Fame’s Fabrication

Fame's Fabrication Laura Kendrick Rutgers University Iwould hm liked to use The Hou,e ofFame to ,ruwer the question what Chaucer thought ofcontemporary chivalric ideology, but the harder I labor to discover Chaucer's own views, the more his artifices and ironies get in my way and force me to fall back to the statement of Chaucer's poet persona (HF 3.1878-82): 1 I wot myself best how y 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 myn art. Chaucer's art is to mask his own opinions and to reveal his readers' to themselves. His House ofFame is a house of mirrors in the psychological modern-not the didactic medieval-sense. In the medieval literary genre of the "mirror," the reader saw a model of conduct, an image, not of himselfor his conscience at the time ofreading but ofthese as they should become through his reflection upon and imitation ofthe ideal image in the "mirror."2 A medieval reader might have expected a text called the House 1 F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works ofGeoffrey Chaucer, 2d ed. (London: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1957). Quotations from The House ofFame are from this edition. 2 In the prologue ro his English translation of Christine de Pisan's work entitled, in English, the Bake a/Noblesse, which he dedicated to Henry VI, Stephen Scrope explains that this book, containing many examples of deeds done by the English nobility's Trojan an­ cestors, is supposed to serve as a mirror: "Lete then be as a mirrour noted and had before youre eyen by contynuall remembraunce to thentent that the exercising of theire noble actis in conquests may the more vigorously endeuce you to succede the prowesse and vailauntnesse of youre high predecessoures in armes" (ed. J. G. Nichols [London: Roxburghe Club, 1860], p. 43). By reflecting on the ideal image ofhis ancestors, the contemporarynobleman should become more like them. To encourage this process of identifying ideal and self-images, Geoffroi de Charny writes almost entirely in the second-person singular his rhymed French Livre depicting the ideal knight. See Le Livre messire Geoffroi de Charny, ed. Arthur Piaget, Romania 26 (1897):394-411. 135 RECONSTRUCTING CHAUCER (or Book) ofFame to be such an "edifying" treatise,3 especially because Chaucer uses in it the conventional didactic devices ofthe dream vision and the celestial journey. Chaucer's fragmentary, uoauthoritative text does not satisfy this expectation. Ifwe do try to take it seriously, then we must make sense of it as best we can by projecting our own meanings and motivations upon the ambiguous master. However, rather than dwelling on us, I war..t to try to imagine what Chaucer's chivalric contemporaries may have seen in his text, especially the third book of the House ofFame, which was, I suspect, intended to provoke them. lo order to imbibe chivalric values and discover how chivalric writers "stood," I have followed Caxton's self-serving advice to the slothful English nobility: not get out there and do something but "read volumes . .. read [among others] Froissart!"4 Medieval upholders of the chivalries ofarms and virtue5 - writers such as Froissart, Cuvelier, Christine de Pisao, or even Gower-would have found two aspects of Chaucer's vision of Fame disturbing: Chaucer's Fame is unjust and untrue, unjust because reputation is arbitrarily distributed, and untrue because the words that make the reputation are arbitrarily related to the deeds or intentions of the renowned. The fundamental premise of chivalric ideology is just the opposite: fame is not arbitrary; it is always 3 An earlier title for Chaucer's work was The Book ofFame. Many of the late-medieval compilers of books of historical examples of good deeds used "edifying" metaphors, perhaps none more fondly than Christine de Pisan. In her prologue to one work, translated by Caxton and entitled in English The Book ofFayttes ofArmes andofChyvalrye, Christine opens with building metaphors that Caxton mistranslates. Christine says that she is encouraged to undertake the construction of the present literary edifice because of her previous writing experience and because she has...