RL, "Gower as Gerontion; Oneiric Autobiography in the Confessio Amantis," Medieaevistik 5 (1992), pp. 81-96.

Gower as Gerontion; Oneiric Autobiography in the Confessio Amantis

Plures plura sciunt et seipsos nesciunt.

Isolating and analysing the inherited, traditional literary structures, schemes, and strategies upon which John Gower drew to build his poem, scholars and critics have established much of what the poet had in mind when he wrote the Confessio Amantis. His mind, however, was not invulnerable to the "tenant on the floor below" (Primo Levi's phrase), and his attempt to combine Christian morality and erotic psychology shows some signs of strain, as Kathryn Lynch indicates when she calls the Confessio Amantis, "a kind of philosophical vision poem gone haywire." [Kathryn L. Lynch, The High Medieval Dream Vision, Stanford, 1988, p. 174.]

Other recent critics have suggested that there is something strange about Gower's loose and baggy monster. Christopher Ricks speaks of "the steely mildness with which Gower meets the bizarrerie of his stories." ["Metamorphosis in Other Words," in A.J. Minnis, Gower's Confessio Amantis, Cambridge, 1983, p. 48.] Derek Pearsall is even more precise when he describes the story of Tereus in terms that may also be applied to any number of other passages in the poem: [Derek Pearsall, "Gower's Narrative Art," PMLA 81 (1966), p. 18.]

At every point Gower mutes the horror and invests the action with sentiment of a morally discriminating kind, as if the characters were operating in a received civilized environment and not in a world of inhuman passion and violence.

Both Ricks and Pearsall imply that Gower has reduced, or repressed the intensity of the material with which he deals, producing an oddly artificial, alienated, if not emotionally false posture. [Although expression and repression are lexically opposites, repression is also another form of expression, as Bert O. States argues in The Rhetoric of Dreams, Ithaca, 1988, pp. 185ff. J.A.W. Bennet seems to admire Gower for his muted, if not exhausted quality: "It is Gower's love of peace and quiet that makes him the poet of early dawns and nights steeped in silence." (Middle English Literature, Oxford 1986, p. 426).]

Part of the odd effect is produced by the use of a first-person narrator in what is arguably, or at least discontinuously, a dream-vision. [As Patrick J. Gallacher points out, "the fiction of Gower's poem is at least conventionally autobiographical." (Love, the Word and Mercury, Albuquerque, 1975, p. 145).] Oneiric autobiography, Jacques Le Goff reminds us, offers a subject matter that generated considerable anxiety on the part of Augustine, Gregory the Great and Isidore of Seville. [Jacques Le Goff, Chicago, 1988, pp. 214-218, 223-227.] Significantly, in the course of his discussion, Le Goff invokes Heraclitus 89, "The world of the waking is unique and common, but each sleeper returns unto himself." [Ibid, p. 229.] Stephen Russell, in the course of establishing a meaning for the term, "radical lyricism," makes the Heraclitus-like assertion that, "...we can know the vision only if we accept the dreamer, while we can know the dreamer only in accepting the dream." [J. Stephen Russell,The English Dream Vision, Columbus, 1988, P. 196. For further discussion of Russell's use of "radical lyricism," see Russell Peck's review in Speculum 65 (1990), pp. 1041-1044.] Reading the Confessio Amantis may then lead us to Gower himself, but autobiography, as Albrecht Classen reminds us, provides an ambiguous yield:

Gerade die Autobiographie befindet sich in einer flimmernden Zwischenzone, wo weder das Sprechende Ich noch die Text-struktur vőllige Dominanz über den jeweils anderen Aspekt gewinnen, sondern wo beide aufeindander verweisen und beide nich ohne das andere Moment existieren können. [Albrecht Classen, Die Autobiographische Lyrik des Europ&ischen spätmittelalters, Amsterdam, 1991, p. 583.]

Even if the autobiographical aspect of the Confessio Amantis could be established, the resistance to granting the status of dream-vision to the Confessio Amantis would still have to be overcome. Although no one has yet challenged the classification of one of its major models, the Roman de la Rose, as a dream vision, neither A.C. Spearing, in Medieval Dream Poetry, nor J. Stephen Russell, in The English Dream Vision, can bring himself to classify Gower's poem categorically as a dream vision. Spearing admits that, "it is possible to read even Gower's Confessio Amantis, and to be so absorbed in its courtly treatment of love and its mythological fiction as to mistake that too for a dream-poem," [Medieval Dream Poetry, Cambridge, 1976, p. 2.] but Russell never mentions the Confessio Amantis in his English Dream Vision. R.F. Yeager, however, includes dream vision to be one of the forms to be found in the Confessio (John Gower's Poetic, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 11, 12, 73, 87, 234).]

On the other hand, Russell provides some useful perceptions about the nature of dream-vision. For example, he points out that dreamers characteristically make errors in interpreting their dreams; Gower provides at least two incompetent interpreters, Amans and Genius. If we question the relevance of the marginal glossalia, we have three misleading voices in the text. [See David W. Hiscoe, "The Ovidian Comic Strategy of Gower's Confessio Amantis," Philological Quarterly 64 (1985), pp. 367-85. Hiscoe uses Ceix and Alcyone to illustrate "the priest consistently fails to see the significance of his chosen story" (p. 378). In speaking of Ceix and Alcyone, Constance Hieatt says, "dodging the question is exasperatingly characteristic of Gower." pp. 48-49, The Realism of Dream Visions, The Hague, 1967.] In addition, as Charles Runacres reminds us, the stories themselves, "are capable of producing their own meaning, independent of that of the 'exposition,'" [Charles Runacres, "Art and Ethics in the Exempla of Confessio Amantis, p. 119.] although Runacres insists that Gower controlled all of these meanings relentlessly, for one purpose or another.

Multiple interpretations, of course, characterize allegory, a genre from which no one has yet excluded the Confessio Amantis. Allegory and dream were not fastidiously distinguished from each other in the middle ages; in his selective, twelfth-century translation of the standard dream books by Artemidorus and Achmet, Pascalis Romanus invokes literary genres to describe the various kinds of dreams:

Est itaque fantasia tamquam fabula, insompnium velud proverbium vel parabola, visio tamquam historia, oraculum ut prophecia, sompnium allegoria.

[S. Collin-Roset, "Le Liber thesauri occulti de Pascalis Romanus," Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litt>rraire du Moyen Age 30 (1963), p. 160 (see below also). For the latest consideration of medieval dream books and dream visions, see Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1992. His remarks on Paschalis Romanus (pp. 68-730 are focused on his medical sophistication.]

In an earlier allegorical work, Gower had explicitly indulged in dream vision, describing the first book of the Vox Clamantis in an early rubric as sompnium nimis horribile, and then, in the verse itself, as sompnia vera (l. 2143). John Fisher (p. 50) implies that Gower was particularly comfortable with the genre when he characterizes the first book as "more imaginative" and "more literary" than the rest of the poem, or the entire Mirour.

Other critics have suggested that Gower resembles Dante, [Yeager, for example, (234) suggests that they resemble each other in their creation of a "personal voice":

Although a creation of Gower the poet, Amans/Gower is still the 'personal voice' so actively opening out 'his' history, detail by detail -- a characteristic he shares with the pilgrim Dante of the Commedia.

Lynch matches one against the other and decides that, "compared to Dante's pilgrim, Amans is a low comic hero..." who "falls considerably short of the heroic" (p. 193)] whose Commedia is certainly allegorical as well as oneiric, and also tends to confound generic expectations. His three purgatorial dreams and two slumbers in Earthly Paradise clearly provide much of the provocation if not justification for Dino S. Cervigni to compose a book entitled Dante's Poetry of Dreams. [Florence, 1986. Early in the first canto of the Inferno, the narrator is pien de sonno (I.11); two cantos later he is,"come l'uom cui sonno piglia," and of course he swoons after hearing Francesca's story.]

Perhaps the closest resemblance to Dante occurs in Book Eight of the Confessio Amantis, when Amans swoons like a fire quenched with water, and the elderly visionary company of love parades itself before him, in a kind of dream within a dream. Gower, however, never offers the kind of specific biographical detail Dante provides; no friends, relatives, lovers, teachers, or mysterious incidents involving baptismal fonts inform the more than 17,000 lines of the English poem, although he does provide an exchange with one king or another in the prologue. In addition, Gower shows few of the mystical impulses and expressions that can be found in Dante and in so many of the other medieval composers of visionary literature. [ Peter Dinzelbacher, for example, in Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1981), provides an extensive discussion of the kinds of mystic expression to be found in dream-visions.]

Historical records also provide little in the way of personal details about Gower. His indefatigable editor tentatively guessed that his author was a merchant, perhaps a dealer in wool, on the basis of the relative restraint Gower showed in condemning wool merchants. [ G.C. Macaulay, Complete Works of John Gower, volume I, Oxford, 1899, pp. lxi-lxv; Fisher ( op. cit., pp. 37-69) offers a catalogue of property and business transactions in his chapter, "Life Records."] Furthermore, the Confessio is not confessional in the modern sense, developed since Rousseau, or even in the medieval sense, if the daydreams involving copulating with animals that Rather of Verona claims filled his mind during church services are what a tenth-century audience might have expected in a work entitled, Confessio.

Peccavi ego peccator in osculo et in amplexibus illecebrosis, palpando et blandiendo inique; et in ecclesia stans vel sedens, ubi sanctae lectiones vel divina officia efficiuntur, otiosis fabulis, vel iniquis cogitationibus me occupavi, et non cogitavi, quae debui, et aures non accomodavi ad ea quae sancta sunt. Intuendo quoque injuste et petulanter et recordando (quod adhuc pejus virorum) animalium, pecudumque concubitus, et alia quaedam obscena. (Migne, Patrologia Latina CXXXVI 398).

For a more specific comparison with Augustine, see Kurt Olsson, John Gower and the Structures of Conversion, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 245-246.] The Mirour does, of course, offer a few personal details, and one confessional routine. At the end of his attack on the Friars, Gower humbly says:

... je ne suy pas clers,

Vestu de sanguin ne de pers,

Ainz ai vestu la raye mance,

Poy sai latin, poy sai romance. [G. C. Macaulay, The Complete Works of John Gower, Oxford, 1899, vol. I, The French Works, ll. 21772-5.]

Almost seven thousand lines later, he speaks De ma chaitive fole vie (l. 27363), and of his indulgence in all 7 deadly sins.

But these passages clearly offer no more than conventionally pious penitential postures, and we must turn to the Vox Clamantis, for more specifically personal detail. In the prose epitome that precedes the epistle to Arundel Gower describes himself as bent by age and sickness, senex et cecus. In the epistle itself, he describes himself as deprived by his blindness of the satisfaction of watching Arundel's great actions, since he:

Cecus ego mere, nequio licet acta videre... Corpore defectus, quamvis mihi curva senectus Torquet... corpus et egrotum, vetus et miserabile totum... (ll. 17, 19-20, 29)

I am virtually blind, but granted that I cannot see what is going on... however much halting old age racks me, the defect of my body... [Eric W. Stockton, The Major Latin Works of John Gower, Seattle, 1962, p. 47.]

However, medieval poets conventionally represented themselves as blind and old. In her discussion of the Voir Dit, a text that also deals with an old man's erotic involvement with a younger woman (and one that may have been more successful than the one Gower describes), [Sylvia Huot's remarks on the virelay composed within Venus' cloud (From Song to Book, Ithaca, 1987, pp. 285-6) indicate what some of the unresolvable ambiguities in the poem are:

The virelay does hint at erotic fulfillment when it describes in some detail the death of Dangier at the hands of Venus... But is a virelay produced by sexual coupling? Do we not rather see that, as love and eroticism are transposed into the language of poetry, poetic activity comes to replace sexual activity? Such a reading would seem to be borne out by the narrator's statement that after the cloud lifted, Guillaume, who had just composed a poem, was rather more moved by the experience than Toute Belle, who had merely acted as audience for the act of poetic composition; he was "tous estahis" (totally ecstatic). whereas she was "un petitet estahie" (a little bit ecstatic). ]

Jacqueline Cerquiglini suggests that Machaut's strabism may not have been the case, but was conventionally associated with clerics. However, she also suggests that blindness often connotes impotence, [Jacqueline Cerquiglini, "Un engin si soutil" Guillaume de Machaut et l'écriture au XIVe siècle, Paris, 1985, pp. 144-145.] and both Andreas Capellanus and Walter Map offer passages that provide such a connection. [Andreas' contention that a blind man cannot love is clearly a sardonic reinvention of the lyric commonplaces involving falling in love through the eyes, but Walter Map (Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. and transl. by M.R. James, revised by C.N.L. Brooke/ R.A.B. Mynors, Oxford, 1983) provides a vivid illustration in his story about Wigon, who is goaded by a remark made by his wife into taking vengeance upon the Breton king Alanus, his father-in-law, who had blinded and emasculated Wigon's own father Remelin, the count of Laon:

Contigit Wiganum cum uxore sua in scaccis ludentem ad maiores operas a suis vocari, liquitque loco suo fidelem sibi militem ut cum domina ludum illum fineret, et abscessit. Cum ergo domina vicisset, ait militi secum ludentio: 'Non tibi, sed orbi filio mat.' Quod improperium Wiganus cum equanimiter ferre non posset, ad Alanum Rebrit properans inopinum invasit...

Now it happened that Wigon when playing chess with his wife was called away by his courtiers to more important business, left in his place a loyal knight of his to finish the game with his lady, and withdrew. When then the lady had won, she said to the knight who was playing with her: 'Mate, not to you, but to the blind man's son.' This taunt Wigon was unable to put up with; he hastened off to Alan Rebrit and fell on him unprepared....

Wigon proceeds to capture, blind and emasculate his father-in-law. Upon his return, he resumes his position at the chessboard, and waits until he has won the game to deliver his trophies of victory. As he tosses the eyes and genitalia of his father-in-law onto the chessboard, in front of his wife, he uses her own words against her:

Wiganus, ut plena glorietur, ulcione, ablatis secum in manica sinistra oculis et genitalibus Alani, celato et facto et proposito facie iocosa et hylari, domum reversus cum uxore considet ad scaccos, et obtento ludo super scaccarium genitalia et oculos proicit, dicens quod ab ipsa didicerat: 'Filie orbi dico mat.'

Wigan, in order to boast his full revenge, carried off with him in his left sleeve Alan's eyes and privy parts, masked deed and purpose with a smiling merry face, returned home and sat down to chess with his wife; when he had won the game he cast both upon the board with the words he had learned from her -- 'Mate to the blind man's daughter.']

Cerquiglini also speaks of the feminization of the poet brought about by his weakness and age, [ Op. cit. p. 109; William Calin makes the same point in A Poet at the Fountain, Lexington, 1974, p. 189.], and perhaps the fact that Achilles is comfortable as a woman in Gower's text and highly distressed in Statius' poem [ IV.1962 ff.; Ach. II.121).] reflects the feminization of the aging poet. However, blindness is a more evident motif, and also seems to have been a literal fact in Gower's case. In his remarks about the corrections to the epistle to Arundel in the All Souls manuscript, Fisher points out that, "nearly all refer to the loss of the author's sight." [ John Gower, New York, 1964, p. 100).]

On the other hand, references to blindness in the Confessio Amantis do not univocally indicate that its author it was blind. Early in the poem, for example, blindness is trivialized. Responding to Genius' admonition against somnolence, Amans reduces a series of tragic gestures to a series of rhetorical hyperboles, the first of which refers to the act of blinding:

Ha, goode fader, certes no.

I hadde levere be mi trowthe,

Er I were set on such a slouthe

And beere such a slepi snoute,

Bothe yhen of myn hed were oute. (IV.2746-50) [G. C. Macaulay, The Complete Works of John Gower, Oxford, 1902, v. 4.]

A more complex passage occurs in Book Six, in the story of Galba and Vitellius, ostensibly an illustration of gluttony, when drunkeness, madness and blindness combine, though with no resonance of personal experience:

Nomore than a blind man thredeth

His nedle be the Sonnes lyht,

Nomore is reson thann e of myht,

When he with drunkeschipe is blent. (VI.558-61)

Later in the same book, the man driven by carnality is compared to a blind horse:

Bot as Baiard the blinde stede,

Til he falle in the dich amidde,

He goth ther noman wole him bidde;

He stant so ferforth out of reule,

There is no with that mai him reule. (VI.1280-85)

Since Chaucer's Bayard [Troilus and Criseyde I.218] is not blind, Gower's addition may be significant.

The most complex example occurs in Book Five, the longest of the eight books of the Confessio Amantis. Phryns, the fairest of mankind, and therefore the object of universal female lust, tears out his own eyes:

Bot for he wolde be nomore Among the wommen so coveited,

The beaute of his face streited

He hath, and threste out bothe hise yhen,

That alle wommen which him syhen

Thanne afterward, of him ne roghte:

And thus his maidehiede he boghte. (V.6378-84)

When Gower told the same story in the Mirour (18301 ff.), Phrynis was castrated (Coupa ses membres). The intertextual connection between blindness and castration would seem to be entirely the work of Gower's imagination, since in Valerius Maximus' text [ Valerii Maximi Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libr Novem, Leipzig, 1888, IV.5.]the comparable figure, named Spurina, merely lacerates his face, while in Gower's own Vox Clamantis Phrynis dies, vaguely "castigating" his body:

Mortuus est corpus castigans virgo Phirinus (6.1323).

Towards the end of the Confessio Amantis, blindness metamorphoses from a fear to a bitter aspiration, in a passage Lynch describes as the culmination of "the theme of age and deterioration." [ Op. cit., p. 181.] Amans looks in the mirror and asks to be blinded:

Wherinne anon myn hertes yhe

I caste, and sih my colour fade,

Myn yhen dymme and al unglade,

Mi chiekes thinne, and al my face

With Elde I myhte se deface,

So riveled and so wo besein,

That ther was nothing full ne plein,

I syh also myn heres hore.)

Mi will was tho to se nomore. (8.2826-31

If we had evidence that Gower, like Chaucer, performed his poem in public, and therefore stood blind and old before his listeners, the dramatic irony of these lines would be oppressively appropriate. [What he finds in the mirror is a mild version of the characteristics attributed to the aged by Maximianus and Innocent III, and the image is part of his final routine, in which the poet reveals that the poem is in some sense a bad dream -- an old man's nightmare, but in a tone peculiar to Gower, as a comparison with the same material as it is presented in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale and Pardoner's Tale, may demonstrate. See Alicia K. Nitecki, "The Conventions of the Old Man's Lament in the Pardoner's Tale," Chaucer Review 16 (1981-1982), 76-84; Alicia K. Nitecki, "Figures of Old Age in Fourteenth-century English Literature," in Aging and the Aged in Medieval Europe, ed. M.M. Sheehan, CSB, Toronto, 1990, 107-116.]

The wish "to se no more," i.e., to experience no more, is also present early in the poem, when Gower first describes the spring, in a reinvention of the lyric topos [The spring-topos was adjusted by various poets to various contexts; in the early fourteenth century, for example, the soldier-poet Guillaume Guiart, composing a poem about war, understandably begins his description of spring by focusing on the activity of worms:

En la saison que la vermine,

Qui souz tout terre l'yver mine,

Se met en l'air en aparant;

Que fleurs vont le país parant

Par diverses couleurs nouvèles;

Que jouvenciaux et damoiseles,

Qui en loial amour languissent,

Du souef tens se resjoissent;

Qu'osellons à chanter s'esbatent;

En leur navie se remabatent

Pélerins, qui armes portent,

Et de ce petit se déportent,

Qu'il ont tant esté yvernaus;

Mariniers vont aus gouvernaus

Por chascun vassal droit conduire (p. 75; ll. 1286-1300)

(La Branche des Royaus Lignages, par Guillaume Guiart, ed. J.A. Buchon, 2 vol., Paris, 1828).] that incidentally anticipates the opening of Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium." [Like Yeats also, Gower constantly ponders the division of soul and body:

...what thing that the body hateth,

The soule loveth and debateth;

But natheles fulofte is sene

Of werre which is hem betwene

The fieble hath wonne the victoire. (Prologue 995-1001)]

Walking in the month of May, estranged from ordinary young lovers, Amans is made uncomfortable by the conventional stimulus for passion, the sensuous song of birds (Yeats' "the young in one another's arms,/ Birds in the trees"):

This enderday, as I forthferde

To walke, as I yow telle may, --

And that was in the Monthe of Maii,

Whan every brid hath chose his make

And thenkth his merthes forto make

Of love that he hath achieved;

Bot so was I nothing relieved...

Unto the wode I gan to fare,

Nought forto singe with the briddes... (I.98-104; 110-11

Instead he has come to weep and, like a muted version of the old man in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, to wish for death

Wisshinge and wepinge al myn one,

For other merthes made I none.

So hard me was that ilke throwe,

That ofte sithes overthrowe

To grounde I was withoute breht;

And evere I wisshide after deth. (I. 115-120)

The link between spring and death occurs again in the story of the Trump of Death. Gower starts the story "in the Monthe of Maii"" (I.2026), with the King of Hungary going forth from his city with a group of "lusti folk that were yonge" (I.2033), suddenly finding himself face to face with two beggars, whom he embraces and honors:

Two pilegrins of so gret age,

That lich unto a dreie ymage

Thei were pale and fade hewed,

And as a bussh which is besnewed,

Here berdes weren hore and white;

There was of kinde bot a lite,

That thei ne semen fulli dede. (I. 2041-47)

Gower now returns to describing the spring:

The day was merie and fair ynowh,

Echon with othre pleide and lowh,

And fellen into tales newe,

How that the freisshe floures grewe,

and how that love among the yonge

Began the hertes thanne awake,

And every bridd hath chosee hire make... (I.2081-88)

The pleasures of spring, however, again give way, in this instance literally to the music of death, as the Trump of Death frightens the king's brother into pleading for his life. In response, the king delivers a sermon in which he reads the two beggars as images of his own age and death:

Now shalt thou noght forthi mervaile

That I doun fro my Charr alihte,

Whanne I behield tofore my sihte

In hem that were of so gret age

Min oghne deth thurgh here ymage,

Which god hath set be lawe of kynde,

Wherof I mai no bote finde. (I. 2226-32)

Spring is again associated with the abhorrent in the second book of the Confessio, when Genius compares Detraction to the dung-beetle:

Lich to the Scharnebudes kinde,

Of whos nature this I finde,

That in the hoteste of the dai,

Whan comen is the merie Maii,

He sprat his wynge and up he fleth:

And under al aboute he seth

The faire lusti floures springe,

Bot therof hath he no likinge;

Bot where he seth of eny beste

The felthe, ther he makth his feste,

And therupon he wole alyhte,

There liketh him non other sihte. (II.413-24)

By emphasizing the heat and filth of spring, in a landscape once again not for old men, Gower reinforces his general vision that The world empeireth comunly. It is, of course, the perpetual lament of the old, for which their own bodies provide evidence daily. If "the two most potent words in Gower (are)... 'soft' and 'thing'", [Christopher Ricks, in Minnis, p. 28. According to J.D. Pickles and J.L. Dawson, A Concordance to John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Cambridge, 1987, "thing" occurs 469 times, "thinge" four times, and "things" 97 times. "Softe" and "softe" occur 73 times, and "softly" once.] they may very well symptomize the poet's awareness both of the general physiological decay of the body and the specifically sexual fear of impotence. As Patrick J. Gallacher observes, "A motif of sexual inadequacy, related to moral imperfection, characterizes his (Gower's) summary of complexional physiology." [ Op. cit., p. 146] In fact, both hardness and softness engross and dominate Gower's imagination, as Lynch indicates when she points to the epitaph on the tomb of Iphis and Araxarathan: "He was to neysshe and sche to hard" (IV.3681). [See Alexandre Leupin, "The Powerlessness of Writing: Guilluame de Machaut, the Gorgon, and Ordenance," Yale French Studies 70 (1986), pp. 127-149, for a discussion of the ambiguity of hardness, both as horror and encouragement.]

Hardness, however, can also be associated with death, as well as with sexual impotence; in discussing his erotic agony, Gower combines the fear of sexual impotence with reification when Amans compares himself with a frozen key:

For certes there was nevere keie

Ne frosen us upon the wal

More inly cold than I am al. (VI.244-46) .

In the Voir Dit, Peronelle gives Machaut a key, certainly not a frozen one, however, in exchange for a ring. The key in the Middle High German "du bist min", the earliest instance of the commonplace, is not frozen, and certainly is not intended to suggest that the lover has been turned into a thing. [In the late twentieth-century popular song, "Brand New Key," the key suggests potency, not reification.]

Later in the same book Gower combines key, lovedrunkness, and blindness:

The boteleer which berth the keie

Is blind...(VI.453-453)

Near the end of the poem, the relief that Venus offers is an ointment, “mor cold than eny keie” (VIII.2816).

But the most blatant reification occurs near the end of the poem; when Venus categorically states that Amans is old, she uses "thing" with transparent ambiguity:

What bargain scholde a man assaie,

Whan that him lacketh forto paie?

Mi sone, if thou be wel bethoght,

This toucheth thee; foryet it noght:

The thing is torned into was;

That which was whilom grene gras,

I welked hey at time now.

Forthi mi conseil is that thou

Remembre wel hou thou art old. (viii.2431-39)

The portrait of the poet that emerges, then, from these formally lyric routines is of an old man, blind, sexually inert, exhausted, and, in his own mind, reified.

Several other aspects of the poem suggest, though not univocally, that the composer of the poem is old. The fact that Book Five, devoted to Avarice, is twice the length of any other book (more than 2000 lines longer than book seven) may be partially accounted for by the argument that Avarice eventually replaced Pride as the most denounced sin in the middle ages. [For a good bibliography on this topic, see Richard Newhauser,."The Meaning of Gawain's Greed," Studies in Philology LXXXVII (1990), pp. 410-426.] In addition, Book Five is filled with stories of rape and violence, constantly linking sex, money, and bloodshed, a phenomenon that is often associated with satire. Walter of Chatillon, ofr example, invokes Juvenal to denounce the sexual behavior of wealthy men: .

Nullis avaritia rebus erubescit,

ex hac vis libidinis derivata crescit,

nam cum semel opibus dives intumescit,

inguinis et capitis que sunt discrimina nescit (Juvenal 6.301).

Avarice blushes at nothing, but derived from it the power of lust grows, for the rich man swells together with his wealth, and cannot tell his loins from his head. [(Moralisch-Satirische Gedichte von Walters von Chatillon, Heidelberg, 1929, 4.19).]

Gower himself, in the Vox Clamantis, makes such a connection more than once. In his denunciation of greedy priests, the connection between greed and sexuality develops through a series of variations on "purse":

Torquentur bursa sic reus atque rea:

Ipse gregis loculos mulget, trahit in tribulosque

Cause quo lana vulsa manebit ei.

Quod corpus peccat peccantis bursa relaxat:

Hec statuunt iura presulis ecce nova.

Sic iteranda modo venus affert lucra registro;

Dum patitur bursa, sunt residiva mala;

Dum loculus pregnat satis, impregnare liceat;

Dat partus loculi iura subacta tibi. (III.194-202)

And so the guilty man and woman are tortured by means of their purse. The priest drains the pockets of his flock and drags it among the thistles of lawsuits so that its fleece will be pulled out by them. The priest's new-fangled decisions declare that because the body has sinned, the sinner;s purse should pay. So in these days repeated lust means profits in the account book. One's sins are in arrears until his purse is opened. When a man's treasure chest is full enough, his lust may have its fill; the treasure chest's spawn renders the law subject to you. [Stockton's translation].

The opening lines recall the denunciation of priestly greed in the Apocalypse of Golias, ll. 139-40:

trahit jus ovium in causae tribulos,

vellens exuvias et mungens loculos.

The priest drains the pockets of his flock and drags it among the thistles. ( The Latin poems commonly attributed to Walter Mapes, ed. by Thomas Wright, London, 1841, p. 8).]

Gower's association of pregnans loculus and locuples in his denunciation of lawyers later in the Vox Clamantis continues to forge a link between sexuality and greed:

Sic viget ex auro loculus pregnans alieno;

Quod male concepit, peius id ipse parit:

Nam modus est legis cito cum locuplex fore nummis

Possit, tunc terras appetit ipse novas.

Thus his purse is prosperous, bulging with other people's gold. For the way of the law is that as soon as one can become rich in money, he then hungers for new lands (VI.131-34).

As a satirist, then, Gower participated in the general moral disapproval of greed, and used the traditional associations of greed and sexuality. In addition, however, the size of Book Five may be a function of the medieval association of Avarice with old age, as these lines from Jean de Cond>'s Lay dou blanc chevalier indicate:

Rihoteus et plains d'amertume

Et avarissieus devient

Li hons quant > vielleche vient.

[ As quoted by Cerquiglini, op. cit., p. 111, n. 6. See also George R. Coffman, "Old Age from Horace to Chaucer," Speculum 9 (1934), 249-77.] For example, early in the book, Genius tells the story of Tantalus, in spite of its apparent non-relationship to avarice; the connection, however, is unsatisfiable appetite; Tantalus was punished for his lust for Juno, and Amans certainly is unhappy with his "heart fastened to a dying animal," although Gower makes no overt reference to the sexual nature of Tantalus' crime.

Links between sex and greed continue throughout Book Five; the miser who loses his "bagges" (loculi again) is symbolically castrated:

That oon wolde have his bagges stille,

And noght departen with his wille,

And dar noght for the thieves slepe,

So fain he wolde his tresor kepe;

That other mai noght wel be glad,

For he is evere more adrad

Of these lovers that gon aboute,

In aunter if thei putte him oute.

So have thei bothe litel joye

As wel of love as of monoie. (V.601-610)

In the story of Neptune and Cornix, the rapist is a figurative robber:

And hire in bothe hise armes hente,

And putte his hond toward the cofre,

Wher forto robbe he made a profre,

That lusti tresor forto stele,

Which passeth other goodes fele

And cleped is the maidenhede...(V.6176-81)

Gower's rhetorical amplifications, however, are matched by significant abbreviations; in the story of Babio, he (V.4781 ff.) suppresses details that are central to the earlier Latin version, including Babio's age, the fact that he attempts incest with his step-daughter, and that his punishment is to be castrated. Suppressing the castration would seem to be part of the general "muting" to which Pearsall alluded, as well as an attempt to reduce the number of direct references to (and therefore the anxiety about) impotence in the poem.

The suppressed incest, however, breaks out extravagantly in book VII, in what MaCaulay describes as "an uninformative and confusing narracio about incest," the story of Apollonius of Tyre. The fact that this story occupies ten percent of the Confessio Amantis [According to Pearsall's count (p. 17), the poem contains 133 stories, 17,213 lines, with 1738 devoted to Apollonius of Tyre (VIII).] makes it at least quantitatively tempting to establish a connection between incest and an old man's nightmare. [For some suggestive studies of medieval literary uses of incest, see: Andrew Welsh, "Doubling and Incest in the Mabinogi," Speculum 65 (1990), pp. 344-362; Elizabeth Archibald, "The Flight from Incest," Chaucer Review 20 (1986), pp. 259-272;, as well as her, "Incest in Medieval Literature," Forum for Modern Language Studies 25 (1989), pp. 1-15, and her book, Apollonius of Tyre, Cambridge, 1991, particularly pp. 191-193; C. David Benson, "Incest and Moral Poetry in Gower's Confessio Amantis," Chaucer Review 19 (1984), pp. 100-109. Yeager (254 ff.) defends Gower's flexibility towards the sin, in his discussion of Benson's puzzlement about why VIII takes incest as its primary topic.]

A connection between old age and incest occurs in the Oneirocriticon of Artemidorus, a dream book whose importance both Le Goff and Russell insist upon. [Op. cit., pp. 235 ff.; pp. 58 ff.. The latest edition of Artemidorus is R.A. Pack, Artemidori Daldiani Onirocriticon Libri V, Leipzig, 1963; the latest translation is The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by R.J. White, Park Ridge, New Jersey, 1975. ] An authoritative text in the Byzantine world, translated into Arabic in the ninth century, a reduced version of the Oneirocriticon found its way into Western libraries by means of Leo Tuscus' translation of Achmet's Oneirocritica, and then by means of Paschalis Romanus' Liber thesauri occulti. [See Collin-Roset's introduction, op. cit. For a fourteenth-century vernacular dream book that provides feudal variations on the tradition of interpreting dreams, see Berriot, Fran$ois, Exposicions et significacions des songes et les Songes Daniel, Geneva, 1989. For other recent attempts to use the Oneirocriticon in interpreting dreams in medieval literature: see Emil Ploss, "Byzantinische Traumsymbolik und Kriemhilds Falkentraum," Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift 39 (1958), 218-26; Wilhelm Deinert, Ritter und Kosmos im Parzival, Munich, 1960; Hans Hesse, "Herzeloydens Traum," Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 43 (1962), 306-309; Karl-Josef Steinmeyer, “Untersuchungen zur allegorischen Bedeutung der Tr&ume in altfranz%sichen Rolandslied,” Langue et Parole 5, Munich, 1963; Arthur T. Hatto, "Herzeloyde's Dragon Dream," German Life and Letters 22 (1968-69), 16-31; Pierre Jonin, "Le songe d'Iseut dan la f*ret du Morois," Moyen Age 64 (1958), 103-13; Arthur B. Groos, "Time Reference and the Liturgical Calendar in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival," Deutsche Vierteljarschrift 75 (1975), 43-64; Steven R. Fischer, The Dream in the Middle High German Epic, Bern, 1978; S.R. Fischer, "Der Traum der Mutter Ruodliebs," Zeitschrift f~r deutsche Philologie 101 (1982); S.R. Fischer, "Dream Books and the Interpretation of Medieval Literary Dreams," Speculum 1982. For earlier work in this area, see Sofus Larsen, "Anitk og Nordisk Drommetro," Aarboger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie III, 7 (1917), 37-85. Also useful are: Hans Joachim Kamphausen, Traum und Vision in der lateinischen Poesie der Karolingerzeit, Bern, 1975. Steven R. Fischer, The Complete Medieval Dreambook: A Multilingual, Alphabetical "Somnia Danielis: Collection, Bern, 1982; on Somniale Danielis: An Edition of a Medieval Latin Dream Interpretation Handbook, ed. Lawrence T. Martin, Bern, 1981. ]

Although ancient dream theory was predominantly concerned with prediction, while modern interpreters are characteristically concerned with the personality of the dreamer, [S.R.F. Price "The Future of Dreams" From Freud to Artemidorus," Past and Present 113 (1986) pp. 3-37. S.R. Fischer, "Dream Books and the Interpretation of Medieval Dreams," Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte lxv (1983), pp. 1 -20. Although Maria Elisabeth Wittmer-Butsch devotes a significant portion of Zur Bedeutung von Schlaf und Traum im Mittelalter, Krems, Vienna, 1990 to "Der Traum als pers%nliches Erlebnis," (pp. 190-368), most of her discussion is confined to religious experiences. ] Artemidorus and his medieval followers do insist that certain qualities of the dreamer himself influence the interpretation of a dream. For example, Artemidorus distinguishes between what a figure in an old man's dream may mean and what the same figure in a young man's dream may mean, while Albertus Magnus explictly states that the meaning of a dream is a function of the dreamer's complexio: [Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, ed. A. Borgnet, Paris, 1890, v. 9, p. 206.]

Artificiosissimus autem judex somniorum, qui bene similitudines potest ex facultate naturae et artis inspicere, hoc modo quod etiam similitudines visae et ad coelestia et ad locum et passionem somniantis et complexionem comparet, et tunc secundum hoc vaticinetur.

The most accomplished judge of dreams, whose ability to examine the similitudes is a function both of nature and of art, compares the similitudes of the vision to celestial affairs, to the place and suffering and psychological composition of the dreamer.

He goes on to indicate that the same dream must be interpreted differently in the case of king and commoner, rich and poor, man and woman.

Artemidorus' interpretation of a dream of incest shows an awareness of a range of possibilities, including a specific connection with age, as well as with wealth:

It is good for a poor man to have sexual intercourse with a rich daughter. For he will receive great assistance from his daughter and, in this way, take pleasure in her. But frequently rich fathers have, even against their original resolution, given something to their daughters after this dream, and sick fathers have died and left behind an inheritance for their daughters. (I.78 p. 61)

Artemidorus also provides material that adds to the signifcance already established by Patrick Gallacher for the figure of Hermes in the Confessio Amantis, since he connects the Greek god with rhetoric, commerce, and death:

Hermes is good for those studying oratory...for those whose life is devoted to trade and commerce....He portends death for the sick (p. 120).

These connections may very well have been in Gower's mind, not because he wished to provide cues for interpretation, but because they were part of the cultural currency of the fourteenth-century imagination.

Another sign that the poem is the product of a poet who is aging uncomfortably is the interest in remedies for the illnesses that accompany old age that informs the Confessio Amantis, [A truly skeptical reader might imagine that the aging lover's passion was at least partly derived from a belief in the therapeutic power of a young body, first demonstrated in the application of Abishag the Shunammite to the body of David, old and stricken with years. In the Secretum Secretorum, for example, Roger Bacon recommends: Si sentis dolorem in stomacho ...tunc medecina necessaria tibi est amplecti puellam calidam et speciosam. "This is probably a perversion of Galen's advice that patients with 'cold' indigestions should apply a plump child or, more conveniently, a fat puppy to their abdominal region in order to increase their innate heat which is the agent of digestion." As quoted in A.G. Little and E. Withington, Fratris Rogeri Bacon De Retardatione Accidentium Senectutis, Oxford, 1928, p. xl.] and may account for some of the entries in the catalogue of stars, herbs, and stones that Genius supplies in Book Seven. The 12th star, Alpheta, governed by Scorpio, is associated with Rosemary (VII.1407), an herb recommended to combat contra passiones senectutis. [Little and Withington, op. cit., p. 174.] Gower also associates the star Algo, which accompanies Saturn, with Eleborum, which is, according to Bacon and others, an antidote to melancholy, a psychological state that accelerates old age. [Ibid., p. 126.]

Gower's English poem, then, is, among other things, the long, bad dream of a sick old man, and the text shows signs of the age of its creator as early as book One. [Or earlier, as Olssen's remarks about (p. 239) the image of Nebuchadnezzar in the prologue to the Confessio Amantis suggest: "The lover, as an aging man, mirrors the pattern of history figured in the statue." Olssen's remarks on the senex as a fool of love (pp. 49-50) are also useful. J.A. Burrow's argument, then, that the reader should be shocked to discover that Amans is old at the end of the poem would (Minnis 5-24) require a fairly slow reader, although Nicolette Zeeman also argues for the abruptness of the revelation of the narrator's age, in "The Verse of Courtly Love in the Framing Narrative of the Confessio Amantis," Medium Aevum 60 (1991), pp. 222-240.] It is significant that, in a poem explicitly and relentlessly concerned with erotic psychology and behavior, several critics have found a scene between two birds to be the most satisfying of the sexual encounters described in the Confessio Amantis. [Bennett claims that we should read the conclusion to Gower's version of the story of Ceix and Alcyone as a wish: "Would that we might be birds" (p. 408).] The extract of monkey glands that enabled Yeats to see nymphs and satyrs copulating in the foam was unavailable to Gower, for whom the domestic, tranquil embrace of Ceix and Alcyone would have to do.