The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form

Description: Dream visions of Langland, Chaucer, and the "Pearl"-poet use "not simply a common external form but one that contains an internal, intrinsic dynamic or strategy as well"; it derives from the "skepticism and nominalism of Augustine, Macrobius,Guillaume de Lorris, Ockham, and Guillaume de Conches." Russell examines the form in its literary and scientific contexts and shows that the dream poets use it "to call all experience into question."; Chapter 5, "Applications: Three Deconstructive Dream Visions," is devoted to BD, HF, and "Pearl." These poems deal with "questions of epistemology, of perspective, of ways of knowing, and of the relationship between words and the truth these words seek to express." They all "share a profound distrust of language and its ability to represent phenomenal reality...and an equal distrust of the knowability of that reality."; BD is a deconstructive poem, a "meditation on the problems of the language of sentiment." It shows language failing rhetorical intentions but affirming a community that holds "values inexpressible in words." BD expresses grief without "succumbing to the trivial locutions."; HF also expresses the inexpressible: it "demonstrates that poems lie." The "slippery distinctions" between dreamer-character and dreamer-poet suggest that the purpose of HF is "the undermining of lore itself, the deconstruction of, perhaps, discourse itself." Chaucer uses writing "to deconstruct the tyranny of the written word."