On Chaucer and Vanishing Ice: A partial retrospective of NCS 2014

Jökulsárlón (March, 2006).

I have so much to say about my recent trip to Iceland — and about the marvelous New Chaucer Society conference I attended there — that I barely know where to begin. My fondness for this particular gathering of medievalists seems to amplify with each successive conference, and so much of what I said about the Portland gathering certainly rings true here as well: that as a fairly recent Ph.D. who, until just two months prior to NCS found herself still in the yawning realm of job contingency, this conference — given and its assemblage of so many kind-hearted and enthusiastic colleagues and friends — always seems to innervate me when I need it most. There are so many parts of the trip and the conference that I want to write about — from the magnificent Settlement Museum, to the stark beauty of the Icelandic countryside, to the deep intellectual and personal generosity of colleagues and friends, to the joys and challenges of traveling to a foreign country and a conference with a three month old — but for now, I'll limit myself to the topic of ice. 

Jökulsárlón (March, 2006)

I was thrilled to be a part of Jeffrey Cohen's Ice sessions at this particular gathering, in no small part because I've found myself fascinated and in awe of Iceland's glaciers ever since I first caught glimpses of them during my 2006 trip to the country. They loomed in the distance as the Flybus hurtled down the road from the airport to Reykjavík, and they towered over us magnificently as Robbie and I careened around the Ring Road from Reykjavík to Skaftafell National Park and back (over a period of a few days, of course!). I remember being simultaneously awestruck by the immensity of Skaftafellsjökull and alarmed by how much the glacier had retreated over the past few decades. I vividly remember ambling along the edge of Jökulsárlón, marveling at the eery quiet, the otherworldly blue hues of the ice, and the seals that frolicked between the icebergs.

Perhaps my most vivid memory of glacial ice, however, is of the lagoon at Gígjökull, one of Eyjafjallajökull's outlet glaciers. We scampered on top of icebergs encased in the frozen waters and hiked to the edge of the glacier itself.  The snow-coated landscape could not have been more gorgeous -- I even recall our guide, Kristin, matter-of-factly assuring us that heaven would be at least this beautiful. But I also remember being stunned to hear Kristin say that, just fifty years prior, the glacier extended far past the edge of the lagoon itself. I thought I heard him wrong at first. "Surely," I thought, "he said five hundred years." I simply couldn't wrap my head around that much vanished ice.

The Gígjökull lagoon, as I will always remember it.

I have an immense fondness for that lagoon and for the hours that we spent in awe of both its stark beauty and its ephemerality. And so, I was more than a little saddened when I learned from Oddur (the glaciologist who participated in the Ice sessions at this years NCS gathering) that the lagoon (featured right) was obliterated when the now infamous volcano under Eyjafjallajökull erupted back in 2010. I'm fairly certain, in fact, that this video captures its destruction; you can also see current photos of the location here. Saddened as I was to hear of the lagoon's extinction, its swift demise brought home to me the volatility of Iceland's landscape, and of how a glaciers can act as both its creator and destroyer. In this way, my brief conversation with Oddur anticipated what so many of us evoked in our papers: that glacial ice remains a dangerous and remarkable substance — but also a deeply imperiled — substance. After all, as Jeffrey stated in his introductory remarks, Iceland's glaciers will cease to exist in two hundred years' time — a span that, by all accounts, is but a geological blink of the eye. 

Jeffrey has already summarized each of our papers in his post about the sessions, so I won't repeat that work here, but what I will say is how struck I was by the ways in which our papers intersected with one another and how our ensuing conversations encouraged me to revisit certain aspects of my own speculations. Case in point: I asked in my own paper how deft of a reader Geoffrey (HoF's narrator) can possibly be if he can't figure out, and quickly, that he's climbing all over a massive rock of ice.  Dan Remein pointed out, however, that it can be startlingly easy to mistake parts of a glacier for rock when one is climbing upon it — something he discovered while on our group's glacier hike the previous day. Perhaps, then, Geoffrey's not a bad reader -- just a confused one! As an aside, Dan's observation, born out of the visceral experiences of the day prior, truly brought home how essential that glacier hike was to our session; and for that reason I do hope, like Jeffrey, that more of us will consider taking these kinds of interdisciplinary turns in our work -- especially at conferences, which are by their very nature designed us to present exploratory works-in-progress.

During the Q&A, Dave Hadbawnik asked about the indeterminacy of the House of Fame's foundation (is it made or is it natural? certainly a question to keep musing upon as I work on this nascent topic), while another attendee asked about the likeliness/possibility of Chaucer having ever seen a glacier on his travels and what that question might mean for an "icy" reading of the poem. Regarding the latter, the matter of imagination was offered up -- the notion that if modern day scientists can imagine what other kinds of ice are possible (at, say, the center of the earth or on distant planets), certainly Chaucer could have conjured up an imagined glacier having only heard of one. And towards the end of our second Ice session, Karl Steel asked us to comment on the risks of giving ice a privileged ontological position. I appreciated that question very much, because it forced me to ask myself whether there was anything arbitrary in my approach to HoF. Was I, in other words, randomly privileging a particular object and, in the process, forcing an otherwise untenable reading out of the poem? I think that Karl's question is an important one to keep asking myself as I continue to examine potentially agential objects in Chaucer's works. At the same time, though, my sensing was that our sessions, didn't afford any undue privilege to ice but rather encouraged us to scrutinize references that all too often go unnoticed and, in the process, see what happens to the texts in question when we do so.

And so, in that spirit, I'll offer up my paper:

"Vanishing Ice and The House of Fame: An Ecocritical Interrogation"

In this talk, I want to consider ice-as-agent in House of Fame. What does it mean for ice to have agency in this poem? How does ice fit within the ecological framework of The House of Fame? And what happens when we consider the agential force of Ice in House of Fame alongside images of moving, melting glaciers? While many scholars have explored the poem’s emphasis on poetic creativity and limitation, reading ice as an agential object (rather than as a mere descriptive feature) might offer an interpretation of the poem that more accurately captures its persistent enjambment of the non-human with the human. The powerful presence of ice in The House of Fame reminds us that, while the poem concerns itself in vibrant ways with human stories and objects, there exists in tandem to the manmade a force that (however glacial its movements or its meltings) may ultimately get the last word.

Ásbyrgi. Photo by Mats Wibe Lund (www.mats.is)

But let’s talk for a moment about glaciers and their creative movements.  In the north of Iceland lies Ásbyrgi, a canyon carved out by one (possibly two) enormous jökulhlaup — flashfloods born of subglacial volcanic eruptions — at Vatnajökull during the last ice age. The eruptions, which took place under the mighty Vatnajokull, instantly melted a tremendous amount of ice, and the resulting flashfloods violently carved out the canyon in a matter of days. The canyon is approximately three kilometers long and one hundred meters high at its deepest point. Vatnajökull itself lies far to the southeast, and covers almost eight percent of Iceland’s landmass. It is parent to over thirty outlet glaciers, and you can reach one of them, Skaftafellsjökull, by a scenic and sobering hike. Along the path, stakes labeled by decade mark the points where the glacier used to reach. And in the background, where there arrow is located, you can see the glacier itself. The amount of absent ice attested by these posts is simply staggering, almost as staggering as the massive expanse of land carved out in its wake, or the stones in the valley that lay split like hardboiled eggs from the immense pressure of the now-absent glacial mass. These spaces stand as quiet, looming memorials to the power and the impermanence of ice. 

Ice, by its very nature, is liminal, and its liminality likely contributed to Chaucer’s decision to perch his House of Fame upon it. The palace sits, after all, “in myddes of the weye / betwixen” heaven, earth, and the sea — an allusion, perhaps, to the vaporous, solid, and liquid forms that water can take. The melting of the building’s glacial foundation, in all of its inexorability, consistently threatens its existence and the stories preserved in its walls. Like the Mississippi River described by Jeffrey Cohen in Prismatic Ecologies, ice is an “earth artist,” “its projects tak[ing] so long to execute that humans have a difficult time discerning their genius” (xix). This very problem of perception certainly plagues our narrator in HoF. Consider, for instance, how he struggles to identify what kind of [CUE] “rock” the HoF is built upon:

But up I clomb with alle payne,

And though to clymbe it greved me,

Yit I ententyf was to see,

And for to powren wonder lowe,

Yf I koude any weyes knowe

What maker stoon this roche was.

For hyt was lyke alum de glas,

But that hyt shoon ful more clere;

But of what congealed matere

Hyt was, I nyste redely.

But at the laste aspied I,

And found that it was every del

A roche of yse, and not of steel.

Thought I, "By Seynt Thomas of Kent,

This were a feble fundament

To bilden on a place hye.

He ought him lytel glorifye

That hereon bilt, God so me save!" 

-- House of Fame, 1118-35

It takes him sixteen lines-worth of musing to figure out that the “rock” is actually ice, which certainly brings into question (given that he’s climbing all over it) how adept he is at reading his surroundings (i.e. couldn’t he feel that it was cold?).

Consider as well how he struggles to understand why it’s built on ice in the first place. He criticizes the builder — essentially calling him/her a fool — and then ponders over the names etched on one of the foundation’s walls that have all but melted away. He seems reassured, however, by the castle, which,  as he describes it, seems to protect one of the walls from the melting effects of the heat (lines 1136-64). I think, however, that HoF invites its audience to see Geoffrey’s shortcomings in this very analysis. For as Bernd Herzogenrath observes, ice is “a shapeshifter” “prone to powerful expansion.” And while humans might not be able to see that expansion take place, the fact remains that all ice, even the glacial foundation of HoF, is forever on the move.

Geoffrey’s initial lamentation over the feebleness of the House of Fame's foundation is, then, the more accurate of his two observations. But it seems to be one that Geoffrey cannot sustain, because to do so would be to admit how much of human ingenuity and accomplishment lie at the mercy of the natural world.  A message that these images* of moving and melting glaciers certainly bring home to us in vital ways. Our narrator may largely assume that ice can be managed by manmade forces, but the fact remains that The House of Fame — and all that it seems to represent and contain — remains forever at the mercy of the foundation upon which it has been built. Human achievement and existence are, by extension, forever at the mercy of the non-human. Ice, then, becomes the primary agential object in HoF, quietly moving, melting, threatening the collapse of all that humans seek to build upon it. Our narrator’s description of the House of Fame and its glacial foundation, then, ruefully reveals the limits of human perception, especially of our ability to read the movements of the natural world and measure our power over it with complete accuracy.

By foregrounding a vibrant ecology with ice as the primary agential object and mover, HoF invites us to reflect upon the tensions between nature and culture that Lisa Kiser sees in Parliament of Fowles, and also invites us to reconsider the limits of human sensory perception. John Muir, the great American naturalist, encountered glaciers in sensual ways not all that removed from Geoffrey in this poem. He saw and embraced them as “vibrating, vibrant things” (to paraphrase Lowell Duckert) and Geoffrey, at least for a brief moment, acknowledges them as such (an admission that I think audiences are meant to keep firmly in mind even if the poem’s narrator cannot). In this way, HoF, through its positioning of ice as the unstable foundation upon which all human achievement is laid to rest, reminds us of a truth that Muir heard echoing through an Alaskan glacier — that “the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation.”** Thank You.

*In the actual presentation, I showed excerpts from James Balog's time-lapse photography, which he showcased in both his TED talk and the documentary Chasing Ice. I selected two clips: one of Sólheimajökull (the glacier on which many of my fellow panelists hiked the day before), and one of the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland. You can find them in this video, which is worth watching in its entirety in order to get a sense of Balog's project and the staggering amount of vanished glacial ice across our planet. 

**I owe a debt of gratitude to Lowell Duckert, whose article "Glacier" introduced me to Muir's description of the Alaskan glacier. 

Bibliography

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 

Duckert, Lowell. “Glacier.” postmedieval 4.1 (2013): 68-79.

Herzogenrath, Bernd. “White.” In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Kiser, Lisa J. “Chaucer and the Politics of Nature.” In Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Eds. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace. Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia, 2001, 41-56. 

Chaucer and the Animated Book

As I gear up for the New Chaucer Society's convention in Reykjavik next month, I've found myself thinking back rather fondly to my time spent in Portland nearly two years ago. And as I slowly transition back into some semblance of a work life after giving birth to my little one, I'm also thinking quite a bit about my projects (both current and future). I'm spending the month of June trying to wrap up a few smaller ones (my article on Middle English Mongols, an encyclopedia entry on Crusades Literature, and, of course, my paper on Ice for the NCS conference), but come August I'll resume work on my book project, Imagining the Crusades in Late Medieval England, in earnest. I hope to have a completed manuscript ready for interested publishers sooner rather than later (later being Spring 2015), and as a result I'm starting to think about what kind of project I'd like to create for myself after I send the manuscript off and away.

Over the past couple of years, I've presented on an array of topics not devoted to "things Crusades-related" in hopes of figuring out what my next project should be. I love my current work on the Crusades, but I have a feeling that by the time this book project is completed I'll be itching for the chance to branch out into newness. For a time, I thought about writing a book on the poetics of grief in Late Middle English literature. Presenting on Pearl last year at Kalamazoo, however, made me rather aware (as I expressed in a related blog post) that I'm not ready to sit for that long with such a potentially depressing topic. As a result, I went back to the drawing board and have been there for quite a while. But working on my current NCS paper on agential Ice in The House of Fame (and revisiting my paper on books as animate objects in Chaucer's works) has renewed my curiosity about the ways in which Chaucer positions and prioritizes various objects in his works — and how he gives them varying degrees of power. While I'm far from fully committed yet, I'm leaning more and more towards diving into this topic in earnest in hopes of producing a larger project that maps out and explores Chaucer's agential objects.

For now, I'll share the paper that got me started along this path (only two years late!):

“Chaucer and the Animated Book”

In the Squire’s Tale, a stranger from Arabye visits the (intensely fictionalized) court of Chinnghis Khan, and presents the Mongol ruler with a series of mirabilia. One of them, a ring, allows the wearer to understand the language of birds. In turn, the brass horse will take its rider anywhere in the world with a turn of a key. These objects, in short, allow their owners to encounter, read, and translate the world around them in entirely new ways. In this respect, they reminded me (as I revisited them a little while back) of books in all of their animating properties.

            This paper explores how we might consider books as animate objects in Chaucer’s literary worlds — as kindred of the animate and animating mirabilia of The Squire’s Tale. Unlike the brass horse or the ring, books are objects that can, in fact, speak in some way — they have the capacity, as Chaucer reveals so persistently, not only to transport but to inspire visions in even the most selective or haphazard of readers.  In this way, books as objects have greater animating properties than the fabled brass horse. A turn of a switch might allow the mechanical beast to transport a rider around the world, but — as Chaucer seems to argue — the turn of a page can produce even more fruitful journeys. For the sake of time, I will limit my discussion largely to Chaucer’s dream vision poetry, though my hope is that we can discuss other appearances of books as objects in Chaucer’s poetry later on.

Dream vision poetry consistently relies on the trope of a narrator falling asleep and “waking” in a dreamscape, where an extended, often didactic, vision ensues. But as Larry Benson and others have observed, Chaucer seems to have invented the convention of the dreamer falling asleep on a book prior to experiencing his dream vision. This image — of the sleeping reader and his book — persists in Chaucer’s poetry, and suggests a certain consistency in his approach to books as objects.

In The Book of the Duchess, both the book and the act of reading offer an escape for the insomnia-addled narrator — an opportunity to “rede and drive the night away” (49). The book that the narrator selects for his nightly reading is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone attracts him the most. He refers to it, in fact, as a “wondyr thinge” (61), and he relays a version of the story that halts abruptly before the lovers’ metamorphosis and reunion. As Helen Phillips and others have argued, by omitting the metamorphosis altogether, the story of Alcyone’s dream more ably parallels the dream vision experienced by the narrator later in the poem. Alcyone, through this omission, becomes a clearer counterpart to the Black Knight, and the story itself focuses (as does the conversation between the narrator and the knight) on the inevitable transience of earthly joy (Phillips 35).

While it is clear that Chaucer may have intended to create this kind of parallel structure, the ties between the book and the dream are utterly lost on the narrator. He stresses at the beginning and end of the poem the impossibility of interpreting the dream.  According to his preface, not even Macrobius or the biblical Joseph could riddle a meaning out of it, and as a result the narrator unceremoniously ends the poem by stating “This was my sweven: now hit ys doon,” refusing to offer any potential commentary or insight into what his dream might mean (1334). Moreover, the narrator only focuses on the theme of sleep and dreaming in the Alcyone narrative, stating how he desperately wishes Juno or Morpheus would grant him the kind of sleep they gave to Alcyone. These instances could suggest that the narrator is either so fixated on his insomnia that he can’t help but focus on this aspect of the text, but they could also suggest that his reading practices are somewhat haphazard. The narrator finds his wish for sleep fulfilled and immediately falls asleep on the book he had been reading. From this point onwards, the intricate dream vision unfolds and it pulls aspects of the Ovidian narrative — the themes of grief and loss overlooked by the narrator — into its landscape. Books, at least in the world of this dream vision poem, can still transport and inspire the mind of even a haphazard or overly selective reader.

The Parliament of Foules treats books in a similar fashion.  Here, we are presented with a narrator who reads a book in order to learn “a certain thing” about love (20). His book of choice: The Dream of Scipio. Like the narrator of The Book of the Duchess, this narrator is also rewarded for his efforts with an elaborate dream vision. And here, as in Book of the Duchess, certain aspects and themes from the book the narrator reads eke their way into the dream itself and are subject to imaginative repurposing; Scipio himself appears to the dreamer at the beginning of the vision, and the importance of common profit in The Dream of Scipio reappears in the later portion of the bird’s debate.

The first section of Parliament, however, contains a passage on the importance of books that sheds additional light on how these particular objects are configured and how they function in Chaucerian dream visions. The narrator tells us that

            Of usage – what for lust and what for lore –

            On bokes rede I ofte, as I you tolde.

            But wherefore that I speke al this? Nat yore

            Agon it happede me for to beholde

            Upon a bok, was write with lettres olde,

            And thereupon, a certeyn thing to lerne,

            The longe day ful faste I redde and yerne.

                        For out of olde feldes, as men seyth,

                        Cometh al this newe corn form yer to yere,

                        And out of olde bokes, in good feyth,

                        Cometh al this new science that men lere.

                        But now to purpose as of this matere:

                        To rede forth hit gan me so delite

                        That al that day me thoughte but a lyte. (15-28)

This description of the book and of the reading process conveys — in ways more elaborate than that seen in The Book of the Duchess — the idea of the book as an object capable of transporting a reader. Books, in this configuration, are objects filled with knowledge. They produce a distracting amount of delight in readers — so much so that readers can find themselves absorbed for an entire day in their contents. The narrator stresses that these objects, moreover, do not lose their capacity to delight because of their age; he elevate the status and appeal of older and dustier tomes, using the analogy of the field to strengthen his case. Books in this configuration produce delight and visionary inspiration, but they also are imbued with creative powers. More than mere repositories of “old” wisdom, they are the direct inspirers of “newe sciences” — new ideas — as well. I think it highly significant that the narrators in the poems mentioned thus far place their emphasis on books rather than the authors who write them. To be sure, authors are mentioned briefly by name, but the book as material object consistently holds the foreground. Animating properties are thus placed squarely in the realm of the inanimate.

            In contrast to these two dream visions, The House of Fame does not describe a narrator falling asleep on a book.  It does, however, have much to say within the actual dream vision about the inspirational power of books to inspire. The narrator of the poem, for instance, encounters an ekphrastic version of Virgil’s Aeneid, and he immediately focuses on the portion of the narrative involving Aeneus and Dido.  He unequivocally takes Dido’s side, criticizing Aeneus at length for treating her so poorly. This episode from Virgil, moreover, reminds the narrator of a host of men who have similarly mistreated their women. These men do not appear directly in Virgil’s story, and as a result, his encounter with this pictographic Aeneid mirrors the narrators’ encounters with physical books described in the other dream visions. Here, as elsewhere, the book is presented as an object that inspires the reader without keeping him bound entirely to its matter.  The narrator also repeatedly stresses that it is “the book” that “tellis” (or speaks), even though Jove — through the Eagle — is said to look fondly on the narrator for his diligent work as an author.  The reader owes his inspiration and his translocation largely to this object, but he is also capable of misreading, misunderstanding, or simply selecting only the portions of the text that are of interest to him or seem applicable; he is also capable of spring–boarding into related thoughts or visions that are only obliquely related to the contents of the book itself.  It is here, then, that a kind of tension emerges, because creative power seems to be transferred to both the reader and the book.  At the same time, it is also possible, I think, to see the reader’s freedom as an indicator that the book has realized its animating potential.

            Out of all of Chaucer’s dream visions, the Legend of Good Women provides the lengthiest homage to books, one that directly addresses their capacities as animated objects.  The passage is a bit long, but I’m going to read it in its entirety since it ties in so directly with what I’ve already discussed:

           
           Than mote we to bokes that we fynde,

Thurgh whiche that olde thinges ben in mynde,

            And to the doctrine of these olde wyse,

            Yeve credence, in every skylful wise,

            That tellen of these olde appreved stories

            Of holynesse, of regnes, of victories,

            Of love, of hate, of other sondry thynges,

            Of whiche I may no maken rehersynges

            And yf that olde bokes were aweye,

            Yloren were of remembraunce the keye.

            Wel ought us thane honouren and believe

            These bokes, there we han noon other preve.

                        And as for me, though that I konne but lyte

            On bokes for to rede I me delyte,

            And to hem yive I feyth and ful credence,

            And in myn herte have hem in reverence

            So hertely, that ther is game noon

            That fro my bokes maketh me to goon,

            Save, certeynly, whan that the month of May

            Is comen, and that here the foules synge,

            And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge,

            Farewel my bok and my devocion! (17-39)

Despite his capricious admission at the close of this passage, the narrator repeatedly urges for “credence” to be given to these books, for them to be upheld as authorities in their own right, because they are the only way for readers in his day to access ancient wisdom (this line of thinking echoes what the narrator of Parliament of Foules observes so briefly about old books). They are, in other words, the sole remaining repositories of important knowledge.

He argues that books should be revered specifically because of the voices of authority contained therein. This seems, at least a first, to put the power back into the authors’ hands. However, just as in Parliament of Foules, no authors are mentioned in these lines, which suggests the disembodied nature of authority contained within the books in question. The focus, as a result, remains squarely on the material object. Books, then, are presented as access points and portals to an older time and to writers and thinkers who have long since passed. 

Eventually, the narrator encounters the God of Love, who calls him a foe because of his actions as an author; his “translacyoun” has turned potential lovers away from their devotion to him . What is particularly compelling in this diatribe against the narrator is the way in which books are conceptualized.  The god of Love announces, for instance, “Yis, God wot, sixty bokys olde and newe hast thou thyself, alle fulle of storyis grete” (273-74), which is an impressively large collection for any private owner in the late fourteenth century. This line suggests the importance of books as tactile objects and the importance and significance of collecting them. The god proceeds in subsequent lines to cite authors directly, asking the narrator “what seith Valerye, Titus, Claudyan? / What seith Jerome agayns Jovynyan?” (280-81), questions that do momentarily reintroduce the author as a figure of great significance. However, the authority of the writer is brought directly into question several lines later, when Alceste comes to the Chaucer-narrator’s defense; she argues that he is so used to composing books that he “takyth non hed of what matere he take” and “nyste what he seyde” (343, 345). Chaucer is cast here as an innocent, but rather incompetent and passive author/translator, so involved in the process of creating and/or translating that he neglects to examine his own material. His books, however, are acknowledged directly by the god of Love (and indirectly by Alceste) as potentially harmful to the god’s cause because of their ability to sway their readers.   Here, as elsewhere, then, poem prioritizes books over their authors as objects responsible for an important, and potentially subversive, kind of transportation.

            What this configuration of books suggests is that as soon as the author cuts the cord on a literary work, it is no longer solely his own; it becomes an object capable of inspiring a reader on his or her own terms, a notion that the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde openly admits in the epilogue:

            Go, litel book, go litel myn tragedie,

            There god thy maker yet, er that he dye,

            So sende might to make in some comedie!

            But litel book, no making thou n’envye,

            But subgit be to alle poesye;

            And kis the steppes, where-as thou seest pace

            Virgile, Ovyde, Lucan, and Stace.

            And for ther is so greet diversitee

            In English and in writing of our tonge,

            So preye I God that noon miswryte thee,

            Ne thee mismetre for defaute of tonge.

            And red wherso thou be, or elles songe,

            That thou be understonde I God biseche! (Book V, lines 1786-98)

Chaucer, or the Chaucer narrator, speaks directly to his book in this passage, talking to it as if it has a sentience all its own. Here, as in The Legend of Good Women, he muses on the matter of authority. One the one hand, he admits that the book is now out of his control even though he authored it. But he affirms the significance of authors by citing names of great writers from the past (as the narrators do in each of Chaucer’s dream vision poems). Nevertheless, he ends his envoy to his creation by voicing his anxieties about how it will be treated (and potentially mistreated) by readers. Once again, then, Chaucer positions the book as an object that, while responsible for the connectivity between author and reader, is ultimately in neither his nor his readers’ control.

To draw upon what Karl Steel observed in his paper given on Tuesday, this representation of books certainly forces us to remember that, as he put it, we cannot relegate the matter of intentionality solely to humans; inanimate object are indeed “forceful entities.”  But unlike many inanimate objects studied across the animate ecologies panels at this conference, books are man-made objects, and they have a different kind of animate capacity as a result. They may well be compendiums of wisdom, but they are also, ultimately springboards.  They are animating objects, but they do not command the perfect attention of their readers, no more than an author can control the way in which his or her work is understood; it is no surprise then, that the matter of misreading comes up consistently and in a variety of ways throughout Chaucer’s works.

In this way, books contain animating properties that are both powerful but finite. On the one hand, the process of reading a book results in the dream visions, but the fact remains that the reader isn’t bound to the written text he has just encountered. This has made me begin to wonder whether we might be able to understand Chaucer’s — or the Chaucer narrators’ — somewhat persistent anxiety over being misread through an understanding of books as finitely animate objects, as objects made by an author but no longer in that person’s control once they are completed, an idea that in many ways evokes modern theoretical patterns of thought, especially Barthe’s “death of the author” and the related realm of reader-response theory.

The figure of Pandarus reflects this idea of authorial anxiety, and also evokes the animating properties of books, and I’ll close this paper by briefly examining how his presence in Troilus aligns with the representation of books in the works I’ve previously discussed. Throughout Troilus, Pandarus acts (as Carolyn Dinshaw has argued) as a poet creating a text, and — I would offer — as a poet inspired by texts like the romances of which he seems to be so fond. In Book III, Pandarus — after having tossed Troilus into bed with Criseyde — curls up by the fire and pretends to read. To quote the text directly, he “took a light and fond his countenance / as for to look upon an old romance” (979-80). These lines, like the passages about reading in the dream visions, reveal the animating properties of books.  Here, the lovers become objects of Pandarus “play,” and they are positioned as characters in a romance twice over as a result. Pandarus in turn, can be understood in this scene as either reading a book (a romance) or as watching the lovers as if they are characters in a romance.  If we follow the second interpretation, the lover’s bed becomes a book, one that reflects the creative (and potentially procreative) desires and aims of its author while also remaining simultaneously beyond the creator’s control and domain. Pandarus, like the authors of the books encountered in the dream vision poems, only has but so much control over the very story he seeks to create. Similarly, books only come about through the work of human hands, but once that work is finished the book itself becomes object with animating and creative properties all its own.

A book might seem, as the Chaucer plaintively suggests at the end of Troilus, at the mercy of its readers, but it never loses its capacity to animate and enliven.  Readers and books, in this configuration, require each other for animation. Chaucer consistently exposes their animating circuitry with regularity, suggesting his persistent engagement with the idea of books as objects, with the notion that the seemingly inanimate book can, in fact, continue to develop and possess animating properties long after an author takes “a light.”

Bibliography

• Amtower, Laurel. Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000.
• Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1987.
• Phillips, Helen and Nick Havely, eds. Chaucer’s Dream Poetry. London: Longman, 1997.