The Alchemy of Imagination and the Labyrinth of Meaning: Some Caveats About the Afterlife of Sources

The Alchemy of Imagination and the Labyrinth of Meaning: Some Caveats About the Afterlife of Sources Carolyn P. Collette Mount Holyoke College In the name of the rose, Umberto Eco constructs the library at the heart of the monastery as a labyrinth, a structural symbol of his theory of literary semiotics. The labyrinth, a figure he explicates in A Theory of Semiotics and in Postscript to the Name of the Rose, represents the tortuous and essentially independent paths that individuals trace in their apprehension and creation of meaning in response to verbal signs: ‘‘Like a large labyrinthine garden, a work of art permits one to take many different routes, whose number is increased by the criss-cross of its paths.’’1 In the Postscript, he distinguishes among types of labyrinths, identifying the rhizome pattern as the one William of Baskerville (like the reader) encounters: ‘‘The rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite.’’2 He goes on, ‘‘The space of conjecture is a rhizome space . . . the world in which William realizes he is living . . . has a rhizome structure: that is, it can be structured but is never structured definitively.’’3 The rhizome labyrinth’s indefinite structure is the labyrinth Vincent DiMarco and I entered when we began our research on the sources and analogues of The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. The tale is famously one without known sources, but it exists within a tradition of Chaucer’s close familiarity with alchemy and a plenitude of contemporary alchemical materi1 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 275. 2 Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1983), p. 57. 3 Eco, Postscript, p. 58. PAGE 243 243 ................. 16094$ CH13 11-01-10 14:04:39 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER als that provide a contextual labyrinth of the sort Eco describes: one that can be structured, but never structured definitively. To compound the difficulty, the discourse of alchemy is without a center or a periphery ; endlessly self-reflexive, it correlates to no clear external signifiers or interpretants. For Chaucer to use such a discourse means that he engaged in the dual conversation that, Eco maintains, all authors who work with source materials create. A writer creating a work creates two conversations. First, the text that is being written is in dialogue with ‘‘all other previously written texts’’ and, second, the author is in dialogue with a model reader.4 Chaucer’s work seems to offer a textbook example of these precepts. The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is indeed in dialogue with multiple previously written texts, and, at the same time, Chaucer alludes to, draws on, and hints at his sources in a way that assumes a model reader, one adept enough to grasp the structure of his labyrinth with its copious verbal crisscrossing paths. The difficulty, of course, is in our coming ‘‘after.’’ The afterlife of the sources and the analogues the poet alludes to is shadowy at best; trying to track them, we enter a labyrinth where even the paths are not clear, the location of a center unsure, and all conclusions are debatable. We know that Chaucer drew on material for the tale, that he did not create it wholly from his imagination. We know from the way that the tale is composed that he plays with the discourse of alchemy, as Lee Patterson and others have shown, and that the cadencing, the lists, the rhythms of the tale bring poetry and meaning out of arcane materials and conventions .5 Yet neither Part 1 nor Part 2, as a whole, has been linked to definitive antecedents. A strong modern critical tradition holds that the tale is Chaucer’s disparagement of an art that he found false. A more venerable tradition of Chaucer as an alchemical adept began as early as the fifteenth century, when Thomas Norton cited Chaucer’s alchemical wisdom in the Ordinal; this tradition flourished in the seventeenth century in conjunction with the story that Gower, whose alchemical writings are extensive...