Chaucer's House of Rumour and the Internet

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. 

Chaucer, circa 1380

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. 

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?  

New Find for Marlowe and Faustus?

I like to start each day by reading a scholarly article that is somewhat related to what I am working on. For my Ben Jonson chapter, I am doing reading on works about secrecy, and I came across in an article by Carlo Ginzburg, titled “The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (in Past & Present 73 (1976): 28-41), a poem in Alciati’s famous emblem-book, Emblemata, that could relate to another famous dramatist I am writing about for my dissertation, Christopher Marlowe. Alciati’s Emblemata was perhaps the most famous emblem book of the early modern era, published in multiple languages over a hundred-year period. The particular poem I am intrigued by is “In Astrologos,” which accompanies a woodcut of the fall of Icarus from the sky. 

 Combined, these form an emblem (above) warning against seeking the forbidden. “In Astrologos” addresses Icarus, “Icare per superos qui raptus et aera, donec / In mare praecipitem cera liquata daret. / Nunc te cera eadem fervensque resuscitat ignis, / Exemplo ut doceas dogmata certa tuo. / Astrologus caveat quicquam praedicere, praeceps / Nam cadet impostor dum super astra uehit.” A rough translation is, “Icarus, you who were snatched from the air by the gods and sent precipitously into the sea after your wax melted, now that same wax and burning fire revive you, so that you may teach certain truths with your example. The advanced astrologer should beware whatever he predicts, for the imposter falls while he is borne above the stars.”

This brings to mind two Marlovian moments. The first is the end of Doctor Faustus, where the scholar realizes that he does indeed have to fulfill his obligation to the devil and be taken to hell. In a last-gasp attempt to avoid the lake of fire, he tries anything: repeating an Ovidian tag (if any divine author should be appealed to in the Marlovian universe, he is the one), calling on God, and absurdly trying to jump up to heaven:

This is from the 1604 A-Text, courtesy of EEBO

What strikes me about his attempts is that they show him to be an "impostor." He recites a line from Ovid’s Amores, which reads in Ovid “O lente currite noctis equi!” (1.13.40). Marlowe’s straightforward translation of that line in the Elegies reads, “stay night and runne not thus.” It is spoken by a lover who wants the night to last longer. Faustus has good reason to use this line. Magicians should be able to do exactly this: manipulate nature, especially the moon. The Ovidian persona in the Amores claims his songs will “Carmina sanguineae deducunt cornua lunae / Et reuocant niueos solis euntis equos” “Verses deduce the horned bloudy moone / And call the sunnes white horses backe at noone” (2.1.23-4). But, as A. R. Sharrock has persuasively argued (“The Drooping Rose: Elegiac Failure in Amores 3.7.” Ramus 24.2 (1995): 152-180), the Amores is predicated on failure. That particular line in Ovid is what the narrator thinks Dawn herself would say if she were in his place. Ovid implies that even Dawn would not be able to stop the coming of, well, the dawn. The line is really about helplessness. One would expect an experienced reader like Faustus to have read Ovid better. Marlowe here ironizes Faustus, and furthers the irony by having the scholar not only use a spell that has been hopelessly ineffective for thousands of years—he also commits a cardinal sin among magicians and says it incorrectly! He adds an extra “lente,” invalidating an already powerless spell. I think it is significant that Marlowe’s ironic portrayal—almost a satire of astrologers and magicians and the like—comes right before the famous question, “who pulls me down?” This line alludes to Marlowe’s translation of the Amores, where, at the end of book 1 he transforms Ovid’s  

               This comes from a 1675 edition, ex typographia Societatis Stationariorum

into a bold, combative affirmation of the persona’s verbal powers:

So, the Latin line “Nam cadet impostor dum super astra uehit” relates to both Doctor Faustus, presented as an “impostor” at the end of Marlowe’s eponymous play, and to the persona of the Amores. It suggests that Marlowe interpreted the narrator of the Amores as an "impostor," and I think the real upshot from all this is that we have another piece of evidence that Marlowe mocks his narrator in the Elegies. This argument, that Marlowe does not identify with the Ovidian persona but in a way undercuts his bombast and hilariously hyperbolic boasts, is not a new interpretation—many have made this argument (M. L. Stapleton has done so most recently in his excellent Marlowe’s Ovid: The Elegies in the Marlowe Canon). What I am asking is whether this more firmly connects Faustus to the persona in the Elegies and if this suggests that traces of this Ovidian persona are more pervasive in Marlowe’s other plays than scholars have previously acknowledged. Although many have noted that Marlowe does not identify with his persona in the Elegies, even more have made the opposite argument—and the same goes for the Tamburlaine plays, Faustus, and other works. This find could possibly help to wrest the scholarly consensus free from readings that see Marlowe in his protagonists and do not see the many shades of irony, mockery, and (quasi-)satire that distinguish Marlowe from his protagonists.

Canon Confidential Time:

I knew this one was coming. Yes, Marlowe was a spy. Everyone knew that already, so this one is the least interesting entry in Canon Confidential. I'll have more surprising entries on authors you never thought were spies coming up soon.