The lewed take
Chaucer's examples give us a good feel for how his contemporary common folk viewed dreams as harbingers of joy or fearful portents sent by God (predominantly the latter, however). The first thing Chaunticleer says when he's awoken by Pertelote is, "By God, me mette I was in swich meschief / Right now that yet myn herte is soore afright. / Now God ... my swevene reeche aright, / And kepe my body out of foul prisoun!" (2894-97). In this statement, he both attributes the dream to God and pleads with him for protection from what he views as "notice in advance, explicit warning of what will come" (Raffel 466, lines 293-95). Pertelote ridicules Chaunticleer, using textual authority by quoting Cato's dismissal of dreaming: "Catoun, which that was so wys a man, / Seyde he nat thus, 'Ne do no fors of dremes'" (2941-42). Chaunticleer defends himself by quiting her use of textual authority, asserting that even more texts argue the contrary, saying:
"men may in olde bookes rede
Of many a man moore of auctorite
Than evere Caton was, so moot I thee,
That al the revers seyn of this sentence,
And han wel founden by experience
That dremes been significaciouns
As wel of joye as of tribulaciouns
That folk enduren in this lif present.
Ther nedeth make of this noon argument;
The verray preeve sheweth it in dede."
(2974-82).
Chaunticleer follows this by quoting several examples of men who failed to heed their dream-warnings and wound up the worse for it — stories we probably can assume were traditional tales among the commoners of Chaucer's time. Chaucer suggests that Chaunticleer may be reciting anecdotes he overheard rather than read — even though the rooster attempts to prove his literary acumen by pointing out that the second story specifically follows the first in the same book. However, Chaunticleer mistranslates the Latin phrase "In principio, / Mulier est hominis confusio." Anyone with sufficient textual learning to read books most likely would be able to tell the difference between confusio (woe, ruin) and felicitas (happiness). The Oxford English Dictionary shows that the Middle English for ruin (confusion) was almost exactly identical to the Latin, so any reader of the Nun's Priest's Tale would be able to recognize immediately that Chaunticleer was either faking his learning or deliberately insulting Pertelote — which, if she is also even just a little educated, as she seems, would not have been a wise move. Thus, Chaunticleer seems to be repeating tales he's heard elsewhere, a circumstance reminiscent of the Pardoner's statement that he tells his audience "many oon / Of olde stories longe tyme agoon. / For lewed peple loven tales olde; / Swiche thynges kan they wel reporte and holde" (Pardoner's Prologue, 435-38). The exchange between Chaunticleer and Pertelote about his dream and dreaming in general is reminiscent of a commoner, worrywart husband henpecked by his wife, who has more earthly concerns than to worry about intangible portents and signs.
Talking theology
After establishing this dynamic of Chaunticleer-Pertelote, Chaucer then moves away from the chickens, digressing into a theological discussion about dreams as signs from God. Before I analyze this section, I'll provide some context from the religious culture in medieval England:
Dream poems were part of medieval literary culture, whether originating from saints or laymen. The Church recognized that lay people could have significant dreams full of divine implications or meaning, and incorporated documentation of some of those dreams into Church culture. Although the most focus remained on saintly dreams, some recognition was given these lay dreams: "It is commonly stated, and correctly so, that the most frequently reported dreams of Antiquity and the early Middle Ages were those of saints and kings. However, the unprofessed laity, 'ordinary' Christians of the Christian community, were also dreaming religious dreams that were represented in Church writings, if less often than saintly dreams (Moreira 1). The fact that some of these dreams were included in Church documents and texts lends them some significance to contemporary religious authorities: "That lay dreams were recorded in religious writings of the era ... suggests that they held a noteworthy place in Christian religious culture and that the religious elite believed these dreams to be worthy of religious interpretation" (Moreira 2).
Medieval dream poems were very unlike much of the narratives about dreams we have seen since the early modern age. They were "rooted in classical and biblical concepts of dream and vision that imbued dreaming with the potential for august, profound, even divine meaning" (Phillips 374). Helen Phillips argues that with the Roman de la Rose, or Romance of the Rose, dream poetry began to be taken more seriously, as a:
"visionary and learned genre ... used for exploring the subject of human sexual passion, taking the experience of desire as a subject for serious literature in a serious genre. ... It is within the dream genre that medieval writers were able to treat the subject discursively as well as experientially, and to sift, debate and contemplate the complexities and contradictions of passion and the states of consciousness it creates. By the late medieval period the dream poem and other types ... were also arenas for the exploration of further subjects such as masculine identity, unhappy marriage, misogyny and feminism. Dream poetry seems also to have stimulated self-conscious and metafictional experimentation in the treatment of issues like the relationship of reader and writer to text, time in narrative, the fictional self, textuality and fiction" (Phillips 374).
This passage from Phillips raises interesting questions about Chaucer's use of dreaming, and subsequent theological discussion about it. Chaucer uses Chaunticleer's dream and debate with Pertelote to explore the theme of misogyny and female authority — "Wommennes conseils been ful ofte colde; / Wommannes conseil broghte us first to wo / And made Adam fro Paradys to go" (3256-58).
He overlaps that theme with a humorous monologue reflecting on the lay and spiritual perception of the value of dreams. In a mocking tone, Chaucer, through the Nun's Priest, admonishes Chaunticleer for failing to heed his dream: "Thou were ful wel ywarned by thy dremes / That thilke day was perilous to thee" (3232-33). He touches on the practice of recording dreams and interpreting them as irrevocable portents of divine origin: "What that God forwoot moot needs bee, / After the opinioun of certein clerkis" and interjects himself into the debate among learned scholars about whether "that Goddes worthy forwityng / Streyneth me nedely for to doon a thyng," by declaring that "if free choys be graunted me / To do that same thyng, or do it noght, / Though God forwoot it er that I was wroght" (3243-44, 3246-48). Burton Raffel translates these lines sardonically as:
"Or even determine if God, with his future knowledge,
Obliges me to go where his knowledge knows. ...
They say that freedom of choice has been granted me,
So I can do my thing, or refuse to do it,
Despite God's knowledge — in any case, I'll rue it!"
Thus, through discourse about dreaming, Chaucer questions the omnipotence and omniscience of God, the free choice of humanity and the value of dreams ... but at the last minute backs away from making any claims, interjecting that "I wol nat han to do of swich mateere ; / My tale is of a cok" (3251-52). However, he's opened the Pandora's box, and it is up to the reader to draw what he may from the tale as a whole answers to several questions:
1) are dreams really portents of what will happen?
2) are they of divine origin?
3) if they are, are they unalterable? Do we have free choice?
4) if they don't come true, what does that say about God's power? Is he really infallible?
Chaunticleer's dream stops short of showing his final fate, so Chaucer leaves the door open for us to conclude what we may. The cock doesn't die in the dream, so there is no final, incontrovertible answer for us about whether dreams can tell us our fate. However, interestingly enough, the dream portents a reddish-orange fox, while the actual fox that seizes Chaunticleer is coal-black.
Perhaps the devil's in the details?
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Trans. Burton Raffel. New York: The Modern Library, 2008.
Moreira, Isabel. "Dreams and Divination in Early Medieval Canonical and Narrative Sources: The Question of Clerical Control." The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Oct., 2003), pp. 621-642
Phillips, Helen. "Dream Poems." A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c. 1350-c. 1500. Ed. Peter Brown. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. 374-386.
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