Uses for a Dead Child in Chaucer, Livy, and Ancient Israel

 

     Like most of his fellow-pilgrims’ narratives, the Physician’s contribution to the Canterbury Tales is a retelling based on a written source.  Far from simply repeating an earlier version, though, Chaucer’s revisions express meaning absent from his source.  The anecdote from Livy [1] the Physician relates has quite a different meaning on the road between London and Canterbury than it did in ancient Rome.  Much significance arises from context and explicit cues apart from the implications of the plot.  The incident is sensational enough to guarantee readers’ attention in any era: in mythic, elemental terms it tells of a loving father who kills his daughter to save her from sexual exploitation.  Yet the significance is altogether different in the two versions and these meanings are also at variance with an earlier story of a sacrificed daughter and with the contemporary reader’s likely reaction.

     The plot elements of the story follow closely the spirited account in Livy, seizing the reader’s attention with lurid sex and violence.  A father finds his lovely and virtuous fourteen-year-old daughter fraudulently claimed as a slave by a lecherous judge.  Rather than let his Virginia (with her sprechende Name) fall to Appius’ lust, the father kills her.  She is a virgin sacrifice, offered up for the ideal of female sexual purity and dependence.

     Yet the first reaction of the modern reader must be shock at Virginius’ filicide, an issue that does not exist in Livy but which by the Middle Ages had become sufficiently important that in Chaucer’s telling, unlike in the Latin, Virginia consents willingly to her own murder.  Thus her end approaches the hagiographic pattern set by the many female saints who are said to have died willingly rather than accept a pagan or otherwise unacceptable lover.  While embracing her own death, she asks only for a brief delay, referring to the respite given Jephthah’s daughter in the Hebrew scriptures. 

     What follows Virginia’s death in Chaucer’s account has no hint of criticism of her father’s brutal deed.  After she dies at his hands, an aroused mob exacts revenge, imprisoning Appius who then commits suicide, hanging his partisans, yet Virginius requests that Claudius, whose false testimony was the excuse for Virginia’s abduction, be only exiled.  The reader hears another Christian grace-note there, surely, in a glimpse of a divine glow of the about such compassionate mercy.

     The reaction to this story in Chaucer is dramatic and has nothing to do with either praising or blaming the father.  The host is overcome with pathos, with such strong feelings of indignation at the malefactor and sympathy for the poor daughter that he acts as though he were crazy (287).  So distressed by the “pitous” (302) narrative is he that he insists he must have a remedy, either medicine or “corny ale” or a “myrie tale.” (316)  The Pardoner, who is to go next, insists on the second of these alternatives, and they stop into a tavern for a drink.  The excuse is presumably welcomed by others among the travelers. 

     The father’s act is not questioned, but rather presented as an extreme example of paternal love, forced on Virginius, like Oedipus the victim of a terrible fate.  Appius is an obvious villain, by pagan or by Christian standards, and his wickedness makes Virginia and her father shine forth the more brightly with their virtue. In a brief coda (277-286) the physician glosses his own story, providing an unlikely version of the story’s instructive value.  Rather than, like the Host, considering Appius a model of extreme sin and Virgina exemplifying the polar opposite, an all-but-impossible saintliness, the Physician identifies with Appius as a fellow sinner and takes the tale as a warning to forsake sin while one still may, bearing in mind that none can tell when God might bring hidden deeds to light.  There is no mention of the evil-doer’s victims, only the pain of the “worm of conscience” and his constant fear, knowing that in the end there must inevitably be an accounting for sin. 

     Presented in the context of the pilgrimage the Physician’s Tale seems, in spite of its shocking content, a diverting tale, a potent emotional experience suited for passing an idle hour, the medieval version of a late show horror movie.  The motif of a lovely and innocent heroine in danger is universally popular, and here its sensationalism is heightened by the horrific act of the father.  In spite of this potent, highly-colored material, though, the stated theme is generic, the most commonplace of medieval Christian formulae, encouragement toward salvation, to avoid sin and embrace Jesus. 

     The primary source for the Physician’s Tale is Livy (III, 44ff.) who tells the story in a leisurely and lively manner, clearly exploiting the sex and violence that make the story of Appius and Verginia (Livy’s spelling) attractive to readers.  The context and the stated significance of the account in Livy, however, is quite distinct from those of Chaucer’s story.   The Roman historian’s goal was to trace the founding of his city and the tale of Verginius marks a transition from the second decemvirate to the second plebeian succession.  Even apart from the intrusion of legends like that of Verginius, Livy’s presentation of such change is often based as much on tradition and literary models as on historical fact.  For him Appius’ attempt to rape Verginia is representative of his generally vicious rule.  Thus Livy includes a lengthy explanation of the strengthening of plebian power in the aftermath of Appius’ crime.  For him the political issue was leading the people’s reaction.  “The people were excited partly by the atrocity of the deed, partly by the opportunity now offered of recovering their liberties.”  The ordinary Romans “talked of nothing but the abolition of the tribunitian power and the right of appeal and loudly expressed their indignation at the condition of public affairs.” 

     Livy emphasizes the role of sexual offenses against women as a sign of decadent leadership and the marker of institutional change by referring to the earlier rape and death of Lucretia which had preceded the overthrow of the monarchy and the original founding of the senate.   Clearly, violence to respectable women is the hallmark of misrule, allowing a political struggle to be accompanied (or, perhaps, masked) as moral outrage.  In Chaucer the sin is personal or spiritual whereas here it is socio-political.   

     In Chaucer’s version Virginia’s daughter refers to another story that in part resembles her own when she asks for some brief respite before her death like that afforded Jephthah’s daughter in the book of Judges.  Though she also is killed by a loving father, this ancient Hebrew episode includes no lascivious and unjust judge.  Jephthah, despite being the son of a “harlot” and practicing banditry, defeats the Ammonites as a Jewish general and becomes then a respected “judge,” ruling Israel for six years.  He finds himself sacrificing his own daughter as the result of a rash vow.  There is no question of his failing to carry out his contract with the divine.  His daughter was, like Agamemnon’s, the price of military victory.

     Once again female blood accompanies a regime change.  The putative theme is, as so often in the Hebrew scripture, the ups and downs of the Jews interpreted as the result of either cleaving to pious rules or flirting with non-Jewish practices.  Israel had been losing its battles because they “did evil again in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim, and Ashtaroth, and the gods of Syria, and the gods of Zidon, and the gods of Moab, and the gods of the children of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines, and forsook the Lord, and served not him.” (Judges 10)  Oddly, though, Israel’s champion Jephthah endears himself to God with a vow that echoes the human sacrifice of the Jews’ neighbors.  His prayer must have pleased Jehovah since victory in battle follows.  Far from deserving censure for killing his daughter, Jephthah was originally, like Abraham, whose case turned out somewhat differently, a type of the believer who demonstrates virtue by submitting his will to the divine.

     The archaic ritual character of this sacrifice is evident in the fact that Jephthah’s daughter’s death was remembered in an annual observance.  “And it was a custom in Israel, that the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year. (Judges 11, 39-40)  This custom suggests that the story is a descent into legend of what was once a divine myth about a female vegetation spirit similar to Ishtar or Persephone.  Here the context is wholly mythic.  Such actions occur on a cosmic stage.  Jephthah’s actions have no moral content any more than those of Oedipus, though later priestly commentators including the Jewish B'reshith Rabba and (much later) Rashi and the Christians Ambrose and John Chrysostom made him an example of error for the same actions that had been consdiered praiseworthy.

     The righteous killing of one’s child so outrages ordinary expectations that stories of such deeds will excite interest in any human society.  Yet the themes implied by the stories of Jephthah and Verginius (and Virginius) vary widely.  The Hebrew version has origins in the cycle of the natural year and the observation that life lives only on life and the hard insistence that the life of the community supersedes personal grief.  Later, Livy’s Latin anecdote about another father’s sacrifice continues the notion that the father’s individual loss is justified by a social gain, in Jephthah’s case the military victory over the Ammonites and in Verginius’ the assertion of the power of the commons, but the mythic and ritualistic associations are muted in favor of proto-democratic political values and individual ethical choice.  Finally, in Chaucer, the story is told for the fun of it, and the putative theme urging the reader to gain salvation by avoiding annoying God seems tossed into the text as an afterthought.      

     Using the violation of the strongest taboos, with the shedding of female blood marking historical change, stories of this type exercise a strong narrative appeal.  The Verginius anecdote appeared in The Romance of the Rose, was depicted by Botticelli, and was retold by later authors, including John Webster and Thomas Heywood in Appius and Virginia and Thomas Babington Macaulay in Lays of Ancient Rome.  In every instance the story’s meaning is a unique compound of plot and context, complicated by what the text says about itself and what the reader makes of it.

 

 

The Use of Convention in “The Floure and the Leafe”

 

Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes; those in parentheses are line numbers. 

 

     Justification of literary valuation is notoriously elusive.  Works rise and fall in the estimation of readers over time based on a number of factors, including the older text’s real or imagined similarity to current writing or to either the critic’s (or the society’s) ideology.  A reader’s perception of beauty may be explained but cannot be proven.  Analysis of fluctuations in the prestige of specific poems and novels is likely to reveal as much or more about readers as about the works in question.

     The history of the reputation of the anonymous fifteenth century poem “The Floure and the Leafe” illustrates a particularly dramatic alteration in status.  Attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer since at least the end of the sixteenth century [1], the poem was highly appreciated for several hundred years.  Dryden lauded it and wrote a modernization, Keats wrote a sonnet in response, and the poem was praised as well as by Hazlitt, Campbell, and others, but, by the middle of the nineteenth century, doubts had begun to appear about its authorship [2] and in 1900 W. W. Skeat not only decisively completed the case for a later and anonymous author (whom he regarded as a woman [3]), but also denigrated the poem in withering terms.  He realized he was going against the grain noting “this poem has so frequently been praised that I feel some diffidence in saying that too much has been made of it” yet he was sufficiently hostile to those who maintained the traditional view to use inverted commas when he called them “critics.” [4]

     The drop in value following the discovery that the poem had not been written by an accepted “great” is, however dramatic, surely not surprising.  The weight which readers give to authority has led to a host of pseudepigrapha, including the ascription of the Pentateuch to Moses and over a hundred texts once falsely attributed to Aristotle, and the art market demonstrates in a clear monetary metric the loss of value when a painting has been shown to be not by a master, but by his school or, worse yet, by a forger.  Yet these decisions are socially rather than aesthetically driven, and have nothing to do with the value of the artwork itself. 

     Shifts in literary taste also influenced the poem’s standing.  Many moderns, in fact, many post-Romantics, would, of course, be put off by a defunct genre like the medieval dream visions.  A superficial view conflates literary convention with lack of imagination and privileges “realism” (as though any collection of marks on a page is a direct representation of lived experience).  At the time when Skeat wrote, a leading edge of literature was realism and an archaic fantasy vision hardly will appeal to one for whom verisimilitude is important. 

     Yet the curious fact is that those who valued the poem prior to Skeat’s comments regularly stressed not its well-wrought artifice but its outstandingly “realistic” descriptions of nature.   In spite of the fact that the language is highly formulaic with most phrases being closely paralleled by antecedents so numerous that no one instance can be seen as the poet’s model, appreciation for “The Floure and the Leafe” was most often based on the poet’s successful representation of a nature that corresponds to lived experience.  Because of Chaucer’s date, early readers also often characterized the poem as simple” and “childlike,” ignoring the poem’s sophistication. 

     Just as Dryden, in an age that favored didacticism found the poem’s moralizing its chief appeal [5] during the Romantic era, when readers prized natural description, they found it in “The Floure and the Leafe.”  For William Hazlitt, one of the most acute critics of the day, Chaucer’s “characteristic excellence, what might be termed gusto” lies in his “descriptions of natural scenery,” so true-to-life that they give “the very feeling of the air, the coolness or moisture of the ground,” and the poem which best exemplifies this outstanding quality is “The Flower and the Leaf.” [6]  Thomas Campbell found in it “fresh and joyous descriptions of external nature.”  The setting of the vision, which seems to moderns so distant from lived experience, is for him “like the recollection of an actual scene.” He comments, “Here is no affected rapture, no flowery sentiment.” [7]  For Keats , reading “this pleasant tale" is an experience that feels natural, like strolling into “a little copse.” [8]

     The principal effect of the conventionality apparently invisible to these earlier readers is that scenes and individuals are highly generic with little specificity.  They are largely interchangeable -- one poet could wander into the locus amoenus of another and scarcely notice the difference, nor would their ladies find much to motivate a choice between the men.  Detail is replaced by superlatives in a pattern so pervasive it requires no exhaustive demonstration.

     Hyperbolic convention appears from the outset with the glorious chariot of Apollo whirling across the sky far above a beautiful scene.  Reverdie is in progress and “every wight/ Of this season wexeth glad and light.” (13-14)  The speaker, ”glad of the season swete” (15) enjoys “heart’s ease.”(20)  She steps out into a very “plesaunt” (36) sight.   Indeed, the poet who devised the entire setting says it “it was more pleasaunt then I coud devise.” (97)  The medlar tree is “the fairest.” (86)  The poet thought herself in Paradise. (115)

 

                         . . . sith the beginning

Of the world was never seen or than

So pleasant a ground of none earthly man.

                                                          (124-126)

 

     The women of the company of the leaf and men are not only themselves beautiful, they sing beautifully as well and, as if that were not enough, go about draped in gems, fine fabrics, and garlands.  The men and the flower party are much the same.  No attempt is made toward what most readers would mean by “realism.”  Yet such conventional superlatives, far from being limited to allegorical dream visions, are universal; the popularity of the device signifies that it has been found highly useful. 

Though such obviously artificial statements may seem to owe their origin to the mindless replication of prior models, the existence of hyperbole in the rhetorical figures of every nation suggests that they function as more than decorative ornaments.  In certain ways these extravagant statements are more “real” than the kind that passes for objective.

     Most obviously, they represent culturally accepted ideals to which, it is understood, living people only imperfectly aspire.  Achilles can exemplify the impossibly brave and competent warrior portrayed as the noblest among men, as can John Wayne.  Medieval romances have episodes as hyperbolic as any comic book action hero.  The dominant desirable qualities for women are illustrated by the countless surpassingly lovely ladies from Helen through the most recent film star, though there are supplementary models specifically for wives such as Penelope and Griselda.  All cultures transmit their beliefs and values through the symbolic systems of songs, dramas, and visual works.  Hyperbole in art defines very plainly the qualities admired by its makers.

     Furthermore, everyone experiences subjective states of mind which correspond closely to poetry’s immoderate claims.  An individual may really think his daughter is the smartest thing around, his sergeant is the bravest man on earth, and his lover the most beautiful.  Such sentiments seem true to parents, comrades, and lovers.  Art represents the human psyche more accurately than non-aesthetic forms of discourse specifically because it allows representation of the affective states so significant in lived experience. 

     Apart from their value in suggesting such cultural codes and individual passions, the hyperboles of poetry have a ludic value, providing the reader or listener with play and entertainment.  People turn to literature for experiences unobtainable otherwise.   The poster in the library that tells our children “reading is a magic carpet” does not lie.  The pleasure of seeing what is not and never can be is akin to that experienced by the contemporary film viewer watching special effects.  And when the depiction is rendered impossibly lovely, this seductive virtual reality can be dazzling in itself. 

     Finally, just as people in humble circumstances often enjoy reading about celebrities, there is likely some effect resembling sympathetic magic causing the reader to imagine herself as blissful as the fine ladies in a story.  The reader of “The Floure and the Leafe” thinking of a beautiful bower crowded with beautiful people resembles the Depression era movie-goer relishing and not resenting men on the silver screen in high top hats arm-in-arm with women sparkling with jewels.  One can almost imagine the ladies of the flower doing a Busby Berkeley number.

     Whereas the poem’s original readers knew the relevant codes and, far from being put off by the use of convention, they regarded it as prestigious as it connects a current work with the laudable models of the past.   For the original audience the use of convention was appreciated for both entertainment value and thematic function.  Once readers had forgotten the meaning of the old conventions, having traded them for new, the poem lost its appeal.  As it happens, the poem lost the authorial sanction of Chaucer’s name at a time when its conventions were already poorly understood, causing the poem to fall into an undeserved obscurity.

 

 

  

1.  Included in Thomas Speght’s 1598 The Workes of our Antient and learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer.

 2.  Skeat’s idea of female authorship may have influenced both his dismissal of the poem and later generations’ near-abandonment of it.  Though the author’s identity and gender remain uncertain, the persona of the text is female.  In this essay I shall use feminine pronouns for the unknown writer.

 3.  In his 1778 edition of Chaucer Thomas Tyrwhitt was the first scholar to doubt the attribution.  (Tyrwhitt also edited Chatterton’s Rowley poems with an appendix demonstrating their true authorship.)  In 1868 Henry Bradshaw’s arguments that the poem must be dated after Chaucer’s death were included in Furnivall’s A Temporary Preface to the Six-Text Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  This view was strengthened by Bernhard ten Brink in Chaucer: Studien zur Geschichte seiner Entwicklung und zur Chronologie seiner Schriften (1870). 

 4.  His observation about “critics” appears in Chaucerian and other pieces (1897), lxi, the admission of diffidence from The Chaucer Canon (1900), 139.Lectures on the English Poets (1818), “On Chaucer and Spenser.”

 5.  See his preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern.

 6.  in British Poetry, quoted in The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, March 1819 p. 474.

7.  Specimens of British Poets, 1819. 

8  “Written On The Blank Space Of A Leaf At The End Of Chaucer’s Tale Of ‘The Flowre And The Lefe.’”

Dreams

 

I omit references within the text as this is a familiar essay, far from a scholarly one.   My readers will have noticed that I am hardly a nice observer of the distinction, though, and I have decided to append a general list of a few sources unnamed in the body of the piece, many of which are well-known. 

 

     Sir Thomas Browne observes in his excellent essay on dreams “that some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.”  People all dream nightly, and thus may act as gods, creating worlds, or at least as artists, spinners of gossamer fictions with such delicacy that they fall to pieces and vanish after the eyes have opened.  This evidence of the fundamental human need for narrative is reconfirmed daily by everyone’s experience, but there is no more agreement about the best use for these products of the imagination than for their cousins emerging from the more conscious areas of the brain, the short stories in a literary quarterly.

     Perhaps the evanescent quality of dreams (in which way they contrast with the author’s hopes of eternal life on the page at least) has a fortunate aspect.  Though fascinating to the dreamer, laden with significant detail and accompanied by urgent emotion, dreams generally cannot survive retelling.  There is little so boring as someone else’s dream.  Even great writers like Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac cannot sustain reader’s interest in unprocessed records of nighttime fantasies.  Yet dreams have such beguiling appeal to the dreamer that they seem as though they surely must bear consequential information. 

     In Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” the rooster Chantecleer, deeply troubled by a dream, groans, fearing, correctly, as it turns out, that his dream of a predator presages an actual attack.  His lady Pertelote reproves him, saying “vanitee in sweven is.”  She offers a physiological explanation, suggesting that dreams arise from overeating, a notion she shares with Winsor McKay whose comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was wholly composed of nightmares occasioned by overindulgence.  A good medieval polemicist, the hen cites the authority of Cato who discounted the significance of dreams. 

     More people over the years have agreed with the rooster than with his consort.  It is certainly the more stimulating and productive position, though heavy dinners late at night may play their own role.   Very many around the world and all through time have like Chanticleer thought dreams contain clues to future events.  The Bible is full of dream interpreters of this sort.    

     In Genesis Joseph no sooner says that interpreting dreams “belongs to God,” then he offers to do the job himself.  He accurately decodes the dreams of his fellow prisoners, with nice symmetry predicting that one will be freed and the other executed.  Neither of the dreams, though, directly portrays the destined outcome; through what Browne had called “symbolicall adaptation” three branches must be read as three days and birds munching bread as birds picking flesh from a corpse.  Thus, while dreams are considered to reveal the future, they do so only indirectly, obliquely, symbolically, after the manner of art. 

     In a depiction of Israel’s utopian future once the nation is properly observant, God promises not only to defeat their military enemies (as well as a plague of locusts), but also that “your old men shall dream dreams,” a promise repeated for Christians in the account of Pentecost.  Yet, in spite of the potential of revelation, it is sometimes difficult to discern the difference between God’s voice and a lie.  Jeremiah warns that false prophets may mislead the people declaring, “I have dreamed.”  After all, as Zecharaiah tells, the priests of other deities also offer dream visions.  “For the idols have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie, and have told false dreams.”  Islam likewise distinguished between the divinely inspired true dream (al-ru’ya) and the false dream, which may come from the devil, though many dreams are considered meaningless and inconsequential (hulm).

     The need for acute discernment in the interpretation of dreams has led to professional training in the skill by shamans and priests.   In many cultures the very dreaming of significant dreams is a task undertaken by specialists.  Not only have psychedelics (called by some in this context entheogens) been useful for vision-seekers, many cultures use psychotropic drugs specifically for the purpose of achieving more lucid dreams.  For instance, the Chonal people of Oaxaca use Calea ternifolia, called in English dream grass and the Xhosa people use Silene undulata, or African dream root.

     Belief in the predictive value of dreams has withered in modern times, though it like astrology survives in vulgar forms such as the pulp publication 1000 Dreams and what they mean (1944), attributed to Yohanna ibn al Farmouzi, and the Gypsy's Witch Dream Book of Numbers (1972).  The latter, in a sign of the decadence of the genre it shares with some fortune cookies, reduces all dreams to numbers of interest only to gamblers.  

    In recent times the interpretation of dreams has turned from divination to psychology, or, to use the mythic imagery of Freud’s Vergilian epigraph for The Interpretation of Dreams, from the heavens to the underworld.  Most moderns would assent to Freud’s declaration that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, though the use of dreams in therapeutic practice has declined precipitously along with the rest of the psychoanalytic system, in spite of the quondam assent of Freud’s colleagues such as Jung who maintained, “who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”  Today, of course, a psychiatrist, after having observed the patient’s general demeanor, is likely to be primarily a prescriber of pills, leaving the talk therapy not to psychologists, but to social workers.  The doctor may never hear a patient’s dream.

    The revelation that narrative action in  a literary text has occurred in a dream has been derided as too convenient a convention, yet it has honorably used by writers including Li Gongzuo in "A Lifetime in a Dream," Chaucer whose Book of the Duchess is built around two dreams, and Langland whose Piers Plowman has an even more elaborate dream architecture.  Everyone knows of the sudden appearance of the white rabbit in a waistcoat to Alice in her doze on the riverbank and of Dorothy’s being carried off to Munchkin Country and eventually Oz before each young heroine awakens again to everyday reality.  The device is used in a good many less-remembered works such as Fritz Lang’s 1944 The Woman in the Window in which as in Oz some characters from the waking world appear in dream roles.  I consider the episode of Marge’s Little Lulu outstanding in which Tubby is pleased when he rises from bed (in dream) to find himself with a moustache but before his second awakening into the security of his accustomed world, he finds himself pursued by an outraged mob crying “little boys can’t have moustaches!” 

     Dreams may convey an entire vision, a world-view.  The most celebrated dreamer of this sort is likely Zhuang Zhou who dreamed he was a butterfly and, upon awakening, pondered whether he might not as likely be a butterfly dreaming he was a man as a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly.  (Oddly, Socrates makes exactly the same point in a passage clear and casual if more abstract and less artful.)  Such epistemological questioning of reality seems to express skepticism like that of the Pyrrhonists, but there is no equivalence between the insect and human consciousness.  During the dream Zhang had been “flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased,” whereas upon rising he fell to uneasy self-conscious cogitation.  It is a smaller Fall from grace perhaps to lose the wings of a butterfly than to be exiled from Eden, but the trajectory is similar.  From the wholly involved but free participation in a natural spontaneous life such as we imagine animals to experience we have descended to the neurotic human psyche, prey to guilt, doubt, and self-questioning.

     Liezi describes a dream of the time the Yellow Emperor wore himself out with governing.  He devoted himself to his duties and at the same time indulged in sensual pleasures until, finding that his “ravaged flesh darkened and his dulled senses were stupefied, he concluded that attachment to himself and to the kingdom were both destructive.  He went into retirement, neglecting matters of state and living like an ascetic.  At this point he had a dream of the utopian land of Hua Hsü where people “have no cravings and lusts.” There “all men follow their natural course” and they have never heard of “profit and loss.”  They have thereby gained an extraordinary sensation of liberation, expressing by Liezi as “the ability to ride space as though walking the solid earth.” This same Yellow Emperor was said to appoint officials based on verbal clues in dreams and to him was ascribed a book of dream interpretation. 

     My own dreams seem rarely to rise to the economy and clarity, not to mention the significance, of these dreams, but of course examples from written sources are generally composed or literary dreams.  Even those reported by physicians such as Freud and Jung seem to many critics to be artificially pruned to reinforce the author’s general theories.  I experience neither divine openings nor the terror of nightmares.  Many times I have found myself in a semi-familiar area, a campus or a city neighborhood having extraordinary difficulty making my way to my destination.  I turn a corner and see an unexpected territory yet to be traversed or a make a short cut through a university building only to find it a maze of corridors.  I feel the mildest frustration.  What can be the purpose of such a fantasy?   Having been student or instructor most of my life, I have often found my dream persona unprepared sometimes for attending, sometimes for teaching a class, though again without much anxiety.  “Ah, well,” I would think, “I have three papers due tomorrow, but two can be submitted late and it will be easy to do the third tonight.”   Or I would improvise a lecture I could deliver without the students’ having read any specific text.  The mildness of my dreams is consistent.  I like many have also imagined myself without pants or without clothes in public places, but others seem not to notice.  The unconscious is often conceived as a roaring beast, but mine seems thoroughly domesticated.

     On several occasions, for months at a time, I have set out a notebook on the night table to record my dreams and I have definitely observed that putting this sort of conscious attention on dreams alters them considerably.  They become far easier to recall, more coherent, and more weighty with the meaning I sought.  Probably the Lakota in a sweat lodge will experience what he has been taught and what he has observed in the practice of others.  A Cameroonian educated in France told me that a snake would visit him in the night to advise him.  As a member of the snake clan it was no more than he expected.  Thus I am confident a Freudian or a Jungian would rapidly acquire the knack of dreams congenial to expectations.    

     It may be, in fact, that our deepest sleep represents at once an unerring prediction of the future and a philosophic cue.  Decades ago the Dalai Lama addressed the great American populace through People magazine saying, in what is his most achievable suggestion if not the most lofty, “Sleep is the best meditation.”  The Vedanta Hindu tradition identifies the waking state with the gross body and the sleeping state with the subtle body.  The deeper sleep in which consciousness is eliminated altogether, the non-REM sleep is identified with the absolute.  (In the familiar way of philosophic one-upmanship, some authors include a fourth state as the final one, at once transcending and underlying the other three.)   Thus samadhi, far from being a remote and mysterious state of consciousness, is experienced by everyone nightly.  While such emptiness may be the source and end of everything, and indeed nirvana means “blown out, extinguished” it is nonetheless far less engaging than the dreams that can dominate our attention at one moment and vanish in a moment.  Dreams seem, like much of what we experience, to mean what we wish for them to mean.

 

 

Sources

Browne, “On Dreams;” Genesis 40:8, Joel 2:28, Acts 2:17, Jeremiah 23:25, Zecharaiah 10:2; Gianluca Toro and Benjamin Thomas, foreword by Jonathan Ott, Drugs of the Dreaming: Oneirogens: Salvia divinorum and Other Dream-Enhancing Plants; Carl Jung, Letters; Plato, Theaetetus; Zhuang Zhou, The Book of Lieh-tzu; Huangfu Mi, Records of Emperors and Kings, Mandukya Upanishad.

Gamelyn: An Outlaw’s Ethics

     The master storyteller Chaucer himself seems to have fancied the story of Gamelyn. Literary scholars have also traced its relations to Robin Hood tales, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and to the William Tell legend. Variously described in terms of its affinities to balladry and romance, studied for what it reveals about medieval law, the primary appeal of the plot is its action. The righteous hero moves from one crisis to another and, though he is sufficiently vulnerable to keep the audience engaged like a character of Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, he is usually capable of vanquishing any number of foes.
     An outlaw’s ethics must be problematic. Someone who has been judged criminal, who has been ousted from civil society for misbehavior, has appearances at any rate against him. Yet Robin Hood’s status as hero is known to everyone, and there were in his day many comparable figures, Adam Bell and Earl Godwin among them. The greenwood may have been dangerous for travelers, but it was also an arena of freedom beyond the reach of unjust feudal authorities. Some outlaws in the English Middle Ages as well as in other times and places have become heroes, “social bandits,” in Hobsbawm’s phrase, seen as allied with the people in opposing an oppressive regime.
     Gamelyn’s perspective is governed by his audience’s socio-economic class. While Robin Hood was regularly identified as a yeoman, neither aristocrat nor peasant, Gamelyn is a member of the land-owning gentry. He is nonetheless as a younger brother vulnerable to exploitation by a coalition including his own brother, the most prominent clerics of the region, and a corrupt legal system. Elements of explicit social protest include criticism of such central pillars of feudalism as the nobility, the church, and the law, but the king’s own judgement is approved, and, in the end, Gamelyn’s reconciliation with the throne sets everything to rights. [1]
     The social order is in question from the very opening when the dying John of Boundes finds that his neighbors, men whom he calls “good men that lawe conne of londe,” (63) mean to controvert his wish to leave property to each of his sons. The sheriff later supports the younger John with concern for neither the law nor ethics. When the younger John binds Gamelyn to a post in his hall, claiming he is insane, he appeals in vain to the clerics feasting there who respond with gratuitous asperity, interested only in currying favor with his wealthy brother. Gamelyn declares “Cursed mote he worth both flesshe and blood,/ That ever doth priour or abbot eny good!" (487-8) Most dramatically, in the scene of the trial of his brother Ote, he realizes the fantasy of the revolutionist and literally brings his elder brother, now become sheriff, the judge, and all twelve jurymen into the role of defendants and summarily executes the lot, declaring by the way “sorwe have that rekke!” [“Sorrow to any who are sorry about it!”] (877)
     Once the outlawed Gamelyn gains access to the King, however, his problems are over. The king not only pardons him and the other outlaws, but awards them “good offices.” (890) The author is not indicting the whole feudal system, only the wicked who must be brought into line by the crown.
     In contrast to the widespread corruption the poet describes in Gamelyn’s neighborhood, the outlaw chief is presented in wholly positive terms. Though his initial words “I am ware of gestes God send us goode” (635) may be taken as either sincerely hospitable or as an ironic welcoming of victims, when Gamelyn tests his host’s courtesy, anticipating “He wil yeve us mete and drink and do us som gode.” (659) the outlaw chief does proceed to treat Adam and Gamelyn most civilly. He “bad hem ete and drink and that of the best.” (676) In this open-hearted generosity in hospitality rituals, the outlaw king recalls Gamelyn’s own extravagant hosting in Fitt 3.
     The sympathetic reader who is not thinking in terms of action movie conventions is likely to be taken aback by the summary killing of the porter at the outset of Fitt III. Gamelyn wreaks angry vengeance, fundamentally opposing his dishonest brother, but incidentally leading him to break the doorkeeper’s neck and toss him in a well. While the action may seem excessive in view of the porter’s trivial and ineffective attempt to keep him out, it is most expressive of his uncontrollable might when roused. Like an old-fashioned swashbuckler or a more recent martial arts adept, he scatters his foes on either side. This is perhaps the earliest form of hero.
     When his elder brother proves impossibly selfish and deceitful, and the local ecclesiastics collude in his wrongdoing, Gamelyn enthusiastically shouts “Save wel the crownes and do hem no harmes,/ But breke both her legges and sithen her armes" (519-20) after which he and Adam pummel the churchmen. Gamelyn proceeds to break his brother’s neck with a single blow, callously telling him "’Sitte ther, brother,’ . . . ‘For to colen thi body as I did myn.’" (535-6)
     His final outburst of violence occurs when at the trial where his brother Ote is being held in his place, when he summarily convicts and executes the judge and jurymen as well as his long-offending brother John. So far is the narrator from considering any of this violence to be excessive or unnecessary, he interjects (passionately if parenthetically) “(sorwe have that rekke!)” (877) (“misery to anyone who cares!}.
     This emphasis on the hero’s strength and fighting abilities is wholly consistent with the king’s eventually not only pardoning him and his outlaw band but awarding them enviable positions. Such muscle is more usefully hired than fought. As a hero of popular culture, Gamelyn excels in scenes of dramatic if almost unbelievable unreflecting action. His ethics are those of the common man: an unthinking acceptance of social norms under most circumstances, a wish to regard oneself as honorable, an honor undamaged, indeed magnified by extravagant violence. The morality is based on the social controls of pride and shame rather than on prescriptive mandates. Gamelyn, one feels certain, would never have turned outlaw had he not been wronged, but his titanic energy must make him seem a somewhat unpredictable associate. The pleasure of those following his story arose perhaps in part from admiration for a strong warrior and in part relief that one need not deal with such a one.
     Gamelyn has a fully happy ending, complete with “a wyf bothe good and feyr” (898), as do most popular works, because this story is meant to be light entertainment, as reassuring as tragedy is unsettling. [2] In fact the heroes of neither action narratives nor tragedies is likely to be concerned with moral choices. A work like Gamelyn simply reaffirms people’s prejudices while one like Oedipus Tyrannos looks beyond right and wrong into the abyss of existence itself. Gamelyn is neither a moral paragon nor an evil-doer as much as he is a regular guy, albeit more daring and capable than his admirers.


1. The reader will recall how the masses who joined in Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381allowed themselves to be deceived by King Richard. Similarly, in the twentieth century, the crowds assembled outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg confident that the beneficent Czar would hear their pleas until his troops opened fire.

2. Thus often the Hollywood adaptations of plays and novels tend to rosier denouements as in almost all the generally excellent films made of Tennessee Williams plays during the 1950s.

Chaucer's Version of the Myth of a Golden Age

     Chaucer's short poem “The Former Age” states a commonplace theme, that of a golden age from which mankind has fallen, and it recognizes its own dependence on tradition by recalling classical precedents with references to Jupiter and Diogenes. Moreover, the poem is directly derivative of several works (the most important being Chaucer’s own Boethius). But the use of literary convention is often a highly dynamic process, and this particular restatement is fully effective in both exploiting the potent resources of the archetype and freely yet harmoniously creating new details, new tones. The poem’s implications are enriched not only by its sources, but also by analogous stories whose images parallel its own.
     Golden age myths are, of course, current world-wide. The Hindu concept of the satya yuga and the Daoist vision of a primal utopia are two essentially similar variations. The most fundamental import of such stories is to complain against suffering, mortality, and wickedness. Lamenting the fall provides an etiology and a type for any specific lament of the limitations of this life.
     But in Chaucer's poem moral corruption associated with the fall is not unspecified. He defines it largely in economic terms. The coming of technological innovation and a cash economy has poisoned relations between men and created an undesirable selfish “delicacye” within individuals. The prior perfection represents a reminiscence comparable to Engels’ primitive communists, [1] or their more modern incarnation -- Gary Snyder’s neolithic communard ecstatics. [2] The present-day failing is described in terms similar to those of “Lak of Stedfastnesse” as the duplicity resulting when men prey upon men prompted by “the anguysschous love of havyinge.”
     The second system of corruption the poet suggests is sexual. Though punishment for sexuality is heavily suggested in the Biblical story of Eden it is not explicit here. The ambiguity of line 28 is heightened by line 29. Though the explicit topic is the covetous pursuit of jewels and precious metals, the combination of “swety bysinesse,” “lurkinge,” and “derkesse” in a story of the fall cannot fail to have sexual meaning. (The term “swety” alone is often used by Chaucer in a sexual context — in the "Miller's Tale" and. in Troilus and Criseyde, for instance. ) ln addition, the sexual associations of caves are explicated not only by Freud but also by countless others (e.g. the Memphis Jug Band in their “Cave Man Blues”). Finally, the second stanza’s description of the crime of wounding the earth with a plow to sow seed more efficiently (objectifying and exploiting the earth) is suggestive enough to drag half The Golden Bough behind it.
     Thus, Chaucer attributes to deranged or unhealthy, “fallen,” economic and sexual relations the aggressive content in human society. While the primary stream of meaning in “The Former Age,” this is not the only one. I believe a contrary value system also resonates within the same narrative images. Frequently in fairy tales underground caves are said to contain a treasure guarded by a powerful and malevolent being. The hero proves himself by gaining a victory over the guardian (as in Beowulf). One might generalize such a successful quest as representing adaptation to the world and characterize the dreamer after a golden age as solipsistic and infantile. Further, the very wealth of detail in Chaucer's poem's picture of our degenerate age, the piling up of parallel phrases suggests a delight in the plenitude of the world. Just as Christians speak of that felix culpa that made movement and action possible, that made oneself possible, so here the fall has “thickened the plot.” The final list of crimes (“poyson, manslautre, mordre”) is so extreme as to remove the application from one”s every day to the realm of moralizing about others, as when suburbanites speak of “crime in the cities.”
     Finally, one must regard the author himself as to some extent dwelling in the golden age since his values are those of the original creation. As a virtuous man he partakes of the nature of that earlier world and proves that it is not wholly lost. All these factors combine with the rather spartan character of life in the golden age as it is portrayed to generate a sort of ambivalent complexity of a sort that would, have been foreign to those who had, as Chaucer says, “no fantasye to debate.” Poignant and vigorous though the lament is, it contains currents of meaning running contrary to the explicit content, which, by their opposition, render the poetry more accurate and more effective.


1. From Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: "There can be no poor and needy – the communistic household and the gens know their responsibility towards the aged, the sick and those disabled in war. All are free and equal, including the women. There is as yet no room for slaves nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of alien tribes."

2. From Snyder “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution”: "In fact, it is my own view that the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural-credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks."