Monday, March 23, 2015

Sexual Alchemy: Sloth & Productivity in Fragment VIII


“We faille of that which that we wolden have, And in oure madnesse everemoore we rave” 

The Canon's Yeoman's Tale
Geoffrey Chaucer

*************************************
Introduction to English Literature 1 
A Genealogy of Gender and Genre 

In this course, we explore gender and genre through literature produced in and around the early British Isles, from the elegiac poetry of the Anglo Saxons to the Epic poetry of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this survey of medieval and early modern texts, we trace how forms of narrative were informed by and acted on the construction of concepts of sex and sexuality. We study how debates around nature and nurture, essential and artificial, eternal and mutable came to produce later notions of transgender, queerness, disability, race, and religious difference.

*************************************
Like Attracts Like:
Confessions of a 14th C Scientist

What is the ultimate goal of Science? What is the ultimate goal of same-sex attraction? In class we listed many of the products of science, including knowledge, power, technology, and conflict. Likewise, we listed many of the products of same-sex relationships, including knowledge of one another, sexual power, techniques for pleasure, and conflict. Then we asked how might investors (of financial or social capital) see this output? What if science or same-sex relationships, despite many contributions, don't produce the specific things they want? What if investors demand scientists turn lead into gold? What if authorities demand that sexual activity produce children? Despite constant work, discourses that resist or fail to live up to the demands of society continue to be marked as unproductive, mad, or sinful. 

Continuing our discussion of the genre of confession as a medieval form of "speaking-together" about corporate sins, our class examined Geoffrey Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman takes a personal story and transforms it into a reflection on the social discourses of alchemy and sexuality. According to medieval science, all bodies are subject to the grand unifying principle that "like attracts like." In this way, alchemy is about taking diverse materials, mixing them together to get like and like to recombine, purifying all substances back into undifferentiated forms. This prime matter, which some supposed mercury to be, is the perfect product of "like attracting like" and from which all matter might be re-created. Likewise, the intimate, secret, all male society of alchemical mentor and apprentice represented in the relationship between the Canon and his Yeoman, reflects "like attracting like," suggesting that same-sex attraction is the more pure sexuality from which all love derives. Yet alchemy and same-sex relationships, while more natural, are considered more sinful because they do not (re)produce the socially demanded products of gold and children. Ironically, the sin of alchemy and same-sex pairings is that they aren't considered heterogenous enough, they do not "divide" in ways to be properly creative.


*************************************
*************************************
Sloth: the Wrong Kind 
of (Re-)Production

“Sloth” or the “unspeakable” sin shows a lack of proper (re)production that marks alchemists making them into embodiments of waste and sloth because it does not produce the proper kind of goods, claims that mark the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale and the Second Nun’s Tale in Fragment VIII of the Canterbury Tales. The Second Nun opens her tale about chastity with a sermon on the sin of “ydelnesse.” One must always keep busy, says the Nun, “Whan he may man in ydelnesse espye, / He kan so lightly cache hym in his trappe, / Til that a man be hent right by the lappe, / He nys nat war the feend hath hym in honde. / Wel oghte us werche, and ydelnesse withstonde” (Geoffrey Chaucer, the Second Nun’s Prologue 8-14). Man is seized by the lap, presenting idleness as failed production or reproduction from the working class. This is critical for her as she is about to tell a tale (a form of leisure) where a secular woman abstains sex to pursue the invisible promised rewards of God. The opposition of Sloth then is not simply (re)production but production of a certain kind.

The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale then is a critical response, an exemplum supposedly showing the dangers of not reproducing according to the norms of gender. The work of excessive masculine heat labor produces a kind of poverty of ideal materials (gold money) but produces an excess of other material and social products. Evident by the switch from identification as an alchemist to the confession that alchemy is impossible, after every attempt to mix everything together, “The pot tobreketh, and farewel, al is go,” the container of breaks by excessive embodiment. If we accept this failure, like an alchemist, we find an over-productive reflection of the compulsion to work in society (Canon Tale 907). This goes beyond the scope of sublimation of the diverse into the singular, instead it does what it promises to do, multiply, only it is multiplying diversity.


*************************************
*************************************


Mercurial Goals & Methods

In his prologue and tales, the Canon’s Yeoman affirms how their labor attempts to control diversity and change through the ability to reproduce (to “multiplie”) of ideal matter. Their work, he says works through “oure materes encorporyng, / Oure cementyng and fermentacioun, (816-817). They bring together diverse bodies and transform them into gold and silver through the technologies of change. In this case, the alchemist uses fire (“fir) as part of “sublymyng” mecury, “quyksilver, yclept mercurie crude” into silver. Mercury is a signature substance in alchemy, considered masculine (metal) and feminine (liquid), as well as spiritual and ideal (easily turned into a gas) as well as material and base (liquid at room-temperature). Mercury was named after the god of border crossing, whose name in Greek means “boundary stone” and the creator of alchemy. Alchemists also believed mercury to be the first undifferentiated original water from Genesis 1.

The problem is Alchemists reproduce the matter of their work rather than their supposed goal. The Canon is always on the move, like mercury, existing without a proper state or place in society. When the pilgrims ask where they come from, the Yeoman responds that he and his master live in the liberties of a city, “In the suburbes of a toun… Lurkynge in hernes and in lanes blynde, / Wheras this robbours and thise theves by kynde / Holden hir pryvee fereful residence, / As they that dar nat shewen hir presence” (Canon Prologue 657-652). Here they are at their liberty to move about freely, keeping company with outlaws (potentially including sodomites) who fall outside the order of law and gender. “Ge is heere and there” the Yeoman says of his master, “He is so variaunt, be abit nowhere.” This shiftiness at once marks the power of queer anonymity and its lack of social access or interaction with proper boundaries that govern bodies in the city. 

*************************************
*************************************


The Madness of (Re)Making

As soon as he erupts on the scene, the alchemists present themselves as bodies that are hard at work, undergoing material change and re-signification. The Canon and his Yeoman have “riden fully fyve mile” so that they and their horses are covered in sweat. This emphasis on the heated labor of the body is mirrored the blackened face of the Yeoman. “Reednesse have I noon, right wel I knowe / In my visage,” confesses the Yeoman, “for fumes diverse / Of metals, whiche ye han herd me reherce, /Consumed and wasted han my reednesse” so that while his “colour was bothe fressh and reed / Now is it wan and of a leden hewe” (Prologue 1097-1098/ Tale 724-728). This darkening of the body as excessively full of masculine heat, in line with humoral theory that stated that darker skin was a result of excess black bile. This bile at once marks a body as containing a tendency towards sloth, depression, and laziness. In other words, too much work and too much of the proper gender (masculine heat) can produce Sloth.

Working with chemicals produces alternative states of mind, madness derived from heighted states of productivity. The Second Nun argues that the Slothful “Thurgh his madnesse and folye / Hath lost his owene good thurgh jupartye, / Thanne he exciteth oother folk therto, / To lesen hir good, as he hymself hath do. / For unto shrewes joye it is and ese / To have hir felawes in peyne and disese.” The Yeoman confesses that “We faille of that which that we wolden have, / And in oure madnesse everemoore we rave” (Canon Tale 958-959). They fail to do the impossible but succeed in producing madness. Madness suggests mental illness but also anger, another result of excessive heat. From the heat of labor, their work makes them depressed, “For sorwe of which almoost we wexen wood.” They become consumed by the act of making and remaking.

*************************************
*************************************


Same Sex Attraction and Sodomitical (Re)Production

In the second tale, where the Canon's Yeoman presents alchemists as liars and con artists, the Yeoman continually affirms the duplicity (multiplication via mimicry) of his work. In this tale, an alchemist promises a priest to secrets of his alchemy, so that he might be able to transform lesser metals into gold. According to the Yeoman, the alchemist tricks a priest, whom is “made his ape,” or copy (Canon Tale 1313). The alchemist will make substantial money off of the priest through his con. He does so by having him work as his assistant, copying his motions as he makes copies of silver objects in a “chalk stoon” that serves as a mold, to take silver shavings and “make it of the same shap” of the object to be multiplied, “an ingot” (Canon Tale 1207-9). If the priest is paying attention, he will learn the con and that by chemistry and a glib ability to exploit others. The alchemist leaves the priest as a version of himself, before he began, penniless but steeped practice.

The Canon and his Yeoman exist in a non-reproductive all male environment that takes the dream of “like attracting like,” a principle from Aristotle. The Yeoman is consistently try to emphasize secrecy and failure in order to distract from potentially speaking about “the sin that should not be named” (sodomy), wherein the student (the lesser) is drawn into the corpus of the master (the Canon). Metaphorically, if not literally, the Canon gives his body as he “blowe the fir” (fire being a sign of the masculine matter), his seed (money), and his companionship (abstaining the company of women) out of a desire for his master’s secret essence (what Plato in the Symposium calls the “algama,” or the hidden thing inside the beloved). As a result of the committed relationship to the Canon, the Yeoman becomes a kind of reproduction of his master, a fantasy of a non-heterosexual (asexual or homosexual) spawning of a male without the need for women.

*************************************
*************************************

No comments:

Post a Comment