Disconsolate Art

Art without consolation would, it seems, be fatally deficient. Art’s distinctive identity, central to a humanist aesthetic, emanates from its supposedly singular capacity to transcend: where humanists are menaced by meaninglessness, art offers significance; where humanists lament loss, art reveals timeless truth and enduring beauty; where humanists sense absence, art promises presence. Humanist art consoles the living about the dead and the losses they signify. It affirms the extension of (human) life into the realms of the lifeless. Read (as it customarily is) with such expectations, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess becomes an artistic experiment in which the death of John of Gaunt’s wife provides Chaucer the matter through which to transcend the boundaries of human life and, in that act, create art. But not so fast. Humanist traditions prepare readers for such a result, and yet this narrative continuously avoids granting it. Instead, the poem actively “refuses to re-figure loss as transcendence.”1 It requires that we proclaim, along with its proverbially obtuse narrator, that “She is dead!” and, in the process, it “insist[s] on the irreducibility of certain limits.”3 Absence, loss, and the threat of meaninglessness all endure. The poem’s many irresolvable ambiguities — its narrator’s mysterious and unnatural illness, its melancholic modifications that transform Ovid’s story of Ceyx (for Chaucer, Seys) and Alcyone into tragedy, its hyperbolic miscommunication between grieving knight and inquisitive dreamer — linger. In deliberately refusing transformation or transcendence, the poem enacts what I would call a disconsolate poetics, in which pain and suffering perdure, in which darkness obscures the light.