western logocentrism was there in the wings waiting to

be discovered all along . . . 69

Lastly, there is perhaps an unexpected Scriptural source for The House of Fame’s

evocation of a Last Judgment presided over by a queen linked, as I suggest Chaucer’s Fame is, to

the rising of Sirius, that is, Isis, a great goddess and Queen of Heaven but also, according to the

euhemeristic tradition exemplified above by Augustine and Christine de Pizan, a historical

personage, a woman of genius and an Egyptian queen. In Matthew 12: 42, Jesus, responding to a

group of skeptical, mistrustful scribes and Pharisees who ask him for a “sign” (i.e. some

miraculous or prophetic proof from the Holy Book that will authorize his teaching as divinely

inspired and hence worth listening to), rebukes them for their lack of receptivity and generosity

by ironically finding, within the very hallowed text of the Bible, two prophetic figural “signs” to

shame them, one of which is the passionately wisdom-seeking “queen of the South” from 1

Kings 10:1ff:

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The queen of the South will arise at the judgment with this generation and

condemn it; for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of

Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.

If I am right that Chaucer’s goddess Fame in glory is in part a playful integumentum of the

literal, i.e. astronomical rising of the star Sirius (the star with a southern declination that reigns

supreme in the eighth sphere of the fixed stars, a symbol and celestial manifestation of Isis, the

Great Goddess and “queen of the South”) this opens up the possibility that, in doing so, Chaucer

was also aware of the “divine foolishness” of his integumentum, that, as a Christian poet, he took

some “elvyssh” delight in the fact that his goddess’s “Last Judgment” is, in its absurd way,

prophesied by the Lord himself in Matthew 12:42. Moreover, in reading the Bible in this

“perversely” astronomical way, Chaucer would only be doing, in his own sublimely ridiculous

way, what Dante--the master astronomical exegete—so often does in his own seriously sublime

way. A case in point is the awesome visionary allegorical pageant that takes place in the Earthly

Paradise, evoked, in the opening lines of Purgatorio’s Canto 30, by a simile that explicitly

compares the holy procession the pilgrim is witnessing to the constellation of Ursa Minor

(popularly known today as the Little Dipper), the circumpolar seven stars of the northern

hemisphere:

Quando il settentrïon del primo cielo,

che né occaso mai seppe né orto

né d’altra nebbia che di colpa velo,

e che faceva li ciascuno accorto

di suo dover, come ’l più basso face

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qual temon gira per venire a porto,

fermo s’affisse . . . (1-7)

When the Wain [or “Seven-Stars”] of the first heaven, which never knew setting

or rising, or veil of other cloud than of sin, and which there made each one aware

of his duty, even as the lower wain guides him who turns the helm to come into

port, had stopped still . . .

Although Dante distinguishes the holy procession (the “settentrïon” or Seven-Stars of the first

heaven, i.e. the Empyrean) from its “lower” mirror (Ursa Minor), the two “Seven-Stars” so

closely parallel and enhance each other that the high/low division between them pantheistically

(or, perhaps more accurately, incarnationally) collapses: to my mind, this clearly suggests that

Dante himself once read or tried to read the mysterious “seven stars” of Revelation

astronomically, taking John’s vision in Revelation 1:12-ff. to be a kind of holy Christian

astronomical integumentum.70 That said, the gulf between sublimely serious Dante and merely

comical Chaucer lessens considerably, for, just as with Dante’s simile of the “Seven-Stars,” there

is, within the context of The House of Fame, a great deal of divine sense to Chaucer’s

astronomical concretization of the rising and judging “queen of the South” of Matthew 12:42. If

we go back to the biblical story to which Jesus refers, we find that “the queen of the South”

(a.k.a. “the queen of Sheba”) is particularly relevant to Chaucer’s poem, for, similar to Chaucer’s

goddess with her magnifying beryl palace and her wickedly witty deflation of self-important

fools, this similarly rich human queen, drawn on her long and difficult (and, to some, no doubt

“crazy”) desert journey from Ethiopia to Jerusalem solely by “the fame of Solomon”--the reports

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that she has heard of his great wisdom—embodies a desire or desirousness that inhabits and

is fueled by language, an unstoppable hunger for revelation, to hear and know the Other, that is,

in principle, opposed to the ego with its self-protective fantasy and predictable logic:

Now when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the

name of the Lord, she came to test him with hard questions . . . and when she

came to Solomon, she told him all that was on her mind. And Solomon answered

all her questions; there was nothing hidden from the king which he could not

explain to her. (1 Kings 10:1, 2-3)

In fact, this “queen of the South” so hungers for the truth that, as implied by the traditional

association of this queen with the female lover of The Song of Solomon (and, hence, for

Christian exegetes, the Bride of Christ), her quest for knowledge is, at the same time, a quest for

love that drives her past the limit of mere ordinary, endlessly repeating pleasure to the break-out

point and “all and nothingness” of ecstasy; as the Bible so plainly tells us, “And King Solomon

gave to the queen of Sheba all that she desired . . . So she turned and went back to her own land,

with her own servants” (I Kings 10:13, 14). 71

As Jesus’s words imply, this intelligently skeptical yet open-hearted and hungrily

questing queen, in contrast to the self-satisfied, sign-demanding, stupidly skeptical Pharisees,

doesn’t believe she knows, and, because of this, she is receptive to the Call of the Other that

comes through the bewitching “fame” of Solomon—so receptive that, to borrow a phrase from

Lacan, she “does not give ground relative to her desire,” traveling across hundred of miles and

then asking and asking and asking until she truly had no more questions left, and then, instead of

trying to freeze or possess the wisdom of Solomon for herself, leaving Solomon in his glory and

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turning back into the desert towards her distant land. According to Christ, it is this truly

desiring and truly open, language-friendly subject who will judge the high-and-mighty wise men

who, demanding signs, close themselves off from the flow of talk and language around them,

thinking they, unlike others, transcend mere human language through their “discourse of the

sign.” 72 Thus, there is even hope for Chaucer’s imaginary Dido, for, even though this Virgilian

“queen of the South”, unlike the insistently questioning biblical “queen of the South,” fell too

quickly and thus gullibly for the verbally entrancing stranger, her very susceptibility to language

and fatally reckless trust of Aeneas implies an openness to the Other that nevertheless puts her

one major step above the insulated subjects both world-hating and worldly who from the get go

assume they know (or know better), placing her above and beyond the self-satisfied and the

cynical, above and beyond all those with reason but without compassion who would condemn

her as immoral and/or dismiss her as foolish. As Chaucer suggests through his depiction of the

transcendently expanding Love that Dido-identifying Ovid upholds, the desire-driven universe of

language, to some degree, always escapes or defies the tidy calculations and narrow intentions of

moralizing human egos and is therefore less predictably patriarchal and wickedly ungenerous

(“wikke fame”) than victimized Dido/Geffrey bitterly and paranoically imagines: in fact,

Chaucer’s poem implies, Virgil’s great queen and the Love that drives her to her death—through

Ovid’s response and amplification—ultimately far outshines Virgil’s stolidly patriarchal hero

and all his Love-denying pious duty, much as we see how, in the great dark pages of the night

sky, Sirius, the brilliant and scintillating star of the Goddess, far outshines Altair, however bright

that star of Jove’s eagle may “stonde.” To be precise, according to the modern scale of

astronomical magnitudes, Sirius is “about 9 1/2 times as bright as the standard 1st magnitude star

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Altair” (Allen 128).

Reading by the Starry Light of Chaucer’s Fame:

Dante’s Lucia and the End of The Canterbury Tales

Having presented my argument for Chaucer’s poetic incarnation of the rising “queen of

the South” of the sky, I would like to conclude this chapter by returning once again to Canto 9 of

Dante’s Purgatorio. Earlier I suggested that Canto 9’s polarity and temporal fusion of the

pilgrim’s golden dream eagle and the “real” Lucia may have been a key inspiration for Chaucer,

spurring him to recreate and work out, in his own “divine comedy,” Dante’s strikingly original

and elegant representation of the Christian “crossing” of a transcendence or divine verticality

that is figured as masculine with a divinely horizontal immanence figured as feminine. I also

hinted at the possibility that understanding the astronomical poetics of Chaucer’s humorous

“low” poem works in two directions—that is, besides showing us Dante’s influence on Chaucer

it also may also shed light retroactively on Dante’s “high” poem, enabling us to see (or create?),

through the eyes of scientifically “elvyssh” Chaucer, a more precisely concrete “astronomical

Dante,” a Dante so profoundly entranced by the common medieval notion of the microcosm

/macrocosm unities of the universe that he seeks to recreate them in his poem not only

symbolically but literally and concretely—in other words, incarnationally. Thus, as I pointed out,

it just so happens that, during the morning hours of the actual historical day in 1300 upon which

Dante’s poem implies that he had his violent dream of being abducted like Ganymede, the event

plays out in the skies of Purgatory above the sleeping pilgrim, with Altair, the Eagle star,

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culminating exactly as the sun rises over the horizon, taking with it into the zenith the

following constellation of Ganymede (Aquarius). And, it just so happens, that, due to the effects

of the precession of the equinoxes (an effect that Dante obviously knew about and clearly

pondered, since he refers to it in his poem), and due to the mathematically idealized location of

Purgatory, the skies of this historical morning in 1300 closely mirror the skies over Jerusalem on

that most important morning in all salvation history, namely, the Sunday morning of March 28,

34, on which Christ rose from the dead.

But what about the mysterious Lucia? We have all heard the interpretation that Lucia is

“Saint Lucy,” and that she is thus a symbol of the light or illumination (lux) of divine grace. This

interpretation sounds reasonable enough, and it is bolstered by the fact that, in his youth, Dante

did write poems that alluded to Saint Lucy’s day—principally due to the fact that her feast day

coincides with the winter solstice, that time when the old sun of the year finally dies and the new

sun is born. Still, I have always thought that there is something different about Dante’s Lucia,

something that makes it difficult to reduce her to Saint Lucy, this standard exegetical equation of

Lucia = the illumination of divine grace. To begin with, there is the conspicuous fact that what

the poet seems to emphasize most about his Lucia is not so much her vision as her

compassionate heart, the way she emanates—in stark contest to the “harder,” imperiously

visionary Beatrice—a loveliness and gentleness and grace that seems distinctly “feminine.”

Dante’s memorable epithet for Lucia in line 100 of Inferno 2 says it all: “enemy of every

cruelty” (“nimica di ciascun crudele”). Like the similarly lovely and compassionate flower-

gathering Matelda of the Earthly Paradise who seems to be one of her avatars (and like the

garland-fashioning Leah of Dante’s dream in Purgatorio 27 who clearly anticipates Matelda),

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Lucia’s physical entry into the world of the poem occurs within a field of wildflowers: upon

the pilgrim’s awakening from his terrifying dream of the eagle in Canto 9 of Purgatorio, Virgil

informs him that “on / the flowers that adorn the ground below, / a lady came; she said, ‘I am

Lucia’” (54-5). Linked throughout Purgatorio by the poet’s emphasis on their grace-ful feminine

compassion /charity and the motif of wildflowers, these three feminine figures, in turn, call up

the mythological figure of flower-gathering Persephone or Proserpina, and, in the pilgrim’s first

words to Matelda in Canto 28, Dante make this connection explicit:

E là m’apparve . . .

Una donna soletta che si gia

E cantando e scegliendo fior da fiore

Ond’ era pinta tutta la sua via.

“Deh, bella donna, che a’ raggi d’amore

ti scaldi, s’i’ vo’ credere a’ sembianti

che soglion esser testimony del core,

vegnati in voglia di trarreti avanti,”

diss’ io a lei, “verso questa rivera,

tanto ch’io possa intender che tu canti.

Tu mi fai rimembrar dove e qual era

Proserpina nel tempo che perdette

La madre lei, ed ella primavera.” (37, 40-51)

And there appeared to me there . . . a lady all alone, who went singing and culling

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flower from flower, with which all her path was painted.

“Pray, fair lady, who do warm yourself at love’s beams, if I may believe

outward looks which are wont to be testimony of he heart,” I said to her, “may it

please you to draw forward to this stream so near that I amy understand what you

sing. You make me recall where and what Proserpine was at the time her mother

lost her, and she the spring.”

Given Dante’s stated desire in lines 7-8 of Canto 1 of Purgatorio, “Ma qui la morta poesì

resurga, / o sante Muse, poi che vostro sono” (“But here let dead poetry rise again, O holy

Muses, since I am yours”), this ancient pagan myth of a “feminine” death and resurrection is

clearly relevant—especially, since the myth’s “death,” the rape and “deflowering” of Persephone

by Pluto, as well as the violated maiden’s yearly springtime “resurrection,” so perfectly

corresponds to the Christian story of the traumatic loss of the soul’s primal innocence and

integrity through the Fall and the joyous recovery of the wholeness of body and soul through

Christ—a promise that Dante poetically enfleshes for us at the end of Purgatorio through the

pilgrim’s re-entry into the Earthly Paradise, and, particularly, through his healing encounter with

the lovely, Persephone-like flower-gathering Matelda, who, in her capacity as a “lady of souls,”

acts as the Christian counterpart to Persephone, the pagan Queen of the Dead and Empress of the

Underworld. Moreover, by Purgatorio’s hidden Persephone connection explicit only in the last

cantos, Dante thus wonderfully times the pilgrim’s re-entry into the Earthly Paradise to coincide

with his poem’s subtle stylistic “resurrection” of its buried Persephone. 73

Thus, rather than identifying Lucia so closely with the Christian St. Lucy (and hence,

evoking grace as contemplation, the illumination of the mind), I propose the meaning of Lucia

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has more to do with the myth of Persephone and what this myth evokes for the Persephone-

like, Hell-descending Dante: the symbolic return to or regeneration of the primal wholeness of

body and soul, the Christian recovery of the flowing and fully fertile Eros of the Earthly

Paradise—what could be called, in Lacanian terms, the plenitude of feminine jouissance. Read in

this way, the Lucia of Canto 9 of Purgatorio is no longer quite so far removed from Chaucer’s

beryl-encastled, Love-expanding goddess Fame, whom, if I am right in connecting to Sirius, the

star of the Great Goddess—is also closely associated to the story of Persephone: as I mentioned

earlier, the star Sirius was traditionally associated not only with the Egyptian Isis but also the

great Roman goddess of the grain with whom Isis was often conflated, namely, Ceres, the mother

of Persephone or Proserpina. Signifying the yearly death and resurrection of the natural world,

the compelling story of Ceres’s mournful loss and joyous recovery of her ravished daughter took

center in the popular nature-worshipping, mystery religions of late antiquity, most notably, the

secret ecstatic rituals known as the Eleusinian mysteries. No doubt in part because of

Macrobius’s metaphorical reference to them in the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (and the

later use and expansion of Macrobius’s ideas by twelfth-century intellectuals such as William of

Conches), the Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Proserpina did not die out with antiquity but

lived on, functioning as a kind of as a numinous symbol of the sacred for a select group of

philosophizing intellectuals “in the know.” Moreover, as I suspect an astronomically-savvy

intellectual such as Dante would have noticed, the story of Ceres and Persephone is told by the

stars themselves, to be precise, through the relationship between Ceres-Sirius and the

constellation associated by the Romans with Proserpina, Virgo the Virgin (Allen 460).74 Set

apart from each by a quarter of the sky, Sirius reaches its culmination in the heavens in sync with

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the rising of the constellation of Virgo on the eastern horizon: translated into the terms of the

myth, Ceres reaches the height of her joy and power when she sees her daughter return, rising in

glory from the earth-tomb of Pluto’s kingdom of death. A fourteenth-century Florentine

manuscript—a commentary on Martianus Capella discussed by Peter Dronke in his book

Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Medieval Platonism—seems to hint at this connection

between Ceres-Sirius and Proserpina-Virgo. In this commentary, the writer mysteriously refers

to harvesters seeking for the buried Proserpina under the Dog-Star, i.e. Sirius: “sub canicula

messores querunt Proserpinam ex terra” (Fabula 170). Although Dronke does not mention it as

a possibility, it seems to me likely that the writer of the commentary knows and is playing on the

astronomical fact that Sirius (“canicula”) reaches its culmination in the heavens (the harvesters

below on earth are said to be “sub canicula”) in sync with the rising of the constellation Virgo

(Proserpina, the maiden of the harvest, rising “ex terra”). 75

What does this pattern of Ceres-Sirius and Virgo-Proserpina have to do with Dante’s

Lucia? The answer to this question goes back to the synchronicity of the pilgrim’s dream of his

Ganymede-like rapture by Jove’s eagle and the “real” event that is hidden from Dante’s

consciousness, namely, Lucia’s lifting and carrying the sleeping pilgrim to the steps of

Purgatory. As I showed earlier, the timing of the hours and implied date of Dante’s dream of

divine rapture creates a precisely appropriate microcosm-macrocosm effect, i.e. Altair (the star

of Jove’s eagle), high in the skies over Purgatory as the constellation of Ganymede (Aquarius)

ascends, reaches its culmination at the mid-heaven or south-point precisely as the sun (Son) rises

over the skies of Purgatory; moreover, this pattern of Altair culminating with the rising sun also

occurred in the skies over Jerusalem on the Sunday morning of March 28, 34, the date of Christ’s

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resurrection. Reasoning that such astronomical precision could hardly be a “coincidence” and

working on the hunch that perhaps Dante, with the eagle-Lucia synchronicity, is playing in some

hidden way with his idealized world-clock (the twelve hour time-lag between the mirroring

Northern Hemisphere Jerusalem and Southern Hemisphere Purgatory), I decided to adjust the

time and place for Jerusalem to see what the sky was doing over that northern landscape as

Dante the pilgrim dreamed about the eagle. 76 As it turns out, something marvelous was

happening . . . just as the sun (Son) was beginning to rise and the Eagle was soaring over the

dreaming pilgrim in Purgatory, in the world of Jerusalem directly opposite, Sirius was

culminating and the constellation of Virgo was rising over the eastern horizon.77 Over that

hidden unseen Real landscape, the once-mournful Ceres was rejoicing, for her daughter was

rising, coming back to life—perhaps through her very love resurrecting her long-lost daughter.

Just so, outside of the consciousness of the weary, Hell-spent pilgrim, gentle Lucia lifts up the

cherished sleeping one and carries him to the place where his regeneration can begin. I realize

that the reading of Purgatorio 9 that I am offering is new; nevertheless, I believe my reading is

supported not only by astronomical fact but also by the intriguing dialectic that connects the

story of Ganymede to the story of Persephone: united by their key thematic element of rape by a

male god, the first myth depicts the rape of a male youth by a god of the sky, and the second the

rape of a female youth by a god of the underworld. Dante represents Christian conversion as a

sexually charged double trauma: heavenly “masculine” rapture and hellish “feminine” rapture

are both traumatic but also interconnected. Through this interconnection, the ruthless erotic

power associated with rape becomes, in some mysterious way, a force for good, a force that

opens the way for the transformation and regeneration of the “doubly feminized” subject. As in

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math, the doubling of trauma thus creates a positive: as John Freccerro argues in Dante: The

Poetics of Conversion, Dante’s poem emphasizes that heavenly ascent cannot be achieved

directly; first must come the hellish descent that purges the subject, stripping the ego of its pride.

In light of the incarnational poetics of Purgatorio 9, one might also say that the opposite is also

true: it is the “feminine” story of the earth that figures “resurrection” (the happy ending of

“heavenly ascent”), and the “masculine” story of the sky that figures the Passion (the necessary

purgation of “hellish descent”), i.e. the male subject is “born again” and lifted up just like

Proserpina via his homoerotic submission to a male god (the act that Dante figures as a

“heavenly ascent” can equally be read as a purgation of the masculine ego, the “descent” into the

humility of the feminine subject position).

This reading of Purgatorio and Lucia in terms of the Ceres-Proserpina myth—and, in

particular, its astronomical coordinates—sheds light not only on the hidden feminine of Dante’s

Christian vision but also, Chaucer’s, emerging in its full significance for Chaucer only at the end

of The Canterbury Tales, in the closing pages of his literary existence. Yet before I explain how

this is so, I would first like to emphasize that I am not suggesting that Chaucer necessarily read

Purgatorio 9’s Lucia in this way and was thus directly inspired by Dante’s example; rather, I

think it much more likely that, through their shared love of the stars and a shared desire to find a

fully incarnational, “feminine” Christian meaning in the mathematical ordering of the heavens

(an ordering that, as we have seen, is inextricably related to poetry, to pagan myth and fable), the

two poets independently gravitated to the heavenly “coordinates” of the myth of Ceres (or Ceres-

Isis, since the two goddesses, being “Great Mothers,” were often conflated) and Proserpina.

Another possibility is that the two poets are tied together by way of some esoteric tradition that

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has not yet been illuminated in modern scholarship. Given the abiding fascination within

certain medieval philosophical circles (e.g. the famous twelfth century “school of Chartres,” and

the fourteenth-century Italian humanists) for pagan mysteries and fables—not to mention

Macrobius’s famous use of the Eleusinian mysteries (the pagan mystery religion based on the

Ceres-Proserpina myth) as a figure for narratio fabulosa (the philosopher’s veiling of truth in

fiction)—the idea that some esoteric tradition might have existed among medieval intellectuals

and remained a “secret” hardly seems far-fetched. And, if one considers the fate of the

mythographer Pierre Bersuire, they may have very well had good reason to hide their unorthodox

ideas and methods: as Jane Chance suggests in the second volume of her encyclopedic study,

Medieval Mythography, Pierre Bersuire’s humanism and flair for independent thinking in his

mythographic scholarship may very well had something to do with what Chance describes as the

“trumped-up charge” of heresy against him in the early 1350s (322). The bishop of Paris charged

Bersuire of heresy, or, more precisely, of heresy in the form of “the pursuit of forms of

prohibited knowledge, both evil and smacking of magic,” leading not only to the scholar’s

privileges at the university being taken away from him but also his imprisonment and torture

(323).

That said, let us return to Chaucer, to the closing of The Canterbury Tales, or, more

specifically, to the Prologue of the Parson’s Tale, which, of course, is not really a “tale” at all but

a well-organized, prose treatise on penance that, in it practical, step-by-step manner, aims to prod

the reader to examine his or her conscience carefully and honestly so that he or she will be able

to make a genuine, soul-baring Christian confession.78 In the Prologue—the last poetry of The

Canterbury Tales—Chaucer sets up the scene for this turn to moral earnestness, signaling to the

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reader that the time for storytelling has come to an end: in the opening lines, we learn from

the narrator that it is late afternoon (around 4 p. m.) and that the sun is so low in the sky that a

man now casts a shadow that is about twice his height in length:

By that the Maunciple hadde his tale ended,

The sonne from the south lyne [the meridian] was descended

So lowe that he nas nat, to my sighte,

Degrees nyne and twenty as in highte.

Foure of the clokke it was tho, I gesse,

For ellevene foot, or litel moore or lesse,

My shadwe ws at thilke tyme, as there

As swiche feet equal of proporcioun.

Therewith the moones exaltacioun—

I meene Libra—alwey gan ascende

As we were entrying at a thropes ende . . . (X. 1-12)

This subtle atmospheric signals, of course, are lost on the ever-ebullient, backslapping Host of

the Canterbury pilgrimage; he turns to the Parson, the only pilgrim who has not yet entered the

storytelling contest, and, in his familiar teasing way, brashly calls upon the country priest to

show his stuff, bidding him “ne breke thou nat oure pley” (24):

“Unbokele and shewe us what is in thy male [pouch, traveling bag];

For trewely, me thynketh by thy cheere

Thou sholdest knytte up wel a greet mateere.

Telle us a fable anon, for cokkes bones!” (26-9)

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A serious and morally earnest man of God, the Bible-thumping Parson does not take well to

the Host’s ribbing, and, in stark contrast to the Nun’s Priest (the other priest on the pilgrimage),

sternly rejects the idea that a fable might serve a godly purpose:

“Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me,

For Paul, that writeth unto Thymothee,

Repreveth hem that weyven soothfastnesse

And tellen fables and swich wrecchednesse . . .” (31-4)

Instead of a engaging in poetry and fable and encouraging further “wrecchednesse,” the Parson

promises his audience that he will “telle a myrie tale in prose / To knytte up al this feeste and

make an ende” (46-7)—that end being an ideal Christian one, the blessed goal of the “parfit

glorious pilgrymage / That highte Jerusalem celestial” (50-1).

How much authority are we to give the Parson in his moralistic judgment against fables?

To the dismay of a great many readers of Chaucer, Chaucer, in the famous Retraction that

follows the Parson’s Tale, seems pretty much to endorse this view: in an earnest, humble voice,

Chaucer asks for God’s mercy and forgiveness, listing and revoking all his poetic works as

“enditynges of worldly vanities.” And, according to at least to Chauncey Wood’s astrological

reading of the opening lines of the Prologue to the Parson’s Tale, the very heavens validate the

Parson’s stern morality, proclaiming the Last Judgment through the symbolism of Libra, the

zodiacal sign that, as narrator indicates, is now ascending; represented in the sky and in

iconography by a balance, i.e. a pair of scales, the rising of Libra, argues Wood, thus creates the

perfect backdrop for the Parson’s somber “wake-up” call to the storytelling pilgrims:

“ . . .if the sign Libra was meant to convey anything at all, it was freighted with ideas of

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judgment, and the evidence is quite strong for believing that the connotations of Libra would

include not only judgments in general but particularly God’s judgment of man under the new

dispensation, made possible by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross” (286).

There is, however, a problem with Wood’s emphasis on Libra: as Wood himself

concedes, the argument about Libra does not explain the odd precision of the opening passage of

the Prologue--the fact the narrator does not simply tell us that Libra “alwey gan ascende” but

also takes pains to tell us that it is 4 p.m. and that the sun is about 29 degrees in height. In his

attempt to solve this interpretative dilemma, Wood speculates that perhaps “Chaucer might be

associating 4: 00 p.m. with the eleventh hour, which is one of the few scriptural times that has

become proverbial” (297). Once again, however, Wood’s reading cannot account for the

precision of the time-setting: if, as Wood suggests, Chaucer means for us to think of the

reference to 4 p.m. solely in an abstract, purely symbolic way, i.e. as having no real connection

to astronomical reality, why does the narrator bother to tell us that the sun is around 29 degrees

in height? Is he just showing off? Is all this precision simply meaningless?

I propose that it is not. Moreover, I propose that if we take a closer look at the sky that

Chaucer’s text so carefully pinpoints for us, we will find a very different heavenly scene than the

one Wood proposes: no Last Judgment but instead a fable-rich scene of feminine plenitude that

offers a gentle, Lucia-like counterpoint to the Parson’s sternly patriarchal morality. As Chaucer

would be able to see very easily by looking at his astrolabe, on April 18 (the traditional date of

the Canterbury pilgrimage, mentioned in the opening passage of the Introduction to the Man of

Law’s Tale) at precisely 4 p.m. when the sun is around 29 degrees high, Sirius reaches its

culmination in the heavens and does so in sync with the rising of the constellation of Virgo, the

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maiden associated with Proserpina, but also, for medieval Christians, the constellation

associated with nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (September 8). (Note: by Chaucer’s day, due

to the effect of what astronomers call “the precession of the equinoxes,” the stars of Virgo had

“moved” to the sign of Libra, i.e. instead of rising in Virgo, the constellation of Virgo was now

rising in Libra).79 Ceres rejoices as her once-buried daughter, laden with grain, rises “ex

terra”—and so will the pilgrims rise as they, “sub canicula,” now turn to listen to the Parson.

Grace abounds. But not only for the fictional pilgrims: his opus ended, the goddess Fame smiles

down upon Geffrey and his bountiful harvest.

There is, however, a further crowning touch: as the astronomically savvy Chaucer may

have very well known, there is a further revelation hidden in his precisely timed opening

sequence—a revelation that, as it were, blesses the feminine fable of Ceres and Proserpina told

by the stars, uncannily merging its feminine resurrection with the “tidings” of Christ,

specifically, the “tidings of great joy” that the angel announces to the shepherds in Luke 2: 10.80

This revelation has to do with the precise ascendant or horoscope that is indicated via the

astronomical coordinates and shadow scale reference that the narrator gives us in opening

passage: not simply Libra but 3 degrees Libra. As Chaucer scholars have long recognized,

Chaucer knew and used the Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn as a reference source, as shown by

the fact this passage, just like the time-setting passage in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s

Tale (II. 1-15), “so obviously depends upon Nicholas’s shadow scale” (Kalendarium, Eisner 32).

This leads us to a question: why does Chaucer, who clearly knows how to use an astrolabe and

make such astronomical calculations himself, bother to cite Nicholas’s shadow scale? The

commonsensical response to this question is to underestimate Chaucer’s astronomical expertise

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and to assume that Chaucer uses Nicholas’s Kalendarium because he has faith in Nicholas’s

scientific exactitude, i.e. Chaucer merely wishes to be “correct” in his measurements. I propose

a new hypothesis, that being that Chaucer’s primary intent in using Nicholas so “obviously” here

is to direct the reader to the Kalendarium and its tables in order to establish a particular

ascendant or horoscope for the opening passage. As the comments of Sigmund Eisner (the

Chaucer scholar who is the editor of the Kalendarium) below suggest, what Chaucer’s use of

Nicholas here ultimately leads us to is an ascendant of exactly 3° Libra:

At 4: 00 p.m., the passage tells us, the sun is less than 29° high. According to

Nicholas, at 4: 00 p.m. on 17 April the sun is at 28° 57′, and on 18 April it is 29°

11′. This means that the passage can only apply to 17 April or earlier . . . If the

date is the latest possible, 17 April, the sun according to Nicholas is at Taurus 5°,

and Libra according to my own (and undoubtedly Chaucer’s) astrolabe, exactly 3°

in ascension. (Kalendarium 33)81

Why is this significant? The answer to this question can be found in a book described by J.D.

North in his Horoscopes and History: in this “rare printed work” dating from the early sixteenth

century are collected not only several horoscopes of the world at its creation but also several

horoscopes of Christ’s nativity (166), among which are included horoscopes constructed by

medieval astrologers such as Pierre d’Ailly, the star-loving French churchman who lived from

1350 to 1420. According to the book’s author, one Tiberio Rossigliano Sisto of Calabria, “five

different ascendants [for Christ’s nativity] are favored by astrologers,” one of which is—you

guessed it-- 3° Libra (172).

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CHAPTER VII

Christianizing the Pagan Milky Way:

The Dreamwork of Chaucer’s Whirling Wicker and the Vision of Dante’s Rose

On the face of it, Chaucer’s carnivalesque whirling house of twigs would seem to have

very little in common with the sublime Heavenly Rose of Dante’s Paradiso—so little in fact that

I suspect most readers would logically assume that the only plausible relationship that Chaucer’s

“round” could have to Dante’s would be a parodic one. However well such an assumption

meshes with standard “secular” reading of Chaucer’s poem, I propose that the “dreamwork” of

the whirling wicker points in a very different direction, revealing once again the profound and

distinctly Christian truth that The House of Fame creates via an intertextuality that occurs both

within and without the poem, that is, through an intuitive “working through” of an earlier

conflict or impasse within the poem that is, in a sense, simultaneously a response to the divine

Other through Dante, through a free-wheeling yet unconsciously driven coming to terms with--

and creative incorporation of—The Divine Comedy. As with the preceding section, my analysis

will focus on The House of Fame’s hidden structuring via astronomical relationships and

patterns, though, with one significant difference: whereas in most of the previous section, my

argument assumed Chaucer’s conscious control of the poem’s astronomical play—that the poet

knowingly created an integumentum of two coinciding celestial events (the setting of Altair and

the rising of Sirius)— the argument in this section, much like my analysis at the beginning of the

previous section of the insistent repetitions of the eagle and Dido within Geffrey’s speech to the

“frend” behind, assumes the presence of “dreamwork.” Coinciding as it does with the abrupt end

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of Geffrey’s invisibility—the narrator’s symbolic emasculation through the objectifying male

voice behind—the relatively “crazier” astronomical play of the whirling wicker suggests the

poet’s own willingness to let go, to let his poem be driven henceforth by a more or less

unconscious, dream-like, associative logic. Abandoning himself to language, Chaucer thus

becomes the metaphorical equivalent of one of those pilgrims to St. Leonard’s “corseynt” that

Geffrey alludes to as he begins his narration of his dream: like one of the prototypically male

pilgrims who announced and performed his newfound Christian freedom and subjectivity by

carrying their literal chains on route to Saint Leonard’s tomb and like one of the prototypically

female, pregnant pilgrims who, burdened in body, walked the road to St. Leonard’s shrine in

hopes of a fortunate birth, Chaucer delivers himself and his poem with and through his material

chains, not by forgetting his chains of signifiers but by carrying and remembering them in all

their quirky and insistent late fourteenth-century English particularity. To discover the

“corseynt,” the wished-for “holybody” that Geffrey bumbles and stumbles towards in this one-

of-a-kind comically sublime ascent, we need to find and follow the literal chains this poem

carries--the more stubbornly English and “elvyssh,” the better.

As many scholars have long recognized, Geffrey’s final destination in The House of

Fame draws on Ovid’s description of The House of Fame (i.e. rumor, gossip) in Metamorphoses

12.39-63, “especially,” as John Fyler points out, “its countless entrances, open night and day (44-

46) and the absence of silence anywhere within (47-48)” (Riverside Chaucer 989). “There is,

however,” Fyler goes on to say, “no classical precedent for a whirling house of twigs” (989).

Significantly, the narrator describes this strikingly un-Ovidian twigginess before he presents, in

lines 1945-ff., the clearly Ovidian features mentioned by Fyler above; moreover, in contrast to

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the more exuberant, confidently declarative amplification of its Ovidian features, the more

anxiously musing and oddly (i.e. unpoetically) redundant way that the narrator describes this

twigginess (using three “or”s, he compares the twiggy house to four things, three of which, e.g.

“panyers,” “hottes,” “dossers,” are synonyms for “basket”) suggests that the image is both

mysterious and, in some strange way, fascinating and thus personally important to him, and that

because of this, he wants to make sure his words get it right—as one does, for example, when

one tries to put into words some uncanny thing that one has seen in a dream:

And al thys house of which y rede

Was mad of twigges, falwe, rede,

And grene eke, and somme weren white,

Swiche as men to these cages thwite,

Or maken of these panyers,

Or elles hottes hottes or dossers . . . (1935-40)

In a sense, perhaps the telltale difference here boils down to the crucial difference between “or”

and “and”: the obviously rhetorical, i.e. self-conscious amplification of the Ovidian passage—

and other passages like it (see, for example, 2031-3, 2147-55)--evokes the exciting, headlong

movement of desire, joyously propelling the reader forward with its sophisticated use of

anaphora (e.g. the repetition of “and” at the beginning of 1943-6, “ne” in 1954-6, and, of course,

the bravura sixteen “of”s of 1961-76); in the above example, however, the seemingly nonsensical

repetition of words for “basket” does not pull us forward in the same way because the link

between the three closely associated—seemingly identical-- “baskets” is an obsessively negating

“or” (as opposed to the affirming “and” that leads to new words), evoking instead the stalled,

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lingering, truly redundant circling movement of the drive.

Many critics have assumed that a source—whether “literary” or “realistic”—must

somewhere exist to explain the emphatic twiggy “basketness” of Chaucer’s so-called House of

Rumor (“so-called” because, although many readers of the poem typically refer to it as such, the

poem itself never names it in this explicitly derogatory fashion, preferring instead to speak of its

“tydynges,” a word denoting news and everyday gossip but also, for medieval English

Christians, the “tidings of great joy” of Luke 2:10, the announcement to the shepherds of Christ’s

birth ).82 In the search for conventional or well-known sources, one of the most thorough and

perspicacious hunters is J.A.W. Bennett: besides noting how Chaucer’s basket-like house calls to

mind a rural peasant dwelling with its familiar wattled walls, Bennett also mentions two possible

literary sources, both of which Chaucer knew well: Alan of Lille’s description in Anticlaudianus

8.10-12 of the contrasting sides of Fortune’s house (“the one gleaming with gold and adorned

with a lofty roof, the other rubbishy and full of holes”), and Jean de Meun’s elaboration in Le

Roman de la Rose 6108-14 which accentuates the contrast with more naturalistic details,

“specifying,” for the bad side of Fortune’s house, “mud walls thinner than the palm of his hand,

roof of straw, cracks and holes ‘more than five hundred thousand’” (Chaucer’s Book of Fame

168). Nevertheless, as Bennett also takes care to point out, Chaucer, in stark contrast to his

possible sources (Jean de Meun especially), does not describe the twiggy house with the would-

be aristocrat’s class-conscious contempt, for, as we learn in the first lines of Chaucer’s

description (1920-3), the whirling house is so cunningly and ingeniously constructed that it

resembles the “Domus Dedaly, / That Laboryntus cleped ys”; writes Bennett, “Chaucer

represents the house as daedal art because, though he has separated Fame from Rumour, he

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recognizes no great gulf divides them. So his house of Rumour, though accommodating all

sorts and conditions of men, and primitive in its materials, is no decayed and dirty hovel” (168).

To this I would add that Chaucer also diverges significantly from “sources” such as Jean de

Meun by granting his colorful peasant-like house of sticks not only an oddly precise yet absurd

size (“hyt was sixty myle of lengthe” 1979) but also an all-encompassing cosmological status to

go along with it, making it, in the sixteen-line tour-de-force chant of its unsorted and unordered

contents (1961-76), nothing short of the Womb or Matrix of the Spoken Word and World, a

chaotic, chora-like place of becoming the contents of which can only be described, as Bennett

puts it, through “a breathless panoramic survey of almost every aspect of human life and fortune,

involving, if we think in astrological terms, all of the gods . . .” (176). The playfully leering

word-play in the opening lines of the narrator’s description clearly paves the way for this reading

of the house as chora or cosmological womb; there, as Susan Schibanoff points out, “the

association of Rumor’s domicile with female reproductive anatomy becomes overt in Chaucer’s

punning description of her house as ‘queynte’ (1923) and ‘quentelych ywrought’” (1925) (189).

Accordingly, as the poem makes clear, this seemingly unsubstantial wicker matrix in the sky will

last as long as Chance and Mutability (“the Great Mother of Tidings”) exists, or, in other words,

until the very end of time: “Al was the tymber of no strengthe, / Yet hit is founded to endure /

While that hit lyst to Aventure, That is the moder of tydynges, / As the see of welles and of

sprynges” (1980-4).

In keeping with these cosmological resonances, two critics have suggested plausible

philosophical sources for Chaucer’s wicker house (as I will shortly explain, both of their

suggestions are particularly relevant to my own argument). In his 1984 article, “Chaucer and

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Chalcidius: The Platonic Origins of The House of Fame,” Joseph Grennen, pointing to the

wide circulation in medieval England of Chalcidius’s partial translation of and commentary of

Plato’s Timaeus, argues that The House of Fame represents the poet’s “own variations on the

Timaean theme,” with, for example, the eagle’s lecture on sound replacing Plato’s views on the

primacy of sight, and the whirling wicker house representing Chaucer’s poetic adaptation of

Plato’s metaphor of the winnowing basket for the Receptacle or chora (summarized briefly

below by Grennen):

To account, for instance, for the way in which silva (primary matter), after

initially receiving the qualities, continues to change, he [Plato] proposes the

image of a winnowing basket (representing the Receptacle) in which the corn (the

various elements) is shaken by the turbulent motion of the basket so that the

lighter portions (chaff) move upward, the heavier ones (grain) downward, forming

new combinations while in a state of flux. (247)

Here is the relevant passage from Chalcidius, translated by Grennen:

Then, using a clear illustration, he [Plato] explains what is meant by separating

one from the other, namely, the four materials, fire, earth, and the rest, indicating

that the cause of this separation is to be found in the flux and stirring up of the

prime matter “just as the cleaning of the grain.” For we know that for a long time

now there have been in use what the poets are fond of calling weapons of Ceres

[arma Cerealia], by means of which what has been reaped is separated; the grains

go way from the moving and the agitation, the chaff is hurled in another: “the

light part flies up, the heavy sinks down.” “In this fashion,” he goes on, “those

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four primary bodies are tossed as in a whirlpool and finally separated

according to kinds.” The whirlpool represents prime matter; separation alludes to

the special place assigned to each element by divine providence. (247)

As Grennen’s essay points out, Chaucer’s whirling house calls to mind the above passage in

several specific ways: besides the aforementioned all-encompassing plenitude and crowded

tumultuousness of the house, there is, of course, Chaucer’s memorable description of the

boisterous conflation of a falsehood and a truth in lines 2089-2109 (“Thus saugh I fals and soth

compouned / Togeded fle for oo tydynge”), followed by the new compounded tiding’s

immediate flight upward to the goddess Fame, who, analogous to the divine providence

described above, gives the newly born tiding a name, an organized character, and an allotted

lifetime: “she gan yeven ech hys name, / After hir disposicioun, / And yaf hem eke duracioun,

Somme to wexe and wane sone” (2112-5). There is also the fact that the narrator of The House of

Fame himself uses the metaphor of winnowing in relation to the inevitable future revelation of a

certain presumably important tiding (one that, for now, the narrator says “shal not now be told

for me”): “For al mot out, other late or rathe, / All the sheves in the lathe” (2139-40). Most

wonderfully of all, Grennen’s argument about the Timaean roots of The House of Fame provides

unexpected support for my own reading of goddess Fame as an integumentum of the rising

Sirius, the star associated with the Great Goddess Isis-Ceres: as it turns out, in the translation by

Chalcidius quoted by Grennen, the metaphor for the receptacle is never called a “winnowing

basket” but is instead to referred to “what the poets are fond of calling weapons of Ceres” (arma

Cerealia).

Similar to Grennen, Jane Chance also suggests (albeit only in passing) a Platonic—or, to

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be precise, Neoplatonic—source for Chaucer’s whirling house of tidings; in her 1995 book,

The Mythographic Chaucer: The Fabulation of Sexual Politics, she writes:

Chaucer’s description of the birth of tidings is analogous to the Neoplatonic

process of human birth in Bernardus’s commentary on the Aeneid, over which the

god Aeolus [In Chaucer’s poem, Aeolus serves the goddess Fame by trumpeting

good and evil fame throughout the world], with Juno’s permission, rules.

However, in the Neoplatonic schema described earlier, and derived most probably

from the famous account in Macrobius’s commentary on the Somnium Scipionis,

the soul descends from the Milky Way through the fixed (eighth) sphere and

down through the planetary spheres until it is incarcerated in the prison of human

flesh; the equivalent beginning of the poem, however, is in the aventure that

mothers the tidings, of which this whirling house of wicker is full in its

chirkynges (1943) and workings. (79)

Chance here is referring to Macrobius’s description of the chaos and tumultuous period when the

soul first definitively descends from its heavenly maternal origin and infancy in the Milky Way

and begins to incarnate, taking on a rudimentary (perhaps sexed?) body that, as it descends

through the planetary spheres, become increasingly individualized with its specific

characteristics and potentials:

When the soul is being drawn towards a body in this first contraction of itself it

begins to experience a tumultuous influx of matter rushing upon it. This is what

Plato alludes to when he speaks in the Phaedo of a soul suddenly staggering as if

drunk as it is being drawn into the body; he wishes to imply the recent draught of

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onrushing matter by which the soul, defiled and weighted down, is pressed

earthwards. (Commentary on the Dream of Scipio I, 12.7; 135)

Although, on the face of it, there seems to be more specific support in the poem for Grennen’s

source idea, the fact that, in Book II, the eagle directs Geffrey’s attention to the Milky Way--and

tells the story of its origin—suggests that there may indeed be something to Chance’s suggestion.

We are thus left with a question: Is the hidden “source” of Chaucer’s whirling house the

metaphorical winnowing basket of Timaeus, as Joseph Grennen forcefully argues, or is a more

likely source Macrobius’s Neoplatonic image of the soul descending from the Milky Way, as

Jane Chance suggests? Could both be right? Turning now to my own reading, I propose that the

“dreamwork” of The House of Fame supports neither view by itself but does, however, strongly

support a conflation of the two (appropriately enough, given that birth through “conflation” is

what Chaucer’s wicker house is all about) and not only that, but something new and different, a

fortuitously and revolutionary Christian conflation of these Platonic and Neoplatonic

cosmologies.

To begin, we must return to lines 935-59 of Book II, to the passage in which the eagle,

departing from his “scientific” mode, explains the Milky Way’s origin through the mythical story

recounted at length by Ovid in Metamorphoses 2. 1-328 of Phaethon, the giddily ambitious

young “son of the Sun” who, needing proof of his high paternity and heedless of his father’s

warnings, tried one day to drive the chariot that his masterful father, the Sun, steers each day

through the sky; needless to say, young Phaethon miserably failed, causing not only his own

untimely death by Jove’s well-aimed thunderbolt but also an apocalyptic conflagration that, if

Jove had not intervened, would have resulted in the destruction of the earth and even the entire

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universe. To this day, the Milky Way exists as a kind of scar on the heavens, an enduring

sign of Phaethon’s foolhardy ride and its tragic consequences; as Chaucer may have

remembered, Dante refers to this etiological myth in Inferno 17, when a frightened, Geffrey-like

Dante the pilgrim flies down to the eighth circle of hell on the back of the monster Geryon: 83

Maggior paura non credo che fosse

quando Fetonte abbandonò li freni,

per che’ l ciel, come pare ancor, si cosse . . .

I do not think that there was greater fear when Phaëthon let loose the reins,

whereby the sky, as yet appears, was scorched . . . (106-8)

According to Jane Chance, medieval mythographers such as John of Garland, Pierre Bersuire,

and Robert Holkot read the myth of Phaethon’s ill-fated ride as one might expect, namely, as an

exemplum against foolish presumption or vainglory; Phaethon, like Icarus, represents the

ignorant and disobedient son (65). In her reading, Chance takes the mythographer’s Phaethon

and runs with it, arguing that the theme of presumption runs throughout The House of Fame,

with Chaucer’s narrator representing a presumptuous and ignorant fool; writes Chance, “What

Chaucer the poet wants us to see is that “Geffrey” is a victim of his own illusions; he has been

transported through his own fantasies, his desire for success, which is itself fraudulent” (66). In

contrast to Chance, I submit that, within Chaucer’s poem, there are two very different but

interconnected meanings at work within the Phaethon myth that tells the story of the Milky

Way’s origin: an “obvious,” p.c. (patriarchally correct) one that reduces the Milky Way to a sign

of Sin or Trespass (the fatal consequence of superbia, of disregarding the Father’s No), and, a

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hidden, subtle—retroactively generated-- meaning that deconstructs and opens up the first,

gesturing to something new, namely, the fully embodied promise of the “true Sun,” the

Incarnation. As I suggested in an earlier chapter, part of the eagle’s role in Book II is to

oedipalize the feminine-identified Geffrey so that the “stuck” poet can begin to hope and gain

needed distance from his inner “Dido” and the futile, fundamentally language-fearing position of

victimization that “she” represents; thus, in this way, the Phaethon of the mythographers serves a

valuable function. Given that the central argument of this dissertation is that The House of

Fame—as a poem of Christian “breakout”-- goes beyond the logic of castration, I obviously

view this function as temporary.

The Proper Milky Ways of the Law: Cicero and John of Salisbury’s Flight from the Scorpion

Put in the simplest of terms, the Phaethon myth gestures to the “corseynt” beyond

castration via the logic of felix culpa, through the Adam/Christ, Eve/Mary convertibility of the

Milky Way. Before, however, discussing the “beyond castration” hidden within the Phaethon

myth (and how this hidden truth animates Chaucer’s poem), I must first lay the groundwork for

that discussion by explaining more specifically how the influential, “intellectual” classical and

Christian readings of the Milky Way that Chaucer would have known do follow the logic of

castration. In these accounts, the Milky Way is a place of spiritual purity, a place defined by its

distance from the unruliness and corruption of the desiring body and the feminine, from “carnal

Dido” and, most importantly for our purposes, the jouissance of tidings, all the empty frivolous

talk of those effeminate and lowly Dido-like types who cannot properly master language.

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As so powerfully suggested by the story of Phaethon’s ride, the Milky Way resembles

a path or road, and in its seemingly linear form (the only form that can be really be seen from our

limited, mortal perspective on earth), it is also a boundary, associated with foolish Phaethon’s

presumption and arrogance, the failure to give the Father God his due, to honor the Limit; yet, as

we know from Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and Macrobious’s Neoplatonic Commentary, in its

circular, heavenly form (i.e. in its true full form, the form that we, on earth, cannot ever see), it is

the abode of the blessed, where human souls live in the glory and the radiant splendor of

innocence and integrity, untainted by matter and its chaos. How can we get from the first Milky

Way to the second? According to the patriarchal and humanist ethics of The Dream of Scipio,

“we” get there by being civic heroes, by being good Roman men (or, perhaps—Scipio Africanus

doesn’t say--women who honor and give birth to good Roman sons); as Scipio’s grandfather

makes clear to him, those destined for the glory of this Milky Way are “great and eminent” men,

the kind of high-spirited, high-minded patriots who serve their country but disdain the common

crowd, closing their ears to its empty babble:

Therefore, if you despair of ever returning to this region in which great and

eminent men have their complete reward, how insignificant will be that human

glory which can scarcely endure for a fraction of a year? But if you will look

upwards and contemplate this eternal goal and abode, you will no longer give

heed to the gossip of the common herd, nor look for your reward in human things.

(The Dream of Scipio 7. 5; Stahl 75-6)

In keeping with this attitude towards the common crowd and its gossip is the familiar, analogous

disdain for the body and its lowly, implicitly feminine and feminizing passions: the ultimate wish

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of the soul is to be blessedly and eternally free from the prison of the body, and the honorable

and superior man—he whose soul is destined to return to the Milky Way (the soul’s native

country)—is he who is able to master and control the body and its passions through the force of

his will:

“Do you then make that effort,” he said, “and regard not yourself but only this

body as mortal; the outward form does not reveal the man but rather the mind of

each individual is his true self, not the figure that one designates by pointing a

finger. Know, therefore, that you are a god if, indeed, a god is that which

quickens, feels, remembers, foresees, and in the same manner rules, restrains, and

impels the body of which it has charge as the supreme God rules the universe; and

as the eternal God moves a universe that is mortal in part, so an everlasting mind

moves your frail body.” (The Dream of Scipio 8.2; Stahl 76)

Accordingly, “the souls of those who have surrendered themselves to bodily passions” are

singled out for the longest and most painful period of purification after death (though, in contrast

to the infinitely less forgiving orthodox Christian view, not eternal damnation); as shown by the

fact that the dream ends with this warning, we can safely conclude that Cicero, a highly skilled

rhetorician, obviously considers it to be an extremely important message:

Indeed, the souls of those who have surrendered themselves to bodily pleasures,

becoming their slaves, and who in response to sensual passion have flouted the

laws of god and of men, slip out of their bodies at death and hover close to the

earth, and return to this region only after long ages of torment. (The Dream of

Scipio 9.3; Stahl 77)

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Of course, Cicero’s reference to “surrendering to bodily passion” includes irrational behavior

that is not explicitly sexual; indeed, as the historian Peter Brown explains in The Body and Soul:

Men and Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, the civilized Roman males of

this period were bothered by “any disruption of the even tenor of their style of command,” and

thus, aspiring to be (or appear to be) ideally just masters of their households and owners of

slaves, they were especially and acutely anxious about displays of “convulsive violence,” the

shame of falling into the carnal unruliness of rage and irrational cruelty (12). Nevertheless,

within Cicero’s text, the emblem of carnal unruliness is not the wrathful male Roman tyrant (as it

often is, for example, for Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy); rather, as Scipio Africanus

points out to his grandson from their lofty perch among the dazzling stars of the Milky Way, it is

the people of Carthage whom Rome—led by Scipio Africanus himself--once “compelled to be

obedient” and now must continue to do so: “To storm it you have now come” (2. 1; 70 in Stahl).

Although Cicero is only referring to Carthage as a historical enemy and loser to Triumphant

Rome, I would argue that this Carthage (and thus the “bodily passions” alluded to in Scipio

Africanus’s final words) becomes explicitly feminized and sexualized through the Aeneid’s fatal

conflation of the historical relationship between Rome and Carthage with the fictional

relationship between Aeneas and Dido, thereby making it all but impossible for post-Virgil

readers to think of Carthage without calling up the image of Dido—the woman that once ruled

it—and, specifically, Dido and her “dark eros,” her doomed, unruly passion for Aeneas.

Although there is no mention of Phaethon in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, I think it is fair to say

that, if Scipio Africanus had mentioned Phaethon, the venerable patriarch would interpret that

myth much along the same lines as the medieval mythographers mentioned by Jane Chance: one

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returns to the heavenly circle of the Milky Way by not being like Phaethon, i.e. by obeying

and internalizing the Father’s Law (the Limit of Castration) and thereby serving one’s Fatherland

by taking up a properly dominant yet just, i.e. stoically self-controlled, masculine subject

position vis-à-vis one’s various “feminine” Others (whether those others be the body, women,

slaves, or subjugated populations). It is thus no exaggeration to say that, in regards to Cicero’s

Milky Way, the ticket to heaven—the assurance of one’s godlike status--is closely linked to

one’s successful performance or approximation of the Roman ideal of masculinity.

In its more profound expressions, orthodox Christian teaching—most notably

Augustine’s theory of Original Sin—obviously rejects this humanist, implicitly masculinist

assumption of the godlike self-sufficiency of the soul as simplistic, superficial and overly

optimistic. Accordingly, instead of reading the Milky Way as the heavenly circle of the worthy

elite—the ultimate destination of austere and manly, masterful souls—medieval Christians, who

took a more inclusive approach, commonly read this phenomenon in light of the more

“feminine” Christian virtues of humility and patience; for them, the brilliant swash of the Milky

Way was not a prize for the few but a sign of the linear route taken by all flawed yet loving

human beings of both sexes (and of all social classes and ages) as they journeyed forth in their

ceaseless and often difficult earthly pilgrimage towards God. Significantly, throughout the later

centuries of the Middle Ages, the Milky Way was popularly associated not so much with the

symbolic universal pilgrimage of Augustine’s City of God as with the specific, literal, well-trod

roads or paths of various well-known pilgrimages, most notably, the great pilgrimage to the

shrine of Saint James at Compostella; in England, it was associated as well with two very

important English pilgrimages: when called “Watling Street,” the pilgrimage to Canterbury

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(“Watlynge Strete,” the English name for the Galaxy mentioned in line 939 in The House of

Fame, is the name of the road that leads to Canterbury), and, when called “Walsyngham Way,”

the pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary in Norfolk, “Our Lady of Walsyngham” (Allen

478). In these vernacular Christian readings of the Milky Way, what makes human beings shine

with the radiance of the holy is the embodied soul’s literal toil of repentance and its awareness of

lack, its yearning for healing and renewal. Against the well-regulated “harmony” of the patrician,

Latinate cosmology of The Dream of Scipio, the popular medieval Christian reading of the Milky

Way as pilgrimage thus evokes—at least potentially-- the implicitly egalitarian truth of

incarnational convertibility: the intertwining of a radical humility that never forgets the

intractability of the earthly Real of the body-as-flesh and a radical hope that anticipates and

hungers for the divine Real of the glorified resurrection body.

I say “potentially” because, as my last example—the Christian Milky Way of the learned

twelfth-century humanist John of Salisbury—subtly suggests, medieval Christian intellectuals

were intrigued and drawn to the wonder and beauty of incarnational convertibility but were, at

the same time, and at a deeper level, instinctively wary of it, reluctant to take its implicitly

revolutionary logic too far, that is, to the point that grapples with the problem of sexuality and

sexual difference and thus can be truly be said to be beyond the logic of castration (as opposed to

being more akin to a nostalgic or regressive fantasy). We find John’s Milky Way in the

concluding pages of his major work of political theory, Policraticus; there, in his effort to refute

the claims of this-worldly hedonism, to put to rest the idea that “any path to happiness inclines

towards the definition of the Epicureans,” John, his rhetoric rising, calls up Ovid’s famous lines

about the Milky Way to make one final ringing endorsement of the Christian life:

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For this reason you say: how may I who am without a path and not on the path

advance along this path? Among a great variety of paths, how may I, a foreigner

and a stranger whose eyes are enfeebled on account of deprivation and are at

present almost extinguished [Chaucer’s weak-eyed Geffrey comes to mind!],

discern the signposts so that the tranquility and joy you promised may be

reached? I answer

There is an elevated path manifested when the heavens are fair; it has the

name of the Milky Way. [Ovid, Metamorphoses, I. 168.]

Your fair heavens will not be unsettled before the eyes of your soul . . . and you

will easily recognize this path. (Policraticus 8.25; Nederman 226)

In a later passage, John identifies his shining metaphorical Milky Way as the path of grace;

apparently drawing upon the Neoplatonic maternal Milky Way described by Macrobius, John

evokes the Milky Way as the all-nurturing and life-saving Celestial Breast that gives suck to

infant souls, returning them, via its dazzling “milk” of grace, to the state of joyful satisfaction:

I acknowledge that grace is operative in both the will and the accomplishment of

the elect; I revere it as the way—indeed, the only true way—which leads to life

and renders satisfaction to each one’s good wishes. This is the milky way

manifested in the splendor of innocence, and its devotion to nutrition fulfills the

duties of the wet nurse and alone prepares for progresses. (Policraticus 8.25;

Nederman 228)

Seemingly intoxicated by this image of the maternal Milky Way giving suck to hungry souls,

John’s rhetoric rises again, becoming, in truth, a rhapsody of incarnational convertibility as he

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exuberantly unfolds for his reader his many thoughts about the mysterious profound

relationship between the tree of knowledge and the wood of the cross; his words offer us a whiff

of paradise, a glimpse into the utopian heavenly country “beyond castration”:

It is promised to them to them that ‘the revolving and flaming sword’ will be

removed from the tree of knowledge so that they may be led and enter into their

native country. I might say more. The tree of knowledge and the wood of life, in

which all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are concealed and in which

dwells corporally the fullness of divinity, is pulled up . . . and is taken out to the

land of our wandering and is planted in the midst of our Church . . . (Policraticus

8.25; Nederman 228)

Given John’s lovely and moving words, I feel somewhat churlish questioning the depth of his

commitment to incarnational convertibility. Nevertheless, I cannot help wondering why this

brilliant and erudite man who, in his first thoughts about the Milky Way, quotes lines from

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so studiously avoids mention of Phaethon, even though, if one thinks

about it, Ovid’s story of the origin of the Milky Way through Phaethon’s Fall, connected to

John’s Milky Way of grace, would seem to offer an almost perfect example of the felix culpa

reversals and interconnections that John so clearly loves to contemplate. Since he undoubtedly

knows Ovid’s story of Phaethon (indeed, two chapters earlier, in Policraticus 8.23, he uses the

mythical Phaethon to signify the dangerously destructive schismatic), John’s missed “rhetorical

opportunity” seems to me significant. What gives?

I propose that a plausible answer to John’s either conscious or unconscious “Phaethon-

avoidance” can be found if we return to the eagle’s account of the Phaethon myth in Chaucer’s

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poem, examining in particular the moment in which the inexperienced Phaethon definitively

loses control and catastrophe begins:

The carte-hors gonne wel espye

That he koude no governaunce,

And gonne for to lepe and launce,

And beren hym now up, now doun,

Til that he sey the Scorpioun,

Which that in heven a sygne is yit.

And he for ferde loste hys wyt

Of that, and let the reynes gon

Of his hors; and they anoon

Gonne up to mounte and doun descende,

Til bothe the eyr and erthe brende,

Til Jupiter, loo, atte laste,

Hym slow, and fro the carte caste. (943-56)

As we can see from this passage, the immediate cause of young Phaethon’s fall is his sudden

sighting of the constellation of Scorpio (apparently looming just ahead of him as he valiantly

attempts to drive the chariot of the Sun along its zodiacal path); in truth, his terror at this specific

sight is ultimately what marks him as mortal, separating him from his dream of matching his

immortal father, the Sun, and, of course, literally causing the fatal consequences of his own death

and the near-death of the material universe. Given that there are other potentially threatening

beasts in the sky, e.g. the constellation of Leo the Lion, why does the myth specify the celestial

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Scorpion to be the “sign of terror,” the sight of which no mortal being can survive? Of

course, as Julius Staal, author of Myths and Patterns in the Sky: Myths and Legends of the Stars,

points out, scorpions are frightening, and frightening in a peculiarly dark and awful way:

Scorpions are essentially creatures that frequent cracks, holes, and other secluded

spots, and are therefore usually associated with acts of secrecy and evil. Scorpions

also are active at night, a fact witth symbolic meaning in popular astronomy.

(220)

Moreover, if anyone who is familiar with the appearance of Scorpio in the sky will know, this

particularly brilliant and large constellation is well-marked and unmistakable, requiring no

stretch of the imagination on the viewer’s part to visualize it as an image of a threatening

scorpion:

From Antares [the reddish alpha star of the constellation that marks the creature’s

heart] going southeastward one cannot miss that striking curve of stars that forms

the tail of the Scorpion, terminating in the poisonous upturned stinger, as if ready

for attack. (Staal 219-20)

The threat of its poisonous sting—a threat for which, due to this creature’s secret ways, no one

can be prepared—makes the scorpion a natural symbol for treachery—and, in medieval lore, for

the treachery that is hidden beneath the smiling face of the flatterer. Thus, in The Book of the

Duchess, Chaucer’s Black Knight, devastated by the sudden loss of his beautiful wife, curses the

goddess Fortune, comparing her to the scorpion:

I lykne hyr to the scorpioun,

That ys a flas, flaterynge beste,

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For with his hed he maketh feste,

But al amydde hys flaterynge

With hys tayle he wol stynge

And envenyme; and so wol she. (636-41)

Similarly, in Canto 17 of Inferno, Dante’s Geryon, that unforgettable squalid and wondrously

polymorphous beast of Fraud, has the face of a just man and a scorpion’s venomous tail (10-1,

25-7).

Given, however, the immediate trauma that Phaethon experiences when he sees the

Scorpion, this reading of the scorpion in terms of treachery or, to be precise, flattering treachery,

seems off the mark, or, if not off the mark entirely, a meaning that derives from--or is

inextricably linked to--some other fundamental association. As astrologically savvy writers like

Chaucer and Dante would know, the celestial Scorpion does indeed have such a fundamental,

truly elemental, primal association: similar to the eighth house of a horoscope, Scorpio, the

ruthless Mars-ruled eighth sign of the zodiac, is the sign of the fundamental secrets and

boundaries of life and death, associated with the great mysteries and liminal experiences of

Death and Sex (i.e. “sex” as drive or force, orgasm--the “little death”—“sex” as a rude unknown

force beyond confines of the personal ego as opposed to “sex” in terms of the more aesthetically

pleasing, pleasurable and personable, harmonizing complementarity of marriage and Venus-

ruled romantic love), and the phoenix-like promises or possibilities associated with these

mysteries: sexual reproduction, transformation and regeneration. According to the tradition of

the “zodiacal man” used in medical astrology (a system that Chaucer refers to in passing to in I.

21 of his Treatise on the Astrolabe), Scorpio--in a sense, compensating for its association with

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the evil of death and mortality—was believed to govern the genitals of both male and female,

the agents of sexual reproduction in the war against mortality. In the Kalendarium of Nicholas

Lynn, a contemporary text that the Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales knew and used, Nicholas

illustrates the eighth sign’s rulership over the genitals by passing on an anecdote that no doubt

struck fear in the hearts of some of his male readers:

He [Nicholas’s as yet unidentified source, one “Campanus”] also knew a man, as

he asserts, suffering from an ulcer on the tip of his penis, and [he said that] it was

incised while the moon was in Scorpio, the sign which dominates that part of the

body, and at the very hour of the incision he died in the hands of those supporting

him, with no other additional cause. (208)

In light of Scorpio’s symbolic and, for believers in astrology, also powerfully concrete

association with the genitals and sexual intercourse, Chaucer’s emphasis on Phaethon’s

uncontrollable up-and-down movement, coupled with the image of burning (“and they anoon

/Gonne up to mounte and doun descende, / Til bothe the eyr and erthe brende”) takes on a new

meaning—thereby opening up or adding, against the customary, strictly maternal reading of the

“milk” of the Milky Way as heavenly breast milk, a new reading of the “milk” as seminal fluid, a

celestial sign of orgasm (in truth, becoming a sign of ultimate jouissance, the “mother of all

orgasms”!). And there is more: given that this image of mounting and descending simultaneously

brings to mind the familiar medieval image of a man mounting and descending the Wheel of

Fortune, Chaucer’s text—anticipating, in telegraphic form, his own story of Phaethon-like

Troilus’s fatal love affair with Fortune-like Criseyde-- nimbly and intuitively conflates the idea

of the human subject’s mortal terror and exultation before the specter of enigmatic Chance, the

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unknown and unknowable riddle of the Future, with the idea of the human subject’s similarly

manic-depressive powerlessness vis-à-vis the “Scorpionic” Otherness of the sexualized body

with its insistent and potentially ruthless, self-destructive craving for ecstasy and orgasmic

transcendence.

Having unearthed the sexual significance of the Scorpion of the Phaethon myth as well as

the “Scorpionic” resonances in Chaucer’s text, we are now in a better position to understand why

John of Salisbury, a high-ranking clergyman, did not find the Phaethon myth suitable for his own

vision of incarnational convertibility: although Ovid’s subtle linking of Phaethon’s “sin” to the

fatal consequences of sex and death calls to mind Augustine’s dark and profoundly sexualized

interpretation of the Fall, John’s reading of Adam and Eve’s sin in terms of “gluttony,” much

like his similarly oral image of the Milky Way as breast or wet-nurse, suggests a more safely

desexualized or asexual, “pre-Oedipal” approach to the fundamental questions about our “mortal

clay.” Some might argue, against this, that John’s use of maternal imagery for grace is

revolutionary rather than nostalgically regressive and ideologically conservative, calling to mind

not only the incarnational spirituality of the late Middle Ages that the pioneering historian

Caroline Walker Bynum has forcefully analyzed and recovered as “woman-friendly” (i.e.

implicitly empowering to and for women rather than repressive), but also, in the terms of

contemporary psychoanalytic theory, Julia Kristeva’s influential theory of the semiotic, a

potentially revolutionary, jouissance-filled space that she associates with the body of the nursing

mother.84 Against this objection, I would counter that John’s attitude towards the existential

problem of language is, for the most part, conventionally patriarchal and masculinist. A case in

point is his unsympathetic, “linguistic” reading of Queen Dido in Book 6 of Policraticus:

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instead of judging Aeneas and Dido equally for their language-based “sins” (he for

manipulating Dido with impressive talk and flattering words, she for foolishly being taken in by

his talk), John takes the familiar, perverse “boys will be boys” approach, that is, although he

clearly recognizes Aeneas’s role in Dido’s seduction through words, he glosses over it, subtly

disassociating the hero’s behavior from his name by calling Aeneas “a man” and “the stranger”

in the one sentence in which he does acknowledge Aeneas’s guilt and then swiftly placing the

burden of responsibility on “frivolous” Dido, whose foolish narcissism and political

incompetence in turn becomes predictably linked to luxury, “lewdness” and, above all,

femaleness and femininity: “This,” intones John, “is the end of the rulership of women and the

effeminate” (Policraticus 6.23; Nederman 131). Thus, for all his beautiful talk about the Milky

Way—the linear path to God and the overflowing round of the breast of grace through which we

as Christians can recapture the satisfaction of primal innocence, joyously transcending the

corrupting influence of language--when push comes to shove, John stubbornly clings to his not-

so-secret belief that, in some way, “real men” can and do elude the problem of language—and

even when they don’t, they can, like the hero Aeneas (and unlike poor Dido and all other

tarnished women) always bounce back to their former moral integrity.85 Translated

psychoanalytically into the terms of Phaethon myth, we as Christians show that we are on the

“milky” path to God by honoring the Father’s Law, which, at its most fundamental level, means

not only honoring the Oedipal Law (prohibition against incest) but also, accepting as a given the

primal, traumatic enigma of human embodiment, namely, the creation of sexual difference and

sexual identity that is automatically set in motion with the birth and consolidation of the human

subject within language. In a sense, Phaethon’s death functions as a warning and, like Christ’s

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death, as a substitution, that is, because Phaethon already did it for us, we as “normal” (non-

psychotic) subjects are granted the reprieve of primal repression: spared the fully catastrophic

consequences of looking directly at the monstrously Thing-like Scorpion, we live in relative

peace and psychic coherence (unshattered by Jove’s thunderbolt) as long as the Scorpion does

not arise from the depths, as long as we are able to avert our eyes, keeping a proper distance

from the great enigma. Moreover, if we collectively continue to do so, God (Nature) grants us

what could be called a “Scorpionic” consolation prize for our conscious and unconscious

compliance with the basic separations or “rules” of sex and gender, namely, the opportunity to

win not only heavenly immortality but also earthly immortality through the miracle of birth, the

successful reproduction and “living on” of our substance: primarily, via sexual reproduction, but

also, for at least a select few (to be precise, for a select few properly male-identified male

philosophers and intellectuals), the sublimation—and, to some extent, purification--of “ordinary”

sexual reproduction via the procreative power of the symbolic phallus.

From Phaethon-Adam to Phaethon-Christ:

Traversing the Fundamental Fantasy with Dante and Chaucer

With its enigmatic, deadly Scorpion at its heart, the Phaethon myth thus brings us face to

face with what Lacan termed “the fundamental fantasy,” defined below in simple clear terms by

the Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink:

Lacan suggests there is one single fantasy—an unconscious fantasy for most of

us—that is absolutely fundamental. This notion is related to Freud’s theory of a

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“primal scene,” a scene that plays a fundamental role in the constitution of the

analysand’s sexuality and life in general. The way one reacted to the scene (real

or imagined) as a child colors the whole of one’s existence, determining one’s

relations to one’s parents and lovers, one’s sexual preferences, and one’s capacity

for sexual satisfaction. (A Clinical Introduction of Lacanian Psychoanalysis:

Theory and Technique 56-7)

From the Lacanian perspective, this fundamental fantasy is clearly a “necessary evil,” something

that gives us a place in the universe beyond the potentially engulfing (m)Other, enabling the

subject to come into being, to desire and organize itself, avoiding the radical vulnerability and

depersonalized openness of psychosis by offering a workable “answer” that, to a sufficient

degree, covers over and blocks the scary unbearable enigma of Otherness (i.e. the unknown of

the Other’s desire, as well as the Otherness of embodiment and sexual difference). Given that

this fantasy framework is, in some way, necessarily connected to language--and thus, according

to the Lacanian perspective, the patriarchal symbolic order—we, as freedom-hungry, would-be

Phaethons, are left with an inevitable question(s), namely, “To what extent must our psychic

experience be governed by this fundamental fantasy, to what extent must we come into and

‘keep’ our existence as subjects only by running along the predictable grooves of--to borrow Iris

Murdoch’s wonderfully scathing phrase--“‘the familiar and recognizable rat-runs of the selfish

ego’” (The Sovereignty of Good 84)? Excluding the radical options of suicide or psychosis, is

there any way to pierce the fundamental fantasy, to get beyond it somehow to a different, more

enlarging view—in Phaethon’s terms, is it ever possible to gaze directly at the Scorpion and live?

According to Freud, or, more specifically, according to the old and no doubt justifiably

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weary Freud who wrote of the “bedrock of castration” in the 1937 essay, “Analysis

Terminable and Interminable,” the answer to this is a modest yet definite “no.” To some degree,

Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, seems to hold out the possibility for a “beyond castration”

through the “traversing of the fundamental fantasy” that occurs, within the psychoanalytic

relationship between analyst and analysand, via the laborious working through and ultimate

shattering of the transference-effect, the analysand’s ceaseless effort to fix the enigmatic desire

of the analyst according to the coordinates of his or her fundamental fantasy, thereby playing out

“his or her usual stance or position in relation to the Other’s desire, attempting to satisfy or

thwart it, be its object or undermine it, as the case may be” (Fink 57). It is the role of the analyst

to throw into question and shake up the analysand’s expectations and assumptions of the what

the Other wants and expects from him or her, what the Other desires; “by not being where the

analysand expects him or her to be,” the analyst vigilantly seeks to embody the pure, anxiety-

producing, object-less enigma of the Other’s desire (Fink 57). Ideally, the elusive analyst

manages to spark and awaken the analysand’s curiosity and desire to such a degree that a

genuine shift in the “neurotic,” i.e. “normal” or “non-psychotic,” subject occurs, opening and

freeing up this subject once more or less totally defined by resentment and fear of the Other to

the utopian possibilities beyond “the bedrock of castration.” Restated in Christian terms, the

analysand encounters the Scorpion yet lives, moving from (and suffering through) the solipsistic

fantasy of Phaethon-Adam to glimpse and feel—paradoxically via the once-dreaded Scorpion

itself--the regenerating, radical charity and jouissance of Phaethon-Christ. (Most wonderfully, as

will become clear by the end of this chapter, the symbol of the radical charity and jouissance of

Phaethon-Christ is, for both Dante and Chaucer, deeply connected to the Milky Way, the very

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sign of Phaethon-Adam’s mortal imperfection.)

This passage from Phaethon-Adam to Phaethon-Christ is key for both Dante and

Chaucer: indeed, it is no overstatement to say that, in regards to their respective poems, The

Divine Comedy and The House of Fame, it is this passage that releases the poet and his poetry,

freeing him to announce himself as a definitively Christian poet, a truly new creation. In The

Divine Comedy, Dante encapsulates this passage in the mysteriously significant Geryon episode

in Canto 17 of Inferno. As many readers might remember, this is the episode in which Dante the

pilgrim, together with Virgil, fly on the back of Geryon, the polymorphous beast of fraud,

downward to the eighth circle of Hell, a.k.a. “Malebolge,” (the infernal, labyrinthine home of all

but the most treacherous of the Fraudulent); as I mentioned earlier, to evoke the terror the

pilgrim feels as he rides on Geryon, Dante explicitly refers to the terror felt by the falling

Phaethon of myth (17.106-8). Unlike the mythical Phaethon, though, Dante the pilgrim survives

his flight, and, as Kevin Brownlee points out, significantly outdoes his Scorpion-fearing

predecessor, i.e. he not only looks out but also touches and rides on the back of Geryon, a beast

that Dante depicts with Scorpionic attributes (“Phaethon’s Fall and Dante’s Ascent” 136).

I would also like to draw attention to something Brownlee does not mention in his essay, namely,

how Dante’s possible astrological framing of Canto 17 serves to underscore or punctuate the

pilgrim’s traversal of the fundamental fantasy, i.e. the passage from Phaethon-Adam to

Phaethon-Christ. In the beginning of the episode, when Dante the pilgrim first catches sight of

the monstrous Geryon, Dante evokes the eighth sign of Scorpio, framing his description of the

fabulous monster with the familiar motif of the treacherous, flattering scorpion:

La faccia sua era faccia d’uom giusto . . .

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Nel vano tutta sua coda guizzava,

torcendo in sù la venenosa forca

ch’a guisa di scorpion la punta armava.

His face was the face of a just man . . .

All his tail was quivering in the void, twisting upward its venomous fork, which

had the point armed like a scorpion’s. (10, 25-7)

At the end of episode, after the pilgrim, aided by the guidance of calm expertise of his mentor

Virgil, has arrived safe and sound in the eighth circle of hell, having survived his scary, self-

described Phaethon-like flight on the scaly back of Geryon, Dante concludes the canto by

comparing the sullen Geryon’s immediate disappearance to an arrow shot from a bow—an image

that, as Dante would know, corresponds to the zodiacal sign that directly follows the Scorpion,

Sagittarius, the Archer:

così ne puose al fondo Gerïone

al piè al piè de la stagliata rocca,

e, discarcate le nostre persone,

si dileguò come da corda cocca.

So, at the very foot of the jagged rock, did Geryon set us down at the bottom, and

disburdened of our persons, vanished like an arrow from a string. (133-6)

By concluding with an archery image, Dante thus subtly constructs the pilgrim as a

successful Phaethon, literally mapping out the pilgrim’s outdistancing of Phaethon in

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astronomical and astrological terms as the zodiacal passage from the Scorpion to the

Archer.86 Given Sagittarius’s astrological rulership by Jupiter (Jupiter, being, for medieval

Christians, the natural mythological equivalent of the Christian God) as well as this sign’s

traditional association with both philosophy and religion, Paradiso offers further support for a

“Sagittarian” reading of the above lines; there, Dante, very possibly influenced by the

astrological connection of Jupiter with the celestial Archer, evokes the image of God as Divine

Archer multiple times, the most memorable occurring in Canto 1, where Beatrice uses it to

explain God’s providential ordering of the universe:

La provedenza, che cotanto assetta,

del suo lume fa ’l ciel sempre quïeto

nel qual si volge quell c’ha maggior fretta;

e ora lì, come a sito decreto,

cen porta la virtù di quella corda

che ciò che scocca drizza in segno lieto.

The Providence which ordains all this, with Its light makes ever quiet that heaven

within which revolves the sphere that has the greatest speed; and thither now, as

to a place decreed, the virtue of that bowstring bears us on, which aims at a joyful

target whatsoever it shoots.

To my mind, the parallel archery images in Inferno and Paradiso suggest a motif of incarnational

convertibility, hinting to us that, in some way, Dante’s successful descent in hell on the back of

the scorpion-like Geryon is a key moment of transformation for the poet-pilgrim—a spiritual

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ascent to the divinely aimed “glad mark” of God and Truth that occurs via a literal descent on

a comically concrete metaphor of fraud and deceit. In short, through the Geryon episode, Dante

the pilgrim traverses the fundamental fantasy of the Phaethon myth: not only does Dante, much

like a modern-day analysand, call up Geryon from up out of the depths of his own mind—“Virgil

the analyst” by his side--he does so by loosening and removing a mysterious “corda” around his

waist, a “corda” that may very well have something to do with the Scorpionic topic of sexuality

since, as Dante tells us, in 16. 107-8, he had once hoped that with this “corda,” he would be able

“to catch the leopard with the painted hide” (although there is much debate among modern Dante

scholars about the precise meaning of this “leopard,” Dante’s earliest commentators interpreted it

as an emblem of lust). Read in this way, Dante’s throwing off of the “corda” to lure and then

“catch” Scorpionic Geryon could be perhaps read as a sign of Dante’s recognition of the illusory,

narcissistic (perhaps even misogynistic) nature of his own adolescent dream of “chastity”: he is

now ready, with mentor Virgil’s help, to face the enigmatic, messy truth of embodiment and

sexuality, and, along with it, the unruly “matter” of language itself. Thus, conspicuously playing

against the traditional, misogynistic image of the “flattering scorpion” with a woman’s face,

Dante shatters the projection generated by the deception of the fundamental fantasy and gives his

beast of Fraud the face of a “just man” (17.10). As if to underscore this “traversal” through

Scorpio to Sagittarius, Dante ends the Geryon episode with a brilliant pun: the Italian word for

the bow of the archer is “corda,” thus calling up the “corda” that he once hoped to catch the

leopard.87 By giving up the “corda” that he once believed might magically ward off the taint of

the Scorpion, the pilgrim uses—and thereby diminishes the power of—the once-dreaded

Scorpion; with Virgil’s help, he recognizes the Zen-like truth that it is possible to use the beast in

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such a way that, after it has fulfilled its purpose, it shoots away like an arrow. 88

Turning from Dante’s masterfully organized Geryon episode to Chaucer’s more chaotic

House of Fame, it may seem at first that any parallels between the two only point to Chaucer’s

lack of seriousness vis-à-vis Dante, Geffrey’s spiritual inferiority vis-à-vis Dante’s pilgrim.

Since all but a handful of critics read The House of Fame as only a light-hearted and secular

romp—something with little if any Christian meaning or purpose—I suspect that most, upon

noticing some intriguing parallel (s), would eventually come to the same dismissive conclusions

as Penelope Doob, an author of a recent chapter-length study of The House of Fame:

In a poem that privileges vision, Dante flies on a human-faced monster; in a poem

about words and sound, Geoffrey is in the claws of an eagle with a human voice.

The point of this parallel, as usual, is that Geoffrey is a comically failed Dante

and operates in a very different world: the best illuminating upward flight

Geoffrey can manage is no better than Dante’s infernal downward flight. Both

flights end in mazes [Dante’s in Malebolge, Chaucer’s in the whirling wicker].

(The Idea of the Labyrinth 322)

The problem with this regrettably all-too-common assessment of Geffrey as a “comically failed

Dante” is that its logic rests on the unspoken assumption that eagle-borne Geffrey and Geryon-

riding Dante begin and end in a similar kind of subject-position. They do not. Roughly speaking,

Dante’s subject position is clearly masculine, and, accordingly, what the pilgrim must “traverse”

is a masculine version of the Phaethon-fantasy, namely, the narcissistic fantasy of masculine

purity and superiority vis-à-vis the treacherous “woman-faced” Scorpion. The pilgrim does

indeed shatter this fantasy: the beast of fraud that he himself calls up out of the depths has the

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face of a just man, not that of a beautiful woman. Moreover, when Dante the pilgrim arrives

in Malebolge, he sees, through the example of the now grotesquely degraded Thaïs (a legendary

courtesan who now scratches at herself with shit-filled nails) that the true “feminine temptress” is

not evil because she tempts men to indulge in physical pleasure with her sexually alluring and

“insatiable” body but, more precisely, because she, empowered by her sexually alluring body

(and seeking to gain more power), tempts the male ego with her flattering words, exaggerating

the male’s every little accomplishment—in essence, as her horrible appearance so graphically

implies, dirtying the world by speaking “shit” and creating “shits” wherever she went (Inferno

18. 127-36). Thus, for Dante, it is not that a woman’s flattery of a man covers up the evil of her

eventual betrayal of him: her flattery in and of itself is the wrong. 89

Chaucer’s Dido-identifying Geffrey, on the other hand, does not suffer from the same

illusion, does not need to learn the same lesson: given that the perfidy of the false lying hero is

the substance of his complaint in Book I of The House of Fame, the narrator obviously

recognizes the treachery of the “man with a just face”; by exposing masculine hypocrisy, he also

clearly rejects the role of “Thais,” she who gains power by flattering the male. Indeed, although

some modern readers may find the narrator’s exclamation against callous seducers gushing and

sentimental (and therefore, “obviously” a joke on the part of sophisticated Chaucer), his very

heartwringing words against heros-as-lying seducers (e.g. Aeneas, Theseus, Jason, etc.) calls to

mind Dante’s similar judgment against such seducers, specifically, the great Jason, for cruelly

abandoning Hypsiplye “alone and pregnant” (Inferno 18.94). Thus, what Chaucer’s narrator

clearly recognizes before the Jovian eagle arrives, Dante’s pilgrim only sees after Geryon has

deposited him in the eighth circle of hell: literally speaking, Geffrey and Dante’s pilgrim are, to

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quote Freud, indeed a “phase apart.” Beginning his eagle-borne journey where Dante’s flight

on Geryon ends, the narrator must face and traverse a “feminine” or “hysteric” version of the

fundamental fantasy, the illusion of feminine innocence and essential goodness. This task is, I

would argue, more difficult and complex than the comparable task faced by Dante’s pilgrim. Not

only must Dido-identifying Geffrey shatter the illusion of feminine innocence vis-à-vis

masculine treachery, he must do so all the while recognizing that the hysteric is not wrong about

the systematic injustice “she” sees and so loudly suffers: unlike the fundamental, culturally

sanctioned masculine narcissism of the glory-seeking hero, the position of feminine narcissism

represented by Chaucer’s Dido is a wounded narcissism that forms in consequence to real acts of

masculine rejection and betrayal (at the level of individuals and at the level of language and

culture in the form of “wikke fame”). Whereas the Geryon episode of Inferno suggests a

Phaethon-like subject who “faces the Scorpion” by moving beyond a naive homoerotic illusion

of masculine purity, The House of Fame begins with the alienated and knowing feminine-

identifying, suicidal subject who, having seen and suffered the injustice of the smooth-talking

“man with a just face,” must now find a way to move beyond the word-killing paralysis of

nihilistic despair, the ego’s last stand, as it were. Rather than dismissing his Geffrey as a

“comically failed Dante,” I would instead argue that Chaucer through Geffrey is taking on

questions related to language and sexual difference—asking the kind of profound questions that

ultimately threaten the patriarchal symbolic order to such a degree that they call into question the

meaning and worth of language and his own poetry (in this way, Chaucer is, like Dido, suicidal).

With laser-like skill, Dante also shows us sex-related sins of language (e.g. the treachery of the

male seducer, the obsequious “feminine masquerade” of Thais); however, in contrast to alienated

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Chaucer, Dante (both poet and pilgrim) identifies with the masculine position with such

confidence that he is able to view these sins and sinners as isolated kinks in the system rather

than evidence of a more worrisome, system-wide problem.

Nevertheless, in spite of un-Dante-esque obstacles created by his dangerous “feminine

knowingness,” Chaucer, just like Dante, seeks to write a truly Christian poetry, to move from

Phaethon-Adam to Phaethon-Christ. Recognizing himself to be “a phase apart” from Dante,

Chaucer deliberately defines himself and his own Christian path in Ovidian rather than Virgilian

terms: in Book Two, we hear of a markedly un-Virgilian Jove who, no controlling and self-

controlled Father with threatening thunderbolt, instead looks favorably on the unlikely Geffrey

and implicitly endorses the messy, exuberantly pluralistic dissemination of tidings (e.g. all the

anonymous and implicitly womanish talk of the common crowd that so offends the dignity of the

elitist humanist)—ultimately leading the narrator, in Book III, to a place that proves despairing

Dido wrong not by damning her in the “pro-Aeneas” way of the patriarchal mythographer but by

revealing in the palace of Fame, over and against Virgil’s more modest, inert and stable pillar,

the spectacular living potency of the Love carried aloft by Ovid, the not-Virgil, the woman-

identifying poet of transformation, famous for both his Heroides and his Metamorphoses. In the

end, however—the end of this poem being the wondrous “whirling wicker”—what sparks and

releases the distinctly Chaucerian incarnational genius of The House of Fame is not Chaucer’s

self-conscious, ego-enhancing identification with an imagined “feminine-identifying Ovid” but

instead how the poet, writing what he calls a dream and opening himself up to the crazy yet

strangely unerring path of his poem’s dreamwork, intuitively responds to and transforms literal

words and phrases that occur in earlier “Ovidian” parts of the poem, that is, within Dido’s

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Ovidian complaint in Book I, and, more emphatically, within Book II’s retelling of Ovid’s

story of Phaethon’s creation of the Milky Way, specifically as the latter “tiding” comes to

Geffrey’s ears in the authoritative form of the eagle’s patriarchal exemplum. Rather than only

comforting the Dido-identifying Chaucerian ego, these Ovidian words of Dido and the eagle

speak and, indeed, encapsulate the Father’s No to and for Geffrey. In so doing, these words

awaken and activate the truth of the Chaucerian subject of the unconscious, enabling the poet and

his poem to tap into—or, perhaps more accurately, create--the Ovidian Phaethon myth’s hidden

promise of incarnational convertibility via the “feminine” sound-driven magic of the lowly

signifier. Moving Chaucer and Geffrey beyond the self-defeating deadlock of “Dido” to the

ample, flourishing, and bustling feminine of the “womb” of tidings, I propose it is this magic that

traces out the path of what might be called the “feminine” passage from Phaethon-Adam to

Phaethon-Christ.

It is this magic of the signifier that brings all the twigs and innumerable bits in this

decidedly odd poem together—magnetizing everything in the poem to that final place similar to

the way that, for Dante, the magnificently sublime and all-encompassing Rose of the Empyrean

functions within The Divine Comedy. Finally, after much labor and many pages of pilgrimage,

we are now finally ready to explain the meaning of Chaucer’s whirling wicker in a way that does

justice to the depth and originality –and, above all, psychoanalytic truth--of the poem’s “elvyssh”

yet unexpectedly Dante-esque conflation of Christian, Platonic and Neoplatonic cosmological

tidings, a conflation that I alluded to at the end of this chapter’s first section. More specifically,

we are now ready to understand how and why the ever-fructifying, wish-fulfilling path of the

signifier takes us to the whirling wicker, creatively weaving and gluing together not only two

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great “twigs” of pagan philosophy and cosmology--the chora of Plato’s Timaeus (as Joseph

Grennen suggests) and the Neoplatonic Milky Way as envisioned by Macrobius (as Jane Chance

suggests)—but also, most importantly for this future writer of The Canterbury Tales, the key

“twig” of late medieval devotion, the great incarnational symbol and reality of the literal

Christian pilgrimage.

The signifier that magically unifies and generates these three “twigs” is the distinctly

English name by which the eagle, as he launches into the story of Phaethon, refers to what is

more universally called the Galaxy or Milky Way:

“Now,” quod he thoo, “cast up thyn ye.

Se yonder, look, the Galaxie,

Which men cleped the Milky Wey

For hit ys whit (and somme, parfey,

Kallen hyt Watlynge Strete) (935-9)

As I suggested above, with this signifier, the eagle speaks the Father’s No for Geffrey. The eagle

directs the narrator’s attention to this “Watlynge Strete” solely for didactic purposes;

disregarding the multiple meanings and resonances of the Milky Way, the eagle’s wish is to draw

a line for Geffrey, to spell out in the heavens the disastrous consequences of Phaethon and his

foolish presumption. For the moment, this firm drawing of the line—as is often the case with

children-- appears to be a relief for the overwhelmed narrator; after the eagle finishes his

exemplum of Phaethon, the narrator thus has no fear of falling (as one might be expect) but

instead brims with a newfound faith and trust in his feathered “father”:

And with this word, soth for to seyne,

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He gan always upper to sore,

And gladded me ay more and more,

So feythfully to me spak he. (960-4)

How are we to read the seeming contradiction of the eagle’s explicit verbal warning (Keep away

from the Limit! Don’t try to be godlike like presumptuous Phaethon!) and the ever-soaring bird’s

implicit, intoxicating bodily message (Transgress! Isn’t it a great feeling to “always upper to

sore”?)? Is the eagle perversely egging on “foolish” Geffrey, setting his presumptuous prey up

for a fall? I do not think so. Instead, as might be expected of a dreamed Jove-sent eagle whose

literary antecedent is Purgatorio 9’s rapturous dream eagle of grace, the eagle’s reference to

Phaethon shifts the poem in a distinctly Christian direction, a direction that hints at the promise

of what I’ve called the Christian passage from Phaethon-Adam to Phaethon-Christ. Accordingly,

Geffrey’s spontaneous first words, as Sheila Delany points out, “are a short prayer in praise of

God, the creator and cause of all he sees” (83):

“O God, “ quod y, “that made Adam,

Moche ys thy might and thy noblesse!” (970-1)

Trying to frame and make sense of his heavenly ascent in Christian terms, the poet-narrator’s

thoughts thus immediately turn to the great medieval Latinate allegorical models of intellectual

and spiritual “celestial flight”: Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Martianus Capella’s The

Marriage of Philology and Mercury, and Alan of Lille’s Anteclaudianus (972-90). Fortunately,

the eagle rudely jolts this would-be Alan of Lille out of his ethereal Latinate daydream:

With that this egle gan to crye,

“Lat be,” quod he, “thy fantasye!” (991-2)

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As the passage that follows makes clear, the eagle’s point is not that “bumbling” Geffrey, in

thinking of these Latinate poets of celestial flight, is being stupidly presumptuous here. Rather,

eagle’s jolt is the jolt of the Dantean revolution, here, signaled in the poem by the eagle’s attempt

to get Geffrey to pierce his bookish fantasy by looking at and learning about the stars directly

and scientifically (not like a “positivist” but with the wonder and desire of the true scientist).90

Humorously evoking Dante’s revolutionary incarnational choice to ground his own celestial

flight in what might be called the up-to-date here-and-now of the astronomical real, the eagle’s

astronomical lesson—albeit frustrated by his unwilling, weak-eyed student—functions to awaken

the would-be Christian poet to new and enlarging possibilities, pushing Geffrey away from the

Latinate models and towards the example of Dante, thereby sparing him (and us!) from possible

poetic disaster—the deadening and “tidying up” of Geffrey’s unpredictable, wondrous and

uniquely embodied dream flight via the writing of an uninspired and derivative allegorical poem.

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However amusingly presented within the poem, Chaucer takes the Dantean “astronomical

lesson” to heart. In the previous chapter with my reading of the eagle and the goddess Fame as

an astronomical integumentum, I proposed one way—one conscious way-- that Chaucer

playfully grounds The House of Fame in the astronomical real. Another less conscious way,

though, is through the transformational magic of the eagle’s squawking “Watling Strete,” that

homely and distinctly English signifier for a white eternal path in the sky and a muddy old road

of an earthly pilgrimage, a sign of both Phaethon’s fall and the Neoplatonic maternal heaven, of

a radiant and curving celestial “body” that, for medieval philosophers and men of science,

represented the astronomical real perhaps more than anything else in the sky: the mysterious

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Milky Way. With a wonderfully apt precision, The House of Fame’s “magic signifier” thus

combines the two prongs of the Dantean incarnational revolution—the truth of the stars and the

truth of the vernacular (the latter being, in the eyes of Dante-admiring Petrarch and other

humanists like him who would have preferred a Latin, safely elitist Divine Comedy, The Divine

Comedy’s one regrettable flaw).

With this signifier, the Chaucerian subject of the unconscious generates the poem’s

breakthrough and Geffrey’s final destination—the wondrous whirling wicker, the great “mother”

of tidings great and small. The first clue of the signifier’s presence is the oddly precise length of

the basket-like structure: “sixty myle of lengthe,” according to the wide-eyed narrator (1979). As

John Leyerle recognized, sixty miles is the length of the pilgrimage road from London to

Canterbury, a fact that very nicely corresponds with Geffrey’s impressions of the primary

occupants of this “hous”:

And, Lord, this hous in alle tymes

Was ful of shipmen and pilgrims,

With scrippes bret-ful of lesinges,

Entremeddled with tydynges,

And eek alone be hemselve.

O, many a thousand tymes twelve

Saugh I eke of these pardoners . . . (2121—7)

For Leyerle, the main point here is that this sixty-mile long, pilgrim-filled house anticipates the

tidings-full pilgrimage of The Canterbury Tales; thus, although he no doubt also knew that this

sixty-mile long road was called “Watlynge Strete” (a name that Chaucer’s poem earlier links to

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the Milky Way), Leyerle doesn’t bother to mention this curious fact. Nevertheless, that

celestial “Watlynge Strete” also makes its ghostly presence felt within the poem: as Jane

Chance’s reading suggests, the process by which the tidings enter and leave the whirling,

tumultuous house bears a striking resemblance to the Neoplatonic process described by

Macrobius by which souls destined for incarnation, once they leave the maternal Milky Way,

undergo the chaotic influx of matter (The Mythographic Chaucer 79). Although Chance

speculates that the poem thereby draws an analogy between the Neoplatonic Milky Way and

“Aventure” as “moder of tydynge” (mentioned at lines 1982-3 in the poem), I would argue

against this that it is the twiggy house itself that is analogous to the Neoplatonic Milky Way: like

the Milky Way-as-nursing mother evoked by Macrobius, it is the containing “basket” of the

house that marks and sets in motion the process of incarnation, separating the still-“pure” tidings

from their soon-to-be mixed and degraded state and thereby functioning as a physical boundary

that encompasses the universe of materialized tidings (similar to the way the circle of the Milky

Way was believed to encompass both the zodiacal belt and the seven planetary spheres).

But why on earth should a house that is as long as the earthly “Watlynge Strete” and that

functions in a way similar to the Neoplatonic “Watlynge Strete” look—as the poem’s description

insists--like a twiggy basket, evoking, for the puzzled and word-groping Geffrey, a curiously

redundant string of synonyms, e.g. “these panyers, / Or elles hottes or dossers” (1939-40)? To

answer this question, I propose we need only take a hint from the eagle’s sound-driven lecture

and open our ears to the sound of “Watlynge Strete.” What we will hear is a fortuitously perfect

pun, a true pun of “Aventure” and “moder of tydynges” that exemplifies and culminates the

dream-logic and dreamwork of this strange, comically sublime poem: “Watlynge” sounds more

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or less identical to “watlynges,” the fourteenth-century noun form of the verb “wattle”

(“wattling” in modern English). As defined below by the Oxford English Dictionary,

“watlynges” is clearly the perfect fourteenth-century word to describe Chaucer’s twiggy house

and its interlaced, labyrinthine structure:

An assemblage of rods or laths interlaced with branches, twigs, osiers, or the like,

serving as the material of a wattled wall, partition, fence, etc., or as the framework

of a “wattle-and-daub” building. Also, in generalized sense, wattle as a structural

material.

Transforming the celestial and earthly “Watlygne Strete” into a “wattled,” basket-like, sixty-mile

“house,” this one little pun also helps to explain how and why Chaucer’s whirling wicker of

“incarnating” tidings is connected not only to Macrobius’s Neoplatonic, celestial incarnational

“primal scene” but also, as Joseph Grennen suggests, to the similarly tumultuous incarnational

“primal scene” represented by the primordial, womb-like chora of Plato’s Timaeus (i.e.

Chalcidius’s medieval Latin translation of Timaeus), to be specific, the chora as it evoked by the

philosopher via the metaphor of the “winnowing basket,” referred poetically by Chalcidius as the

“weapons of Ceres.”

How then does the poem link up these Neoplatonic and Platonic “primal scenes” of

incarnation specifically to the more purely symbolic incarnation of language that Geffrey will

witness-- the “matter” or “mattering” of tidings? One way the poem does this is perhaps via the

astronomical real. If, for Chaucer, the rising of goddess Fame in judgment as Chaucer’s

integumentum for the astronomical rising of Sirius/Ceres, the “winnowing basket,” as

Chalcidius’s “weapon of Ceres,” enters the poem quite naturally—and, implicitly, with the

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poet’s full conscious intention: by doing so, Chaucer creates a new cosmology, replacing a

Cosmology of Matter run by Ceres-Nature with a Cosmology of the Word run by Ceres-Fame.

Once again, however, it could also be that it is the unconscious “magic” of the signifier that links

up Fame to the incarnational “winnowing basket” of Platonic cosmology. Similar to the

“watlynges”/“Watlynge Strete” pun, this pun, as it turns out, also connects the image of the

whirling wicker to an important earlier Ovidian passage within the poem, this time, to the

Heroides-like exclamation spoken in Book I by Geffrey’s despairing Dido:

O wikke Fame!—for there nys

Nothing so swift, lo, as she is! (349-50)

In this case, the potently generative pun is on “wikke” (“wicked” in modern English), a word that

sounds very close to “wiker” or “wyker” (“wicker” in modern English), a Middle English word

denoting, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, “a pliant twig or small rod, usually of

willow, esp. as used for making baskets and various other objects; an oiser; a withe.” The

dictionary illustrates fourteenth-century usage with a 1398 citation (taken from John Trevisa’s

English translation of Bartholomew the Englishman’s De Proprietatibus Rerum) that echoes the

“panyers” (1939) that Geffrey thinks of as he tries to describe the twiggy house that he sees, e.g.

“Suche vessels wre fyrste made of tree and of wykers: as panyers, baskettes.” Through the

“magic” of this simple pun, the swift “wikke Fame” so feared by Geffrey’s hysteric “inner Dido”

is fortuitously transformed into the swiftly turning “wicker Fame”: instead of a monolithic and

unchanging “wikke” Other, the once timid narrator finds an incredibly vital and generative

“wicker” chora-like womb that takes in all tidings only to change them and to thereby produce

new and unforeseen combinations.

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With these two pun-generated magical transformations, the would-be Christian poet

Geffrey enters a space that transcends both masculine and feminine responses to the Father’s No,

opening up incarnational possibilities beyond the patriarchal “bedrock of castration,” beyond

both the “feminine” stance of victimization and resentment (Dido vs. “wikke fame”) and the

“masculine” stance of arrogance and naïve idealism associated with Oedipal anxieties (the

celestial “Watlynge Strete” as sign—and warning-- of presumptuous Phaethon’s fall). But, as the

poem makes emphatically clear, the tidings-hungry Geffrey cannot enter this space through the

force of his own volition: paralleling Dante’s dream eagle of grace in Canto 9 of Purgatorio, the

eagle of Book II—now called by Geffrey “myn egle” (1990)—the eagle will, once again, be

Geffrey’s mode of transport. Without departing from the light-hearted tone of his poem, Chaucer

hints at the Christian meaning of the bird in two ways. First, as the eagle tells Geffrey, there is

only one way for him to get in the whirling house:

“But certyn, oon thing I the telle,

That but I bringe the therinne,

Ne shalt thou never kunne gynne

To come into hyt, out of doute,

So faste hit whirleth, lo, aboute.” (2002-6)

The eagle then goes on to frame and define his mission using religious words evoking grace and

the comfort of the Holy Spirit: the eagle reminds the narrator how “Jove, of his grace, / As I have

seyd, wol the solace” (2007-8) and refers to how he, the eagle, helps Geffrey, obediently

executing the divine will that Jove “yaf in expres commaundement” (2021). Besides these

obvious Christian signals, the poem more subtly underscores its message through the repeated

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imagery of “abiding” and “dwelling,” words specifically associated with grace and charity

(e.g. the indwelling of God within the soul and the soul within God) in the writings of Saint

John, the New Testament writer of God’s love who is traditionally symbolized by the eagle (see,

for example, John 15. 4-11, the well-known passage which begins with Jesus saying “Abide in

me, and I in you,” as well as 1 John 2:24, 3.6, and 4:12). When the eagle drops off Geffrey at the

mountain and palace of Fame, the eagle’s words suggestively combine his prayer for God’s

grace and his promise to Geffrey that he will “abyden” him, that is, that he will wait for the poet,

that he literally will not abandon him:

“Farewel,” quod he,

“And here I wol abyden the;

And God of heven sende the grace

Some good to lernen in this place.” (1085-7)

Later on, when Geffrey spots the awaiting eagle “perched hye upon a stoon” (1991), the

interchange between the two once again subtly evokes John’s holy “abiding” and “dwelling” by

combining the idea of the eagle’s “abiding” with a petition for God’s grace or love (here, in the

form of Geffrey’s oath):

And I gan stregthe to hym [the eagle] gon,

And seyde thus: “Y preye the

That thou a while abide me,

For Goddis love . . .

“Petre, hat is myn entente,”

Quod he to me; “therefore y duelle.” (1992-5, 2000-1)

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Of course, this literally “abiding” eagle’s transport of Geffrey is, of course, very funny and

far from sublime (at 2018-9, the narrator tells us that the bird “hente me up betweene hys toon, /

And at a wyndowe yn me broghte”). Nevertheless, the humor of this awkward transport does not

rule out its grace-ful, contemplative consequences—hinted at in the poem by the sudden and

uncanny stillness that the eagle-borne Geffrey perceives upon entering the house (described

earlier in 1924-6 as moving as “swyft as thought” and never stopping):

And therwithalle, me thoughte hit stente,

And nothing hyt aboute wente—

And me sette in the flor adoun. (2031-3)

Bennett eloquently sums up the import of this passage: “The poet, that is, when divinely guided,

can reach the still centre of this turning world, can watch the whole process of a tale’s gestation”

(Chaucer’s Book of Fame 178).

Arrival at the Center: The Whirling Wicker, the Rose, and Two Final Visions of Love

“In the flor adoun” at the center of “the turning world” that is a “wattled” house, the poet

and seeker Geffrey finds himself in the still center between punitive threat and dead certainty of

“wikke Fame” and the flourishing abundance of “wicker Fame,” between the purgatorial

“Watlynge Strete” of embodiment (both in its earthly and celestial forms) and the promise of the

heavenly, Neoplatonic “Watlynge Strete,” the bright land of charity beyond sin. Its sublime

traces and Christian echoes fully seen and heard, we are now ready to see what is perhaps the

biggest “secret” of The House of Fame’s marvelous, odd, and seemingly merely carnivalesque,

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“secular” image: namely, the fact that, it is, for Chaucer the newly “baptized and confirmed”

Christian poet, nothing short of an ultimate symbol, the poet’s fully incarnational and distinctly

English tribute to--and translation-transformation of--the corresponding ultimate symbol of

Dante’s Divine Comedy—the Rose of the Empyrean. Thus, just as Dante the poet suddenly finds

himself, at the end of Paradiso, in the center of the Heavenly Rose, a great charity-infused round

of the All that “belongs” to and is identified with the goddess-like Mary, the Empress of Heaven

who gave and gives birth to the Word (the ultimate “tidings of great joy”), Geffrey the poet

(aided, of course, by his Dantean eagle) lands “adoun” in the midst of the whirling wicker, a

great jouissance-infused, chora-like “basket” of the All of Tidings that “belongs” to and is

identified with the goddess Fame, the Empress of Language who gives birth to the word.

Moreover, just as Dante the pilgrim is distinguished by his embodiment wherever he goes,

Geffrey finds himself surrounded by shade-like tidings: when each finally arrives at his

destination, there is a sense that the hidden power or “centering” of both is somehow related to

their special, privileged state of embodiment. To some, these parallels, if present, “must be”

parodic—a mere joke on Chaucer’s part. Falling into the predictable either/or stranglehold of

patriarchal logic, such a reading, however, misses and blocks the hub around which, for both the

medieval poet who “writes Christ” and the inarticulate peasant who “eats” Christ-as-Communion

Round, the “new tidings” of Christ revolves: the mysterious “real” of incarnational

convertibility.

To support my reading of the incarnational, non-parodic relationship between Chaucer’s

whirling wicker and Dante’s sublime Rose, I point to three pieces of evidence, one from the

cultural milieu outside the poem, one from the text within, and another from “the astronomical

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real.” The first, coming from the world of medieval architecture, is taken from John

Leyerle’s essay, “The Rose-Wheel Design and Dante’s Paradiso.” In this essay, Leyerle directs

the reader’s attention to the intriguing design of the church of San Zeno in Verona, in particular,

its large round window (what we today typically call a “rose window”) constructed by one

Brioloto “in the last decade of the twelfth century, or soon after” (281). As Leyerle explains,

what makes this church window of San Zeno so particularly rich—and distinctly medieval—in

meaning is that, due to its two-part structure, it changes its meaning depending on one’s

perspective: from the outside, the observer primarily sees the window as the spoked wheel of

fortune (rota fortunae), the traditional motif of earthly mutability made famous by Boethius;

from the inside, the observer primarily sees, in essence, the “negative” of the spoked wheel, the

window as the petaled flower or rose (rosa) of light, the rose being a traditional symbol of both

the earthly beloved Lady and Mary, the glorious rosa sine spine (287-9). Leyerle first points out

the obvious symbolic opposition between the two perspectives:

One side [of the window] is on the exterior of the church and faces the mutable

presence of the world; this is where the figures of those on fortune’s wheel

appear, a reminder that the worldly situation is mutable. The other side is on the

interior of the church and faces the divine presence of God. (289)

Presenting Dante’s Divine Comedy as the supreme literary synthesis and fulfillment of the rose-

wheel design, Leyerle then goes on to explore and emphasize what I would refer to as the

“incarnational convertibility” of the two-part design, that is, how rota and rosa are coincident

and inseparable. This connection between the two—literally separated only by one letter--brings

hope to what would otherwise be a stalemate between the human and the divine. In Leyerle’s

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reading, this hope is realized most powerfully via the love and light that connects earthly love

to divine love:

On the earth the rose is the beloved lady, and the wheel is mutability, fortune’s

ever-turning changes in time, this pattern is not without hope, however, because it

is a fallen copy of the divine pattern in which the rose is Mary, or the celestial

rose itself, and the wheel is order, God’s cosmos circling in eternity. Earthly love,

sprung from vision and therefore an aspect of light, thus has redemptive power to

lead man to divine love, a progression that Dante records of himself in his great

poem which is, at once, both rigorously rational and transcendently mystical.

Dante’s love for the earthly Beatrice is the start of his poetic and spiritual ascent

to the Empyrean. (303)

Within The House of Fame, Chaucer similarly draws on this hopeful view of love’s redemptive

power via the motif of “love tidings.” As we see through the miraculously expanding power of

Love that Ovid upholds in the Hall of Fame, love tidings have special force and power. Love

tidings also mysteriously frame Geffrey’s journey, hinting that the poet will only find fulfillment

by producing and multiplying a new kind of love tiding. At the beginning, the eagle tells him that

Jove is specifically concerned that the poet--though deserving reward for his selfless service to

lovers (he is always writing about love)--has “no tydynges / Of Loves folk yf they be glade / Ne

noght elles that God made” (643-5). And, at the end, with the mysterious appearance of the “man

of the great auctoritee” whom Geffrey sees but does not hear, the motif of love tidings returns,

for, as the poem pointedly informs us, this “man” (whether tiding or something else) who creates

such a stir and crescendo enters into the whirling house “In a corner of the halle, / Ther men of

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love-tydynges tolde” (2142-3). The poem, of course, abruptly and tantalizingly ends without

our hearing the words of this enigmatic “man of gret auctoritee” ---a fact that I would argue hints

at the special, transcendent nature of the “love-tydygnes” he speaks.

The second, textual piece of evidence for the whirling wicker-Rose connection is more

specific and, as an added bonus, offers a new source for Chaucer’s explicit use of the image of

the labyrinth at the beginning of the poem’s description of the house:

Tho saugh y stonde in a valeye,

Under the castel, faste by,

An hous, that Domus Dedaly,

That Laboryntus cleped ys . . . (1918-20)

So far, Lee Patterson has perhaps made the best case for a likely source. In his Chaucer and the

Subject of History, Patterson, calling Chaucer’s house “the wicker cage of history,” points to the

historian Orosius’s depiction of his complex literary task via the “telling metaphor of basket-

weaving,” i.e. the historian weaves together strands of unrelated events to create an

“inextricabilem cratem” (a wickerwork or hurdle that cannot be unraveled) (99-100). As

Patterson points out, the medieval historian Ranulf Higden, repeats this Orosian metaphor but

changes it a bit, stating at the beginning of his Polychronicon, “that the historian’s materials are a

‘Daedalini labyrintus, inextricabilis intricationis,’ which in Trevisa’s fourteenth-century

translation reads ‘laborintus, Dedalus hous’” (100). Because he reads The House of Fame as a

strictly secular poem about the problem of truth in relation to historical tidings, this source works

particularly well for Patterson; summing up, he writes, “The House of Tydyngs is thus the

labyrinth not only of history but of the writing of history” (101). Putting aside the obvious fact

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that I reject Patterson’s reading of the poem in terms of the writing of secular history, I will

instead point out a few significant problems with the source he suggests: 1) within the context of

the poem, the labyrinth of tidings is neither asexual nor owned by masculine writers of secular

history: rather, as Chaucer mischievously emphasizes through the use of double entendres (right

after the reference to “Laboryntus” in line 1921, the poem feminizes the labyrinth by punningly

refers to how this “queynte hous” is “queyntelych ywrought”), this house, in essence, belongs to

no man—it belongs to and is identified with the goddess Fame, 2) whereas Chaucer’s poem,

drawing upon the familiar figure of Daedulus as artist, emphasizes the artistry and wonderous

intricacy of the labyrinth, Patterson, who emphasizes the “inextricabilem cratem” of Orosius,

clearly views the labyrinth in malo (“Whether or not Chaucer’s House of Tydyngs finds its

textual source in Orosius’s Historiae—the metaphor of labyrinthine interweaving does invoke a

recursive secular history” 100).

There is, however, a possible source for The House of Fame’s “Domus Dedaly” that

solves the above problems—a labyrinth not only distinctly English but also feminine, love-

related, gossip-related, legendary, and, as will soon become clear, uncannily apt for Chaucer’s

“divine comedy.” I refer to a labyrinth that, according to Penelope Doob’s exhaustive The Idea

of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, ranks as “the most famous

medieval maze of all,” namely, the legendary labyrinthine camera of Rosamund Clifford (the

famed “Fair Rosamund”), “a curving and impenetrable Daedalian creation allegedly constructed

by Henry II at Woodstock to shield his mistress from his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine” (106).92

Ironically enough, this legend of Rosamund’s maze, presented as historical fact, makes its first

appearance in the very book that Patterson refers to in his discussion: Ralph Higden’s

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Polychronicon, translated into English by John Trevisa in the late fourteenth-century. There,

we learn of a wondrous maze-like structure built by an openly adulterous king whose

scandalously passionate love affair for his Rosamund—like that of Chaucer’s Dido--implicitly

defies and generates “wikke fame,” yet, at the same time, due to the story’s highly romantic aura

and fabulous details, sets the stage for the future amplification and multiplication of love tidings

(which, of course, is what exactly did happen: the legend of Fair Rosamund captivated and

sparked the imagination of English writers for centuries). Much like the “Domus Dedaly” of

Chaucer’s poem that Geffrey spies “under the castel, faste by,” the labyrinthine love-nest that

Henry built for Rosamund was presumably not in his palace at Woodstock but in some secret

place somewhere on the grounds of Woodstock (a place that Eleanor could not easily find).

Below is John Trevisa’s translation of Higden; for the purposes of my argument about the

whirling wicker’s relation to Dante’s heavenly Rose, note in particular the passage’s emphasis on

“wonder craft” (the labyrinth as a sign of godlike artistry as opposed to befuddlement) and the

play on Rosamund’s name as “rose of the world”:

He [Henry II] that hadde prisoned his wif Eleanore the queene, and was priveliche

a spouse brekere, leveth now openliche in spousebreche, and in nought aschamed

to misuse the wenche Rosamond. To this faire wenche the kyng made at

Wodestoke a chamber of wonder craft, wonderliche i-made by Dedalus werke,

lest the queene schulde fynde and take Rosamounde; but the wenche deide sone,

and is i-buried in the chapitre hous at Godestowe [a nunnery] besides Oxenforde

with sich a writygne on her tombe:

‘Hic jacet in tumba rosa mundi, non rosa munda,

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Non redolet, sed olet, quare redolere solet.’

That is, Here lieth in tombe the rose of the world, nought a clene rose; it smelleth

nought swete, but it stinketh, that was wont to smelle ful swete. This wenche

hadde a litel cofre scarsliche of two foot long, i-made by wonder craft, that is yit

i-seyn there. Therynne it semeth that geantes fighten, bestes stertelleth, foules

fleeth and fisches meoven with oute manis hond meovynge. (Ranulf Higden,

Polychronicon, vol. VIII, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby, 52-5. Trevisa’s translation

is given on facing pages.)

Given Chaucer’s close association with the Ricardian court as well as the fact that, in his early

and middle poetry, the poet typically represents himself as a love-poet and servant of Love and

lovers, Chaucer would have most certainly heard of and remembered this highly memorable,

local and well-fabled story of Rosamund and Henry’s “labyrinth of love”: after all, one of the

few love lyrics ascribed to Chaucer is a graceful poem addressed to a “Rosamounde,” a poem

that in which the poet wittily plays upon the lady’s name as “rose of the world” (“Madame, ye

ben of al beaute shryne / As fer as circled is the mapamounde”) (Riverside Chaucer 649). Hence,

against the asexual and more narrowly defined Orosonian “inextricabilem cratem” suggested by

Lee Patterson, I would argue that, if Chaucer did have a specific source in mind when he

depicted the whirling wicker as a labyrinth, this emphatically “quenyte” and jouissance-filled,

home-grown labyrinth, identified with “the rose of the world,” would seem to be the more likely

one: without exaggeration, one might say that Rosamund’s labyrinth is made-to-order for

Chaucer’s all-encompassing yet distinctly vernacular house of tidings.

More importantly for the argument at hand, the possible trace of this “rose of the world”

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labyrinth in The House of Fame strengthens the likelihood that Chaucer conceived his

whirling wicker as a complement to the Rose of Dante’s Paradiso. Once again, building on John

Leyerle’s reading of the rose-wheel design, it is important not to reduce the relationship between

the “rose of the world” and “the rose of heaven” to one of simple opposition but to recognize the

incarnational promise that the two “roses” and the loves (or, in terms of Chaucer’s poem, love-

tidings) they represent are, in some way, also inseparably and mysteriously connected. In the

above-quoted passage from Trevisa, for example, the writer sets out a strong symbolic

opposition (the moralistic epitaph on Rosamund’s tomb) yet ends with a romantic and enigmatic

detail (Rosamund’s still-surviving coffer with its wondrously animate carvings of giants and

various animals that “meoven with oute manis hond meovynge”) that, evoking the vitality,

beauty and generative powers of Nature, hints at the secret promise of Rosamund, the “rose of

the world.” Perhaps, at some level, the tidings of Rosamund, the “rose of the world,” enthralled

late medieval people not only because it was scandalous gossip about the powerful but also

because the story of a king’s overpowering, illicit love for a “faire wenche” (and the secret,

labyrinthine site of their love-making) is analogous to the King of Heaven’s similarly

overpowering, “illicit” love for the “fairest” of all young women--the Virgin Mary, that is, how,

the human Mary, no earthly queen, is not God’s wife nor He her husband but nevertheless she

bears his Son, and the “love-making” by which this Son is conceived is shrouded in mystery,

occurring, as it were, in a secret and unfathomable place. When the legend of Rosamund’s

labyrinth and the tidings of the Incarnation are seen in this light, the idea of a correspondence

existing between Chaucer’s femininized, “queynte” labyrinth and the Dante’s sublime Marian

Rose is no longer far-fetched or outrageous.

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This possible trace of Rosamund’s labyrinth, however, is not the most powerful point

of contact between Chaucer’s whirling house of tidings and Dante’s Rose: that honor goes to the

astronomical real of the Milky Way to which both are connected, that vast and mysterious

celestial phenomenon so imbued and written over with so many influential, fundamental

classical and medieval “tidings” of sin and holiness—and redemption (Phaethon’s Fall, Scipio’s

heaven of heroic souls, Macrobius’s birthplace and nursery of souls, John of Salisbury’s shining

way and maternal breast of grace, the Way of Saint James and Watling Street, etc.). So far, I

have demonstrated the ways in which I believe the richly symbolic Milky Way, called

“Watlynge Strete,” enters and re-enters Chaucer’s poem, in effect generating Geffrey’s final

destination in a sixty-mile long wattled House of Tidings via the dreamwork transformations of

its signifier. I will now hazard a guess that what charges the signifier “Watlynge Strete” with

such generative force for Chaucer as he writes his “divine comedy” is directly tied to this

scientifically inclined poet’s contemplation about the relationship between Dante’s Rose and the

rest of Creation—above all, its mysterious connection to the Milky Way. To those familiar or

acquainted with the vast land of Dante scholarship, this perception of the Rose will be

unfamiliar. According at least to my search of the incredibly helpful Dartmouth Dante Project,

none of the 70 or so Dante commentators in this database make this connection. Knowing this, I

realize that some may be very skeptical of my argument. To me, such a reaction is entirely

understandable: out of respect for the great Dantisti tradition and its awesome mountain of

erudite scholarship, I myself at first doubted the worth of my observations and analyses.

Nevertheless, as I will now show, the evidence within the poem is there; moreover, this evidence

is, I would argue, as strong as the evidence supporting currently well-known and well-respected

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scholarly hypotheses about the Rose, for example, Busnelli’s suggestion that Dante’s may

have conceived of his amphitheater-like Rose after seeing the Roman Coliseum or the hypothesis

advanced by Giuseppe Di Scipio in The Symbolic Rose in Dante’s Paradiso that Dante’s primary

inspiration for the Rose was the precisely designed Gothic cathedral with its light-filled, flower-

like windows. 93 Below I list the key supporting passages within The Divine Comedy (as well as

one from Dante’s Il Convivio) that I believe point to a Rose-Milky Way connection:

• Dante’s Rose is, in essence, a vast shining circle of light that is peopled with the radiant souls

of the blessed; due to an extraordinary and special privilege, Dante the pilgrim, who

throughout the preceding cantos of Paradiso has only seen the blessed as flames, is now

granted a vision of the blessed as they will appear in their gloried bodies at the Last Judgment

(Paradiso 31. 43-5). Through these fundamental elements, Dante recalls and incarnationally

rewrites the image of the heavenly Milky Way as it appears in Chapter 3 of Cicero’s Dream

of Scipio: there, Scipio refers to the Milky Way, the abode of pure, disembodied souls, as

“splendidissimo candore inter flammas circus elucens” (a circle shining forth with the most

dazzling brightness amidst the flames).

• In Paradiso 30: 61-90, Dante describes for us the astonishing mystical process by which he

comes to see and experience the Rose. First, he tells us he saw a river of light that is sparked

by flashing reddish-gold gems constantly and vibrantly entering and leaving its intoxicating

“waters” (61-9). Comparing himself to a hungry infant who, upon waking up, immediately

turns his face towards “the milk” (il latte), Dante describes how he hurried towards the river

of light and then bent his face down to drink with his eyes its flowing light. As he does this

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drinking, he immediately sees the linear river of light transformed into the great circle of

light—the Rose (88-90). This amazingly rich passage evokes the Milky Way in a number of

ways, most notably in its analogy of the river as “the milk” that the hungry infant-pilgrim

turns toward (here, Dante perhaps is thinking of John of Salisbury’s maternal Milky Way)

and its depiction of a linear river of light that then transforms into a circle of light. As its

name clearly suggests, the radiant Milky Way or Galaxy has been since ancient times

implicitly defined as “flowing light,” and, given that this celestial phenomenon also looks like

a path or road, the idea of a river naturally comes to mind as well: according to Richard

Allen’s cross-cultural survey of Milky Way lore, “during all historic time it has been thought

of as the River of Heaven” (474). Moreover, just as with Dante’s river of light that changes

into a round as his powers of vision (spiritual state) heightens, our vision of the Milky Way

changes depending upon our perspective: while on earth, we can only see it in its linear form

(as a path or river), but, if we could look at it from a heavenly perspective, we would be able

to see its true circular form. Lastly, Dante’s description of the river of light with its flaming

sparking gems perhaps also calls to mind The Dream of Scipio’s “flammas” that appear with

the dazzling circle of light (quoted above).

• Earlier, in the sphere of Mars, Dante has a vision of Christ; significantly, to communicate the

great mystery and ineffability of his experience, he evokes the Galaxy—the Galaxy that so

that that even wise men are baffled (Paradiso 14. 97-100). This vision in turn seems in some

way related to the Rose: the depiction of the great cross of light in terms of a circle’s

quadrants (101-2) evokes the geometry of the Rose, and the lights that Dante sees

spontaneously sparking and flashing forth on the cross “from horn to horn,” being implicitly

associated with both Mars (red) and Christ (the Sun) seem to anticipate the vibrant, sparking

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and flashing reddish-gold gems of Canto 30’s river of light.

• Dante’s next vision of Christ—Canto 23’s vision of the triumphant Sun-Christ rising with his

troops (19-33)--occurs in the eighth sphere, the eighth being the sphere identified with the

fixed stars and the Milky Way. Significantly, directly after Dante is granted this

overpowering, dazzling vision of the translucent substance of Christ, Beatrice refers to Christ

as Savior in terms that evoke one of the most common—and indeed, universal--figures of the

Milky Way, namely, that of a celestial road or path connecting Heaven and Earth: “That

which overcomes you now / is strength against which nothing had defense. / Within it dwell

the wisdom and power that opened between Heaven and earth the road / mankind for ages

longed for eternity” (Paradiso 23. 37-9; Musa 272). In the Milky Way’s eighth sphere (and in

this same Canto), Dante also is granted his first vision of Mary; Beatrice’s words to Dante

mingle the idea of Mary as Rose with the idea of a heavenly “good path” (“buon cammino”):

“There is the Rose in which the Word of God / took on the flesh, and there the lilies are /

whose fragrance led mankind down the good path” (Paradiso 23. 73-5; Musa 273).

• In the sphere of Saturn, one of the flame-souls Dante encounters describes his experience of

mystical contemplation with a powerful and richly symbolic image that, visually speaking,

suggests a microcosm of the Rose in its similarly eroticized, Virgin Mary-like relationship to

God (as Beatrice explains to Dante in Paradiso 30. 106-8, the vast round pool of light that

forms the Rose is ultimately generated and sustained by one shaft of divine light reflected

from the summit of the Primum Mobile); it also anticipates the rapturous conclusion of The

Divine Comedy—Dante’s experience of the beatific vision as he is surrounded—

enwombed—by the light of the Rose:

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“A ray of God’s light [luce divina] focuses on me

and penetrates the light enwombing me [m’inventro],

whose force once joined to that of my own sight

lifts me above myself until I see

the Primal Source from which such might is milked [è munta].”

(Paradiso 21. 83-7; Musa 249-50)

Here, once again, Dante subtly calls up the Milky Way--the “milk” that is light—through his

precise choice of a verb that could be translated as “to derive from” but, in fact, literally

means “to milk.” With this supremely well-placed verb, Dante is thus able to depict mystical

contemplation as the ultimate “mother of all orgasms,” subtly fusing together the phallic

jouissance associated with the creative, life-initiating “milk” of male orgasm (the Milky Way,

as I suggested earlier, implied by the Scorpion that triggers Phaethon’s Fall) and the infantile

joy associated with the embodying “milk” of maternal comfort and “enwombing” protection

(the Neoplatonic maternal Milky Way described by Macrobius and later Christianized by

John of Salisbury). Through the “milk” that is light, Dante thus makes divine light fully

Incarnational, i.e. Rose-like, hinting that through God’s desirous focus upon the

contemplative, the contemplative encounters and participates in the simultaneously

penetrating and all-encompassing divine jouissance of the eternal “primal scene.”

• In Paradiso 25, while he is in the eighth sphere, Dante the pilgrim encounters the soul of

Saint James who tests Dante on Hope, one of the three theological virtues. We learn in this

canto from Beatrice that this particular virtue holds a profound personal significance for

Dante: indeed, hope is the poet’s principal and outstanding virtue, that which not only

distinguishes Dante apart from all other members of the Church Militant (i.e. all living

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Christians) but also the virtue through or because of which God has rewarded and

entrusted Dante with the extraordinary, special privilege of visiting Heaven before his actual

physical death (25. 52-7). How is Dante’s emphatic self-identification with Hope and Saint

James relevant to the Milky Way and its connection to the Rose? As I mentioned earlier,

medieval tradition associated devotion to Saint James with the Milky Way: one of the most

widely used popular names for the Milky Way was “The Way of Saint James,” referring to

the hugely important pilgrimage to the saint’s shrine in northeastern Spain; indeed, this name

for the Milky Way was so popular (and also clearly significant to Dante) that Dante himself,

in his erudite Il Convivio, introduces the topic of the Galaxy by this very name: “The Galaxy,

that is, the white circle commonly called the Way of Saint James” (“La Galassia, cioe quello

bianco cerchio che il vulgo chiama la Via de Santo Jacopo”). Although Dante does not

mention the heavenly Way of Saint James directly in this canto, Beatrice first identifies the

saint to Dante the pilgrim with an exclamation that calls up the earthly Way of Saint James

and, through the sound of the word “Galicia” (the place where the saint’s shrine is located),

the Galaxy (“Galassia”), its celestial counterpart: “Look, look there! You see the Baron / who

draws souls to Galicia (“Galizia”) down on earth” (Paradiso 25. 17-8; Musa 296).94 Whether

or not Dante ever walked the earthly Way of Saint James is, of course, irrelevant: according

to Beatrice, Dante’s hope is uniquely splendid and powerful, excelling that of all other

Christians on earth; hence, metaphorically speaking, one could also say that no other living

Christian is as devoted and true to the Way of Saint James, a Way marked out “in Nature’s

book” by the ghostly, undulating path of the Milky Way against the night sky. Because of his

supreme hope, Dante’s destiny is similar to that of Saint James—the latter being identified by

Beatrice’s salutation (25. 29-30) as the illustrious life through whom the bounty of Heaven’s

basilica was written (“Inclita vita per cui la larghezza / de la nostra basilica si scrisse”). I

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propose that Dante and his writing of Rose could also be described in this way. 95

• Lastly, as I discussed in chapter two of this dissertation, Dante makes mention of the Milky

Way in his Il Convivio, a learned earlier work in which the poet ingeniously equates different

heavenly spheres and objects with different sciences. Here, in contrast to The Divine Comedy,

Dante grants the ever-mysterious Galaxy a prominent, explicit place in his meticulous

allegorical scheme, comparing it to the lofty science of Metaphysics. Although I quoted this

passage in chapter two, for the reader’s convenience, I will quote it again here:

Consequently, since the Galaxy is an effect of those stars which we cannot see,

except that we understand these things by their effects, and Metaphysics treats of

the primal substances, which we likewise cannot understand except by their

effects, it is clear that the Starry Heaven bears a great resemblance to

Metaphysics. (75)

In light of the above analogy, could we not also say that Dante’s vision of the Rose—in essence,

the reflection of the descending Primal light-ray upon the outer surface of the Primum Mobile—is

also like Metaphysics, a way of seeing and understanding primal substances through their effects?

And if so, isn’t it likely that, the Rose is, for Dante, in some mysterious way also connected to the

Galaxy?

Having now presented my case for a Rose-Galaxy connection, I realize that some readers

will rightly wonder, “Well, even if this connection is present within Dante’s text, what does it

really add to our understanding or appreciation of Dante’s Christian vision?” and, more

pointedly, “And, aside from suggesting that Chaucer did somehow recognize and wonder about

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this mysterious connection, how does knowing about it help us to understand the relationship

between The House of Fame and The Divine Comedy, or, more specifically, the relationship

between the respective final destinations and “visions” of Dante and Geffrey?”

I will first try my best to answer the first question. Before doing so, though, I think it is

important to clarify that the Rose-Milky Way connection to which I refer is not a purely

symbolic one, that is, I am not proposing simply that Dante was inspired by ideas about the

Milky Way (nor I am doing the opposite, proposing that Dante the Christian was really at heart a

pantheist!); rather, I am arguing that Dante’s poem suggests something far grander and more

delicate, namely, that a mysterious real connection exists between the two, a real connection

that, in effect, bridges Earth (the great “body” of the physical universe) and Heaven (the glorified

“body” of the Empyrean that transcends time and place). In contrast to a purely symbolic

connection, such a connection marvelously and profoundly realizes—indeed—Incarnates—the

very promise that the Milky Way has so often figured for so many different peoples throughout

human history: “Est via sublimis, caelo manifesta sereno; / lactea nomen habet, candore

notabilis ipso” (Metamorphoses I. 168-9).

Returning to the task at hand, I propose that a realization of The Divine Comedy’s

delicate Rose-Milky Way connection sheds a new and different light on the last sublime

moments of Dante’s poem: the poet’s infinite struggle to describe in words his final vision of the

three circles of the Trinity, in particular, the absolutely ineffable culmination of that vision—the

revelation of the ultimate mystery of the Incarnation—followed by its immediate sanctifying

effect upon the poet’s will and desire. For the reader’s reference, below is Mark Musa’s

translation of the passage (i.e. the lines of the poem that begin and conclude the final revelation

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of the mystery of the Incarnation):

That circling which, as I conceived it, shone

in You as Your own first reflected light

when I had looked deeper into It a while,

seemed in Itself and in Its own Self-color

to be depicted with man’s very image.

My eyes were totally absorbed by it.

As the geometer who tries so hard

to square the circle, but cannot discover,

think as he may, the principle involved,

so did I strive with this new mystery:

I yearned to know how could our image fit

into that circle, how could it conform;

but my own wings could not take me so high—

then a great flash of understanding struck

my mind, and suddenly its wish was granted.

At this point power failed high fantasy

but, like a wheel in perfect balance turning,

I felt my will and my desire impelled

by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. (Paradiso 33. 127-45)

Obviously, there are no explicit references or allusions to the Milky Way here. Instead, the Milky

Way (and its “transfiguration” into the Rose) enters the final moments of the poem indirectly

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through what I see as Dante’s last supreme reactivation and Christian transcendence of the

myth of Phaethon, the mythical “son of the Sun” whose catastrophic Fall created the Milky Way.

So far as I know, my reading of the final vision in terms of Phaethon is original: although Kevin

Brownlee, in his 1984 essay, “Phaethon’s Fall and Dante’s Ascent,” uses The Comedy’s six

references to Phaethon to make his case for Dante as a “corrected” Phaethon, Brownlee, who

bases his analysis only on explicit references, never discusses the final vision in terms of the

Phaethon myth; moreover, whereas Brownlee’s analysis sets out a contrast between “bad”

Phaethon and “good” Dante, my reading will show that, in the final moments of his poem, Dante

“corrects” and transcends Phaethon—not, however, by moralistically judging him but in a

profoundly compassionate way that suggests the poet’s profound sympathy and indeed

identification with that tragic “son of the Sun.” Given Dante’s truly awe-inspiring—and

sometimes jaw-dropping--audacity and degree of self-confidence and indeed “presumption” at

times, the poet’s likely awareness of his own “inner Phaethon” hardly seems surprising. As

Dante himself rather presumptuously declares through the mouth of his Beatrice, he comes to

heaven by dint of his absolutely supreme hope--not his humility!

Personality, however, is not the deepest link between Dante and Phaethon; what stirs the

poet’s compassionate empathy is something to which he alludes to in one of the Comedy’s

explicit references to Phaethon—something present in Ovid’s lengthy telling of Phaethon’s story

but one that seldom appears in the abbreviated exemplum form of the medieval mythographic

tradition. This something is the great cause that not only sets the story in action but also

ultimately spurs Phaethon to his reckless deeds, namely, his anxiety and uncertainty concerning

the truth of his divine origin. In Ovid’s telling of the fable, young Phaethon’s painful doubts

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about his ancestry arise one day when Epathus--a boy who was commonly believed to be

Jove’s son—puts boasting Phaethon in his place by nastily telling him that he is a fool to believe

everything that his mother tells him, a fool to believe he is actually the son of the Sun. Angry and

ashamed, Phaethon then runs to his mother, pleading with her to give him proof of his heavenly

origin (Metamorphoses 1. 749-61). In the opening simile of Paradiso 17, Dante refers to this part

of the story to express Dante the pilgrim’s unspoken fervent desire to hear news of his future

from his illustrious ancestor, Cacciaguida:

Like him who came to Clymene to learn

the truth of those things said against him, he

who still makes fathers chary of their sons,

Was I, and just so was I felt to be

by Beatrice and that holy light

who for my sake had moved from where he was. (Paradiso 17. 1-6, Musa

202)

For Brownlee, this untypical medieval reference to Phaethon, rather than indicating the poet’s

more nuanced view of Phaethon, points only to Dante’s ongoing pattern of “correcting”

Phaethon through an “almost symmetrical inversion” of the Ovidian narrative; thus, writes

Brownlee: “While Phaethon (Met. I, 755-761) came to his female ancestor (i.e. his mother,

Clymene) to ask about his past, Dante is about to question his male ancestor Cacciaguida

(repeatedly referred to as a father) about his future” (“Phaethon’s Fall and Dante’s Ascent” 137).

This is all that Brownlee says about this passage.

In response, I have only one question: But isn’t it likely that Dante, a poet whose

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passionate quest for knowledge of his own “heavenly origin” does not cease until he receives

“proof,” profoundly—and at a level beyond the superego-- identifies and empathizes with

Phaethon’s fervent and singleminded wish for proof of his heavenly origin? Isn’t Dante, like

Phaethon in the passage below, another proud “son of the Sun” who climbs the steep path to the

glorious “palace” of his heavenly Father, and, upon finally meeting his dazzling Father “face to

face,” boldly and immediately reveals to Him his burning desire to have all his doubts removed,

to know once and for all and clearly that he has not been deceived in his lifelong belief and hope

that he is not only mortal but also “the son of the Sun”?

“Why hast thou come? What seekest thou in this high dwelling, Phaethon—a son

no father need deny?” The lad replied: “O common light of this vast universe,

Phoebus, my father, if thou grantest me the right to use that name, if Clymene is

not hiding her shame beneath an unreal pretence, grant me a proof, my father, by

which all may know me for thy true son, and take away this uncertainty from my

mind.” (Metamorphoses II. 33-9)

In making the above comparison between Phaethon and Dante, I am, of course, referring to the

final vision of Paradiso—not so much to the vision of the Trinity but that which is the poet’s

ultimate wish, the revelation of how our human image fits in and conforms to the divine circling

of Christ; as Christopher Ryan suggests, “It is entirely apt that the final vision should end in this

way, for it may be said that the central quest of Dante’s understanding in the poem, and indeed in

his oeuvre as a whole, was to grasp how the divine is present in the human” (“Dante’s Theology”

136). Put another way, Dante’s central quest is to grasp how it is that he—and, with him, all

other seemingly mortal human beings—can be or become a true child of Christ, the radiant Sun

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of the universe. Hence, rather than simply moralizing about or judging Phaethon (though, of

course, this element is there as well), I would emphasize more how this proud Christian poet sees

in Phaethon his twin, at once intuitively recognizing the humble truth that “all but for the grace

of god go I” and the mysterious promise of incarnational convertibility—the divine alchemy by

which the lead of Dante’ s own greatest personal obstacle or “symptom” (his arrogance and

audacious presumption) becomes through the love and grace of God transformed into the very

gold through which the supremely hopeful Dante attains his ultimate wish.

Dante sets in motion his final great reactivation of the Phaethon myth with Bernard’s

prayer to the Virgin; before the saint begins his prayer requesting grace, Bernard’s introductory

words link Dante’s need for grace specifically to the pilgrim’s pride and presumption, here

suggestively linked with the Phaethon-like Icarus of myth: “But lest you fall backwards beating

your wings, / believing to ascend on your own power, / we must offer a prayer requesting grace”

(Paradiso 32. 145-7; Musa 380).96 With this emphasis on the Virgin we come full circle:

whereas, as I suggested earlier, Phaethon’s Fall is implicitly tied to the masculine naiveté and

narcissism (the fundamental inability to “survive” the mortal enigma of sexual difference evoked

by the feminine-linked Scorpion), Bernard’s words make clear that Dante-Phaethon’s ultimate

Healing or “Transfiguration” can and must only come through the intercession of feminine Mary,

the grace-abounding Rose of Heaven, she whose feminine face most resembles Christ’s

(Paradiso 32. 85-7); without Mary, Dante would ultimately suffer the same tragic fate as

Phaethon. Needless to say, this symbolic link between Phaethon and Mary as Healer becomes

profoundly enriched and enhanced via the poem’s mysterious, Incarnational Milky Way-Rose

connection.

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Just when we think an artist could not possibly enrich his already astonishingly

intricate nexus of ideas further, Dante, of course--as he always does--surprises us again by

adding another one of his profound and illuminating twists: rather than showing us Mary’s

intercession simply erasing or taking away Dante’s Phaethon-like presumption (as another less

gifted poet would do), Dante shows us instead how the catalyst of Mary, “the noon-day torch of

charity” (Paradiso 33. 10-11) ignites and intensifies the Phaethon in Dante! As the passage

below hints (with its precisely chosen Phaethon-like verb “presume” (“presuni”) and the verb’s

juxtaposition with the phrase “abbondante grazia” (note the literal presence of “dante” within

the very word of blessing!), grace “abounds” rather represses or “corrects”; transcending human

morality, grace works and achieves its transformative magic through rather against what

appeared to be Dante’s primary spiritual obstacle:

Oh abbondante grazia ond’ io presunsi

Ficcar la viso per la luce etterna,

Tanto che la veduta vi consunsi!

O grace abounding, through which I presumed

to set my eyes on the Eternal Light

so long that I spent all my sight on it! (Paradiso 33. 82-4; Mandelbaum 294)

As the poet describes the rapturous culmination of his vision, Dante presents this experience in a

way that uncannily sums up all the essential moments of Phaethon’s Fall: like Phaethon who

gazes upon his Father the Sun asking for proof of his heavenly origin, Dante boldly gazes upon

circling of Christ, striving with all his might to see how our human image “fits” into the circle;

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like Phaethon who falls directly after seeing a strange sight (the Scorpion) that his

overwhelmed mind cannot take in, Dante’s “wings” fail him when his mind is similarly

overwhelmed by a strange sight (the “vista nova” of 33. 136); like Phaethon who is struck down

and killed by Jove’s lightning bolt, Dante’s mind—the image-receiving part of the mind--is

struck and “killed” by a divine lightning bolt of understanding; like Phaethon whose life and

meaning is typically summed up by the image of his daring deed--his attempt to drive the chariot

or “wheels” of the Sun--Dante sums up his life and magnum opus with an image of himself as a

wheel moving in perfect balance along that same heavenly circuit of the sun. In the poem’s final

moments, Dante thus transfigures Phaethon, turning his tragic mortal story into a divine comedy:

whereas the fatal lightning bolt of Ovid’s story simply kills Phaethon, the lightning bolt of

Dante’s poem “kills” in order to grant Dante the very thing that Phaethon so ardently desired and

was denied—proof of his heavenly origin; whereas Phaethon’s “impossible” wish to remove all

uncertainty about his divine origin, being, in essence, denied, spurs Phaethon’s recklessness and

leads to the catastrophic consequence of Phaethon’s gracelessly uncontrolled and imbalanced

circuit of the Sun, Dante’s similarly “impossible” wish to know and understand his heavenly

origin, being granted, immediately blesses Dante, enabling him to transcend his ego and

relinquish control to Love, to move his “wheel” in sync with the light, swift, perfectly grace-ful

and blissfully balanced circuit of “the sun and the other stars.” Hence, with all these echoes of

Phaethon, one possible way to interpret the poetically and philosophically dense and compressed

last lines of Dante’s Comedy is to read the perfectly balanced “wheel” as a synecdoche for the

chariot of the true Sun, i.e. Christ (a chariot that, in the mystical pageant at the end of

Purgatorio, Dante associates symbolically with the Ideal Church, i.e. the Body of Christ; in

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Purgatorio 29: 114-2, the poet contrasts the splendor of this chariot with the burnt up chariot

of Phaethon’s Fall). This makes sense, given that Dante, in his role as Prophet, clearly writes his

great poem with the hope that the telling of his own journey of spiritual regeneration and

transformation will inspire and awaken the Christian world, ultimately leading to the

regeneration and transformation of the Church via the providential and righteous annihilation of

the now mismanaged chariot of the corrupt earthly Church. Significantly, within Ovid’s own

text, the Sun refers to his chariot as a “wheel” in his last desperate words of advice to his

headstrong son: “where the Altar lies low in the heavens, guide thy wheel [rota]”

(Metamorphoses 2. 139-40; Loeb 71). Moreover, as Dante must have known and deeply

appreciated, Ovid masterfully ends Phaethon’s sad story with an unforgettable image that is at

once poignant and philosophically profound:

Here lies the reins, there the axle torn from the pole; in another place, the spokes

of the broken wheels [“radii fractarum . . . rotarum”], and fragments of the

wrecked chariot are scattered far and wide. (Metamorphoses 2. 316-8; Loeb 83)

In his reading of The Divine Comedy, John Freccero argues that Dante’s journey of the mind--

ending as it does with the image of a perfectly balanced wheel—suggests the profound influence

of Plato’s Timaeus (i.e. Chalcidius’s translation of Timaeus) upon Dante; in his essay, “Pilgrim

in a Gyre,” Freccero suggests that Dante was particularly influenced by Plato’s metaphor of

“broken circles,” used by the philosopher to evoke the chaotic and traumatic changes undergone

by the star-soul once it receives a body (Dante: The Poetics of Conversion 78). Since Ovid

himself may have also been inspired by Plato’s “broken circles,” Freccero’s reading thus

indirectly supports my own “Phaethon-inspired” reading.97

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As a Christian, Dante’s ultimate wish, however, is not Plato’s: in contrast to the

ethereal Platonist who laments the process of incarnation and who yearns only to leave the body

behind, Dante recognizes the “broken circles” yet, in spite of all the mortal suffering his poem so

vividly depicts, never abandons the Christian incarnational hope that the soul’s ultimate healing

and transfiguration can and must take place through and with the body: through Primal Love, the

uncertain “son of the Sun” and his ghostly scar, the linear Milky Way, are mysteriously

transfigured into the mystically certain, Christic “son of the Sun” and the vast light-filled bloom

of Empyrean, the Rose. Reading the last lines of The Comedy in light of the Phaethon of

Metamorphoses brings home this incarnational truth with uncanny physical precision: as Ovid

pointedly informs us, it is Phaethon’s bodily lightness and lack of weight that immediately

alarms the horses and causes the chariot and its wheels to be imbalanced: “But the weight was

light [“sed leve pondus erat”], not such as the horses of the sun could feel, and the yoke lacked

its accustomed burden. And, as curved ships, without their proper ballast [“iusto sine pondere”],

roll in the waves, and, unstable because too light, are borne out of their course, so the chariot,

without its accustomed burden, gives leaps into the air, is tossed aloft and is like a riderless car”

(Metamorphoses 2. 161-6; Loeb 71).

This “weight” of the sanctified and centered body would be something new and

altogether different than the “mortal pondo” that Saint Peter refers to in Paradiso 27. 64-6 when,

after uttering his fierce denunciation of the corrupt papacy, he tells Dante, “And you, my son,

whose mortal weight must bring / you back on earth again, open your mouth down there / and do

not hide what I do not hide from you” (Musa 320). Produced through the fullness of mystical

certitude, this is the “weight” of the living body of one who no longer has any doubts concerning

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his or her heavenly origin—of one who thus no longer suffers from the fundamental and

deranging contempt and, indeed, “death” of the body that, as Lacan suggests, begins with our

birth into language. Once again, Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a fresh way to appreciate the

wisdom of Dante’s structuring of his poem: just as I suggested earlier that Dante’s first

performance of Phaethon in Inferno 17 could be read as Dante’s “traversal of fundamental

fantasy,” I propose that Dante’s final, culminating performance of Phaethon corresponds with the

later Lacan’s idea that the analysand’s journey comes to an end only when, after having traversed

the fundamental fantasy, the analysand’s achieves a full identification with the symptom that

most defines him or her (in Dante’s case, his “Phaethon”). In the passage below, Slavoj Žižek

defines this concept:

. . . the final Lacanian definition of the end of the psychoanalytic process is

identification with the symptom. The analysis achieves its end when the patient is

able to recognize, in the Real of his symptom, the only support of his being [in

other words, the “mortal pondo” that is the “ballast” (“iustus pondus”) of his

earthly being]. That is how we must read Freud’s wo es war, soll ich werden: you,

the subject, must identify yourself with the place where your symptom already

was; in its ‘pathological’ particularity you must recognize the element which

gives consistency to your being. (The Sublime Object of Ideology 75)

Further confirmation of the Christian “identification with the symptom” comes from the writings

of Saint Paul, the “Chosen Vessel” (“Vas d’elezione,” Inferno 2. 28) whose reported rapture “to

the third Heaven” while still living (2 Cor. 12: 2-4) seems to be, in Dante’s view, the only real

precedent for the poet’s own heavenly journey. In 2 Cor. 7-9, directly after Paul refers to his

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rapture, he writes of a mysterious “thorn in the flesh” that has plagued him; once clearly

unable and unwilling to identify with this tormenting “symptom,” Paul repeatedly begged God to

remove it, but now, through the grace of God’s response, he has come to identify fully with its

“pathological particularity,” for, through its weight—the grounding weight of the Real--God

shines forth most fully and truly:

And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn

was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from

being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave

me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made

perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the

power of Christ may rest upon me.

Could it be that, through the divine lightning flash that strikes and “kills” his mind (the “mind”

defined by the logic of the patriarchal order), Dante, for the first time in his life, freed by grace

and no longer mortally insecure of his heavenly origin, finally became God’s “perfectly balanced

wheel” by similarly accepting the “weight” of the Real? Could it be that, as Paul’s juxtaposition

of the “rapture” and “thorn in the flesh” passages hints, Dante’s full acceptance of the “weight”

of his “pathological particularity” (his “Phaethon”) is, in some way, inextricably tied to the

poet’s full acceptance of the divine authority of his own visit to Heaven?

Turning from the sublime, intensely serious, profoundly layered, elegant closing

moments of The Divine Comedy to the comical and abrupt closing moments of The House of

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Fame is, of course, a jolt. To clarify the following discussion for the reader, I will first cite

the last twenty or so lines of Chaucer’s poem:

I herde a gret noyse withalle

In a corner of the halle,

There men of love-tydynges tolde,

And I gan thiderward beholde,

For I saugh rennynge every wight

As faste as that they hadden myght,

And everych cried, “What thing is that?”

And somme sayde, “I not never what.”

And whan that they were alle on an hepe,

Tho behynde begunne up lepe,

And clamben up on other faste,

And up the nose and yen kaste,

And trodden fast on others heles,

And stampen, as men doon aftir eles.

Atte laste y saugh a man,

Which that y [nevene] kan

But he semed for to be

A man of gret auctorite . . . (2141-58)

In my reading of this strange “ending,” I will emphasize the several ways that the above passage

parallels the closing of Dante’s poem. Critics of Chaucer’s poem before me have pointed out

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some of these parallels; in both cases though the critic is either reluctant or adamantly

opposed to interpreting these parallels as suggesting anything beyond parody. Jane Chance, who

reads Geffrey as a “fool” pure and simple, halfheartedly suggests in her lengthy chapter on the

poem there may be something more serious here; however, instead of exploring her intriguing

idea further, she simply drops it (most likely because it doesn’t fit with the rest of her reading of

the poem): “Chaucer may even intend this inconclusive ending to parallel that of Dante’s

Commedia, when the poet sees God in a final, blinding, ineffable vision, with God represented

much more humbly by the ‘man of gret auctoritee’ (the archetypal poet?)” (The Mythographic

Chaucer 81). In a dismissive footnote in her chapter-length study of the poem, Penelope Doob

cites even more parallels—though clearly not because she finds them genuinely meaningful but

only to be thorough:

Parodic allusion to Dante here is quite extensive: at the end of the Paradiso,

Dante has a vision of the Trinity from within the tightly and hierarchically

organized amphitheater; in a totally disorganized crowd, Geoffrey sees, but does

not hear, a man who merely seems to be authoritative. Dante’s poem ends with

the pilgrim’s whirling “like a wheel” that is equally moved by the Love which

moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradiso 33. 144-145), in perfect accord with

cosmic principles. Geoffrey too ends up spinning in a building, that, like Dante

and the stars, probably moves like a wheel . . . But once Geoffrey enters the

House of Rumor, he is unaware of its whirling (2031-2032) and deprived of

ecastic union with the cosmos: he remains very much in a terrestial maze, a failed

visionary. (The Idea of the Labyrinth 327)

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The problem with the above reading is that it takes difference to mean failure: as Jane

Chance remarks--but, for whatever reason, cannot take seriously—Chaucer’s “inconclusive

ending,” as will now argue, suggests a creative and thoughtful response to Dante’s final vision,

not a trivial, parodic one. Although we may fault Chaucer’s artistry in comparison with Dante’s

sustained mastery, the “final vision” of Chaucer’s poem has its own incarnational wisdom and

sublime “elvyssh” brilliance: knowing his own “weight,” Chaucer pays tribute to his great

Christian poet mentor and guide but also clearly recognizes that Dante’s Christian vision does

not--and, obviously, cannot--speak for all.

One of Chaucer’s key techniques is to take Dante at his word—literally, indeed, so

extremely literally that lowly, “carnal” literalness turns into its opposite and becomes

unexpectedly sublime. For example, in the closing of the Comedy, one of the ways that Dante

indicates his present distance from the transcendent experience of his vision is to evoke the

common experience of waking up from a wonderful dream only to have its images immediately

fade and slip away from one’s consciousness:

As he who sees things in a dream and wakes

to feel the passion of the dream still there

though no part of it remains in mind,

just such am I: my vision fades and all

but ceases, yet the sweetness born of it

I still can feel distilling in my heart. (Paradiso 33. 58-63; Musa 392)

But, of course, Dante is only speaking poetically here—and doing so in order to enhance the

sense of mystery and transcendence: what Dante actually presents to the reader is coherent and

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orderly, i.e. every detail seems mastered, under the poet’s control. Chaucer, however, takes

Dante at his word, recreating in the last moments of his own poem what really happens to the

mind of the awakening dreamer; as Bennett astutely observed, “the renewed sense of crowding

and confusion corresponds to true dream-experience; and it is all of a piece that the function of

the last of the dramatis personae should remain as mysterious as his relation to the crowds of

tale-mongers” (Chaucer’s Book of Fame 184). Another way that Dante evokes transcendence

and mystery is by repeatedly using the qualifying verb “to seem” as he recounts the changing

images of his vision of God, most notably, in his recounting of the final showing: as he tells us

how he gazed at second circle of the Trinity, Dante states in 33.131 that the circle “seemed to me

painted with our human effigy” (“mi parve pinta de la nostra effige”). Dante then tells us of his

futile struggle to resolve this “seemed to me”—without success, of course, since, according to

Dante’s poem, how our human form “fits” the circle cannot be known precisely, cannot be

grasped by the image-receiving intellect. Echoing Dante, Chaucer tells us in the last lines of his

poem that, after first looking “thiderward,” he also “atte laste” saw a “man” whom he could not

name but who “semed for to be / a man of gret auctoritee.” Unlike Dante who takes his poem

past its great unsettling mystery, bringing it to an authenticating and pacifying close with an

image of the now-transformed poet moving effortlessly in sync with the cosmos, Chaucer

abruptly ends with its sudden and mysterious showing, never resolving the enigma, the

“seeming.”

What, then, makes Chaucer’s “literal” responses to Dante comically sublime as opposed

to parodic--or even darkly cynical? Might Chaucer instead be poking fun at Dante, deflating his

predecessor’s visionary pretensions? In response, I would first point to something I mentioned in

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an earlier discussion, namely, the sudden return of the theme of “love tidings” in the closing

of Chaucer’s poem. That the mysterious “man of gret auctorite” enters the whirling wicker in the

secret place or “corner” where “men of love-tydynges tolde” signals that he, too, is a teller of

“secret love tidings,” but, not just any teller or love-poet, but someone whose “love tiding” is

implicitly so universal and charismatically authoritative that men run from all areas of the

whirling house in order to see and hear for themselves what this great wondrous “man of Love”

has to say. To my mind, the most likely meaning here is that, within the “eternal present” of this

all-encompassing cosmic House of Tidings, this mysterious man represents Christ or Primal

Love, the entry of the Word into this “womb of the word.” In doing so, Chaucer would thus be

making a precise and thoughtful parallel with Dante’s poem: just as Dante’s represents the

transcendent mystery of the Incarnation by inciting and then necessarily frustrating our desire to

see clearly and explicitly how our human image “fits” the circle of Christ, Chaucer does so by

inciting and necessarily frustrating our desire to hear clearly and explicitly how our earthly

tidings of love correspond to the enigmatic, “unspeakable” tidings of Love brought by the

mysterious “man of gret auctorite.” For both poets, this ultimate mystery of the Incarnation

seems, in some sense, subtly yet inextricably connected to the great enigma of sexuality and

sexual difference (Phaethon’s Scorpion returns!): although Dante tells us of a “human image” he

saw depicted within the circle of Christ, he significantly does not indicate the sex of this image—

perhaps because this is precisely what he could not make out as he peered and scrutinized this

“vista nova” (Paradiso 33.136); in Chaucer’s poem, there is a “man of gret auctorite” but the

poem’s open and inconclusive ending (and the fact that Geffrey does not or cannot “name” him)

hints that this “man” brings new love tidings and thus will not speak predictably as a “man” (or,

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for that matter, a “woman” who, in the manner of Geffrey’s Dido, defines herself solely and

predictably in opposition to “man”).

Chaucer ties this idea of emphatically “new” love tidings to the Gospel: as B.G. Koonce

points out, the scene of wild commotion and wonderment at the end of the poem --although

typically read in negative terms by many critics—has a clear biblical precedent in Mark 1: 27-8’s

description of the people of Galilee’s similarly excited and wildly curious reaction to Jesus and

his new tidings (268). Koonce cites the Vulgate, but the Middle English of the Wycliff Bible

makes the parallel even stronger: “And alle men wondriden, so that thei soughten togidre

amonge hem, seyinge, “What is this thinge? What is this new techyng?” And the tale or tything

[i.e. “tiding”; “fama” in the Vulgate] wente forthe anoon in to al the cuntre of Galilee.”

Similarly, in Chaucer’s poem, Geffrey tells of the eager rushing crowd’s response to the “man”

and his new love tidings, “everych cried, “What thing is that?” / And somme sayde, “I not never

what” (2147-8). The image of people leaping up to see over the heads of those in front of them

(“Tho behynde begunne up lepe / And clamben up on other faste’) also has its biblical precedent,

calling to mind the uncannily Geffrey-like figure of Zacchaeus the tax-collector, a similarly

“unlikely hero” whose comical story of grace appears in Luke 19:2-10:

And he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not, on account of the crowd,

because he was small of stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up a sycamore

tree to see him, for he was sure to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the

place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down; for

I must stay at your house today. So he made haste and came down, and received

him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all murmured, “He has gone in to be the

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guest of a man who is a sinner.” (Luke 19:2-7).

With its wild commotion and zestful crescendo of anaphoric “And”s, this last passage also hints

at its Christic meaning by the way of its striking future Chaucerian parallel: the chaotic and

anaphora-filled “rushing crowd scene” at the end of the “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Chaucer’s

brilliantly comic Christian beast fable starring a rooster who plays both Adam and Christ,

reenacting the Fall and then the Passion and Resurrection (there, the rushing crowd of country

people chase after the predatory and wily Satanic fox that successfully tempts and very nearly

succeeds in killing off Chauntecleer, the rooster hero). Significantly, Chaucer wrote The House

of Fame passage right around the time of 1381 Peasant’s Revolt, and, in the passage from “The

Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Chaucer makes his one-and-only explicit reference to this important

historical event, comparing the excited and angry rushing peasants of his tale to the marauding

peasants of the Revolt (3394-6). Given that the Revolt was associated with a populist form of

Christianity generated and empowered by Bible translation and the new egalitarian readings of

the Gospel, the poet did not need to imagine the excitement of the people depicted in Mark 1: 27-

8: he was living right in the thick of it. Thus, in some way it seems, despite his own clearly

higher social status, Chaucer, unlike his friend John Gower, was able to look beyond his own

world and see the revolutionary power and significance of the Gospel’s always-new “tidings.”

(Perhaps, too, he empathized with the clear “revolutionary tendencies” that Dante so fiercely and

unabashedly displays throughout The Divine Comedy, i.e. the Italian poet’s intense feelings of

outrage and desire for “swift justice” in response to the corruption and greed of the

institutionalized Church at it highest, most powerful levels).

With these Christic resonances in mind, we can now better appreciate the transcendental

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effects of Chaucer’s seemingly trivializing or merely parodic technique of “taking Dante at

his word,” how in both the instances I mentioned (Chaucer’s literalization of Dante’s “awakened

dreamer” simile; Chaucer’s pointed, “punctuating” use of Dante’s qualifying expression, “it

seemed to me”) serves to highlight the revolutionary newness and mystery of the “tidings” of the

Incarnation—to keep open the door that Dante himself prefers to close. Thus, instead of a vision

of the Incarnation being like a wonderful dream that tantalizingly slips away from the awakening

dreamer, in Chaucer’s poem, Christ, like the Sun itself, is the unmasterable force or “pressure of

the Real” that abruptly awakens the dreamer, scrambling his—and our--human world of dream.

Given Chaucer’s love of concrete, astronomical play--as well as Dante’s emphasis on the Sun in

his concluding lines—I am inclined to believe that Chaucer is making an ingenious, implicit

comparison here between the “man” and the Sun, especially since, at this time of the year, the

Sun’s route intersects the Circle of the Galaxy and the Sun thus enters “Watlynge Strete” (and,

accordingly, the Christic “man” enters Chaucer’s sixty-mile long, pilgrim-filled wattled house of

tidings). If so, Chaucer’s literal paralleling of Dante’s final vision becomes even more precise:

although the last five lines of the Comedy move our attention away from the Rose, Dante never

actually tells us that he has left the Rose (we only assume that he has); thus, if, like Chaucer, one

takes Dante at his word, both poems similarly end with Christ entering or appearing in each

poet’s Milky Way-traced “Final Destination”—a feminine all-encompassing Round that neither

poet explicitly leaves.

As before, I propose that rather than simply dismissing Chaucer as a “parodic” or “failed”

Dante, the differences between the parallel endings of their poems might be more meaningfully

interpreted in terms of their “phase apart” relationship, with Virgil-sponsored, Phaethon-like

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Dante exemplifying the “masculine” subject position and Dido-identifying, modest and

unassuming Geffrey the “feminine” subject position. In a sense, each poet gets his wish fulfilled

in the way that fits his subject position. Obviously, this statement goes against common sense

since Chaucer’s poem abruptly ends without indicating any transformation of the poet narrator,

whereas Dante’s poem, like a great classical symphony, ends with the resolution of the now-

transformed poet-narrator effortlessly “like a wheel in perfect balance turning,” his will and

desire revolving in sync with the cosmos, impelled by the “Love that moves the sun and the other

stars.” There is, however, a serious problem with the common-sensical position: it accepts

without inquiry Dante’s carefully chosen image of ultimate satisfaction--the perfect circling of

the wheel around the object of desire (God, simultaneously the center of the Soul and center of

the Cosmos.98 Of course, as we know, this chosen image of ultimate satisfaction, far from being

merely subjective is valid and true and authoritative, for, behind it, stands the massive edifice of

the Western philosophical and theological tradition. From the perspective of that tradition,

Dante’s image is supremely satisfying: if we could only see the truth, we all long for this, to

circle eternally around God, the object of our desire.

But how universally satisfying is this image really? Putting aside moralistic assumptions

for a moment, why might some readers find Dante’s automatic “circling around the desired God-

object” so intensely (and perhaps mysteriously) satisfying while other equally sensitive and

intelligent readers find it so much less satisfying? The passage below, written by the Lacanian

theorist Slavoj Žižek, suggests that the difference may be ultimately related to the sexualized

“opposition between the jouissance of drives and the jouissance of the Other” (an idea that

Lacan elaborates on in Seminar XX: Encore):

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On the one hand we have the closed, ultimately solipsistic, circuit of drives

which find their satisfaction in . . . [the] circulating around object petit a as the

object of the drive. On the other hand, there are subjects for whom access to

jouissance is much more linked to the domain of the Other’s discourse . . . (The

Fragile Absolute 143-4)

Here, the first sentence refers to phallic jouissance, the only kind of jouissance available and of

interest to subjects defined as masculine (since, according to Lacan and Freud, masculine

subjectivity is structured and determined completely by the phallic function, i.e. the Father’s

No); the second sentence refers to Lacan’s nebulous and much-debated idea of “Other

jouissance,” a non-phallic—and, hence, difficult to define--kind of jouissance that is available to

feminine subjects in addition to the more common phallic form (the latter clearly being the

“juice” that keeps the symbolic order running). Although some interpret Lacan’s idea of non-

phallic “Other jouissance” or “jouissance feminine” as a mystical beatitude beyond speech—and

thus beyond the Other-- Žižek emphatically rejects this as a “standard misreading, “ suggesting

instead that this mysterious “Other jouissance” refers to a jouissance of speech that is linked to

the feminine subject’s alienation /externalization of her enjoyment in the Other (145). For Žižek,

this speech-related “Other jouissance” thus has an implicitly ethical edge: as suggested by the

theorist’s immediately ensuing reading of Saint Paul’s famous words on Love (I Corinthians 13)

in terms of “feminine sexuation,” Žižek links non-phallic jouissance to Christian charity and

humility, to “the ultimate mystery of love” by which “incompleteness is in a way higher than

completion” (147).

In many ways, Chaucer’s poem exemplifies this non-phallic jouissance of speech to an

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extraordinary degree: Book I shows us Dido-identifying Geffrey’s hysterical over-

identification with the speech of the Other; in Book II, we encounter the eagle—a traditional

symbol of visionary power—who delivers a lecture on the physics of sound; in Book III, Geffrey

sees the miraculous sight of Ovid’s Love expanding and multiplying and then the goddess Fame

whose unpredictable judgment seems thoroughly “beyond the Law” yet, at the same time, never

truly against It; the poem ends with Geffrey (and us) in the whirling wicker suspended, waiting

for and wondering about the mysterious “love tidings” of the “man of gret auctorite.” And then,

there is, of course, Chaucer’s own immersion in the words of Master Dante himself—an

immersion that, as I have shown, often ends up releasing and magnifying the latent feminine

possibilities within Dante’s text. Perhaps, in the end, Chaucer’s unspeaking “man of gret

auctorite” paradoxically does “say it all,” summing up Chaucer’s simultaneous great respect for

and pointed divergence from Dante: whereas Dante shows himself gazing at the Trinity and

attempting to see the mystery of the Incarnation, Chaucer pointedly rejects Dante’s visionary

assumptions, ending his poem in such a way that “full sight” itself proves to be lacking—having

given us “the man” in plain sight, Chaucer’s ending makes us “feminine” instead of “masculine,”

opening our minds and ears up to the words of the Other. Seen in this way, one might say

Dante’s poem ends with the poet declaring how his ineffable vision automatically, i.e. without

his conscious control, transformed and sanctified him—but not really us, Chaucer’s poem ends in

a way that shows no special transformation or sanctification of the poet, and, in so doing,

automatically transforms all of us (however momentarily, however modestly). Rather than

spurring our hope to emulate Dante’s circling or wheeling in the “closed” and perfect circuit of

cosmic Love, Chaucer’s ending works upon us in the truth of our purgatorial present, spurring us

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to wonder along with him how might the Word that is Love “fits” our words about love. In

some way, Chaucer is clearly not satisfied with the answers so far proposed by those men

sharing love-tidings in secret whom Geffrey spies in the corner: for Chaucer, the love-tidings of

the Christic “man of gret auctorite” are for all, shining forth not like the Sun of Rational Clarity

but like the impossibly generous Sun that exceeds patriarchal logic, rising alike on the evil and

on the good (Matthew 5:45). Rather than pacifying us, these tidings, by the mere “dawning”

pressure of their nearness, spill into the crowd and incite bodies at large to “lepe” and fall into a

“hepe.” The men in the corner lose their treasured intimacy: perhaps, Chaucer’s poem hints, the

impossible best-kept Secret of the Incarnation is that It is that which puts an end to the

masculinist dream of possessing and hoarding “the secret”—and hence, the very Secret that no

“man” really wants to hear.

This sounds rather hopeless. Fortunately, this is not the end of Chaucer’s “queynte”

wisdom, for, similar to Judith Butler, who, in our times, critiques the influential Lacan for the

French theorist’s ultimate failure to imagine the Phallus in a truly symbolic way—and then

opposes him by doing just that, Chaucer, I submit, intuitively recognized the insidious limitations

of an infinitely more influential and paradigmatic “phallocentric” theory, namely, Augustine’s

theory of Original Sin.99 “These limitations are tied to Augustine’s reading of the events in Eden

in Book 14 of The City of God, particularly, the theologian’s key idea about God’s precisely just

punishment of Adam and Eve’s flagrant act of disobedience. On the one hand, Augustine clearly

means his idea to be universal, and, to some extent, this is how he first presents it; sounding a

note similar to Paul in Romans 7:14-25 (“For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not

want is what I do”), Augustine writes:

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. . . he who in his pride had pleased himself was by God’s justice handed over

to himself. But the result of this was not that he was in every way under his own

control, but that he was at odds with himself, and lived a harsh and pitiable

slavery, instead of the freedom he so ardently desired . . . In fact, to put it briefly,

in the punishment of that sin the retribution for disobedience is simply

disobedience itself. For man’s wretchedness is nothing but his own disobedience

to himself, so that because he would not do what he could, he now wills to do

what he cannot. (City of God 14.15; 575)

Augustine’s discussion, however, loses its universal character as soon as he begins to imagine

the aftermath of the Fall, or, more precisely, as soon as he begins to dwell on Gen 3:7 (“Then the

eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked”). Captivated by the idea of

sexual shame, Augustine now locates the sign and punishment of the body in certain unruly

“members.” With the use of the plural “members,” Augustine tries to be universal, once again

evoking Paul in Romans 7:23 who also refers to the unruliness of his “members.” But, as the

context of Augustine’s discussion makes clear, he, unlike Paul, is obviously—and only--thinking

of one “member” in particular—the member that shames the male sex by openly demonstrating

its disobedience (whether through an unwanted erection or, perhaps worse, its unwanted “failure

to move”):

It is right, therefore to be ashamed of this lust, and it is right that the members

which it moves or fails to move by its own right . . . should be called pudenda

(“parts of shame”) . . . The flesh did not yet, in a fashion, give proof of man’s

disobedience by a disobedience of its own . . .

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When this grace was taken away, and in consequence their disobedience was

chastised by a corresponding punishment, there appeared in the movements of

their body a certain indecent novelty, which made nakedness shameful. It made

them self-conscious and embarrassed. (City of God 14.17; 178)

Human nature then is, without any doubt, ashamed about lust, and rightly

ashamed. For in its disobedience, which subjected the sexual organs solely to its

own impulses and snatched them from the will’s authority, we see a proof of the

retribution imposed on man for that first disobedience. And it was entirely fitting

that this retribution should show itself in that part which effects the procreation of

the very nature that was changed for the worse through that first great sin. (City of

God 14.20; 582)

In short, even though Augustine is emphasizing sexual shame, his implicitly androcentric

approach to the story of Adam and Eve suggests an underlying sexual pride, a certain desire to

make woman invisible, to move woman out of the relationship between God and Man. Although

Augustine refers to it as a punishment, God’s choice to “sign” the male body in this way (and not

the female’s) also suggests that God cares more about his wayward sons than his wayward

daughters. As with the all-important biblical ritual of circumcision, God’s just retribution against

the male member may be painful but it also transforms the biological male into a subject of the

patriarchal order. There is, however, an important difference: whereas the biblical ritual of

circumcision more or less openly announces its patriarchal logic, Christian Augustine, whose

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religion is supposedly universal and who presents his theory of Original Sin as universal,

hides or disavows his own androcentric bias, thereby creating a much more insidious precedent.

One obvious consequence of this insidious androcentric bias is the well-known

phenomenon of the Virgin/Whore complex: if the feminine subject does not exist, is not a true

subject, i.e. a moral agent capable of guilt, she must be either a wicked temptress who leads men

to ruin or a guileless “virgin” who inspires men with her innocence and purity. Obviously, such a

position is incompatible with the idea of feminine spiritual growth.100 I propose the whirling

wicker of Chaucer’s poem hints at a way out of this Augustinian dilemma. This will seem

strange to those feminist readers who fault Chaucer for his apparently “male-only” occupants of

the House of Tidings; to such readers, Chaucer’s failure to use one feminine pronoun ominously

suggest that, despite all his seemingly carnivalesque antics, this poet also ultimately silences

“women” in the end. Against this view, I submit that Chaucer’s poem offers no bandages or

tokens but instead opens up the symbolic in a much more profound and foundational manner.

Like Judith Butler, Chaucer does this by symbolically purifying the implicitly

androcentric Phallus of the Master Theorist. Judith Butler does this by making a case for the

“lesbian phallus.” Chaucer’s method is to change the site of the Augustinian “unruly member”

from the penis to the tongue. His inspiration comes from the Letter of Saint James:

Look at the ships also . . . they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the

will of the pilot directs. So the tongue is a little member and boasts of great

things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!

And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is an unrighteous world among our

members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the cycle of nature [“inflammat

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rotam nativitatis nostrae” in the Vulgate], and set on fire by hell. For every

kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been

tamed by humankind, but no human being can tame the tongue—a restless evil,

full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse

men, who are made in the likeness of God. (James 3: 4-10)

Seeming to echo James, Chaucer, in the passage below, describes the rapid movement and ever-

increasing growth of tidings to a blazing fire--a fire that, occurring as it does in the all-

encompassing whirling wicker, could also to be said to inflame the “rota” or “wheel” of our

birth:

. . . Thus north and south

Wente every tydyng fro mouth to mouth,

And that encresing ever moo,

As fyr ys wont to quyke and goo

From a sparke spronge amys,

Til al the citee brent up ys. (2075-80)

With this association of a raging fire with the “unruly member” that, shared by all, truly unites us

all, the full revolutionary Christian potential of James’s version of “original sin” begins to

emerge. In contrast to Augustine’s focus on the “natural,” i.e. androcentric, “unruly member,”

which, much like Lacan’s “Signification of the Phallus,” serves to explain and implicitly justify

the structure and workings of the earthly patriarchal symbolic order, James’s singular emphasis

on the incredible, inflammatory power of this distinctively human “little member” (the tongue

with which we equally bless God and curse men) undermines that very order by striking at its

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dark heart--the hidden masculine narcissism that would deny the feminine (and the

marginalized) access to the divine. In so doing, James opens up the way for the utopian promise

of Pentecost, the incarnational convertibility of the tongue—the flame-like “tongues” that, after

Jesus is taken up into heaven, one day appear to rest upon the bereft lovers of the embodied

Christ, symbolically generating, empowering and inflaming with charity the individually diverse

yet united community of the Holy Spirit (the Love of the Trinity, according to Christian

theology):

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound

came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were

sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each of them”

(Acts 2: 1-3).

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NOTES 1 In Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism, Sheila Delany discusses this common literary convention or “rule” of the dream vision genre:

It is appropriate, in the Proem to a dream-vision, for the author to introduce some remarks about the value of dreams. To do so amounts to an esthetic justification for the work to follow; for if the dream is acknowledged to be at least potentially a vehicle of truth, then the dream-vision frame may be considered to add authenticity... Since dreams were not accepted as uniformly valid, most dream-visions in medieval literature begin with an assertion of the truth of dreams in general, or at least of the particular dream about to be told. (37, 38)

To illustrate the convention, Delany quotes Chaucer’s translation of the beginning lines of the Roman de la Rose. 2 As some readers will recognize, with the phrase “stumbling block,” I allude to Paul’s discourse on divine folly and holy weakness: “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seeks wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” (1 Cor. 1: 22-5). 3 As scholars have pointed out, the Invocation of Book I takes part in both the “envious detractors” topos, as well as the charity topos, both of which are conventional in medieval writings (Delany 42-3). Clearly, Chaucer may just be exaggerating this literary convention in order to poke fun at it; however, I would argue that the two biblical sources I mention provide uncannily apt models for the narrator’s unusual use of both the “envious detractors” topos and the “charity” topos. In Deut. 28, after expounding God’s commandments to the people, Moses rains down an exhaustively specific list of blessings and curses upon the people of Israel. Basically, everything that is good (from good crops to national prosperity to good health) will happen to those who obey the Lord, and everything that is evil will happen to those who don’t follow God’s law. The Chaucerian narrator’s humorously generalized “every harm that any man / Hath had syth the world began” (99-100) is here exhaustively realized with vividly painstaking particularity; indeed, if a reader did not know the biblical source, he or she would no doubt be tempted to laugh at the Deteronomic God’s over-the-top list of curses. Below, I quote a small sample:

The Lord will smite you with the boils of Egypt, and with the ulcers and the scurvy and the itch, of which you cannot be healed. The Lord will smite you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind; and you shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness, and you shall not prosper in your ways; and you shall only be oppressed and robbed continually, and there shall be no one to help you. You shall betroth a wife, and another man will lie with her . . . (Deut. 28: 27-30)

In a similar vein, John, at the end of Revelation, threatens the would-be distorter of his writing with both dire physical and spiritual consequences; with these words, John authorizes his vision as absolutely sacred and inviolable:

I warn every one who hears the words of prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and the holy city, which are described in this book. (22: 18-9)

4 Thus, in her reading of the whirling “house of Rumor” in Book III of The House of Fame, Lochrie, drawing attention to the fact that the gossips seem to be all male (i.e. there are no feminine pronouns in the lengthy passage), implicitly depicts the whirling wicker as a kind of medieval bathhouse, a place where “men whisper love-tidings to each other in queer fashion” (90). In this domain of “homosocial masculine intimacy,” writes Lochrie, “masculine desire is permitted to circulate without interruption or disruption within earshot of men of great authority: poetry in the making” (92). In the last chapter of this dissertation, I will splice Judith Butler’s queer theory with Augustinian Original Sin to offer my own alternative, “radical Christian” reading of the mysterious “masculinity” of the inhabitants of the whirling house. 5 Two notable exceptions to this critical consensus are B.G. Koonce’s 1966 Chaucer and the Tradition and the Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in The House of Fame, and Sheila Delany’s 1972 Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism. Koonce’s allegorical reading of the poem parallels the three books of The House of Fame to the three books of Dante’s Divine Comedy; clearly indebted to the hermeneutical principles of D.W. Robertson Jr.’s “patristic exegesis,” Koonce offers an earnest, ideologically conservative Christian interpretation of Chaucer’s poem. Delany, by contrast, does not offer a “Christian interpretation” of The House of Fame but instead

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proposes that the poem’s pervasive skepticism, in combination with the narrator’s occasional, well-timed appeals to Christ or God, can be read as exemplifying the late-medieval philosophical position known as “skeptical fideism.” Expressed in the writings of thirteenth- and –fourteenth-century philosophers (e.g. Boetius of Dacia, Siger of Brabant, William of Ockam, etc), this position is characterized by its fundamental “faith-saving” philosophical move, namely, its “separation of truths,” the philosopher’s conveniently compartmentalizing distinction between natural/worldly truths (truths supported by reason) and the supernatural truths of Church doctrine (truths accepted by faith). Ultimately, for Delany, Chaucer is thus not exactly what one would call a “Christian poet,” since he is, as it were, only a Christian by default: “Fideism differs from faith; it is a last resort, the only kind of faith available to those who can find no reason to believe. Chaucer is no ideological poet like Jean de Meun or Dante. Religion is not his first idea but his last, so that it enters the structure of his work not as credible solution to a dialectic, but in fact as another term in dialectic” (118). As my dissertation will make abundantly clear, I reject both of these readings of The House of Fame (and, beyond that, the “Chaucerian Christianity” that each reading respectively expounds or implies)-- primarily because, in my view, both Koonce and Delany, much like the many critics who take The House of Fame to be a purely secular poem, present a view of Christianity that more or less aligns with patriarchal logic (the “tidy separations” of the patriarchal symbolic order). In doing so, both of their readings fail to capture the transformative, incarnational possibilities associated with Christian truth hinted at in the opening line of Chaucer’s poem. 6 In a helpful glossary at the end of Žižek: A Critical Introduction, Sarah Kay (who, as it so happens, is in her “other life” a noted British medievalist, a professor of French and Occitan Literature at Cambridge) offers a lucid definition of “après coup”:

Après-Coup: The psychoanalytical view of time is that it does not progress in a linear way but in a kind of backward loop, so that the crucial tense is the future perfect: what ‘will have been’. For example, a childhood experience will reveal itself to have been traumatic if it is reactivated as such—for example, in a neurotic symptom—by some subsequent turn of events. The concept of après-coup does not mean that the past does not determine the present—it does, but in a way that is itself overdetermined by the present. Thus significance is always grasped retroactively. An elementary effect of après-coup is that it is not until the end of the sentence that the meaning of its beginning can be ascertained [as the opening line of The House of Fame so wonderfully demonstrates] . . .There is nothing teleological about après-coup; the point is that what may seem inevitable is a purely contingent state of affairs. The process of après-coup shapes Lacan’s reading of Freud and Žižek’s readings of both Lacan and Hegel: each reader reveals from his or her own, contingent viewpoint ‘what’s in the text which could not be written there’ (‘Lacan in Slovenia’, 26). (159)

7 For my own understanding of Lacan’s essential ideas about sexual difference, in particular, Seminar XX’s key distinctions between the “masculine” and “feminine” “formulae of sexuation,” I am indebted not only to Žižek’s writings but also to the work of Bruce Fink, a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst, student of Jacques-Alain Miller (the general editor of Lacan’s seminars) and professor of psychology who has written extensively—with both clarity and sophistication--on Lacanian theory (no easy feat!) (Fink has also translated several key Lacanian texts, among which include, in 2007, the first English translation of the complete Ecrits and, in 1999, the first English translation of the complete Seminar XX). In the eighth chapter of The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (98-125), Fink offers an lucid overview of what he proposes are Lacan’s central concerns and theses about sexual differentiation, focusing at length on Seminar XX’s “formulae of sexuation.” As Fink takes care to emphasize, Lacan’s “formulae” are ultimately not dependent upon biology: “From a clinical vantage point, a great many biological females turn out to have masculine structure, and a great many biological males prove to have feminine structure . . . Each person’s relation to the signifier and mode of jouissance has to be examined more carefully; one cannot jump to conclusions on the basis of biological sex” (108). 8 With his characteristic emphasis on love/charity—and his consequent alignment of Christianity with “feminine” subjectivity-- Žižek’s concept of Christianity can be distinguished from that of Alain Badiou, a fellow theorist of revolutionary Christianity whose 1997 work, Saint Paul: La Fondation de L’Universalisme (translated into English in 2003), clearly inspired Žižek’s own views (on page two of The Fragile Absolute, Žižek acknowledges his debt to Badiou’s “path-breaking book on Saint Paul”). In contrast to Žižek, Badiou, who defines the Christian subject in gender-neutral terms, places a greater emphasis on faith: Badiou’s reading defines the Christian subject as one who,

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like a true militant, publicly declares and is faithful to the “truth-event” of the Resurrection (the “truth-event” of the Resurrection being defined by Badiou not as an empirical fact but as a theoretical break that makes universalism possible). For further discussion of the differences between Badiou and Žižek, see 117-23 of Sarah Kay’s Žižek: A Critical Introduction. 9 Butler makes this point through her reading of Lacan’s earlier essay, “The Mirror Stage” (Lacan’s key essay about the ego-to-ego relations of the narcissistic imaginary) in conjunction with and against Lacan’s later essay, “The Signification of the Phallus” (Lacan’s key essay about sexual difference, the symbolic relations between men and women constructed through the binary logic of “having the phallus” and “being the phallus”):

Are we to accept the priority of the phallus without questioning the narcissistic investment by which an organ, a body part, has been elevated / erected to the structuring and centering principle of the world? If “The Mirror Stage” reveals how, through the synecdochal function of the imaginary, parts come to stand for wholes and a decentered body is transfigured into a totality with a center, then we might be led to ask which organs perform this centering and synecdochal function. “The Signification of the Phallus” effectively refuses the question that the former essay implicitly raised. For if the phallus in its symbolic function is neither an organ nor an imaginary effect, then it is not constructed through the imaginary, and maintains a status and integrity independent of it. This corresponds, of course, to the distinction that Lacan makes throughout his work between the imaginary and the symbolic. But if the phallus can be shown to be a synecdochal effect, if it both stands for the part, the organ, and is the imaginary transfiguration of that part into the centering and totalizing function of the body, then the phallus appears as symbolic only to the extent that its construction through the transfigurative and specular mechanisms of the imaginary is denied. Indeed, if the phallus is an imaginary effect, then it is not merely the symbolic status of the phallus that is called into question, but the very distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary. (Bodies That Matter 79).

10 In my critique of Lyotard here, I hope that it is clear to readers that I am critiquing Lyotard’s postmodern, intellectually fashionable, profoundly disembodied construction of Judaism—not the actual religion as it is devoutly practiced and lived. Lyotard’s overly “Protestant” construction completely disregards the richly maternal Lebenswelt in which this emphatically family-and-community honoring religion has thrived throughout the centuries. In a strange way, the modern ideal of Jewish national “land” and the accompanying fixation on “landlessness” seems to coincide with the deep erosion of the maternal “land” of this lived Judaism. (Moreover, the enduring medieval image of the cursed “Wandering Jew,” which Lyotard draws upon metaphorically in his essay, was generated and amplified by Christians—not Jews.) The standard, all-too-easy assumption of Jewish iconoclasm vs. pagan idolatry (and Christian “regression”) upon which Lyotard relies can also be challenged. In The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Žižek speculates about this very question:

The usual argument is that pagan (pre-Jewish) gods were ‘anthropomorphic’ (Ancient Greek gods fornicated, cheated, and engaged in other ordinary human passions...), while the Jewish religion, with its iconoclasm, was the first thoroughly to ‘de-anthromorphize’ Divinity. What, however, if things are the exact opposite? What if the very need to prohibit man from making images of God bears witness to the ‘personification’ of God discernible in God’s saying ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’ (Genesis 1:26.)—what if the true target of Jewish iconoclastic prohibition were not previous pagan religions but, rather, its own ‘anthropormorphization’ /‘personalization’ of God? What if the Jewish religion itself generates the very excess it has to prohibit? In pagan religions, such prohibitions would have been meaningless . . . According to the standard notion, pagans were anthropomorphic, Jews were radically iconoclastic, and Christianity operates a kind of ‘synthesis,’ a partial regression to paganism, by introducing the ultimate ‘icon to erase all other icons’, that of the suffering Christ. Against this argument, one should assert that it is the Jewish religion which remains an ‘abstract/immediate’ negation of anthropomorphism, and as such attached to it, determined by it in its very direct negation, whereas it is only Christianity that actually ‘sublate’ paganism. (103-4)

11 In Ecclesiasticus 24, Wisdom, imagined as praising herself before the assembly of the Most High (1-2), compares herself to trees, perfumes, blossoming vines, and so forth: sounding very much like Isis, the Egyptian Great Mother whose life-saving abundance and fertility was always strongly associated with the all-important yearly miracle of the

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Nile’s inundation, Wisdom is then rapturously described by the author in terms of the yearly harvest-time inundation of five major rivers--the Pishon, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Jordan, and the Nile (Ecclesiasticus 24: 25-7). Apparently, Wisdom’s strong resemblance to Isis here was part of the author’s deliberate strategy. In her recent book God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (2003), Barbara Newman notes:

“The sage ben Sirach wrote Ecclesiasticus in part to stem the assimilation of Diaspora Jews, so he employed the erotic allure of Sophia to compete with the popular hellenistic cult of Isis. Wisdom in Ecclesiasticus, like a Jewish fertility goddess, makes her appeal through the lush imagery of spices, fruitful vines, life-giving streams, and aromatic trees. “Come unto me, all you who desire me,” she pleads, “and take your fill of my produce” (Ecclus, 26.26) . . . Ben Sirach reinforced the superiority of Judaism over pagan worship by identifying this seductive yet maternal Wisdom with the most resonant symbols of Jewish identity—Jerusalem, the Temple cult, and the Torah” (191)

12 Fortunately, though, Sartre’s Genet is not Genet: as Kate Millet, author of Sexual Politics and one of the first writers to recognize the feminist potential of Genet’s work, points out in her chapter on Genet, “Because it did not cover Genet’s last three plays [The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens], Sartre’s biography leaves its subject still a rebel, failing to report his final metamorphosis into revolutionary” (488). In contrast to Sartre’s Genet, the revolutionary Genet did not remain stuck in the contempt for the feminine and femininized Other but instead chose to create change at the symbolic level, breaking the master/slave dynamic by writing political plays that targeted and exposed the “obscene fathers” of Western culture. What is fascinating about this later Genet is that, like Augustine whose conversion is supported and blessed by the allegorical goddess “continence” and an ascent to feminine biblical Wisdom, Genet empowers his new symbolic voice and prophet-like identity—as the passage below by Millet suggests-- by similarly envisioning an authoritative maternal allegorical goddess, in this case, the Black Queen named Felicity:

The Blacks is a turning point in Genet’s exegesis of the politics and psychology of oppression, marking a move away from defeated self-hate to dignity and self-definition . . . Sounding the very depths of the colonial attitude, Genet demonstrates how the inability to accept the black woman is tantamount to a kind of self-hatred infecting the whole race. “Stately mother of my race . . . you are Africa, oh monumental night, and I hate you,” Village bursts out. Felicity, the Black Queen, and the spirit of Africa, the matriarch who challenges and defeats the figurehead of the White Queen, is in fact the mother of this race: its future depends on its ability to come to terms with its origin, to identify with its negritude, the alternative value which will save it from the destructive standards of whiteness. In Felicity’s magnificent evocations of Africa, the force and magic of an entire continent is gathered . . . (Sexual Politics 496, 497)]

13 Of course, this being a “feminist” question, many critics of the poem ignore this question entirely, choosing instead to frame the Dido vs. Aeneas impasse solely in terms of “truth.” Thus, Sheila Delany, author of one of the most well known and interesting studies of the poem, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism, writes: “Although the moral and esthetic problems posed by the legend of Dido and Aeneas are not simply reducible to a “true” position versus a false one, truth is nonetheless at the core of Chaucer’s interest in the legend” (56). 14 For example, in Medieval Mythography (volume one), Jane Chance cites glosses of Bernard Silverstris in which Bernard identifies Theseus as an exemplar of wisdom or the rational, virtuous man (452-3, 459). In Medieval Mythography (volume two), Chance cites passages from a work known as Integumenta Ovidii by John of Garland in which John interprets Theseus as the exemplar of contemplative life (240, 423n20). For further examples of fourteenth-century mythographers (e.g. Boccaccio, Pierre Bersuire, etc.) interpreting Theseus as either an ideal virtuous man or Christ, see also pp. 148-55 in Penelope Doob’s The Idea of the Labyrinth, from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages; on pp. 117-33 of this same work, Doob discusses how the motif of Christ-Theseus informed church mazes and the Easter rituals connected to them, focusing in particular on a fascinating labyrinth ritual dance that was performed during Easter time at the Cathedral of Saint Stephen at Auxerre from “at least as early as the fourteenth century until 1538” (123). 15 Not that some mythographers did not try to whitewash Theseus’s act of betrayal: as Penelope Doob points out, according to one of Pierre Bersuire’s more strained allegorical readings, “Theseus abandons Ariadne because she signifies the Jews whom God loved until they betrayed them, and Phaedra represents the faithful Gentiles” (The Idea of the Labyrinth 153-4). 16 Koonce sums up his improbably pro-Aeneas allegorical reading of Book I of The House of Fame thusly: “In emphasizing the story of Dido, Chaucer is in accord with Virgil’s medieval commentators, who stress Aeneas’s

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carnal bond with Dido as an important aspect of the spirit’s pilgrimage . . . Whereas Dido herself is a symbol of libidinous love, Carthage, the city which she rules, is the world, or Babylon, brought to confusion by sin. Aeneas’s sojourn with Dido illustrates the spirit’s turning away from reason and virtue to the world and the flesh” (Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame 112). 17 According to Bruce Fink, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and noted explicator of Lacan, Lacan came out with this particular “bombshell expression” in the late 1960s (The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance 104). Fink points out that, in the original French, Lacan’s statement is even stronger than it is in English: Lacan’s il n’y a pas is stronger than saying “Sexual relationships do not exist,” for it implies that “Sexual relationships do not ex-sist” either; indeed, “There ain’t no such thing” (193). 18 Freud’s famous “fort/da” anecdote appears in the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud describes the repetitive play of his little, one-and-half year old grandson, the boy’s “occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on” (13). One day while watching the boy playing with a wooden reel that had piece of string attached to it, Freud realized that this disturbing habit was actually a kind of game, and “that the only use he [the boy] made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them” (14). In the complete version of the game, the little boy stages the disappearance and return of the object:

What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his c curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his ‘o-o-o-o’ [interpreted by Freud as the child’s approximation of “fort,” the German word for “gone”]. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]. (14)

Freud’s language throughout his interpretation emphasizes the agency of the little boy, e.g. he refers to the boy’s game a sign of “the child’s great cultural achievement” (14) and, similar to Melanie Klein (and in contrast to Lacan), he clearly views the boy’s game as a vehicle for expressing authentic emotions and desires that are in some sense “pre-linguistic,” i.e. there is no sense in Freud’s text that he views the toddler’s linguistic “baby steps” in the fundamentally structuring way that Lacan does. 19 Ironically, the later Lacan’s new emphasis on the necessity of the symptom provides strong support for my reading of Lacan’s likely strong unwillingness to give up his fantasy. In 71ff. of his book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, the Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek explains (and unreservedly supports) Lacan’s changing view of the symptom. Briefly stated, whereas the earlier Lacan interpreted the symptom as a ciphered yet inherently readable message to the Other—one that could be hypothetically “dissolved” via the process of psychoanalysis—the later Lacan, having come to the conclusion that the analysand’s key symptom persists even after its interpretation, proposed with his theory of the “sinthome” that the symptom, being the radically senseless pathological particularity that ultimately defines the subject (and gives him jouissance), is all but impossible for the subject to give up. Writes Žižek:

What we must bear in mind here is the radical ontological status of the symptom: symptom, conceived as sinthome, is literally our only substance, the only positive support of our being, the only point that gives consistency to the subject. In other words, symptom is the way that we—the subjects—‘avoid madness’, the way we ‘choose something (the symptom formation) instead of nothing (radical psychotic autism, the destruction of the symbolic universe)’ through the binding of our enjoyment to a certain signifying, symbolic formation which assures a minimum consistency to our being-in-the-world. (The Sublime Object of Ideology 75)

Such a theory—much like Lacan’s definition of the “ethical” as necessarily “beyond good and evil”—obviously poses serious ethical questions (“ethical” defined here in its more conventional, non-Lacanian sense) since, hypothetically speaking, it could be used to support and defend truly reprehensible human behavior; moreover, if we consider the position of analyst, Lacan’s theory of “sinthome” is ethically troubling in that it offers the analyst fool-proof protection, making it truly impossible for him or her to fail. Unfortunately Žižek, who is apparently unfailingly loyal to Lacan (i.e. uncritical of Lacan), accepts Lacan’s idea of the “sinthome” as a psychic given and thus does not bother to address its troubling implications. 20 For example, just as Fama chants that Dido and Aeneas are “forgetful of their kingdoms,” Mercury sharply reprimands Aeneas for having forgotten his kingdom: “Heu, regni rerumque oblite tuarum!” (4. 267).

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21 Unless otherwise noted in this dissertation, all quotations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (the Italian text and English translations) are taken from Charles S. Singleton’s text and translation of the poem (Princeton University Press, 1970-75). 22 “Therefore we said: If for any man the tumult of the flesh fell silent, silent the images of the earth, and of the waters, and of the air; silent the heavens; silent for him the very soul itself, and he should pass beyond himself by not thinking upon himself; silent his dreams and all imagined appearances, and every tongue, and every sign; and if all things that come to be through change should become wholly silent to him—for if any man can hear, then all these things say to him, ‘We did not make ourselves,’ but he who endures forever made us—if when they have said these words, they then become silent for they have raised up his ear to him who made them, and God alone speaks, not through such things but through himself, so that we hear his Word, not uttered by a tongue of flesh, ‘nor by a sound of thunder,’ nor by the riddle of a similitude, but by himself whom we love in these things, himself we hear without their aid—even as we then reached out and in swift thought attained to that eternal Wisdom which abides over all things—if this could be prolonged, and other visions of a far inferior kind could be withdrawn, and this alone ravish, and absorb, and hide away its beholder in the deepest joys, so that sempiternal life might be such as was that moment for which we sighed, would it not be this: ‘Enter into the joy of your Lord?’ When shall this be? When ‘we shall all rise again, but we shall not all be changed’”(The Confessions 9.10. 25; Ryan 222). 23 As might be expected given Aristotle’s notorious view of the female as a kind of monstrous or deformed version of the male, this Lacquer-inspired “radical” or “queer” slant on Aristotle’s theories about gender is not accepted wholeheartedly by all scholars who study classical and medieval theories of gender. For example, in her introduction to her important 1993 study, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture, Joan Cadden nods to the work of Thomas Lacquer but in such a way as to indicate that her own study will present new evidence that challenges Lacquer’s thesis:

This analysis [the analysis that Cadden will present in her book] differs from that of Thomas Lacquer, whose recent work argues that before the eighteenth century male and female were in various ways regarded as manifestations of a unified substratum. Though there is much evidence in the present study that fits his “one sex” model, medieval views on the status of the uterus and the opinions of medieval physiognomers about male and female traits suggest evidence of other models not reducible to Lacquer’s (3).

Significantly, Cadden never mentions Lacquer by name again in her study. Cadden’s discussion of Aristotle suggests that she does not take much stock in the idea of the hidden “subversiveness” of Aristotelian gender theory: thus, instead of-- as Cadden might see it--“unduly magnifying” the possible inadvertent subversive effects of Aristotle’s ideas, Cadden sets up a contrast between Aristotle and Hippocrates, stressing Aristotle’s greater polarization of female and male and a corresponding rejection of the Hippocratic notion of parallelism between the sexes:

The polarization of female and male is much more pronounced in the Aristotelian representation than in the Hippocratic. Hot and cold, perfect and imperfect, ability to produce semen and inability to do so, contributor of form and contributor of matter, active and passive, in spite of the fact that Aristotle understood these pairs in relative terms, they create a radical contrast between the sexes. The contrast contains unambiguous value implications, since in Aristotle’s system active is clearly better than passive, form better than matter. Furthermore, except for hot and cold, the extremes cannot meaningfully be mediated, so neither the Hippocratic notion of parallelism between the sexes, which Aristotle rejected, mitigated the value-laden opposition between female and male. (24-5, italics mine)

24 Han Jonas’s seminal essay, “The Nobility of Sight,” appears in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago, 1982). 25In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek zeroes in on this element of the feminine complicity through his discussion of one of the most recognizable modern “types” of the “beautiful soul,” namely, the all-suffering, “saintly” mother who is willing to sacrifice everything for her family—except, of course, her very sacrifice:

To make this clear, let us take the case of the suffering mother as the ‘pillar of the family’: all other members of the family—her husband, her children—exploit her mercilessly; she does all the domestic work and she is of course continually groaning, complaining of how her life is nothing but mute suffering, sacrifice without reward. The point, however, is that this ‘silent sacrifice’ is

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her imaginary identification: it gives consistency to her self-identity—if we take this incessant sacrificing from her, nothing remains; she literally ‘loses ground’ . . . The mother’s fault is therefore not simply in her ‘inactivity’ in silently enduring the role of exploited victim, but in actively sustaining the social-symbolic network in which she is reduced to playing such a role. Her, we could also refer to the distinction between ‘constituting’ and ‘constituted’ identification between the ideal ego and the ego-ideal. On the level of the ideal-imaginary ego, the ‘beautiful soul’ sees herself as a fragile, passive victim; she identifies with this role; in it she ‘likes herself’, she appears to herself likeable; this role gives her narcissistic pleasure; but her real identification is with the formal structure of the intersubjective field which enables her to assume this role. In other words, this structuring of the intersubjective space (the family network) is the point of her symbolic identification, the point from which she observes herself so that she appears to herself likeable in her imaginary role. (216)

26 As Chance suggests in the second volume of her encyclopedic study, Medieval Mythography, Pierre Bersuire’s humanism and flair for independent thinking in his mythographic scholarship may very well had something to do with what Chance describes as “the trumped-up charge” of heresy against him in the early 1350s (322). The bishop of Paris charged Bersuire of heresy, or, more precisely, of heresy in the form of “the pursuit of forms of prohibited knowledge, both evil and smacking of magic,” leading not only to the scholar’s privileges at the university being taken away from him but also his imprisonment and torture (323). Although Bersuire was eventually released (the king sided with the university and Bersuire against the Church), “after the torture and imprisonment, Bersuire,” notes Chance, “never wrote another mythographic work” (324). 27 In his Preface to Chaucer, D.W. Robertson, Jr. comments on Chaucerian modesty; as is usual for Robertson, he emphasizes the group culture over the individual artist, suggesting that Chaucer’s attitudes merely demonstrate the typical fourteenth-century English dislike for heroic posturing (since, however, Robertson unfortunately develops and supports his claim with examples taken only from Chaucer’s poetry, it is ultimately impossible to evaluate; nevertheless, even though Robertson doesn’t prove his point about Englishness, his comments about Chaucer and the heroic are both eloquent and interesting):

During the second half of the fourteenth English art fails to show any outward manifestations of the heroic . . . Among the pilgrims to Canterbury a meek knight, a threadbare clerk, and a poor parson stand out as ideal figures. The heroic potentialities of Troilus are undercut whenever they appear . . . Most revealing, perhaps, is his picture of himself in the prologue of Sir Thopas. A feeling for the heroic requires a certain inner seriousness about one’s own potentialities, perhaps a touch of vanity. But we cannot imagine Chaucer seeking a laurel crown. The stout little man we see riding silently with downcast eyes towards Canterbury meekly accepting the banter of Harry Baily is above all a man with a keen eye for the distinction between outward grandeur and inner worth. English experience with an old Edward doting on an unworthy woman and a young Richard who could not always achieve those principles of chivalry which he so ardently admired may have made this distinction acutely apparent during Chaucer’s lifetime. Whatever the cause, the English of Chaucer’s day were not inspired by posturing in the grand manner, and in this matter Chaucer seems to have shared their taste. (284-5)

28 In 1 pr. 4 of The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius recounts to Lady Philosophy (and to posterity) the circumstances that led to his imprisonment in 523. Briefly stated, Boethius, a high-ranking member of the Senate during the rule of Theodoric (the Arian king of the Ostrogoths who invaded Italy in 489, became Roman Governor in 493, reigning over the Western Empire until his death in 526) was thrown into prison without trial after being charged with treason, to be specific, engaging in a conspiracy or cover-up to protect the Senate by hiding the treason of Albinus, another Senator, who had been accused of hatching a scheme to overthrow Theodoric with the help of the Eastern Emperor Justinian. As the understandably embittered Boethius points out, the ungrateful Senate then cowardly turned on him, sentencing him to exile and death with a trial: “But surely I deserved differently from the Senators themselves? . . . I defended the innocence of the whole Senate with complete disregard for my own peril” (Loeb 155). In order, as Boethius puts it, “to smirch it [the charge of treason] with the stain of some foul deed," the Senate of “committing sacrilege [using sorcery, invoking the aid of demons or spirits] in canvassing for high office,” a crime which the ethical Boethius hotly denies, pointing out to Lady Philosophy that his accusers are so wicked that, to build this case of sacrilege against him, they spread rumors and insidiously played upon the fears of the

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people by citing as “proof” the intellectual Boethius’s very lifelong devotion to Philosophy, i.e. his unusual degree of learning and knowledge (no doubt, in the arts of astronomy and astrology): “I shall appear to have been a close party to such a misdeed [sorcery] because I am steeped in your learning and trained in your ways” (Loeb 157). Boethius sums up the outrageous injustice of his current situation:

If I were accused of trying to burn down a temple or of sacrilegiously murdering priests, or of contriving the deaths of all good men, I should be punished, and rightly—but only having been present and tried, and either having confessed or been found guilty. But now I am condemned to death, my goods confiscate, for too zealously supporting the Senate, although I am nearly five hundred miles away and unable to speak in my own defense. Ah me! Surely I deserved that no one could possibly be convicted on a charge like this! (Loeb 155)

Scholars continue to debate the whys and wherefores of Boethius’s terrible political downfall. P. G. Walsh, in his introduction to his 1999 English translation of The Consolation of the Philosophy, suggests a number of factors:

As he himself concedes, Boethius made enemies for himself both at court and in the Roman senate; he was clearly zealous in dealing with cases of corruption and injustice that came to his notice [In his complaint to Lady Philosophy, Boethius, for example, tells of specific cases in which, at the risk of gaining political enemies, he successfully protected the poor and the people against the predations of the wealthy and powerful.], but the history of his fall suggests that he alienated others by the imperious exercise of his position. (xvi)

Walsh then goes on to point out that, due to the ecclesiastical situation at the time, i.e. the tensions caused by the conflict between Arianism and the Church, the Arian Theodoric’s fears of a plot against his regime may have been justified: “He [Theodoric] himself had attained the throne of Italy in 493 with the complicity of the eastern emperor Zeno, and now that the religious differences between east and west had been settled, the continuing dominance of Arian Ostrogoths over Roma Aeterna, the heart of Classical and Christian traditions, was increasingly resented in both Constantinople and Rome” (xvi). 29 To the best of my knowledge, this question has not been posed within modern English scholarship on The Consolation of Philosophy, very likely because the possible (and, to my mind, probable) link between Virgil’s Fama and Boethius’s Philosophy is not addressed in the explanatory notes of the major modern English translations (e.g. those by Richard Green (1962), S.J. Tester (Loeb edition, 1973), and, most recently, the 1999 translation by P.G. Walsh), nor is it noted in J.J. O’Donnell’s well-respected 1990 commentary on the Latin text. P.G. Walsh offers the conventional gloss of Philosophy’s fluctuating stature, writing, “Her varying stature as described here symbolizes the different aspects of philosophy. Her feet are on the ground in the disciplines of logic and ethics, but her head is in and above the heavens when she turns to physics and natural theology” (116). 30 Lacan uses the resonant phrase, the “murder of the thing,” in his aforementioned rewriting of the Freudian death drive in “The Function and Field of Speech and Language”: “Thus,” writes Lacan, “the symbol manifests itself as the murder of thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire” (Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, 104). 31 Judith Butler uses this phrase in her essay “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary” (pp. 57-91 in Bodies That Matter), an essay in which Butler critiques the phallocentrism of Lacanian theory. Reading Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” (Lacan’s essay about the imaginary origins of the ego) in conjunction with “The Signification of the Phallus” (Lacan’s essay about symbolic relations, the phallus as privileged signifier, i.e. the signifier that functions as the ordering principle of what can be signified), Butler challenges the fundamental (and indeed crucial) distinction that Lacan insists upon, namely, that between the imaginary and the symbolic. Against Lacan’s strenuous claims otherwise, Butler argues that Lacan’s theory insidiously confounds the two registers, thus revealing the supposedly independent phallus to be an “imaginary effect” and the Lacanian imaginary to be “hegemonic” (e.g. rather than being truly distinct from the symbolic, the concept of the phallus, according to Butler, is already illogically in play in the supposedly sex-neutral imaginary described in “The Mirror Stage”). Like many feminists, Butler takes Lacan to task for what is perhaps one of the most glaring weaknesses of his theory, namely, the slippage between penis and phallus (a slippage that Lacan and diehard Lacanians, of course, always deny). Although some enthusiasts of Lacan will likely quickly dismiss Butler by condescendingly claiming that she “misunderstands” or “misreads” Lacanian theory (perhaps without even bothering to read her essay!), to my mind, Butler’s purely logical objection—as I believe the passage below demonstrates—is both sensible and hard to refute:

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But what is the status of this particular ontological difference [the difference between the phallus as “signifier” and penis as “the signified”] if it turns out that this symbol, the phallus, always takes the penis as that which it symbolizes? What is the character of this bind whereby the phallus symbolizes the penis to the extent that it differentiates itself form the penis, where the penis becomes the privileged referent to be negated? If the phallus must negate the penis in order to symbolize and signify in its privileged way, then the phallus is bound to the penis, not through simple identity, but through determinate negation. If the phallus only signifies to the extent that it is not the penis, and the penis is qualified as that body part that it must not be, then the phallus is fundamentally dependent upon the penis in order to symbolize at all . . . (Bodies That Matter 84).

32 In his autobiographical speech to Lady Philosophy in 1 pr. 4 of The Consolation, the now-sorely-disillusioned Boethius characterizes himself as a highly principled and dutiful man dedicated to public service, a man who strove throughout his life to realize the Platonic ideal of the philosopher-king (The Republic, 473d):

Are these our rewards for obedient service to you? It was you who established through the words of Plato the principle that those states would be happy where philosophers were kings or their governers were philosophers. You, through that same Plato, told us that this was why philosophers must involve themselves in political affairs, lest the rule of nations be left to the base and wicked, bringing ruin and destruction on the good. It was in accordance with that teaching that I chose to apply in the practice of public administration what I learned from you in the seclusion of my private leisure. (Loeb 147)

33 As some readers might recognize from my language (“unplugging” and “hegemonic imaginary”), my reading is inspired by the writings of both Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler, two contemporary theorists who, due to their sometimes clashing critical perspectives (Žižek representing a defiantly “unpolitically correct” Lacanian perspective, and Butler representing a more socially and empirically minded queer/feminist one), have engaged in several intellectual skirmishes over the past decade or so. In her recent book, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (2003), Sarah Kay offers a helpful summary of some of their important interactions, pointing in particular to Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality: Dialogues on the Left (2000), a book of essays co-authored by Žižek, Butler, and Ernesto Laclau in which the three authors debate each other (Kay 92-100). (Not surprisingly, though, Kay sides with Žižek.) Butler’s 1993 Bodies That Matter (1993) includes a chapter, “Arguing with the Real” (187-222), in which Butler critiques some of Žižek’s pre-1990 writings, discussing both what she sees as politically questionable about his Lacanian analyses and arguments but also what she finds useful. Since, as far as I know, Butler avoids religious questions, I am not sure how what she thinks of Žižek’s recent radical Lacanian recovery of Pauline Christianity (e.g. The Fragile Absolute (2000), On Belief (2001), The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003)). In spite of this, I believe that her critique of the Lacanian imaginary as “hegemonic” works very well in conjunction with Žižek’s “death drive” characterization of Pauline Christianity as an “unplugging” from the symbolic order. 34 Through the opening poem, Boethius (i.e. Boethius the poet rather than the speaker of the poem) validates and prepares the way for Philosophy’s indictment of the prisoner’s spectatorial passivity, his languishing surrender to the Muses qua “theatrical tramps” of the imaginary; as Seth Lerer points out, the prisoner’s passivity is evident in the way the speaker of the opening poem depicts his writing as dictation—a telling verbal detail that is not missed by the penetrating eyes of Philosophy:

Philosophy recognizes that the Muses are dictating to the prisoner as he himself confessed: her phrasing “verba dictantes” [to be precise, the narrator’s words in 1. pr. 1 describing Philosophy’s mental processes: “Quae ubi poeticas Musas vidit adsistentes toro fletibusque meis verba dictantes”(“When she saw the Muses of poetry standing by my bed dictating words for my laments”)], his “dictant scribenda.” Her first words boldly fill the empty silence in which the prisoner writes. In this context her banishment of the Muses can be read in a new way… They [the Muses] are . . . a barrier positive barrier to Boethius’s search for his own voice. They render him passive and put words in his head, if not his mouth. They hinder the expression of his own self, that self he had forgotten. (101)

35 This idea of Philosophy’s fierce anger being displaced from its true target is in keeping with the interpretation of Lady Philosophy that is implied by Dante’s characterization of his Lady Philosophy-like Beatrice. Dante, in a sense, redirects Philosophy’s displaced anger, making the wayward, unfaithful son/lover (Dante the pilgrim) the immediate, direct target of the imperious Lady’s stern rebuke in the climactic reunion scene of Dante and Beatrice

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(Purgatorio 30-1). In The Consolation, the combination of Philosophy’s fierce anger, penetrating gaze and ruthless questioning clearly frightens and overwhelms the already-weakened Boethius, rendering him mute and causing him to weep; similarly, in Purgatorio 31, Dante the pilgrim, in response to Beatrice’s rebuke, breaks down under the pressure, bursting into tears and losing his voice (31. 16-21). 36 I put “feminine” in quotation marks because, in Lacanian theory, 1) “feminine” does not coincide with biological femininity, and 2) Lacan stressed that, even when a subject is defined by “feminine sexuation,” the subject’s access to this non-phallic jouissance or “Other jouissance” is never a given but always only a possibility (and a rare possibility at that given that access to this “feminine” jouissance implies that the subject is capable of true humility, i.e. is no longer trapped, as Chaucer’s Dido is, in the egoistic “battle of the sexes” deadlock of complicitous resentment). Within the text, I say that my discussion is “implied” by Žižek’s reading of Lacan because I am aware that Žižek’s position on this crucial question of the transformation of the subject is—at least in terms of “sexuation”--ultimately ambiguous and ambivalent. That is, in his attempt to remain faithful to Lacan (who pretty much denies the possibility of changing one’s fundamental “sexuation”), Žižek is, for example, willing to go so far as to characterize “the passage from Judaism to Christianity” as a shift from “masculine” to “feminine” sexuation (Fragile Absolute 143), but he shies away from explicitly stating or debating whether this shift from “masculine” to “feminine” sexuation could or does occur at the level of the individual Christian subject. Like Lacan with his “death drive” Antigone (Seminar VII, trans. Porter, 243-325), Žižek often problematically illustrates the concept of the revolutionary or truly ethical “act” by pointing to a feminine character who breaks free from the symbolic order and its narrow morality via her literal suicide and/or psychosis (in short, the transformation of the true “act” is possible if you are willing to kill yourself or go mad); in the concluding pages of her recent critical survey of Žižek’s work, Sarah Kay touches on this troubling aspect of Žižek’s writing (152-6). I propose that Žižek’s argumentative move here is somewhat of a face-saving gesture, since his emphasis on literal suicide and madness enables Žižek to avoid serious disagreement with Lacan by eluding the tricky question of whether, after undergoing the revolutionary shift from “masculine” to “feminine” sexuation, a subject could actually continue to exist and thrive in a new, symbolically meaningful way. 37 Anna O. —the pseudonym for Bertha Pappenheim—was a patient of Freud’s colleague, Joseph Breuer, with whom Freud collaborated in the groundbreaking therapeutic work with female hysterics, a work that led to their joint authorship of the 1895 Studies in Hysteria and ultimately, for Freud, his founding of psychoanalysis. In her introductory essay to the 2004 Penguin Classics translation of Studies in Hysteria, Rachel Bowlby describes Anna O. (for Bowlby, she who figures as the “ghost” or “largely forgotten mother” of psychoanalysis) in a way that very nicely captures Anna’s remarkable and even wondrously “Fame”-like capacity for the “feminine” jouissance of the word:

It happens that the phrase ‘talking cure’ was first uttered in English, although Anna O.’s first language was German. Breuer’s German text quotes the English phrase, and the foreign expression in the middle of the sentence, just like the foreign body to which Breuer likened the hysterical symptom, is noticeable at odds with its environment. In the story of Anna O.’s treatment, the English phrase comes out of moment when she was compulsively speaking in languages other than German—Italian, French, and in particular English. Languages are multiplied, set alongside each other, as if to exhibit their separate meanings for the speaker. In the talking cure, there is no one language, but a constant movement of boundaries between languages themselves and between languages and other domains. (xi)

38 In The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Mary Carruthers points out that “sedes,” along with topos and locus, were used often by ancient and medieval writers to signify how memory works in the brain: “The words topos, sedes, and locus, used in writings on logic and rhetoric as well as on mnemonics, refer fundamentally to physical locations in the brain, which are made accessible by means of an ordering system that functions somewhat like a cross between routing systems used by programs to store, retrieve, merge, and distinguish the information in a computer’s ‘memory,’ and postal addresses or library shelf-marks” (29). 39 In his discussion of this passage, Seth Lerer also calls attention to how Philosophy’s rebuke to Boethius is framed in terms of rhetoric. Unlike me, however, Lerer reads Philosophy here as condescending to the obtuse Boethius who, according to Lerer, as yet only inhabits the lowly rhetorical world and is thus not ready to receive Philosophy’s “higher truths”:

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Before she can engage the prisoner in a dialogue, she must descend to his level. The first indication of her shift in diction comes when she describes the library. As a locus, the library signifies the literal and figurative place of argument. She seeks a “storeroom of the mind” in which she has placed not physical books but the opinions they contain. The value of her writings lies not in their presence as objects, but in their ability to preserve philosophical truths. By employing a diction taken from classical mnemonic theory, with its emphases on the loci and sedes of argument, Philosophy moves metaphorically into the prisoner’s rhetorical world, while the same time emphasizing the existence of her own higher truths. (Boethius and Dialogue 104-5)

My point is, of course, the opposite, i.e. Boethius, intoxicated with the “sky” of Philosophy (the high art of astronomy), has forgotten the all-important “ground” (rhetoric, speech). Lerer makes no mention of the disjunction between Philosophy’s definition of her desire in terms of rhetoric and Boethius’s definition of his desire in terms of astronomy. 40 “And after him [Socrates] the crowd of Epicureans and Stoics and the rest strove as far as they could to seize his legacy, carrying me off protesting and struggling, as is I were part of the booty, tearing my dress, which I wove with my own hands, and then went off with their torn-off shreds, thinking that they possessed all of me” (The Consolation of Philosophy 1. pr. 3, Loeb 143). 41 As I mentioned in Chapter Two of this dissertation, Carolyn Dinshaw gestures towards the idea of a utopian Christian poetics in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, a book that, needless to say, I very much admire for its thought-provoking analysis, and that has, throughout the years, vibrantly influenced and stimulated my own thinking about Chaucer and the crucial topic of Christian hermeneutics; there, in the closing pages, eloquently summing up her argument about the “eunuch hermeneutics” of Chaucer’s Pardoner, Dinshaw writes:

…the Pardoner urges his audience to think about the possibility of linguistic presence even as the pilgrimage wends forth its way on earth. Constituted by absence, he sets his listeners to thinking about absolute Presence, about radical Being in which there is no lack and in which all difference and division are obviated. So completely unlike the others around him, so far outside the categories by which they operate that he isn’t even their Other, the Pardoner, not-man, not-woman, is the unlikely but best pilgrim for this task on the road to Canterbury; for in the ideal Christian society too, according to Saint Paul, “non est masculus neque femina” (Galatians 3:28).

Nevertheless, although Dinshaw paradoxically concludes her book with a quote from Saint Paul, in her first chapter, she sweepingly rejects Paul’s hermeneutics as hopelessly patriarchal (22-3); thus, we are left with the sense that Dinshaw believes that whatever is good or liberating about Paul’s Christianity exists apart from language and the way Paul reads the Bible. This is in keeping with Dinshaw’s tendency to view the earthly patriarchal symbolic order as so unassailable that radical or utopian Christian writing and interpretation becomes a more or less impossible task; like the various theorists of “l’ecriture feminine” that she mentions in a long speculative footnote, Dinshaw so thoroughly opposes “women’s literal, bodily experience to the figurative discourse of Western patriarchy” that, in regards to writing at least, she quietly writes herself (and her women readers) into an essentialist and very earthbound--albeit cozily rounded –corner. Within the dichotomous terms of her argument, a Christian poetics, i.e. a poetics “based on the incarnate Word,” is ultimately wistfully reduced to the status of a tantalizing, yearned-for impossibility, a poetics that exists beyond or outside of “the fallible, mediate letter of human language” (183). Of one thing, however, she seems certain: in the unlikely yet happy event that such a poetics of “linguistic presence” could exist, it would not have anything to do with critical thinking, the interpretation of other texts. 42In The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, Pierre Hadot’s erudite and wide-ranging 2006 study of the figure of veiled Isis (or Nature) from ancient to modern times, the author devotes an entire chapter (“Isis Has No Veils,” pp. 247-61) to Goethe’s innovative critique and transformation of the traditional metaphor. The “theme of a ‘mystery in broad daylight’ [or, put another way, “Isis has no veils”] recurs in most diverse ways in the poet’s work” (256). Writes Hadot:

Obviously, when Goethe declares that Isis has no veils, we must understand this critique of the traditional metaphor in a metaphorical sense. For Goethe, in fact, the veil does not hide anything. It is not opaque, but transparent and luminous, “woven,” as is said in the poem “Dedication,” from morning mist and the light of the sun. It does not hide, but reveals, diffusing a transcendent light. (259)

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43 For example, through psychotherapy with Freud and Breuer, Frau Cacilie M.’s violent and recurring facial neuralgia is traced to a traumatic memory of her husband deeply offending her in a conversation and to the literal sentence that went through her head at the time, “That was like a slap in the face.” The painful attack ends when the suffering patient, reliving the forgotten scene, suddenly grabs her cheek and speaks this thought aloud (181). In another instance, Frau Cacilie M.’s severe pain in her right heel disappears when, during another reproduction of a traumatic memory, she speaks of being “gripped by the fear that she might not be able to ‘find herself on right footing’” (182). The most impressive example—the example that seemed, to Freud, to prove “the genesis of hysterical symptoms alone”-- involves the patient’s memory of a hysterical attack (perhaps her first?) that occurred when she was fifteen years old:

She [Frau Cacilie M.] was lying in bed—she was fifteen at the time—watched over by her strict grandmother. Suddenly the child let out a cry; she had a piercing pain in her forehead between her eyes, which then lasted for weeks. In the analysis of this pain, which was reproduced after almost thirty years, she reported that her grandmother had looked at her so ‘penetratingly’ that her gaze had pushed deep into her brain. She was, in fact, frightened of being regarded suspiciously by the old woman. On telling me this thought she broke out laughing and the pain was over again. (Studies in Hysteria 181-2)

44Here, with the phrase of “ownmost” truth, I am alluding to Lacan’s Heideggerian definition of the death drive in “The Function and Field of Speech and Language”:

…so does the death instinct essentially express the limit of the historical function of the subject. This limit is death—not as an eventual coming-to-term of the life of the individual, nor as the empirical certainty of the subject, but, as Heidegger’s formula puts it, as that ‘possibility which is one’s ownmost, unconditional, unsupersedable, certain and as such indeterminable (unuberholbare), for the subject—‘subject’ understood as meaning the subject defined by his historicity . . . this limit represents the past in its real form, that is to say, not the physical past as it has become perfected in the work of memory, nor the historic past in which man finds the guarantor of his future, but the past which reveals itself reversed in repetition. (Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, 103)

45 In psychoanalytic terms, I propose that this striking difference between Boethius’s direct encounter with Philosophy and Chaucer’s indirect relationship with Fame, rather than be interpreted as evidence of Chaucer’s controlling, “neurotic” passivity, may be perhaps more profitably interpreted in terms of gender (or, in Lacanian terms, the “sexuation” of the subject) in light of Freud’s essay, “A Child is Being Beaten,” Freud’s provocative essay in which he discusses his observations of children’s habitual “beating fantasies” and offers speculative insights and hypotheses about what he takes to be “masculine” and “feminine” variants of this fantasy. See “A Child is Being Beaten,” in Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, trans. James and Alix Strachey (London; Hogarth Press, 1924), pp. 172-201. Like the boys in Freud’s essay, Boethius fantasizes his persona to be the direct recipient of an imposing authority figure’s corrective “attentions,” whereas, like the girls in Freud’s essay, Chaucer, in Book III of The House of Fame, fantasizes his persona as watching other “children,” most notably, other males, be “disciplined” by powerful Fame. 46 In his explanatory note for lines 1338-92, John Fyler writes, “Several critics have noted that Fame’s judgment of her petitioners is an ironic version of the Last Judgment.” He then refers the reader to several sources (Riverside Chaucer 987). 47 This is, for example, B.G. Koonce’s conclusion: see Chapter 5 of Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame, 178-ff. 48 I say “significantly” because the “feminized” narrator’s submissive relationship to the eagle is one of the key points of Hansen’s gendered reading of The House of Fame. Against the majority of critics who simply dismiss the eagle and his discourse as merely comical, Hansen takes the eagle more seriously, reading him as a “manly figure” that speaks “with all the authority of those ‘grete clerkes’ from whom the narrator dissociates himself in the Proem” (101). 49 Two authoritative studies that deal with the twelfth-century theory of integumentum in relation to William of Conches and Bernard Silvestris are Winthrop Wetherbee’s Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century and Peter Dronke’s Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism. For further information in regards to how later medieval writers used the theory of integumentum, see Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100-v. 1375: The Commentary Tradition, edited by A.J. Minnis and A. B. Scott.

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50 The source of this tradition is Plato’s Timaeus. As the Dante scholar John Freccero points out in his essay, “Pilgrim in a Gyre” (pp. 70-92 in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion), this influential tradition followed the cosmology of the Timaeus, designating the movement of the sphere of the fixed stars as “rightward” and spiritually harmonious (the eternal “circle of the Same”), and the contrary movement of the seven spheres below (“the circle of the Other”) as “leftward” and thus against divine motion. According to the Timaeus, these two types of heavenly motion are be mirrored in the microcosmic universe of each human soul:

The human soul has the same revolutions, Plato tells us, and is made from the same material. The highest part of the soul, its intelligence or speculative reason, moves as the circle of the Same. It can arrive at the perfection of knowledge, for it contemplates only eternal things, and yet at the same time it dominates all the other powers of the soul. The soul’s revolutions according to the Circle of the Other are contrary motions, which represent the soul’s other powers in their relationship to the temporal world. In Chalcidius’s commentary on Plato’s passage, the matter is summed up for us very briefly: “The sphere of the fixed stars [the motion of the Same] in the soul is reason, [the spheres] of the planets, iracundia and cupiditas and other movements of this sort” (Freccero 77).

Of course, as Freccero often shows with Dante’s poetry, Chaucer re-interprets and rewrites the Platonic tradition, re-creating the stars themselves through the humble truth of the Incarnation. 51 May 3 is the date on which Pandarus, playing Cupid, sets in motion “his grete emprise,” his grand orchestration of the love affair between Troilus and Criseyde (Troilus and Criseyde 2.56). It is also the date on which the action of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale occurs (VII. 3187-90), when Chauntecleer the rooster meets the Fate that his dream warned him about, when he undergoes and wins his “life and death” battle of wits with his nemesis, the fox. In The Knight’s Tale, Palamon escapes from prison “of May / the thridde nyght” (VII. 1462-3). 52 That Chaucer would enjoy using numbers in this subtle, non-intrusive symbolic way is, for a medieval poet, hardly surprising. As demonstrated by poets from Dante to the Pearl-poet, medieval poets, no doubt inspired by the Christian exegetical tradition, often used religious-based numerical symbolism and numerical structuring devices. For a helpful overview and introduction, see Ernst Curtius’s chapter on “Numerical Composition” in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (501-9). 53 The computer program that I use is Voyager III, with SkyPilot, version 3.78 for Mac OS X, copyright Carina Software 1990-2005. With this program, I have verified and/or determined all the astronomical calculations presented in this dissertation. As for the astrolabe model I use, the reader, if interested, may purchase such an instrument from Janus, an online company headed by astrolabe aficionado James E. Morrison (www.astrolabes.org); for a very modest price, Morrison’s company offers high-quality, accurate, easy-to-use astrolabe reproductions precisely calculated for whatever latitude and longitude and year the consumer specifies. Also, at the end of her book, Time and the Astrolabe in The Canterbury Tales (University of Oklahoma, 2002), Marijane Osborn provides the curious reader with a template to make an “adequate, practice astrolabe” (271-4). (For those readers frightened of the math and science of astronomy, Osborn’s book offers both a very readable, informative and interesting introduction to the medieval use of the astrolabe and a lucid argument for Chaucer’s practical use of the astrolabe in the writing of his poetry; as summed up by the author herself, Osborn’s purpose is to demystify the astrolabe for the modern reader by means of Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, and, in doing so, to show how Chaucer uses the astrolabe “to create secular time-related structures within individual Canterbury tales” (5). In her book, Osborn presents a new take on the oft-debated topic of the framing of the Canterbury tales as a whole. Wary of allegorical interpretations and eschewing the idea of a more “metaphysical” design at work in the Tales, Osborn argues that Chaucer’s use of astronomy and the astrolabe in the Tales and throughout his poetry is, for the most part, realistic and practical, emphatically down-to-earth. For further information about the medieval astrolabe and Chaucer’s astronomy from a scientific, historical perspective, see J.D. North’s Chaucer’s Universe (Oxford, 1988); North is a well-known historian of medieval astronomy and cosmology, and Osborn cites his work throughout her book.) 54 This association of Ganymede with the constellation of Aquarius was traditional. Allen, in Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, writes that Cicero, Hyginus, Virgil, and Ovid all identified Aquarius with Ganymede (46). More specifically, one can find the Ganymede-Aquarius connection in the Astronomica of Manilius (5.486), and in De Astronomia of Hyginus (2.16). 55 In Horoscopes and History, J. D. North cites 32 degrees North as “the standard figure for Jerusalem” used by late medieval astrologers (172).

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56 On April 11, 1300 in Jerusalem, the sun rose at 5:06 a.m., and Altair culminated at 5:07 a.m., a mere one minute later. 57 The exact calculations are as follows: in Jerusalem on March 28, 34, the sun rose at 5:36 a.m., and Altair culminated at 5:41 a.m.; on March 29, 34, in Jerusalem, the sun rose at 5:35, and Altair culminated at 5:37 a.m. The point here is not so much that Dante would have come up with the same exact calculations, but that he could have easily been close enough in his calculations to recognize the similarity of the two skies (the sky of April 11, 1300 and the sky of March 28-29, 34, the repetition of the pattern of Altair culminating as the sun rises.) 58 At this point, many readers might justly wonder the following: “If Dante was aware of such “holy synchronicity,” why didn’t he share this wonderful fact with his readers?” I believe there is a very good reason why Dante would not risk being more explicit, namely, he wisely realized that, if he did so, he would likely be misinterpreted as meddling heretically and dangerously with the “off limits” historical moment of Christ’s resurrection. Rather than viewing Dante’s use of the stars as a symbolic “citing” of that holy morning, some of Dante’s readers would have suspected that the poet was blasphemously suggesting that, in some way, the configuration in the heavens functioned as a cause of the Resurrection. 59 On December 10, 1379 in London, Sirius rose at 7:51 p.m. and, thus would be just coming into view as Altair disappeared, setting at 8:14 p.m. The opposition of rising Sirius and setting Altair is particularly easy to see on an astrolabe; in the spatial terms of the astrolabe, the small temporal difference that separates these two events is hardly noticeable. 60 The Roman astronomical writer Hyginus, in De Astronomia, a work that includes an encyclopedia account of the constellations, uses this structuring and mnemonic device all throughout Book 3 and Book 4. More than 70 medieval manuscripts of this book exist, dating from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries (L’Astronomie xlvi). See also The Aratus ascribed to Germanicus Caesar, another late-classical work that describes the constellations in detail. Although less abundant than the manuscripts of Hyginus’s De Astronomia, numerous medieval manuscripts of this work (similarly dating from the ninth century onwards) also exist (2). 61 In The Divine Comedy, Dante draws upon this traditional association of the eagle with the Roman Empire in Paradiso 18-20, the cantos dealing with the Sphere of Jupiter, the sphere in which the pilgrim sees the blessed spirits form themselves into the shape of a great eagle. 62 In the seventh and concluding chapter of his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heavens, Kant proposes his theory about Sirius and the Eagle in a lengthy footnote; for Kant, there is a wonderful “rightness” about his conclusion that the dazzling Sirius must be the center of the universe:

If, therefore, we draw a line from a spot near the tail of the Eagle through the plane of the Milky Way to the opposite point, this line must pass through the center of the system. And, in fact, it comes very exactly to Sirius, the brightest star in the whole sky, which, on account of this happy concurrence harmonizing so well with its preponderating form, seems to deserve its being held to be the central body [of the universe]. (165)

63 For an overview of the principles of astral magic, see Richard Kieckhefer’s Magic and the Middle Ages (131-3). For further study, Kieckhefer offers a helpful bibliography at the end of his work. 64 Moreover, in a neat twist that further hints at Chaucer’s reading of Gower, Gower’s framing of his list of fifteen stars directly links the “natural magic” to Alexander, the darling of Chaucer’s Fame: implicitly suggesting a magical cause for Alexander’s extraordinary triumphs and fame, Gower recounts the legend that the great magician and astronomer Nectanabus taught the eager Alexander all about the “magique naturel” associated with certain powerful stars (VII. 1295-1308). 65 Richard Kieckhefer’s Magic in the Middle Ages provides an introduction to the topic of Hermetic magic and to Hermes Trismestigus, the legendary figure associated with this tradition. As Kieckhefer points out, the figure of Hermes Trismestigus became a kind of “patron saint” of the occultist Humanist movement of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries:

The mythic figure taken as a kind of patron saint for this movement was Hermes Trismestigus, whose image appears on a mosaic pavement laid at the cathedral of Siena in the late 1480s . . . Standing beside the Sibyls, Hermes is depicted here not as a magician but as a supposed prophet of Christianity, though his connections with magic, astrology, and alchemy could hardly be put out of mind or distinguished altogether from his prophetic powers. (145)

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For the relationship between Isis and Hermes Trismestigus (or Hermes/Thoth) in later paganism, especially among the more “philosophical” pagans, see pp. 207-8 in R. E. Witt’s Isis in the Graeco-Roman World. Writes Witt, “Egyptian Hermes—Trismestigus—is the mage by whom Isis has been taught, the Thoth who is himself the Word of God, the Logos by whom all things have been created” (207); “Hermes/Thoth, Trismestigus, is indeed inseparable from Isis ‘the wise’, regarded as his daughter and pupil, and described both as ‘prior to the Muses at Hermopolis’, where he has invented writing and music, and as ‘Justice’”(208). The humanists referred to above by Kieckhefer clearly knew of the relationship of Isis and Hermes Trismestigus; we see evidence of this in the “astonishing” frescoes of Pinturiccchio at the Sistine Chapel in the Room of the Saints, described below by Witt:

Commissioned by the man who became Pope in the year that Columbus discovered the New World, they include some astonishing novelties or rather mythological borrowings form Ancient Egypt. Here we can still gaze at Io, the Greek cow, turning in to Egyptian Isis, at the Apis Bull, identified with the Bull of the Borgias, at Apis Bulls worshipping the cross of Christendom, and at Moses, Hermes Trismestigus and Isis in a single group. (269)

66 For an intriguing discussion of the relationship of the Isaic tradition to Pauline Christianity and later Christianity, see the last two chapters of Witt’s Isis in the Graeco-Roman World. In Cult of Isis in the Roman Empire, Malcolm Donalson sums up the powerful appeal of Isis, citing the many reasons why the religion of Isis at one time represented a serious rival to the Christian religion:

The appeal of Isis in the Roman world was both multi-faceted and strong . . . When one considers the diverse spheres of both life and death in which appeals to Isis were believed to be efficacious, it is no wonder that her cult became a serious rival for others, notably Christianity. As if the assurance of personal salvation and a blessed afterlife were not enough, this goddess offered the promise of good fortune, health, power over countless dilemmas through her magic, an ideal model and patroness for parenting, the model par excellence for married life, safety in childbirth, strength in sorrow, rescue at sea, and military victory for the state. This was the “All-goddess,” Panthea, and once the people knew her, she could have few peers. (19)

67 Another source for this information would be the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon who, drawing upon Augustine as his source, refers to Isis as the inventor of writing:

Then Io, afterwards called Isis, gave letters to the Egyptians, as Augustine states in the eighteenth book of the City of God. This Isis, as Augustine states, is said to have been the daughter of Inachus, first kind of the Argives, who reigned in the first year of Jacob and Esau, grandsons of Abraham, as Augustine and the histories state; although some has maintained that Isis came from Ethiopia into Egypt as a queen, and gave them letters, and bestowed many benefits, as Augustine states. (Vol. 1, 54)

68 Christine de Pizan identifies Isis as the inventor of non-hieroglyphic Egyptian script and agricultural grafting in 1.36.1 of The Book of the City of Ladies; there, Lady Reason tells Christine the following:

“Isis, likewise, was a woman of such great learning acquired through labor that she was not only named the queen of Egypt but also the most singular and special goddess of the Egyptians . . . She invented a form of shorthand which she taught to the Egyptians and provided them a way to abridge their excessively involved script . . . she taught the Egyptians how to set up vegetable gardens and how to make plantings and grafts from different stalks.” (76-7)

69 Apparently unaware that Isis as inventor of writing and agricultural grafting has already beat him to it, Derrida proposes his theory of the textual graft in Dissemination:

One ought to explore systematically not only what appears to be a simple etymological coincidence uniting the graft and the graph (both from the Greek graphion: writing instrument, stylus) but also the analogy between the forms of textual grafting and so-called vegetal grafting, or even, more and more commonly today, animal grafting. It would not be enough to compose an encyclopedic catalogue of grafts (approach grafting, detached scion grafting: whip grafts, splice grafts, saddle grafts, cleft grafts, bark grafts; bridge grafting, inarching, repair grafting, bracing; T-budding, shield budding, etc.); one must elaborate a systematic treatise on the textual graft. (202)

For a helpful introduction and overview of how the “textual graft” functions as a model for Derrida’s practice of deconstructive reading, see pp. 134-56 of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Cornell University Press, 1982). Note: My playful remark about Derrida and Isis notwithstanding, I

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have much respect for his work; indeed, although I do not quote from or engage with Derrida’s writings in this dissertation, it seems to me that many of the readings offered in this dissertation show an affinity for “deconstructive” thinking and Derrida’s practice of textual grafting, e.g. my reading of Boethius’s Lady Philosophy as haunted by Virgil’s Fama. 70 To some degree, John’s writing in Revelation certainly offers itself up to this kind of astronomical hermeneutic. For example, in Revelation 12:1, John writes, “And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with sun,” which, to those who know the science of the stars, could easily be read interpreted as the sun/son being within the constellation of Virgo the Virgin (perhaps this is why, early on, the Church decided upon a Virgo birth date for the Blessed Virgin?). 71 For an extended exegesis of the Queen of South in terms of mystical contemplation, see Richard of St. Victor’s The Mystical Ark (4.12), pp. 326-9 in Grover Zinn’s English translation. Below, I offer a sample of Richard’s impassioned exegesis:

Who is this Queen of the South, both inhabitant and lady of that warm region, who is kindled with longing to see Solomon? Who, I say, is this queen, except any holy soul who forcefully controls the senses and appetites of the flesh and the thoughts and affections of the mind; who burns with love for the supreme King and true Solomon; and who is afire with longing to see Him? Such a queen presses the King of highest wisdom by putting riddles and frequent questions to Him, when any devoted soul, confident of divine assistance, vigorously pursues with zeal the investigation of truth. (326-7)

72 For this point about “the discourse of the sign,” I am indebted to Alain Badiou’s reading of Christianity in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, especially, Chapter Four, “Theory of Discourses” (40-54). 73 In his 1971 essay, “Proserpina, Matelda, and the Pilgrim,” Emerson Brown--clearly inspired by Charles Singleton’s arguably sometimes puritanical approach to The Divine Comedy--offers a very moralistic reading of the allusion to Proserpina in Purgatorio 28: according to Brown, the fact the pilgrim thinks of Persephone when he sees Matelda “emphasizes the distance separating Dante from Matelda, fallen man from Eden,” showing us the pilgrim’s “inability to understand Matelda” (45). For Brown, there can be no positive Christian meaning to the story of Persephone; strangely, he does not even consider how the mythical Queen of the Dead might function as a figure for Matelda in her role as Christian Lady of Souls. Not surprisingly, since he only views Proserpina negatively, Brown thus does not link Purgatorio 28’s allusion to Proserpina to Dante’s holy Lucia. 74 This relationship of Virgo to the goddesses of the harvest (Ceres and Proserpina) is hinted at in the traditional depiction of Virgo as a maiden carrying a sheaf of wheat: in fact, to this day, the alpha star of the constellation is called Spica, the Latin word for “spike” as in “ear of corn” (i.e. sheaf of wheat). Thus, in his Astronomica 2.442, Manilius refers to Virgo in a phrase that links her carrying of “spike” to her presumed special relationship to Ceres: “spicifera est Virgo Cereris” (translated by Goold as “the Virgin with her spike belongs to Ceres”). 75 According to Richard Allen’s section on Sirius in Stars Names: Their Lore and Meaning, “the culmination of this star at midnight was celebrated in the great temple of Ceres at Eleusis” (125); if this was indeed the case, the pattern of Virgo rising as Sirius culminates would seem to be the likely rationale for such a celebration. 76 For this intuition, I am indebted to Alison Cornish’s important recognition of the symbolism of Dante’s synchronicity, specifically, her intuition that Dante’s use of time in Purgatorio 9 (Cornish’s reading focuses on Purgatorio 9’s ambiguous opening image of Aurora) may in some way be illuminated by Dante’s fanciful analogy in the Convivio of the “city of Maria” of the Northern hemisphere and the “the city of Lucia” of the Southern hemisphere (Reading Dante’s Stars 73-5). In this analogy (see Convivio 3. 5), Dante uses the opposing cities of Mary and Lucia to imagine at once the opposing temporal perspectives of the inhabitants of the North and South poles (in the Convivio, Lucia is thus indeed a “Queen of the South”!). Cornish contends that the purpose of Dante’s analogy is ultimately moral as well as scientific, i.e. “The two hemispheres are not opposed as good and evil, or dark and light, but rather as reciprocal poles of a providentially illuminated universe” (74). This being the case, Cornish uses Dante’s insistence on “the contemporaneousness of times in a bipolar world” (78) to bolster her reading of the temporally ambiguous opening image (an image that has been an interpretative crux that has bedeviled generations of Dante scholars). Along similar lines, I propose that Dante’s Mary-Lucia analogy in the Convivio bolsters my reading of a hidden astronomical synchronicity that, as I see it, creates a perfect microcosm-macrocosm effect, “grounding” the “microcosmic” contemporaneousness of the pilgrim’s dream and Lucia’s transport of him in “macrocosmic” “contemporaneousness of times in a bipolar world’—the contemporaneous astronomical events

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occurring over the skies of Purgatory (the Southern hemisphere) and over the skies of Jerusalem (the Northern hemisphere). 77 In Purgatorio 9, the pilgrim says his dream of the eagle began “at the hour near morning.” Since, on April 11, 1300, sunrise occurred at 5: 06 a.m., “the hour near morning” would be around 4 a.m., give or take a few minutes. Translated into “Jerusalem time,” this would mean around 4 p.m. (there being in Dante’s idealized scheme, an exact twelve-hour difference between Purgatory and Jerusalem). In Jerusalem, Sirius was culminating at 4:03 p.m.—or, in other words, from the perspective of the sleeping pilgrim in Purgatory, precisely “at the hour near morning” in which he tells us he began to have his dream of the eagle. 78 As Helen Cooper points out, “such treatises had become widespread after the decision of the Lateran Council in 1215 that oral confession should be made once a year” (Oxford Guide to Chaucer 400). 79 Again, because Sirius was so conspicuously marked on medieval astrolabes, even an “astrolabe novice” would have found its time of culmination particularly easy to recognize and pinpoint. 80 Through my reading, it has recently come to my attention that, just as I see Chaucer doing here, Christine de Pizan also saw a link between Ceres and Christ: see Judith Kellogg’s essay in Jane Chance’s The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in the Early France and England (pp. 100-24) for an account and analysis of some of the fascinating Cere-Christ parallels Christine makes in her mythographic L’Epistre Othea. 81 Not surprisingly, since April 18 is the date mentioned in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, this indication at the end of the Tales of an April 17 date has been a thorn in the side of generations of Chaucer scholars. What is happening? Did the Canterbury pilgrims inadvertently stumble into a black hole somewhere along the way and are now, at the end of their journey, moving backwards in time? Eisner’s intuitive response to this mystery seems to me to be the right one; as Eisner suggests, Chaucer most likely indicates specific dates and times in the Tales “for symbolic purposes”—not because he wishes to set up a logically consistent chronological sequence for the Tales (33):

To sum up, Chaucer does uses the Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn . . . He does not, however, use it to give a final chronological organization to the Canterbury Tales. He uses it instead as a source of information concerning specific hours and days [and I would add, very likely specific horoscopes or “sky scenes”] which are necessary for his entire artistic scheme: he is content to use Nicholas’s Kalendarium as a time and date-telling device, and after all, that is what a calendar is for. (Kalendarium 34)

82 The Middle English Compendium cites numerous examples of “tidings” used specifically to indicate the announcement of Christ’s birth. The examples range from c. 1200 to c. 1500 and beyond. 83 In her chapter on The House of Fame in The Mythographic Chaucer: The Fabulation of Sexual Politics, Jane Chance seizes on this Phaethon-linked parallel between Chaucer’s Geffrey and Dante’s pilgrim in Inferno 17:

Chaucer, however, aware of the appearance of both Phaethon and Icarus together in the Inferno, and using Dante as he would any other medieval mythographer, as he did with Ganymede, constructs a parallel in the seventeenth canto between “Geffrey” and Dante, who is transported from one circle to another by the beast of fraud, Geryon . . . Steering his middle course through the air, he [“Geffrey”] is very much like Dante riding the beast Geryon through hell (66).

In the spirit of the school of D. W. Robertson, Jr., Chance—whose erudite book I otherwise admire--often dubiously assumes that poets of genius such as Dante and Chaucer for the most part worked within the lines, letting themselves be boxed in by the intellectual limitations of conventionally moralistic medieval mythographers; thus she reads both Dante’s Geryon episode and Chaucer’s “Geryon-like” Geffrey –and the House of Fame in general--through the strenuously patriarchal moralizing lens of traditional mythographers, e.g. “The special applicability of the figure of Geryon to Chaucer, given the fact that Geryon does not at all appear in the House of Fame, concerns what might be termed the self-deceit, the doubleness or two-headed nature of “Geffrey” borned by the Eagle” (68). For a non-Robertsonian, more “incarnational” reading of the Geryon episode in relation to allegory and The Canterbury Tales (The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, in particular), see Richard Neuse’s discussion in Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in The Canterbury Tales (1991), pp. 64-ff. 84 In pp. 93-7 of his 2003 book, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, Gary Cestaro—who reads Dante’s Divine Comedy via Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic—refers to John’s Milky Way and suggests this kind of “Kristevan” reading; my problem with Cestaro’s reading is that, although he explains how John’s wet nurse imagery associates goodness with infancy and evil with speech and language, he obscures the fact, in Policraticus, John, like

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the conventional mythographer, also specifically links the evil and frivolity of speech with bad or foolish women such as Dido—not to mention all those “effeminate courtiers”; thus, in Lacanian terms, John’s maternal divine is idealistic and would seem to be linked more to the Imaginary rather than to the Real (as Cestaro’s use of Kristeva suggests). To me, there is a world of difference between John’s Milky Way and, for example, Julian of Norwich’s truly revolutionary and fully incarnational use of maternal imagery (not only does Julian make explicit use of the androgynous Jesus of Mother motif of Cistercian tradition, she also challenges and transcends conventional sex-role expectations by imagining and incarnating herself as an object of maternal love as opposed to directing it—as many of her late-medieval sisters did--to the Child Jesus.) 85 There is a further irony to John’s patriarchal double standard in regards to Dido and Aeneas, namely, the fact that this very double standard serves to mask the likely truth that, if John—like the fictional Dido-- had been actually present for Aeneas’s speech at Dido’s banquet—he, like many or perhaps most men, would have also been “swept off his feet” by Aeneas’s heroically impressive (and far-from-effeminate) autobiographical narration of his experience of the Fall of Troy! 86 In response to the question, “Why would Dante map out the pilgrim’s outdistancing of Phaethon in this way?” one need only imagine Dante reading the myth of Phaethon informed by ideas about the Milky Way gleaned from both his reading and his own observation. On the one hand, that which defines Phaethon (and thus, us) as a mortal subject—definitely not a god—is his inability to go on or past the Scorpion, thus creating the “scar” of the Milky Way. On the other hand, as we know from Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and Macrobius’s Commentary, the Milky Way is not just a negative sign or remainder of human “sin” but also an immensely holy and, for the pagan pantheist at least, fully Real place, the shining radiant circle and native country of two kinds of souls: the still-yet-undefiled “infant” souls who are just beginning the process of earthly incarnation and the purified souls who have returned from their sojourn on earth. Moreover, as I explained earlier, according to Macrobius, these purified souls return and gain access to this native country by passing through one of the two opposing constellations that marks the intersection of the Milky Circle with the Circle of the Zodiac: although Macrobius (in contrast to Ptolemy) incorrectly identifies these constellations as Cancer (for souls leaving the Milky Way) and Capricorn (for souls re-entering the Milky Way), anyone with a fairly basic competence in practical astronomy would know by looking up at the night sky that the two zodiacal “portals” to the Milky Way actually fall within the constellations Gemini and Sagittarius, the latter being, as the designated portal for the souls returning to the Milky Way, not only the constellation astrologically ruled by benevolent Jupiter (the planet named after the Father God of the Sky who kills Phaethon and thereby saves the universe from chaos, reestablishing the natural order) but also, significantly and appropriately, the constellation of the Archer that comes right after Scorpion (the Archer who, as any sky-map will show you, aims his arrow directly at Antares, the glowing red star that marks the Scorpion’s heart)--hence, for the would-be successful Phaethon, the “heavenly portal constellation” that can only be reached by surviving the sight of the Scorpion. 87 For this pun, I am indebted to Richard Neuse’s discussion of the Geryon episode in Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in The Canterbury Tales (see pp. 79-80). 88 Having traversed the fundamental fantasy in Canto 17 of Inferno, Dante’s next calling up of the Scorpion, at the beginning of Canto 9 of Purgatorio, challenges us to undergo the same traversal, once again mysteriously linking the facing of the difficult “downward” truth of sexuality and embodiment (the sight of the Scorpion that Phaethon could not endure) to the “upward” experience of the divine. There, a little before Dante narrates his terrifying dream of being a Ganymede snatched up into the sky by Jove’s eagle, the poet depicts a beautiful sky scene, tantalizing us with an ambiguous and undeniably unsettling mixture of images—that of the implicitly threatening, glittering, gem-adorned constellation of the Scorpion and that of a unnamed Aurora-like goddess taking leave of her devoted old lover, the night:

Now she who shares the bed of old Tithonus, abandoning the arms of her sweet lover, grew white along the eastern balcony; the heavens facing her were glittering with gems set in the semblance of the chill animal that assails men with its tail . . . (1-6, Mandelbaum 74)

Due to the temporal ambiguity of the scene described, the precise identity of this mythical woman has provoked much heated debate among Dante scholars, with one group of scholars arguing for a dawn scene (a solar Aurora)

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and another group arguing for a night scene (a lunar Aurora) (Reading Dante’s Stars 62-78). Whether Dante is describing a night or dawn sky, though, I would argue that the disturbing ambiguity of the image remains: no matter how we look at it, there is ultimately no way to know for certain how the Aurora in this passage is connected to the sight of the glittering Scorpion. Is she a Scorpionic femme fatale, an emasculating woman of Mars-like will and desire who, without a second thought, abandons her old lover for someone younger and more potent? Or, as Alison Cornish ingeniously suggests, given the whitening along the eastern balcony, might we read the passage more hopefully as pointing to the inevitable astronomical “erasure” of the menacing Scorpion, an erasure by light that “foreshadows the seven P’s (symbolizing peccata, or sins) that the pilgrim is about to receive on his forehead, and which are to be expunged progressively over the course of a three-day mountain hike” (Reading Dante’s Stars 77)? Rather than trying to settle on any one reading of the passage, I propose instead that Dante means to make us uncomfortable, to keep us wondering indefinitely about the meaning of his Scorpionic Aurora. Here, just as he did in the Geryon episode, Dante plays against the traditional motif of the woman-faced scorpion, this time not by giving that image of treachery a male face but by instead calling up the traditional motif only half-way, thereby trading an unambiguously negative image of female sexuality for one that is tantalizing and truly enigmatic—and therefore truly threatening. Through our unease with the seemingly sinister yet possibly “good” Aurora—an anxiety that we experience directly before we hear of the pilgrim’s terrifying, violent dream of divine rapture—the poet thus intensifies, perhaps especially for his male readers, the impact and meaning of that rapture, grounding it in the very experience of the feminine Other that the subject strives to shut out with the simplifying, self-protective blinders of fantasy. And, once again, Dante’s poem subtly performs the Scorpio-Sagittarius traversal, moving his poem from the dreaded, mortifying sight of the Scorpion to a passage that evokes the transcendence of the Jovian divine (the mythical rape of Ganymede). In this case, though, the homoerotically charged dream of Jovian rapture continues rather than overcomes that which the celestial Scorpion emanates. Against the more conventionally asexual or more harmonious depictions of grace, Dante, like a mystic, daringly brings to the fore the incarnational convertibility of the sexualized body’s disturbing yet potentially regenerating jouissance. Moreover, most importantly, Dante may do all this knowing that he is not only citing the 1300 April sky over Purgatory but also, at the same time, the sky over Jerusalem as it would have appeared to the rising Christ on the historical dawn of the Resurrection (March 27, 34): then, the Moon—the traditional symbol of the feminized Church-- was in the Western sky wearing the gems of the Scorpion (given that Passover occurs at the Full Moon, this would be very easy to figure out), facing the dawn and the rising sun / Sun—a rising sun that, as I explained in the previous section, just so happened to coincide nearly perfectly with the culmination of Altair (the star of Jove’s eagle). 89 Significantly, the Geryon episode appears directly after Dante meets the sodomites towards whom, as Bruce Holsinger underscores in his essay, “Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of The Divine Comedy” (pp. 243-74 in the 1996 Premodern Sexualities, e.d. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero), Dante the pilgrim experiences such an intense, compulsive attraction that, for a fleeting moment, he feels tempted to sacrifice everything, throwing himself down into their burning pit (Inferno 16. 46-8). Dante depicts these particular sodomites, among them, his beloved teacher, Brunetto Latini, not as effete or androgynous but as emphatically masculine and virile, even hyper-masculine, e.g. in 15. 121-4, Dante compares Brunetto and the men with him to athletes running a race, with his beloved Brunetto in the lead, appearing to win the prize; 16. 22-7, Dante compares a small group of sodomites to naked, well-oiled champion wrestlers. Holsinger’s brief remarks about the Geryon episode suggest that, for the most part, Holsinger reads the pilgrim’s flight on the back of Geryon as not much more than a sublimation of homoerotic desire, “Dante thus projects his frustrated desires to join and embrace the sodomites to a wistful vision of their winged flight, a flight the pilgrim experiences in the next canto as he and his guide climb onto the back of Geryon” (252). To me, though, Dante’s openness about expressing his homoerotic desire—as well as the well-known fact that, in Purgatorio 26, Dante the pilgrim encounters homosexuals--suggests that, in regards to the sodomites he places in hell, he is taking a stand not against “sodomy” pure and simple but a virile, phallic kind of sodomy that is insidiously aligned with masculine narcissism and, very likely, misogyny. In short, Dante recognizes (in himself as well as other men) the ethical and spiritual danger of the kind of high-minded, manly humanist “with a just face” who, believing himself above all things feminine, cannot see his own Scorpionic tail—or, for that matter, that of his masculine doubles. 90 B.G. Koonce points out, the eagle’s humorous scolding of the narrator parallels Beatrice’s similarly sharp words to Dante in Paradiso 1. 88-90, who, just like Chaucer’s narrator, cannot take in his pioneering celestial experience due to the obscuring, distracting filters of earthly authorities: “You make yourself / obtuse with false imagining; you

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can / not see what you would see if you dispelled it” (168). Koonce strengthens this parallel between the eagle and Beatrice by pointing out how Beatrice immediately follows this rebuke of Dante with a lecture on “natural place,” “a lesson Chaucer has just received from the eagle” (Chaucer and Tradition of the Fame: Symbolism in The House of Fame 168). 91 By “astronomical real,” I am thinking of the Lacanian real—specifically as Lacan humorously and pointedly evoked it in the following statements: “The real is what does not depend on my idea of it” (Lacan, Seminar XXI, April 23, 1974), and “You can’t do whatever you want with it” (Lacan, Seminar XIII, January 5, 1966) (quoted in Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance 142). As Bruce Fink explains, Lacan had interesting and unexpectedly generous things to say about scientific discourse. In his well-known theory of the four discourses (the four discourses being that of the master, university, hysteric, and analyst), Lacan did not identify scientific discourse with “the master’s discourse” or “academic discourse” (as one might expect). Rather, Lacan believed scientific discourse, that is, scientific discourse in its best sense, to be most like the discourse of the hysteric (a favorite of Lacan’s) since, in Lacan’s view, both of these passionately questioning discourses—in contrast to, for example, “the master’s discourse”-- grapple with and encounter the real, that which is beyond the known, beyond the comfort of the symbolic order:

That means that the truth of the hysteric’s discourse, its hidden motor force, is the real. Physics too, when carried out in a truly scientific spirit, is ordained and commanded by the real, that is, by that which does not work, by that which does not fit. It does not set out to carefully cover over paradoxes and contradictions, in an attempt to prove the theory is nowhere lacking—that it works in every instance—but rather to take such paradoxes and contradictions as far as they can go. (The Lacanian Subject 134-5)

92 Two secondary sources that trace the fascinating medieval origins and increasingly lurid permutations of the Fair Rosamund legend are Virgil Hetzel’s Fair Rosamund: A Study of the Development of a Literary Theme (see pp. 1- 13) and D.D.R. Owen’s Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen and Legend (see pp. 114-21). 93 In his Commentary on Paradiso, Charles Singleton mentions in passing Busnelli’s idea about the Rose-as-Roman Coliseum in his note on the “candida rosa” of Canto 31.1 (511). As for Di Scipio’s argument about the Rose, Di Scipio himself acknowledges that his argument is speculative, stating, “While there is no textual or documented proof that Dante was aware of the birth and development of Gothic architecture in Europe and particularly in France, one can assume that he had knowledge of and was interested in this development” (The Symbolic Rose in Dante’s Paradiso 151). In his 1989 essay, “Symbolism and Structure in Paradiso 30,” Peter Dronke voices a just critique of this linking of the Rose with gothic cathedrals and stained glass windows, pointing out that “the more we attend to the details of Dante’s description, the clearer it becomes that it far outstrips anything that had been visually realized in his time in sculpture or stained glass” (rpt. in Latin and Vernacular Poets of the Middle Ages 41). Against this view, Dronke speculates “that the principal inspiration behind Dante’s rose is more probably verbal than visual,” though, in all fairness to John Leyerle (in his essay, Dronke is clearly aiming his critique at Leyerle’s “The Rose-Wheel Design in Dante’s Paradiso”), I would point out that, as my own summary indicates, Leyerle’s nuanced essay on the rose-wheel design does not present a simplistic, visually based argument but instead strives to explore and tease out the richly suggestive relationship between visual and the verbal symbolism, focusing in particular on what Leyerle sees as the ultimate message of the medieval rose-wheel pattern--the complex and intertwined relationship between the earthly and celestial love. 94 Indeed, Mary Orr, in Dante and the Early Astronomers, speculates that the popular naming of the Galaxy as the Way of Saint James “perhaps arose through a confusion of Galaxy and Galicia, where was a famous shrine of St. James, and hence came the belief in Italy that the Galassia was a sign by night to guide pilgrims on their way to this shrine at Compostella in Galizia” (198). 95 There may be a “Phaethon” subtext here that calls up and parallels the Geryon episode of Inferno 17: whereas, in Inferno 17, Dante, comparing himself to Phaethon (he whose Fall created the Milky Way), flies down to the eighth circle of Hell on the back of Geryon, a beast of fraud who, according to legend, was once a treacherously inhospitable King of Spain, here, in the eighth sphere of heaven, we learn that the supremely hopeful Dante has, metaphorically speaking, ascended to the eighth sphere of Heaven on the back of Saint James (he who represents the Christian Milky Way of pilgrimage and grace)--identified by Beatrice as “the baron” whom pilgrims visit at Galicia, his shrine in Spain.

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96 Although it is true that, in his following prayer, Bernard universalizes this image of trying to ascend on one’s own power (Paradiso 33. 13-5), I do not believe that this rules out my more pointed reading of Bernard’s introductory remark: Dante makes himself an Everyman in the perhaps the most truthful and real way possible—by linking himself to humanity through his own particular weakness. 97 Ovid’s “broken wheels” also mirror Dante’s “wheel” in a way that Plato’s “broken circles” do not: as Freccero himself suggests in his essay, “The Final Image,” the meaning of the last lines of Dante’s poem may very well hinge in part on Dante’s choice not to use the word “circle” (a word denoting a geometric abstraction) but to use the word “wheel” (a word denoting a concrete embodiment of the circle). (Dante: The Poetics of Conversion 245-57). 98 Here, my understanding of the two-fold movement of Dante’s wheel is indebted to John Freccero’s brilliant landmark essay, “The Final Image: Paradiso XXXIII, 144” (Dante: The Poetics of Conversion 245-57). 99 Although Judith Butler critiques Lacan in different writings, here I am thinking specifically of the critique of Lacan in her essay, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary” (Bodies That Matter 57-91). In this essay, Butler reading Lacan’s “The Signification of the Phallus” in conjunction with his earlier essay, “The Mirror Essay,” argues that Lacan’s theory, with its disavowed slippages between “phallus” and “penis,” nonsensically constructs a “hegemonic imaginary” that effectively generates and sustains the privileged status of the supposedly purely symbolic “phallus.” To break through this troubling impasse, Butler suggests a deconstructive strategy of “aggressive reterritorialization” (e.g. “the lesbian phallus”) by which the privileged status of the phallus is called into question via the very insistence upon the phallus’s symbolic status. The “lesbian phallus” is particularly powerful and revolutionary, since it confounds the binary logic of “The Signification of the Phallus,” offering “the occasion (a set of occasions) for the phallus to signify differently, and in so signifying, to resignify, unwittingly, its own masculinist and heterosexist privilege” (90). 100 Although one might hope that the religiously minded might recognize this as a problem, Barbara Newman’s essay, “Flaws in the Golden Bowl: Gender and Spiritual Formation in the Twelfth Century” (pp. 19-45 in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist), a study of what the author calls the monastic “literature of formation” (texts devoted to the training of monks and nuns), suggests otherwise. In her analysis of 45 texts written between 1075 and 1225, Newman found that whereas many twelfth-century texts directed at male religious conceive of the spiritual life as a dynamic quest or arduous, step-by-step progress of growth, parallel texts directed at female audiences almost always lack this element of “spiritual dynamism.”

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Anne V. Sullivan

EDUCATION 2007 Ph.D. in English, Northwestern University 1989 M.A. in English, University of California, Davis 1985 B.A. in English with Honors, University of California, Davis AWARDS 2002-2003 Dissertation Year Fellowship, Northwestern University 1998 Karin Strand Prize, Best Graduate English Essay, Northwestern University 1997-2001 Graduate Fellowship, Northwestern University PRESENTATIONS 1999 34th Int’l Congress on Medieval Studies of the Medievalist Institute.

Presented "Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde: Where the Boys Are." TEACHING 1998-2002 TEACHING ASSISTANT at Northwestern University

Courses included English Literary Traditions, Introduction to Shakespeare, European Thought and Culture: Introduction to the Middle Ages, Introduction to the Novel and The Bible as Literature. Also taught English composition.

1993-97 INSTRUCTOR at Sacramento City College

Taught English composition and E.S.L. for the Sacramento City College/University of California, Davis writing program.

1990-93 READER at University of California, Davis

Courses included Medieval Literature, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.

1989 LECTURER at University of California, Davis Taught English composition. 1987-90 TEACHING ASSISTANT at University of California, Davis Taught English composition.