Chaucer's Recital Presence in the House of Fame and the Embodiment of Authority

Do you remember those vellum books? . . . I bring you stupendous news!—this is the man who wrote them.

(E. M. Forster, "The Celestial Omnibus")

The didactic foundation of Chaucer's House of Fame seems firm enough. Chaucer observes (purportedly for the first time) that his success as a lover and/or as a poet is neither predictable nor necessarily enduring. His dream exemplifies the fickleness of mundane celebrity.¹ Reduced to such a synopsis, the House of Fame dramatizes a conventional truism. Chaucer's personal experience thus reinforces the authority of his prior reading. But Chaucer's most enigmatic dream vision also seems to voice a peculiarly (post)modern anxiety. Chaucer recurrently worries that his authorial intent is itself elusive and ephemeral because this text's content is merely illusional. His individual uncertainty radically questions a medieval—that is to say, a common-sensical or, some would say, a naive—confidence that writing can truly transmit speech.²

Unlike the steady progress of Boethius's education, unlike the encyclopedic march of Dante's curriculum, Chaucer's walkabout presents a whirligig of focal points. His observations command reflection upon too many topics, including poesis and politics, philology and psychology, epistemology and eschatology, aesthetics and acoustics, metaphysics and ethics. Despite its moral clarity, most attempts to perceive the House of Fame as a unified whole collapse in frustration or speculation or both because the dream's narrative structure seems so wobbly, itself a "feble fundament" (1132).³ Paul G. Ruggiers sought a "binding principle" in the "progressively universalizing principle which determines its form."⁴ Nevertheless, most readers see only the conspicuous randomness of Chaucer's sequence of scenes. The design of the House of Fame as a pseudo-trilogy appears to be a considered chaos, a labyrinthine pattern that both demands and denies blueprinting.

Precisely because it is impossible to discover one floor plan of Chaucer's whole House of Fame, the reader's quest for a firm interpretive footing mirrors the dreamer's meandering sightseeing. Some of this dream vision's apparently deliberate randomness can be attributed to Chaucer's realistic representation of the actual dreaming experience. The instability of Chaucer's narrative may as readily be a book-learned illusion, however. From the start, Chaucer wonders if his peculiar dream should be categorized as a false "fantome" or a true oracle (11). This term phantom haunts the entire House of Fame. Chaucer most frequently uses "fantome" to denote one of Macrobius's five types of dreams—the phantasma, or visum, defined as an apparition occurring between wakefulness and sleep, which presents "hosts of diverse things, either delightful or disturbing."⁵ In the House of Fame the term phantom subsequently serves as a synonym for "illusion" (493). In a variety of interpretive contexts, the term phantom or phantasm may also signify "a mental process" or "product," "illusory phenomena" or "a lie."⁶ All dream images are merely fantasies, of course. But, as Sheila Delany has written, fantasy itself is that faculty of the human imagination that "serves as intermediary between perception and understanding."⁷ On the one hand, perceptions of reality that come directly from the senses must be processed as phantasms:

likenesses of particular material things re-realized in physical configurations of the organ of phantasia. . . . Although the forms presented in the phantasms have been stripped of their original matter, the phantasm-likeness is particularized by its details, the external object's original individuating matter being "represented" by features of the phantasm.⁸

On the other hand, dream-stimulated phenomena seem as real as conscious sensations because "All perceptions . . . presented to the mind are encoded as phantasmata, 'representations' or a 'kind of eikón.'"⁹ So, both real sensory perceptions and fictional dream visions generate "impressions" (39). So, too, both the concurrent hearing of spoken words and the subsequent reading of written words present equivalently fantastic representations of the author's presence.¹⁰ Informed by this embracing conception of fantasy, the House of Fame threads together (with an admittedly rather knotty clue) Chaucer's memory of several otherwise apparently unrelated...