Sikernesse and Fere in Troilus and Criseyde

Fear virtually saturates the Troilus. Troilus dreads being thought fearful of combat; he frets over every turn in his relationship with Criseyde; and even his hastily constructed confidence that Criseyde will return from the Greek camp betrays his dread, as suggested by his dream of Criseyde in the boar's arms. ¹ The vicariously involved narrator dares not love; he fears that his reader will misunderstand and thus condemn Criseyde because of what he must disclose about her (V, 1775); and he is, perhaps above all, anxious about the transmission of his text (V, 1793-99) because of miscopying, "mismetering," and the instability of the English language. And of course there is Criseyde, "the ferfulleste wight / That myghte be" (II, 450-51). ²

In this article I would like to focus on this fear, and particularly on the way in which Chaucer imbeds his concern with certainty and fear within two sets of words, one revolving around the term sikernesse and the other around the term fere. Both of these terms are repeated, or echoed, in other words that complicate their apparently stable meaning, and thus the characters' fear of circumstances bleeds into the narrator's fears about the slipperiness of the verbal realm in which he operates. That verbal play, moreover, accumulates to form a deterministic undercurrent as well as a persistent sense of sympathetic knowing in the reader of the poem. Here are the two constellations of terms:

fere, companion, together
fere, fear
fire, fire (occasionally spelled feere)
fair, pleasing, attractive (occasionally feire)
faren, act, behave; go, fare (appears in past tense as ferde, ferde)
fer, far, at a distance

sikernesse, security, safety
siker, safe, certain
sik(e), sick (sometimes seeke, seke)
syk, sigh, sigh
seke, seek, look for

The verbal play involving each of these words tells a skeletal story that undercuts all the gestures toward autonomy in the surface narrative. ³ Fear and companionship are inextricably linked: fear creates the need for companionship, but within companionship (dependence on a fere) is the fear (fere) of loss, and thus avoidance of companionship diminishes fear. This double bind is enriched moreover by the story of sikernesse: all desire for certainty amounts to sickness and leads to sighing, the expression mainly of either loss or a falsely secure feeling of satisfaction. And this state of sickness in longing for certainty, as the ninth couplet of the Canterbury Tales implies, defines the human condition. A fundamental desire stirs the Canterbury pilgrims

The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

(I 17-18)

Sikernesse as certainty, then, is never far removed from sike as sick or as sigh, and fere as companionship nearly always contains the sense of fere as dread.

In arguing for the importance of the play among these words and suggesting even that the words tell their own "story," I am operating in an area where Chaucer's assumptions about language and ours overlap. The two critical concerns in my approach are familiar ones: the instability of linguistic signs and the power of the reader to produce meaning. The particular aspect of the linguistic instability that I would like to emphasize emerges from the distinction Roman Jakobson makes between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language. ⁴ The paradigmatic aspect of language involves a sort of interchangeability between or among terms regardless of their situation in a linear, sequential unit such as a narrative episode or a sentence. A word is always haunted by associations independent of its syntactical function. In his discussion of the Troilus as fundamentally a poem about language, Eugene Vance explains the distinction in this way: "The paradigmatic axis of speech is disjunctive, and involves mental acts of association or substitution based upon a relationship of equivalence between two terms, regardless of whether that relationship involves a principle of identity or opposition. The syntagmatic is...