Forms of Perspective and Chaucer's Dream Spaces: Memory and the Catalogue in <em>The House of Fame</em>

Abstract

In the medieval intellectual tradition, the interior of an architectural space was well established as a metaphor for a different kind of interiority, the invisible space within the mind. The classical conceit of the memory palace--an ancient rhetorical technique for the organization of the memory as an internalized series of rooms--provided medieval authors with a practical tool for mnemonic enhancement as well as an imaginative means by which to link mental and physical interiors within the spaces of narrative. (1) Several recent discussions of space in medieval English literature, building on the work of theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, have explored the social, political, and cultural implications of but few have closely considered the relationship between these two different forms of interior the material and the mental/memorial. (2) The role that plays in the narrative representation of space fundamentally links these two forms of interiority, and, in his discussion of Perspective and the presentation of space, F. K. Stanzel usefully emphasizes the connection between visual or spatial and the subjective perspective of narration (115-22; section 5.2). Tracing the complexity of interior spaces in inward-looking medieval fictions can extend and nuance the conclusions about in narrative that Stanzel draws based largely on 19th and 20th-century novels. (3) Although in the past romance has played the most prominent role in the application of narrative theory to medieval texts, (4) the conventions of the medieval dream vision--in which an autodiegetic narrator or narrator-hero typically reports the events of a dream after waking--ideally position this genre for investigation in terms of the relationship between and the representation of interior space. (5) For medieval writers like Chaucer, the depths of the mind and physical interior spaces could not be mapped onto one another perfectly, nor were they incommensurable: the medieval first-person narrative can demonstrate how the perceiving mind or consciousness organizes and makes sense of physical space in ways that resemble how the trained mind or memory organizes and makes sense of its own accumulated cognitive contents. Three of Chaucer's dream visions--The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and The House of Fame--closely link interior spaces with subjectivity, inwardness, and problems of perspective, but this essay will focus primarily on The House of Fame, a dream narrative structured as a personal journey through a series of three interior spaces. (6) Each of these dream visions, however, follows its respective narrator-dreamer as he moves through various interior spaces, on one level reproducing the mise-en-abyme effect of framed dream narrative itself, a multiply embedded voyage within the mind. The temples, palaces, walled gardens, and stranger interiors represented in these dream poems are most often constructed through the literary device of the catalogue, in which the contents of a given room are listed at length but rarely placed in precise spatial relation to one another. Drawing uncritically on Stanzel's distinction between perspectival and aperspectival spatial representation, one might not hesitate to associate these dream visions with the uncomplicated aperspectivism of the early Victorian novels to which he points. Yet the contexts and complications of spatial in medieval narratives like the House of Fame challenge the binary impulse of typologies like Stanzel's. The poem includes both aperspectival inventories and a handful of more perspectival depictions of spatial relations among objects, but the key technique of the list or catalogue, understood in the context of the medieval rhetorical arts, must be reevaluated as a unique organizing schema for representing and making sense of interior spaces. To employ the catalogue as the primary tool of spatial description may seem capable of producing only a jumbled, aperspectival representation of an interior, but the strategy aligns with the narrator's difficult task of organizing into narrative description and rendering intelligible the overwhelming profusion of information confronting his senses. …