The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages by Penelope Reed Doob

Abstract

REVIEWS Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). xviii, 356. 25 illustrations. The general reader has likely been troubled and tried by labyrinthine pas­ sages found no more traceable with the passage of time — the Garden of Forked Paths schematized by Borges, or the rough corridor of Beckett’s Foirades/Fizzles. In Penelope Doob’s new book the bold and fresh hypoth­ esis is advanced that the labyrinth is one of the fundamental spatial models of literary construction (as J. Hillis Miller has urged in a contrary manner in “Ariadne’s Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line,” in Interpretation of Narrative, ed. Mario J. Valdes and Owen J. Miller [University of Toronto Press, 1978] 148-66). It may also be useful and consoling to conceive that a labyrinth is what we are in, and even that what followers of St. Paul have called the World is such a baffling and wearily trod, though adventurous, con­ struction in which to mark time. See how our vocabulary for investigation and endurance can be attached to the labyrinth — “clue,” “amazement,” the “inextricable” and “inexplicable,” and, Doob would argue, “meander­ ing,” “hazard” and “peril” (Latin anceps), “error,” “toil” (and the Latin labor), “text,” “circumlocution,” and “complexity.” Though Doob limits herself to cases from some of the earlier moments of literature and visual design, her evidence should remain of use to those whose interests happen to be in later material. Joyceans will first find a careful amassing of information about the ingenious Daedalus, and, later, Daedalian practice in intertextuality. And readers who might suppose that the situating by Donne of Truth on a mountain that one “about must, and about must go” is an expression of skepticism about sectarian division, may consult pages 78-79, where a similar theme is traced back to some Early Christian polemicists. Within the project of this book, with materials ex­ plored by medievalists, Doob ranges with admirable mastery and professional breadth in major discussions of texts for several of which general canonical claims may be made. There is no reference further back to the Odyssey or the construction (possibly) of pyramids. Life is made easier, though less English Studies in Ca n a d a , x v ii , 3, September 1 9 9 1 pleasurable, by the use throughout the book of English translations with only infrequent citation of the original passages. The book, it should be remarked, is quite a handsome one with actual footnotes, and very accurate in presentation. In the initial phases of the book the Idea promised in the title is expounded in a way an Aristotelian at least might recognize, through a very careful step by step isolating of essential attributes of labyrinths (see 61-62; on 97 Hillis Miller is misapplied as corroboration). One learns the fact that visual evidence before the Renaissance regularly depicted designs of “unicursal” labyrinths, in which a single path laboriously winds, usually in half circles, from the entrance around to the goal. These the book illustrates with a variety of cases, some retraceable if you own the book and grew up liking to do that, others less comprehensible. But the curious counterfact to visual evidence is that literary narration often seems to speak of “multicursal” labyrinths with dead ends, for which one would need a clew or clue in its first OED sense like the one Ariadne presented to the untrustworthy Theseus. And yet the first clearcut visual design of a multicursal labyrinth seems to occur only ca. 1420 in Giovanni Fontana’s manuscript War Machines Noted in Code Jictitiis] and Figures, as I learn from Hermann Kern, Labyrinthe: Erscheinungsformen und Deutungen: 5000 Jahre Gegenwart eines Urbilds (München: Prestel, 1982) 202-4. The coruscating dual form of the labyrinth Doob then shapes into an Idea more difficult to be mindful of, something more like what happens to the pos­ sibility of a Grecian urn in Keats’s imagination. Thus we have “labyrinthicity ” in (most any) “ornate, highly complicated work of art, elegantly ordered by interwoven parts comprising an admirable whole” (192, cf. 3, but also the old adjective “daedal” ). It comes to name the...