Damascus Triola
In this essay, I compare the ways in which Macrobius’ fifth-century work on dreams and discourse differs from Chaucer’s fourteenth-century work which operates along a similar line of dream inquiry. As such, I will first explore the Macrobian conceit of dreams and then move into a Chaucerian understanding of dreams, discourse, and narration. Ultimately, I seek to foreground in Chaucer’s work a movement away from God as the source of creation, and instead toward the opening up of a space for human creativity and a sense of internality, consciousness, and self-fashioning through the profanation of dreams.
If narration and dreaming both share the quality of a perspectival representation of consciousness, then it is fair to begin acknowledging the similarities between a dreamer and an author. A dreamer dreams of an alternate space in which the central character plays the role of protagonist, and a writer writes a similar role. A problem arises, however, in the attribution of authorship. Addressing this concern, an early medieval scholar, Macrobius, defines the origins of various dream types in his “Commentary on the Dream of Scipio.” As defined, they exist in two primary categories: divine and non-divine. However, written or spoken discourse does not originate from the category of divinity. Instead, discourse exists as a medium or vehicle for meaning translation, the magical job of the oracle—a job which is often applied to translating the very thing we are discussing, dreams. And it is precisely here where Chaucer positions the role of the author: both within and without dreams, and to this author the dreamer pays tribute in the form of visions.
In this conception of dreams and narrative, narrative is the story of the story, the narration of the dream vision. A vision is already a kind of narrative and therefore a discourse on dreams is metanarrative. As a result, the narrative on dreams is inherently separate from the divine realm by virtue of its presentation through human translation and from within the human sphere. Macrobius’ sequestering of discourse to the human sphere—rather than divine sphere—is further complicated by his explication of the author’s/oracle’s role in interpretation. Through the dream state, a divine image or message is received, a translator (through interpretation) transfers those images into human discourse in the form of words, images, or sounds, and then often that discourse must then be reinterpreted. In this model, the initial translator’s role (i.e. author) is to provide as transparent a layer as possible between the divine vision and the narrative created.
The next step is the human interpretation of a human interpretation which becomes a narration of the narration of a dream. Despite this nestled metadiscursive or metanarrative distancing from the divine, Macrobius’ text on dreams still treats dreams like they are divine themselves. In his definition of oracular visions, Macrobius does not acknowledge the bias of human subjectivity because he believes in the objective Truth of God. This is simply how he defines True vision. However, Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess points to, and plays with, this Macrobian ideal of transparency through the contrasted opacity of its narrator. Instead of providing a narrator who reveals the divine workings of a celestial sphere, the narrator begins the narrative by merging into obscurity, through his own flaws, this division between the divine and human spheres. Further, when the narrator “wakes up” in a dream, his dream itself is influenced by the reading he was doing before falling asleep. We are then disallowed, disavowed, from seeing this dream as divinity. It is planted firmly in the human terrestri. However, like Macrobius’ oracular dreams, this dream too holds the potential to reflect a future reality within the world of the waking. Macrobius’ celestial dream realm of divinity and divine predestination and Chaucer’s human dream sphere which reflects more accurately the realm of both human desire and anxiety, share the quality of foretelling. In this overlapping, Chaucer’s human dream sphere begins to raise the question of to what degree human dreams predict the future insomuch as they put form to, thereby reifying the subconscious. To Macrobius, the effect (the result of a prophetic dream) has nothing to do with its eventual fruition, but for Chaucer’s text, the effect can be the cause of its own effect. The narrative becomes the basis for the realization of the narrative’s content.
Part I – Macrobius’ Dreams
The Macrobian presentation of dreams from his “Commentary on the Dream Scipio” provides an introduction to a pre-Chaucerian conceit of dreams. Macrobius, a clear influencer of thoughts and dreams, offers a relevant entry point to thinking about dreams as they relate to narration. Macrobius’ dream types, although divided into various subcategories, can be simplified into two primary types: predictive and non-predictive—dreams which are imaginary/fictional and dreams which are purely non-imaginary/factual. To relate this in modern terms, a dream which is imaginary/fictional is predictive of Truth because it is not tied to human perception of the waking world. Instead, it finds its source of information in divinity through a subject who is experiencing no waking stimuli (and therefore free of the Earthly sphere). Based on these contingencies, it may be prophetic. A dream which is non-imaginary/factual is non-predictive of Truth because it is tied to the subjective human experience of stimuli (from the earthly sphere). Although not in these terms, Macrobius is arguing against the subjectivity of human perception as being capable of producing Truth (divine truth). Instead, he argues that only through the most objective means attainable by humans—prophecy/the prophet—can humans approach an understanding of the incomprehensible divinity of Truth. This places narrative discourse as most ideal when it is most transparent or least affected by human subjectivity (Macrobi 265-267).
For Macrobius, Truth and divinity are the same thing—as such, there is no mode of meaningful discourse which does not have its origin in God. While Chaucer’s mode creates space for the base, Macrobius’ disavows it. Dreams which are tied to the human world “nightmare and the apparition,” as opposed to the divine one, are of the earthly realm and therefore more base. The earthly and therefore human-in-origin dream “arise[s] from some condition or circumstance” that was encountered during waking hours. As a result of this human origination, the dream may not be Truth. Human dreams are, by their position in his spherical conceit of the universe, not divine (Macrobi 266). In this vision of visions, truth is divine and originates not in our plane of existence and experience. However, this understanding is complicated by human apprehension of dreams whose source is divine. To apprehend the divine would be an impossible task, similar to asking someone to objectively describe existence. Nonetheless, humans must interface with Truth or with existence in order for information on either to be received and retransmitted. This is presented through deliverance of prophecy, or, translated through narrative discourse (there are other modes of communication which arguably do not fall under the umbrella term of discourse but which still provide a similar kind of prophecy). In an idealized version of this informational delivery system, narrative discourse is that which provides the most transparency by virtue of its absence of human consciousness.
In Macrobian terms, transparency is achieved when the translation of the divine is completed by a human who is “pious” or “revered” (267). This notion of human “purity” in approaching discursivity is always already ironically based on a state of shunning what is human for what is divine. Macrobius places discourse in an inhuman, idealized state far from whole while calling it complete. This translation is as an act of representation through language, or narrative discourse. It is narrative and not solely discursive because it seeks to communicate a story to an audience. In this case, a story from another realm (dream or divine) is translated into terms that may be understood or interpreted by a reader or listener. The narrative’s representation of Truth, or in other words the merit of their narrative act, is directly linked to the moral character of the translator. After Macrobius, who was likely not a Christian, these terms would come to have a similar meaning as in someone who has a “good conscience” or is otherwise morally pure. In either case, the Macrobian concept of a good, pious, or heightened divine knowledge transforms into the consciousness—or knowing—of a moral being (conscious from Latin: scire where we get the term “scrying” or the use of a scryer’s orb to see clearly into and know the future, and English: science, knowing). This imagined moral human being is one that is freed from the “deceit[s]” of the earthly dream. To prove this point about the varying layers of existence Macrobius offers an analysis of a Virgilian line: “‘False are the dreams (insomnia) sent by departed spirits to their sky.’ He[Virgil] used the word ‘sky’ with reference to our mortal realm because the earth bears the same relation to the regions of the dead as the heavens bear to the earth” (Macrobi 266). This spherical imagination of the layering of existential planes that Macrobius sets up, provides the necessary framework to understand Macrobius’ moral conception of the prophet—a term which I am suggesting is synonymous or nearly synonymous with the narrator and further which is eventually used to distinguish “good” or meritorious literature from “bad”—a line which Chaucer’s texts blur. To Macrobius the prophet is one who is able to transcend above the draw of the earthly plane and see clearly. He operates primarily independent of earthly “deceitfulness”. In all of this, Macrobius establishes clear lines which serve to divide, separate, or stratify existence into an orderly conceit. There is Truth and there is falsity, and it is the role of the prophet (or narrator) to reveal Truth and communicate it. This binary split between sacred and profane sanctions narratives into two types. This is not at all the condition under which a story like the “Miller’s Tale” could be generated and be taken for anything but solely bawdy which it not. The duality and subsequent blurring between the sacred and profane of Chaucer’s work can be at least partially explained by an increased emphasis on human interpretation.
Macrobius’ interpretation of Aeneas’ journey into Tartarus and then Elysium in The Aeneid provides context and further explication of the connection and interdependency between divine Truth and the act of human interpretation through narrative discourse. He quotes Porphyry’s analysis of Homer whom he (Porphyry) says has made the same distinction as Virgil between truth and lies. Macrobius’ analysis of Porphyry’s analysis suggests that it is the physical nature of the gates material as it relates to the “clear and direct vision” versus “a dark obstructing veil interposed” which clarifies the understanding of truth/lies by the viewer and the object of view (Macrobi 268). In a gigantic leap of imagination, he continues by suggesting the horn has more truth because it can be seen through when thinned, while ivory cannot. Besides demonstrating a rather ridiculousness leap of interpretive liberty, this statement nicely illustrates and elucidates this conception of narrative framing as it relates to transparency. In “citing Virgil” as Macrobius puts it, Macrobius insinuates into his argument on Truth, the place of the author. The author will “…tear away…” the “…cloud, which [is] now, drawn over thy sight” and “dulls thy mortal vision” (Macrobi 268). For Macrobius, this author (what I am arguing in this case is the narrator) reveals the clearest vision of Truth he can. This is understood. However, not only has he quoted Virgil, he has quoted Porphyry’s interpretation of Virgil which is an interpretation of an interpretation of the truth the original author is making about the nature of dream Truth (I am presuming here because of his clear deference and reverence that he takes Virgil as a kind of prophet). In this one example, Macrobius has illustrated the multilayering abstraction of metanarrative discourse and brought to bear on his concept of prophetic Truth the complication of interpretation.
Ultimately, in reading The Aeneid through Macrobius, the reader is presented with at least a tertiary representation of some original “Truth” as it is presented, and this layering of removal upon removal doesn’t even begin to touch on the question of The Aeneid’s position as a work of Roman propaganda. In this example from Macrobius’ own work on dreams and Truth (which is supposed to be about The Dream of Scipio), it can be shown that the transmission of Truth through the dream is not straightforward. Certainly blurring occurs, as even Macrobius himself becomes transfixed by his own act of interpretation of interpretations. The prophet (or narrator) who seeks to communicate a dream to others is not as simple as it was initially presented. The necessity of interpreting Virgil or even of interpreting Porphyry’s interpretation of Virgil already demonstrates a view of dreams, prophecy, and narration highly fraught with a complexity of layers of translation and representation. This reading of Macrobius does not correspond to the original binary presentation of prophetic and non-prophetic dreams—instead, it complicates ideas of prophecy and narration by demonstrating in itself that the very act of reading requires a new act of transformation, translation or representation—a byproduct of the human tendency to seek knowledge and attribute meaning. Although Macrobius does not examine dreams as wish fulfillment or as self-actualization, in his own way he demonstrates the ability and desire of the human intellect to interpret meaning and create a narrative that is self-pleasing or self-gratifying. This complication finds its way into the thinking in the Medieval period by way of the word “dream”. Chaucer’s texts in their capacity to depict both the high and low or sacred and profane don’t just exist in duality, but actively blur the lines between these worlds. They are able to do so by this transition in the meaning of dream as it moves from Macrobius’ flawed conception of the dream to one which better incorporates and acknowledges human will.
Part II – Freud’s Dreams and Secularism
Freud discusses this relationship between dreams, narration, and God. He looks at both the necessity for the authorial inception of the dream along with the often subsequent (non-secular) authorial rejection of the dream. In Freud’s observations are echoes of Macrobius’ own dream analysis. Whereas Macrobius expresses assurance in the prophetic dream’s source in divinity, Freud expresses frustration at such an attribution of dreams—instead, seeing them unfold from within as unconscious desires remnants of past experience. Chaucer falls somewhere between these two both chronologically and in claiming authorship in the act of creation. Freud notes, “In the scientific consideration of dreams, we start from the assumption that they are the products of our own psychical activity; yet the finished dream seems to us something alien…” (Freud 42). Freud’s “scientifically” based assumption is that dreams must be psychical. In other words, in the absence of God, dreams must come from the self because there is nothing/nowhere else from which they may come. He continues to suggest that people are “so little disposed to admit authorship that we are just as happy to say ‘a dream came to me’ as ‘I dreamed’” (Freud 42). His use of the word “authorship” provides a nice context from which to understand the dream as an act of creation—the dream as a consecutive linking of images experienced by a dreamer. The dream however is often left, to Freud’s frustration, misattributed to the passivity of a recipient: “a dream came”. Conversely to Macrobius, this is the ideal situation; the passivity Freud notes is exactly the withholding of base human interference that best allows for the transmission of the divine message. While for Freud, rejecting personal authorship is to remain adherent to a sacred/spiritual perspective, to a denial of the presumption of the human capacity for creation. This distinction is tantamount to the difference in narrative between messianic and authorial. There is a span of time and a degree of change that takes place between Macrobius and Freud in their respective discussions on dreams. Chaucer falls between the two. Chaucer neither lives in a secular world nor in one in which the creative capacity of the human is wholly discounted.
Part III – Chaucer’s Dreams
Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess is a tale told by a man unable to sleep but who gains access to the dream world by reading Ovid’s narrative on the origin of halcyon days—a state of peace and protection granted through following a false dream vision’s prophetic power. Ovid’s narrative is a story in which an apparition resembling Seys goes to Alcyone in the waking world and while she is in a state of visum (Macrobius’ definition of a liminal state of partial sleeping partial waking, not so dissimilar from the narrator’s own state) transmits a message taken for a true dream prophecy. Ironically, this false dream vision ends up coming true despite its origination in the false appearance of the dead and reanimated Seys. It is on this story of the deceptive truth in an apparitional dream which grants these halcyon days that The Book of the Duchess unfolds its story.
Chaucer’s narrator in Book of the Duchess at first appears to exhibit something similar to Freud’s noted passivity when he declares in the first line of his story: “By this light” and not “my light” (Chaucer 1). Since a narrator is if anything, the one who takes ownership of, and sheds light on, a story, the rejection of ownership and illumination by necessity (exempting chaos, chance, or secularity) places that agency elsewhere. However, to complicate things further, the narrator’s rejection is preceded by a direct declaration of ownership. The narrator states, “I have great wonder”. Wonder is both a state of being awestruck at divinity as well as a human prodigy (“wonder”, n.).
In the initial reading “wonder” is the narrator’s dispossession of light, but if read as the narrator’s “hav[ing] gret wonder” being a statement of claiming prodigious intellect, the antecedent of “this” is no longer authority deferred, but authority surreptitiously claimed. In this reading, the narrator can indeed be said to be taking charge of and responsibility for the creation of the light by which the story begins. Chaucer beginning his first work with the introduction of light is something that has been done at least once famously before. In presenting a double meaning of “this light” the text positions itself between creation through divine inspiration and human creation through an internal light. The source of the light is left ambiguous and unclaimed, but still occurring initially. In this initial line, the allusion to Genesis and therefore a divine story is made. In the ambiguity of ownership of both this light and this line, the text in its very first line situates itself as both below and on the same level as God. The human is the creator, and God is the Creator. The allusion and credit are due, but it is also appropriated. It is the text within a text, or the intertextuality of the creation of all text after The Original.
Proceeding from this reading of Book of the Duchess, the narrator covertly acknowledges himself as being the source of “light”. However, the context of the opening lines begins to shift. In a more standard reading, “I have gret wonder, by this light/ How that I live, for day ne night”, indicate an admission of a “defaute” in the ability to understand God’s luminous wondrous majesty and generous gift of life (Chaucer 1-2). However, this is not the tone set by the poem nor does God’s majesty seem to enter into the discussion of insomnia (in the modern sense) that follows. Therefore this reading provides little insight into the understanding of these lines. At best a reading which incorporates the interpretation of a divine origination of light provides a sufficient context in which to view narration as the blending of human and divine light.
However, understanding the light as a metaphor for human thought rather than divine will, decryptifies insomnia. If waking life and consciousness are, pardon the anachronism, having the lights on, then sleeping life is when those lights go out. This simple fluctuation of day and night and human sleep patterns create a link between light and consciousness and dark and unconsciousness—between clarity and obscurity and between open narrative discourse as exposition and closed interior discourse as private. Dreaming, with the figurative lights off, is darkness, but discursive narration can only exist with the figurative lights on. Ironically then, the Dream poetry then exists in a state of contradiction; it is an imitation of a private discourse turned public. This is part of the appeal. Given the above interpretation of the first line of Book of the Duchess, this move in associating dreams with narration is in no way passive, but is instead indicative of a narrative/narrator aware of its/his own nature. That the connection between dreams and narration is really about joining the discursive nature of the speech act with the experience of the ecstatic/joyous—an attempt to narrate a purely aesthetic experience. To Macrobius this communicative discourse on ecstasy is the challenge of transparency or the distancing of oneself from consciousness. To Freud this ecstatic state is an alienating experience of being narrated to by oneself from outside of one’s own state of consciousness—this leads often the misattribution, like the claim Macrobius makes to divine transmission. But to Chaucer’s narrator this dreaming ecstatic world is a coy game of laying claim to authorship while still transferring authorship to God. All three of these explanations seek to define the rules for the state of mind which is operating on a sub/extra-conscious level. Each rule may be defined as a type of narration. Macrobius purports to deny authorship: disconnected omniscience; Freud seeks to claim total authorship: ego/I centrality. And Chaucer’s text seeks to play with these two ideas—in the end we have a first-person narrator whose mind is so opaque, neither idea is a real option.
An obvious objection to this statement is the fact that the Book of the Duchess’ narrator is anything but ecstatic. Quite on the contrary, the narrator is morose, dyspeptic (bilious), and “hooly” consumed by his “sorwful imaginacioun” (Chaucer 14-15). For this reading to work, the ecstatic/joyous has to be understood as generalized to that which is emotionally overwhelming to the point of inexpressibility. Being expressible/inexpressible has built into it the concept of narration. The inexpressible is just that (inexpressible) because one cannot believe that what one is experiencing is really happening. Otherwise, if it were happening to them, how could they possibly fail to express it, it having happened. This is again the sense of alienation that occurs in moments of transcending basic consciousness. In this case, what ecstasy and misery share in their oppositional duality is this condition of inexpressibility as a result of their being experienced outside of oneself. As the narrator suggests, and not without pun on “holy”, is that he is completely or “hooly” (wholly and holy) consumed in the “imaginacioun” (mind). The creative act, the authorial act of writing, has more basis in the inexpressible than the expressible. What that is already expressed needs representation? Dreams and heightened emotionality then become an obvious locus for the creative world of narration, and it is no coincidence that the Book of the Duchess begins with a narrator stuck in the world of sleeplessness and inexpressible sorrow. By juxtaposing the two, the text offers this overwhelming emotion as a substitution for dreams. The narrator has not one, but the other, until he has the other, but not the one. In either case, it is the narratives’ magical job (which it itself solves with a similar kind of substitution) to deliver understanding to that which is not understandable: to narrate the inexperienced world.
Robert Edwards in The Dream of Chaucer spends a moment of time focused on this scene as well. He offers that this opening scene in the Book of the Duchess is the narrator “find[ing] a means of externalizing interior experience, of transferring what exists privately within consciousness to an intelligible form” (Edwards 68). In slightly different terms, Edwards’ view aligns nicely with the interpretation of our fledgling narrator seeking to shine his wondrous light and establish order on a dark unconscious narrative through the enlightening discourse of a conscious one. The degree to which he suggests Chaucer is aware of this seems dubious, but nonetheless it provides an interesting continued reading of this section. He offers that the narrator’s “ydel thought[s]” represent “a process of imagination” which is “isolated” from both the “external world” and “specifically isolated from questions of good and evil” (Edwards 70). He determines this to be the case by the connotations of “ydel” as both without practical effect and without moral significance. Stories, narratives, that are incapable of having a practical effect draw attention to this Macrobian sense of dream divination as being that which is removed from the physical world and therefore sacred. In placing himself in a position where he is separate from the physical world, Chaucer’s narrator moves closer to divinity. However, in establishing himself as amoral (unable to distinguish between good and bad), he also finds himself distinct and separate from the concept of a moral God. Chaucer’s narrator finds himself inhabiting a world where he is not one thing, but at least two contradictory things. In owning his position of the creator, he must also disown his position as the Creator. This is not a simple task and it requires a careful dissimulation.
Understanding Book of the Duchess in the context of narration and Freud’s dream possession/dispossession places the narrator, who at first seemed a passive recipient of God’s will, instead becomes a subject of his own light or consciousness which he cannot seem to extinguish. This foundation provides a platform from which to develop an understanding of dreams and narration. As is, the beginning of the text presents, in Freudian terms, a speaker with a nervous disorder. He has so many an “ydel thought” which he, in a great demonstration of dream logic, attributes “purely” to his “defaute of slepe” (Chaucer 4-5). In some reversal of reasoning, the narrator suggests that he has thoughts because he cannot sleep, not that he cannot sleep because he has thoughts. On this subject of causality Freud writes of the dreamer’s psyche:
It [the psyche] cannot subject its images to the only tests that can demonstrate their objective reality. It also disregards the distinction between images which are arbitrarily interchangeable and others where this arbitrariness does not exist. It goes astray because it is unable to apply the law of causality [my emphasis] to the content of its dreams. In short, the psyche’s act of turning away from the external world also holds the grounds for its belief in the subjective world of the dream. (Freud 44-45)
Instead of assuming that this narrator’s preemptive exhibition of dream logic results from a baseline cognitive incapacity for reason, instead, it can be seen as what happens to waking consciousness when it is denied sleep—when the conscious “light” is left on for too long. For Freud the dream state is that which cannot establish “distinctions” between subjective/objective images. And when Chaucer’s narrator laments that “nothing [is] leef nor loth./ [and that] Al is yliche good…” he too suggests this inability to create distinctions while conscious (Chaucer 8-9). The narrator cares not how things “cometh or goth” and feels both “[j]oye or sorwe” and cannot distinguish between the two thereby destroying any reasonable meaning achieved through oppositional duality. In essence, he has blurred the barrier between waking and sleeping, between fact and fiction, between truth and lies, etc. In short, the narrator is hallucinating—a common symptom of sleep deprivation (Waters et al). This blurring has implications for narration, namely the mirrored blurring of the Creator versus a creator. In a way, like Chaucer’s text, the narrator is both conscious and unconscious. The text claims a more complex space for autonomy from and dependence on a single Creator/creator.
Part IV – Conclusion
The indiscernibility of experiential consciousness as sourced from either subjectively derived experience or objectively derived experience is at the root of understanding dreams and their relation to narration. As demonstrated above through the narrator’s state of indifference, the Book of the Duchess suggests a combinatorial conception of the sleeping and waking worlds (and other narrative worlds). It differs in its basic construction from the hierarchical stratification of Macrobius’ five dreams categories because it acknowledges the intertextuality of narrative creation and a dependence on translation and interpretation. Chaucer’s text plays with this conception, taunting its position by placing its own narrator in the position of being both connected to and disconnected from physical reality. The narrator eventually becomes disconnected completely, but he is then connected through Ovid’s narrative to a new narrative of his own creation—the dream. In this layering of metatextual and metanarrative referencing, the narrator is able to safely occupy the position of the creator, but as a creator in a long series of creators all leading from a Creator. The narrator’s ascendance to a place of power as a creator is simultaneously established as a state of misery. In doing so it places its narrator in a position of authority, but without any of the majesty that might be construed as heretical. Chaucer’s narrator is the semi-transparent medium through which the narrative unfolds, but whose transparency is also known through its own self-realized light. Chaucer the author uses his natural capacity for creation to write a narrative in which the narrator weaves a tale around a dream and in so doing creates a reality where Chaucer himself may safely write tales in distanced halcyon dreams which yield to real halcyon days.
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