Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer’s House of Fame

In book ii of The House of Fame, Geffrey’s eagle guide expounds the Aristotelian principle of motion that governs the poem’s universe of things. All natural bodies move, he explains, because they are drawn toward the “stede” or “place” where they belong:

… every kyndely thyng that isHath a kyndely stede ther heMay best in hyt conserved be;Unto which place every thyngThorgh his kyndely enclynyngMoveth for to come toWhan that hyt is awey therfro[.]¹

(730–36)

Scholars have previously linked the principle of “kyndely enclynyng” with Lady Philosophy’s exposition of Nature’s regulatory operations in The Consolation of Philosophy, but its impact on the underlying material dynamics of The House of Fame, and the consequences of those dynamics for Chaucer’s developing poetics, has not been recognized.² This essay argues that natural inclination, the motion intrinsic to things, is not only responsible for the upward movement of “tydynges” to Fame’s house—what Karla Taylor calls their “natural history”³—but serves more broadly as the basis of an ars poetica of material agency. Indeed, Geffrey’s ascent to the House of Rumor has long been read as metapoetical, a writer’s meditation on the sources, purpose, and value of his art. Some see its “tydynges” as an archive of fresh subject matter for a new vernacular tradition rooted in the affairs of the “shipmen and pilgrimes, … pardoners, / Currours, and eke messagers” who gather at the poem’s conclusion like prototypes of their Canterbury-bound cousins (2122, 2127–28).⁴ This essay, too, reads The House of Fame as a “theoretical General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” but seeks to establish their connection on grounds of form rather than content or theme.⁵ Borrowing the epithet of “Fugitif Aeneas,” whose flight from Troy embodies the principle of “kyndely enclynyng” in Book I, I describe Chaucer’s investigation of the relationship of motion and form in The House of Fame as a fugitive poetics, a way of making poetry in a world in which “every kyndely thyng that is” reveals itself in transit.⁶

That material agency, what I call “fugitivity,” bears consequences for poiesis becomes apparent near the end of The House of Fame, when Geffrey declines to recount the “tydynge” he overhears. He protests not only that others “kan synge hit bet,” but that, finally, “al mot out, other late or rathe, / Alle the sheves in the lathe” (2139–40). This essay reads Geffrey’s demurral, and the rationale behind it, as a complex claim about the methods and materials of authorship, a claim upon which Chaucer stakes out a theory of literary form that anticipates the composite and open-ended shapes of his later works, especially the Canterbury Tales. For as Geffrey disclaims his own skill in a manner typical of Chaucer’s self-deprecating narrators, he finally subordinates the agency of all tale-tellers to the strange agency of poetic matter itself, the stuff that, as of its own accord, “mot out.”⁷ Indeed, in the motion of the poem’s Boethian universe, I propose, Chaucer discovers a law of natural propensity that reveals the constitutive forces of social engagement and literary creation alike, the tendencies of all bodies to “longen … to goon,” as The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales famously has it (12). In this sense, following V. A. Kolve’s comment in his classic study of The Friar’s Tale that “[p]ilgrims and carters were they all,” The House of Fame stages itself, and the literary project it inaugurates, “in the middle,” amidst a busy thoroughfare, a world in which everyone is a fugitive.⁸ In The House of Fame, Chaucer explores how to make a poem—a stable and effective formal structure—out of materials that won’t stop moving. The solution toward which The House of Fame points is not to “fix” matter but to invent forms that accommodate its dynamism.

The first half of this essay examines the poem’s representation of the Boethian principle of natural motion and its...