The Narrative of the Dreamscape: The Book of the Duchess, part 2

The Chaucer Reading Challenge continues

Link to part 1.

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Dreams are strange because they show us the terrain of the mind without the conscious narrative threads that we impose in order to make sense of the world. They reveal our anxieties, our desires, our suffering. They also reveal the limitations of our own reason in coping with these realities.

Many readers, including many professional scholars, have asked why our narrator is so dense through the course of his dream. Why can he not understand the nature of the Man in Black’s loss when it is clear to every reader? There are various reasonable and well-argued readings of this problem, and they are not wrong: Chaucer is further establishing the ironic distance between narrator and poet; the narrator is drawing out the Man in Black through performative lack of understanding and thus encouraging him towards what we might call “the talking cure”; the poet is encouraging the reader to supply the answer to his repeated inquiry regarding the source of the Man in Black's grief.

Any and all of these readings are valid, but it seems to me that the primary reason that the narrator lacks understanding is that he is in a dream: this is how we behave in dreams. We can be frustratingly dense; we can lose the ability to perform basic tasks; we do not behave as we do in our waking life. I dreamed recently that I needed to go teach a class, but I couldn’t remember where the classroom was, and when I tried to search for it on my phone, I lost the ability to type. These are not problems for me in waking life.

After all, as soon as the dream begins, we are presented with a surreal dreamscape that does not resemble waking life: the bedroom wall is covered with visual representations of The Romance of the Rose; a horse appears, apparently in the chamber, for the narrator to ride into the woods, seamlessly from his bed; and we soon discover that the dreamer has been transported back to the reign of Augustus Caesar, called Octavian in the poem—which is, by the way, the era of Ovid, the author of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone that the narrator has just read. This is how dreams work. This is dream logic.

And what do we do with the humble puppy who can’t keep up with the hunt through the woods and who leads the narrator in the direction of The Man in Black? Again, this is dream logic. The puppy doesn’t necessarily have to signify beyond this narrative function.

Perhaps the most forceful argument for my reading of the narrator's dream-like behavior is that he hears the Man in Black (MIB) sing a song specifically about the death of his beloved—in the context of an apostrophe to death—and yet still he fails to understand the man's grief: "[She] is fro me deed and is agoon / And thus in sorwe lefte me allone" (lines 479-480). Unlike the elaborate metaphors of death that the MIB spins later in the poem, there is nothing ambiguous or difficult to understand about these lines. She is dead, and he is alone. Hearing a fact and yet being unable to understand it is something that happens in the dreamscape, a space where comprehension may be elusive or fragmented.

But while our dream-narrator may be a bit dense, he is kind and offers to help the MIB: "For, by my trouthe, to make you hool / I wol do al my power hool" (lines 553-554). And this opens the door to other interpretations of the narrator's failure of understanding: specifically, that he is trying to draw out the MIB, to help him to talk about his pain and loss in order to offer some relief from it. The MIB thanks him and calls him friend (line 560), which is a generous gesture that reaches across the apparent social gap between them—which mirrors the stark distinction of rank between John of Gaunt, for whom the poem was written, and Chaucer himself.

As the MIB describes his state of mind, we may be reminded of the depressive self-assessment of the narrator at the beginning of the poem: his pain is without remedy, he says, and he is “Alwey dying and be nat ded” (line 588). This comparison may be why the narrator never returns to the subject of his own lovesickness—since it pales in comparison to that of the MIB, and this difference may help to draw the narrator out of his own depressive state (though he never tells us this, but rather leaves the subject behind completely).

The second half of the poem is the MIB talking as the narrator listens and continues not to understand the significance of the loss until the very end. Initially, the MIB makes use of a game of chess against Fortune as a metaphor—"So turneth she hir false weel” (line 643). Before it was a game show, the Wheel of Fortune was a philosophical idea, with the goddess Fortune spinning her wheel, causing those at the top to fall into misfortune. Chaucer draws this idea from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a mainstay of philosophical thought throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, and which Chaucer himself translated (as did King Alfred and, much later, Queen Elizabeth I).

In this metaphorical game of chess, Fortune has taken the MIB’s queen. This is not an especially subtle metaphor, and yet the narrator takes it literally: why would one be so sad about losing a piece in a game of chess? The MIB’s response to the narrator’s cluelessness is the poem’s refrain, which is repeated twice more: “I have lost more than thou wenest” (line 744). I have lost more than you understand.

To explain, the MIB elaborates over the next several hundred lines, explaining his love in quasi-religious terms (a mainstay of chivalric literature) and describing his beloved “White” in a series of superlatives—in terms of beauty, kindness, and moral uprightness.

This continues until the final devastating exchange, in which the reality of the loss finally dawns upon our narrator:

“Sire,” quod I, “wher is she now?”
“Now?” quod he, and stinte anon.
Therwith he wex as deed as stoon,
And saide, “Allas! that I was bore!
That was the los, that herbifore
I tolde thee that I hadde lorn.
Bithenke how I saide herbiforn,
‘Thou woost ful litel what thou menest;
I have lost more than thou wenest.’
God woot, allas, right that was she!”
“Allas, sire, how? What may that be?”
“She is deed!” “Nay!” “Yis, by my trouthe.”
“Is that your los? By God, it is routhe!” (lines 1298-1310)

This is the only appropriate response to such grief: it is a pity. All other attempts at consolation are inevitably trite and insufficient in the face of death.

And at this revelation, the dreamer awakens, finding his book beside him in bed: “This was my sweven; now it is don” (line 1334). And here we may come back to that initial inset narrative—that of Ceyx and Alcyone—and Chaucer’s decision to elide the transformation of the lovers into birds at the end of the story.

In the context of a consolatory poem, such an ending may remind us of the clichés spoken at funerals: “she’s in a better place,” or “she is at peace now.” These sorts of bromides spoken to survivors are inadequate or even painful. The only fitting thing to say is spoken by our narrator: “By God, it is a pity.”

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I hope you have enjoyed our journey through the dreamscape of The Book of the Duchess. In our next installment, we will move on to the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, as well as our first selection of medieval music to accompany our reading.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet dream narrative to yours.

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