I have already written about how Ovid’s House of
Fame in the Metamorphoses could be
read as a precursor to the Internet here. For this post I am going to
talk about how Geoffrey Chaucer’s homage to Ovid’s House of Fame, a surreal
dream-poem fittingly titled The House of
Fame, not only resembles the internet but can help us understand digital
technologies in a new light.
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| Chaucer, circa 1380 |
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| Ganymede and eagle |
So, The
House of Fame. This is a dream-poem, which means it is about as coherent
and credible as a dream would be. The narrator dreams that he is taken up to
the heavens, Ganymede-style, by Jove’s golden eagle. This pricey raptor is a
pompous, know-it-all philosopher type, claiming to be a master of acoustics who
knows all about the physics of how all words that are ever spoken go to the
House of Fame. He claims that every single story ever told goes to that House
to be judged and either commemorated by the goddess Fame or consigned to Trotsky’s
dustbin of history. But, before these stories get to Fame’s House, they stop at
the House of Rumour, which is like a way station on the road to Fame.
Now, the House of Fame rests on top of a mountain of
ice (it gets weirder/better). The House of Rumour, meanwhile, spins in the air right
below the House of Fame. Think of a carousel, but one that floats, is made out
of wood, measures over sixty miles in diameter, and, instead of plastic horses,
is full of people standing around and gossiping.
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| a la Under the Table and Dreaming |
Every word ever spoken comes
here and the gossips spread the word, so to speak. It is literally the opposite
of Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone.” All stories, from water-cooler talk to the
narratives like the legend of Troy that define and celebrate cultures and
nations, arise in the House of Rumour, a place where nothing can be believed
because everyone is augmenting, distorting, and fabricating narratives. This is
the House that I feel resembles the Internet. Both are loci toward which all
verbal communication gravitates. Both are also known for their credibility gap.
But what is most intriguing is that Chaucer defines all those gossips in the House
of Rumour as “spies” overlooking the world (they are up in the heavens) in
lines 701-6 of the poem. Fame is able to know every single narrative ever told because
of these spies. Rhetorically, surveillance grants its practitioners
omniscience. It is fitting that Chaucer would imagine these gossips in the
House of Rumour to be spies informing Fame of all the stories they come across.
What I feel is important from this is the way we think about the credibility of
the dataveillance and the data mining occurring right now. Technology lends an aura of credibility
to its users. But, we should not be so quick to differentiate the unreliable
web from the reliable dataveillance that is mining the web. After all, it is
working with information that is about as reliable as the tales fabricated in
the House of Rumour. Here’s what it’s
all about: we live in an era of dataveillance, and we think it is the wave of
the future. We should probably start thinking about it more as a newer version
of the low-tech surveillance techniques used in the past, a digitization of
rumor.
Canon Confidential Time:
J. D. Salinger was a counter-intelligence
operative for the U. S. Army in Europe. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge
and interrogated German prisoners of war. His transition from
counterintelligence to counterculture hero was in part aided by his keen eye
for subtle details. Is it too far-fetched to say that his use of the catching
metaphor could have been inspired by his experience trying to catch all sorts
of information on enemy combatants?
