ABSTRACT
In his account for the “origins of the English novel,” Michael McKeon suggests that one of the features that differentiates the novel from its pre-seventeenth-century precursors is a difference “in attitudes towards how to tell the truth in narrative” (20). As he explains, “the ‘authentication’ of medieval narrative is achieved through a variety of conventions, which can provide it with a foundation that is felt to be somehow ‘empirical’ in a sense far looser than any modern conception of that term;” and the particular example that he proposes is “the authenticating frame of the dream vision” (37–38). This generalization is supported to some extent by the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, who undeniably recognizes and exploits the authenticating potential of dream-experience in several of his longer dream-visions—including, for example, The House of Fame. In this poem, Chaucer asserts the validity of his version of the tragedy of Dido (as opposed to the preceding versions by Virgil and Ovid) only by pretending to write “just as I dreamed indeed, without adducing any other authority” (“as me mette, redely—/Non other auctour alegge I” [ll. 313–14]). However, of all the conventions that might have been chosen to illustrate authenticating maneuvers in medieval narrative, the dream-vision is perhaps a particularly complex, even problematic, example. This is because the dream-vision seems to have been used by medieval authors not just as a means of authentication but also as a vehicle for questioning the very validity of the various truth-claims that different kinds of discourse typically make.
