The House of Fame

"Exactly. I chose the House of Fame because I think it’s a really important precursor to the Canterbury Tales . The House of Fame is in fact my favourite Chaucerian text. It’s a crazy text. It’s unfinished—or seemingly unfinished. It’s a dream vision. It’s also the poem of Chaucer’s that seems to be the most autobiographical—though ‘seems’ is an important word there. The main character is called Geoffrey: he’s a writer, works as an accountant (as Chaucer did in the Customs Office), and then goes home at night to read books and try to write. The story is that he has writer’s block. He doesn’t know what to write about. He falls asleep and he has this very complicated and interesting dream where he passes through various different locations. He has a guide, an eagle figure, who kind of shouts at him in all kinds of ways. He takes him up to the Milky Way. He looks down on the world. He goes through a Temple of Glas and then, later on, he reaches the House of Fame, and then the House of Rumour. These different locations are really important. When he’s in the temple early on, the story of Aeneas and Dido is painted on the walls. This is one of the foundational stories of Western culture: the story of the Aeneid by Virgil. It then morphs into another version of that story: the Heroides by Ovid. Chaucer is showing us that even when you’re reading the most authoritative texts, they’re not reliable, because these two great authorities tell us different things about these characters. Can they both be right? Can we trust even the greatest of authorities? “Can we trust even the greatest of authorities?” Then we get to the House of Fame. We talk a lot these days about the ‘canon,’ but Chaucer was really interested in that idea, too. In the House of Fame, he shows us that the names of the famous are etched in ice. On one side, the names are in the sun, so they melt. On the other, they happen to be in the shade, so they survive. It’s completely random: some good things survive; some don’t. We don’t know all the stuff that didn’t survive, or that’s hidden and hasn’t come out into the open. He shows us these great authors standing on pillars, all fighting with each other. One says that Homer is a liar, for instance. That’s a really radical thing for Chaucer to say—that maybe these great authorities didn’t really know what they were talking about. The Chaucer figure goes through this vision of the canon, and someone asks him who he is, and if he’s there for fame. He says, ‘No, I’m not, I’m just looking for new tidings, but I haven’t found anything here; I’m not getting inspired.’ He wants ‘Somme new tydynges for to lere / Somme newe thinges, y not what.’ Then he goes to the House of Rumour. The House of Rumour is a refracted depiction of what seems to be the contemporary city—contemporary London. It’s a crazy place: it’s very dynamic; everything is moving; it’s very loud; things are flying everywhere; it’s open; there are no porters at the doors guarding it, no gatekeepers of the profession. Things go in, Things go out. Truth and lies are fixed together: “fals and soth compouned”, just as they are earlier. It’s not an idealised place, but it’s a dynamic place: it’s a place of life, where there are lots and lots of stories. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter You mentioned the very end of the poem, where all these seemingly ordinary people arrive with these bags full of stories. The stories are from all over the place. Some of them are lies, some of them are true—we just don’t know. But they’re interesting. The poem breaks off on the word ‘authority’, which is a perfect ending. The figures in the poem see someone who “semed for to be / A man of gret auctorite”, but of course that person can’t arrive, because the whole poem has been about the notion that authority doesn’t exist—that we should tear down authority. Now, Chaucer thought that people such as Virgil and Ovid were fantastic poets. He isn’t saying that we should throw them away or ignore them. He read them; he was inspired by them. Many of the tales, which are allegedly told by ordinary people, are in fact tales from literary sources. But I think he’s really interested in getting material from everywhere . So, read the classics, but also listen to what ordinary people are saying. There’s a part in the House of Fame where the eagle guide says to him, ‘Your problem is you just sit on your own in your room reading books. You need to go to the doorway, and talk to your neighbors as well – “thy verray neyghbores’ that live ‘at thy dores.’ He tells the ‘Geffrey’ narrator figure to go and listen to them. So, the message of the House of Fame is about opening out a sense of where you can find material, listening to everyone’s stories. And that segues perfectly into the idea of the Canterbury Tales , where the fundamental point is that everyone has a story to tell. We should listen to all kinds of different stories, different versions of events, and decide for ourselves where we think any truths might lie. But you have to understand that every version of the story is one perspective. No one has an objective perspective; we’re always hearing versions and biased perspectives."