under the epigone’s nagging anxiety that there is no poetic garment not
already used (“All that he wereth, it is borowed ware”).^65 In this dismal
virtual reality, Drede glimpses his waking avatar ingloriously revealed. The
poet-dreamer’s emulous desire to write stands exposed as a crude desire to
acquire power through listening (“The drevyll stondeth to herken, and he
can”), and ambitions to adopt the public voice of Lydgate have shrunk to
this poem of esoteric, paranoid exchanges. Drede has now become the
object of his own anxious look.
This“teder man”is a nightmare vision of the other that haunts rhetorical
discourse, thehomo rhetoricusdescribed by Richard Lanham^66 – afigure (in
every sense) who is solely a collection of patches from the rhetorical garments
of others. At the end of this long tunnel, the rhetorician has encountered a
simulacrum of himself; he has become the object of his own vision and his
own knowledge, although that knowledge is– aptly enough– filtered
through the words of Dissimulation, as if to imply that it will always be the
product of a pervasive, unlocatable deceit and misrecognition. As the dream’s
frame breaks and the prologue intrudes, Drede’s look gives him access to an
ascendancy that is indistinguishable from the most degrading exposure.
Another frame now cracks, for the threat this uncanny being prefigures is
soon made clear. As the last and deadliest Vice comes at him from behind, a
frightened Drede reacts:
I lyked no thynge his playe,
For yf I had not quyckelyfledde the touche,
He had plucte oute the nobles of my pouche. ( 502 – 04 )A sinisterly“privy”overture (“behynde me he sayde‘Bo!’,” 500 ) is swiftly
transformed into a threat of castration.^67 The Wedo in Dunbar’sTretis of
the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedouses the same analogy:
Quhen I that grome geldit had of gudis and of natur,
Me thoght him gracelese one to goif, sa me God help. (B 3 , 393 – 94 )The impotence–the symbolic castration, indeed–that frames the poem
once again breaks in as it did with the introduction of Dame Sans-Pere.
Disceyte also returns us to the breakdown of language, which, as we saw,
was so conspicuous in that scene. The speech he produces communicates
most fully the“cruel emptiness”of the Thing, here“unveiled with a cruel
and insistent power”;^68 it is that of an unrepresentable absolutist Other,
menacing, arbitrary and incomprehensible:
Parde, remembre whan ye were there,
There I wynked on you–wote ye not where?The Bowge of Courteand the paranoid subject 59