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Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer's House of Fame

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Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer's House of Fame Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer’s House of Fame Rebecca Davis University of California, Irvine n book ii of The House of Fame, Geffrey’s eagle guide expounds Ithe 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 is Hath a kyndely stede ther he May best in hyt conserved be; Unto which place every thyng Thorgh his kyndely enclynyng Moveth for to come to Whan 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 My thanks to Elizabeth Allen, Jeremy Kiene, and the members of Former, a working group on form and poetics, and to Sarah Salih and the journal’s anonymous readers, for encouraging this project and providing insightful feedback on previous drafts. I am grateful to J. Allan Mitchell and Tom Goodmann for organizing sessions at New Chau- cer Society meetings in 2012 and 2014 that fostered my inquiries into materiality and form. 1 All citations of The House of Fame and other Chaucerian texts are from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Line numbers are given parenthetically in the text. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015):101–132 ᭧ 2015 The New Chaucer Society ................. 18793$ $CH4 10-07-15 08:03:36 PS PAGE 101 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER 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 metapoe- tical, 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 Borrow- ing 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 2 In Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), for example, John Fyler connects the eagle’s speech with Boethian inclination, but dismisses the larger import of the passage: ‘‘[T]he most remarkable quality of the argument on sound is its irrelevance to the central issues of the poem’’ (54). But see Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), who examines the Boethian underpinnings of Chaucer’s experiments with ‘‘mixed form’’ in Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales. 3 Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads ‘‘The Divine Comedy’’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 31. 4 Reading The House of Fame as an ars poetica goes back to George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1915), who sug- gests that in the characters gathered at the end of the poem one can ‘‘almost descry the Canterbury Tales in the distance’’ (102). For a recent contribution to the ars poetica tradition that reviews and critiques many of its previous assumptions, see Susan Schiba- noff, Chaucer’s Queer Poetics: Rereading the Dream Trio (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), esp. 1–22 and 152–96. 5 See Helen Cooper, ‘‘The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour,’’ NML 3 (1999): 39–66 (63 n. 45). 6 In describing the poem’s material world as distinctly ‘‘active,’’ this essay engages questions raised by new materialist critiques of anthropocentric and subject-centric con- cepts of agency. See especially Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 2–3; and ‘‘Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency,’’ in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, D.C.: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 237–69. Among medieval- ist literary critics, Kellie Robertson has led the way in establishing the value of new materialist approaches for medieval literary, historical, and philosophical concerns. See 102 ................. 18793$ $CH4 10-07-15 08:03:36 PS PAGE 102 FUGITIVE POETICS IN CHAUCER’S HOUSE OF FAME 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 compos- ite and open-ended shapes of his later works, especially the Canterbury Tales. For as Geffrey disclaims his own skill in a manner typical of Chau- cer’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 propen- sity 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 Kellie Robertson, ‘‘Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto,’’ Exemplaria 22 (2010): 99–118; ‘‘Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object,’’ LitComp 5 (2008): 1060–80; and ‘‘Exemplary Rocks,’’ in Cohen, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, 91– 121. In adducing a Boethian context for the lively matter of Chaucer’s House of Fame,I seek in part to redress the bracketing of medieval concepts that Robertson observes in contemporary accounts of materialism. 7 The poem features numerous examples of ‘‘tydynges’’ in outgoing motion beyond the instances I discuss in this essay. See, for example, Geffrey’s comparison of the peti- tioners of Fame to a swarm buzzing ‘‘as been don in an hive / Ayen her tyme of out- fleynge’’ (1522–23), and, near the end of the poem, when the embodied ‘‘tydynges’’ attempt to exit the House of Rumor through a ‘‘wyndowe out to goon’’ (2086). Schiba- noff, Chaucer’s Queer Poetics,alsoobservesthe‘‘incessantbusyness’’ofmatterinthe House of Rumor, an attribute that flips the gendered assumptions of hylomorphism in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions (in which an active male agent gives form to passive female matter) (190–91). But while Schibanoff opposes Rumor’s ‘‘queer poetics’’ to the ‘‘natural poetics’’ of the eagle’s ‘‘orderly’’ sound waves, I argue that the eagle’s account of natural inclination, an Aristotelian principle Chaucer borrowed from Boe- thius, is in fact the basis of a new poetics of motion. 8 Kolve examines the theological, iconographical, and literary tradition of human middleness in V. A. Kolve, ‘‘ ‘Man in the Middle’: Art and Religion in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale,’’ SAC 12 (1990): 3–46 (45). 103 ................. 18793$ $CH4 10-07-15 08:03:37 PS PAGE 103 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER 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 disruption of stable forms. In the metamorphic world of The House of Fame, Geffrey’s confidence in matter (‘‘al mot out’’) seems initially to produce a corresponding pessi- mism with respect to form: none can hold. As John Fyler observes in tracing Ovidianism in The House of Fame, Chaucer ‘‘repeatedly builds systems only to undermine them, and his poem moves in a diastolic/ systolic rhythm of expansion and collapse.’’9 The poem’s preoccupation with order manifests in its distinct architectural settings, a series of houses subdivided into ‘‘sondry habitacles’’ (1194).10 Previous studies have contextualized these structures within monastic and rhetorical the- ories of memory, including the technologies of artificial memory devised to reify, manipulate, and preserve fleeting temporal and textual experi- ences.11 But while the memory houses of medieval mnemotechnics devise loci, stable though virtual depositories for things to be remem- bered, in The House of Fame things rarely stay put.
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