Medieval Literature and Contemporary Theory (New Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 2)

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A Journal of Theory and Interpretation

Medieual Literature and Contemporary Theory

COVERDESIGN: All Artist P a i ~ i t i ~a ~Self-Portrait. g DP cluris mulieribus of' Boccaccio (in French 11-am.),1402. Paris, E3ibliothi.q~~ hationale, MS fr. 12420, fhl. 101 yo.

New

Literary History A Journal of Theory and Interpretation

Thejournal welcomes two types of contributions: theoretical articles on literature that deal with such subjects as the nature of literary theory, the aims of literature, the idea of literary history, the reading process, hermeneutics, the relation of linguistics to literature, literary change, literary value, the definitions of periods and their uses in interpretation, the evolution of styles,conventions, and genres, and articlesfrom other dticiplinesthat help interpret or define the problem of literary history or literary stwly. We solicit manuscripts from all scholars interested in problems pertinent to theory and interpretation. Contributions can deal with any literature and need not be in English; they should not exceed 5,000 words. Manuscripts are submitted at the author's risk and will not be returned unless they are accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes. Address all editorial communications to: The Editor, New Literary History, Wilson Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903, U. S. A.

VOLUME X WINTER 1979. NUMBER 2

EDITOR Ralph Cohen

EDITORIAL BOARD L. A. Beaurline Francis R. Hart E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Alan B. Howard

Robert Kellogg

Arthur C. Kirsch

J . C. Levenson

Austin E. Quigley

ADVISORY EDITORS Warner Berthoff, Haruard University Morton Bloomfield, Harvard University Helene Cixous, University of Paris VIII-Vincennes Jonathan Culler, Cornell University Richard Ellmann, Oxford Universzty Alastair Fowler, University of Edinburgh Wolfgang Iser, Univer.sity of Constance Fredric R.Jameson, Yale University H. W. Janson, New York University

Hans Robert Jauss, University of Constance

Thomas S. Kuhn, Princeton University

Robert Langbaum, Universzty of Virginia

Vida E. Markovie, Belgrade University

John Passmore, Australian National Universzty

Robert Weimann, Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR

Hayden White, University of CalfonziaSanta Cruz

TECHNICAL STAFF Chevis F. Horne, Jr. Gordon Hutner Laurene T . McKillop Barbara B. Smith, Secretary and Business Manager

PUBLISHER T h e Johns Hopkins University Press New Literary History was founded as part of the Sesquicentennial Celebration of the University of Virginia in 1969. It appears three times each academic year in Autumn, Winter, and Spring. Single copies, $5.00 (add $.90 postage outside U.S.). One-year subscriptions: institutions, $20.00; individuals, $1 1.00 (add $2.55 postage outside U.S.). Address subscription inquiries, address changes, claims for missing issues, advertising inquiries, and other correspondence relating to business affairs to: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218. T h e index for Volumes VII and VIII will be included in the ten-year index to be published in 1979. Thereafter, New Literary History will publish a cumulated index every five years.

Contents Volume X

Number 2

Winter 1979

Medieval Literature and Contemporary Theory

HANS ROBERT JAUSS

T h e Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature 181

PAUL ZUMTHOR From Hi(story) to Poem, o r the Paths of Pun: The Grands Rhetoriqueurs of Fifteenth-Century France 23 1 RAINER WARNING

On the Alterity of Medieval Religious Drama 265

EUGENE VANCE Mervelous Signals: Poetics, Sign Theory, and Politics in Chaucer's Troilw 293 MARIA CORTI

Models and Antimodels in Medieval Culture 339 Discussion

PAUL ZUMTHOR

Comments on H. R. Jauss's Article 367

EUGENE VANCE A Coda: Modern Medievalism and the Understanding of Understanding 377 J. A. BURROW BRIAN STOCK

T h e Alterity of Medieval Literature 385 Antiqui or Moderni? 39 1

DANIEL POIRION Literary Meaning in the Middle Ages: From a Sociology of Genres to an Anthropology of Works 401 MORTON BLOOMFIELD CONTRIBUTORS

Continuities and Discontinuities 409 Cover 3

Copyright @ 1979 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

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The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval

Literature

Hans Robert Jauss 'Thus is the skillful writer Under the reign of the sovereign heaven, Who from his treasure puts forth As a clever and knowledgeable man T h e old things and the new, Which together are good and beautiful. Guillaume le Clerc, Le Bestiaire

I. A Suggestion How to Legitimate the Contemporary

Interest in Medieval Literature

HE STUDY of the literature of the European Middle Ages has at the present time a peculiar advantage. It has lost its place in the educational canon, and therefore it hardly shows up in courses of study or curricula. It stands far from the modern trend of the development of theory and began its reorientation almost without notice; it is therefore still more strongly challenged in terms of its universality and public reputation than are the neighboring historical disciplines. In the necessity to reestablish its intellectual interest, one can today see an advantage rather than a misfortune, as the following presentation of studies from 1957 to 1976 will seek to demonstrate." Of all the demands of the student protest movement and the institutional reform of higher education in the idealist sixties, the establishment of interest is the very one which-for research as well as for teaching-is most to be hoped to outlast the technocratic regression of the pessimistic seventies. If I now take a position vis-a-vis this demand, I gladly confess that my experience with medieval literature has neither sprung from an original and consistently maintained point of view, nor is it considered by me to be unique. T h e reasons which, in my opinion, even today still justify an interest in this direction of studies and this field of research * Collected in Alteritat und Modernitat der mittelalterlichen Literatur (Munich: W . Fink

T

Verlag, 1977). CopyrightQ 1979 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia

182

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

only came to me little by little-and certainly not to me alone. T o a great extent, they are recognitions of a still unfinished "paradigm change" of which I only gradually became aware. Since I am especially eager to draw such insights into a review, I have opted for the attempt at a reevaluation of my experience from the perspective of the position I have now reached instead of the correction and completion of earlier findings. Proceeding in this manner, perhaps I will come off badly in answering my critics; but insofar as they themselves have a stake in efforts toward a renewal of medieval studies, they will surely concede to me that the order of the day is not to take up once again certain esoteric polemics, but rather to work out new formulations of the question. The present dilemma of research into the Middle Ages may be sketched as follows: the classical paradigms of the positivistic research of tradition as well as of the idealistic interpretation of works or styles have exhausted themselves, and the highly touted modern methods of structural linguistics, semiotics, and phenomenological or sociological literary theory have not yet gelled into the development of paradigms.' In view of this situation, I propose to justify the research and educational interest in medieval literature on three grounds: the aesthetic pleasure, the surprising otherness, and the model character of medieval texts. As one can easily guess, a proven method of literary hermeneutics lies at the basis of this triad. The immediate or prereflective reader experience, which always implicitly includes a test of readability, constitutes the necessary first hermeneutic bridge. The mediating effect o r hermeneutic function of the aesthetic pleasure proves to be that, whether through progressive agreement or through a via negationis, through the displeasure which occurs during the reading, one becomes aware of the astounding or surprising otherness of the world opened up by the text. In order to become conscious of this otherness of a departed past, a reflective consideration of its surprising aspects is called for, an activity which methodologically entails the reconstruction of the horizon of expectation of the addressees for whom the text was originally composed. This second hermeneutic step meanwhile cannot in itself be the absolute goal of understanding, if the knowledge of the otherness of a distant text-world so gained is to be more than simply a sharpened variation of historical reification, objectified through the contrast of horizons. In passing through the surprise of otherness, its possible meaning for us must be sought: the question of a significance which reaches further historically, which surpasses the original communicative situation, must be posed. O r to put it in Hans-Georg Gadamer's terminology: in the process of active

THE ALTERITY AND MODERNITY OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

183

understanding, the contrast of horizons must be led on to the fusion of the past horizon of aesthetic experience with the present one. But here there is no guarantee in advance that the fusion of horizons will succeed. T h e initial aesthetic pleasure of the text can finally disclose itself as a naive, modernizing preunderstanding, and the first aesthetic judgment of unreadability can also prove to be incapable of being overcome. Then the text, as a document which only retains historical interest, drops out of the canon of contemporary aesthetic experience. T o be sure, such a separation is a sentence which may be commuted, for the text which can no longer be aesthetically concretized2 for us may be able to obtain significance again for later readers. Significance, which is unlocked through aesthetic experience, arises from the convergence of effect [Wirkung]and reception. It is no atemporal, basic element which is always already given; rather, it is the nevercompleted result of a process of progressive and enriching interpretation, which concretizes-in an ever new and different manner-the textually immanent potential for meaning in the change of horizons of historical life- world^.^ T h e exceptionally fragmented history of the passing on of medieval literature demonstrates precisely this process of the development and preservation, the transformation and rejuvenation of the aesthetic canon, and does so in an exemplary manner: its repression by the aesthetic canon of the Renaissance; its continued existence as "subliterature" (bibliothLque bleue, roman gothique) during the Enlightenment; its rediscovery as a norm-giving origin by the secular and belated aesthetics of Christianity in Romanticism; its learned disclosure by nineteenth-century historicism; its reception by the ideologies of national literature; the countercurrent of its evaluation as the bridge of continuity of the Latin-European tradition; and, finally, the still isolated attempts of C. S. Lewis, Eugtne Vinaver, Robert Guiette, Alfred Adler, and Paul Zumthor to establish the modernity of medieval literature in its "alterity." Whoever, as specialist and as aficionado of its texts, holds the experience of medieval literature to be irreplaceable can, therefore, certainly no longer convince the educated among its detractors by appealing to a timeless canon of masterpieces supposedly incapable of being lost. Rather, he would better convince them with the invitation that the literature of this particularly distant and yet still exemplary past translates itself into our present without recourse to thesaurus or tabula rma, cultural heritage or modernism-insofar as the reader again makes use of his aesthetic "bill of rights" of a pleasurable understanding and an understanding pleasure.

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11. T h e Aesthetic Pleasure of Medieval Texts With this we turn back from the hermeneutic to the historical side of the problem. T o what extent can the steps-which are supposed to lead from aesthetic pleasure, through the reconstruction of otherness, to the disclosure of concretizable significance-prove themselves with medieval literature and bring the particular characteristics of its text-world into view, so that a learned interest can reestablish itself at the same time that an amateur's interest can be won over? Those features are numerous which, conditioned by the period, often impede the enjoyment of medieval texts for a modern reader who still senses the aesthetic charm of the past: the priority of convention over expression, the impersonality of the style, the formalism of the lyric, the traditionalism of the epic, the mixture of the poetic with the didactic, the difficult, hermetic symbolism.4So, at first it seems that an immediate aesthetic pleasure today still occurs only with texts from this past which-as productions of a flourishing imagination-allow one to forget such conventions, and which in fact have remained "readable" throughout the centuries: adventure novels, romances, and ballads. What Ariosto, Spenser, and Tasso found worthy at the apex of a process of renarration, and what also, as subliterature, survived all trivialization; what entered into Hegel's definition of adventuresomeness as the basic type of the Romantic, and what was so curiously mythified in Wagner's Lohengrin or Parsfal-as C. S. Lewis ~ h o w e d ,this ~ for the most part goes back to a pre-Christian but nonclassical heritage (as with the matiire de Bretagne). Thus precisely the least orthodox field of medieval texts has proved itself to be the most enduring in the history of reception! T h e elementary need for a fantasy world of adventure and lovers' rendezvous, of the mysterious and the wish-fulfilling, may explain the success of this "evergreen" of the medieval imagination. But this elementary level in no way exhausts the immediate pleasure of medieval texts. Aesthetic experience makes access possible on other levels as well, an access which does not need a bridge of historical knowledge. Robert Guiette, who described the charm of the obscure, the still-unsolved ("symbolisme sans signifiunce") as the primary attitude implicit in the medieval romance, has also rediscovered the aesthetic charm of poisie formelle, the conscious delight in variation. His attempts toward an aesthetics of reception of medieval literature may be collated into a scale of the modalities of aesthetic experience which arranges the process of reception according to literary genres, and which discloses the attitude particular to each:


(a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f)

liturgical drama religious play legend chanson de gestr symbolic poetry romance (g) fabliau (farce) (h) courtly lyric

-

cultic participation

- craving for spectacle / edification

-

astonishment / emotion / edification

- admiration / pity - deciphering the meaning - the delight in the unsolved (the obscure) -

entertainment / amusement

- the pleasure of formal variation

It is obvious that not each of these attitudes is immediately there for the asking for the modern reader. Only with difficulty can he transfer himself into cultic participation without the bridge of the Catholic faith which the liturgical drama presupposes. And he must first win back the particular sensibility for the symbolic, the invisible, and the supernatural, which was self-evident for the medieval reader as a "lecteur de symboles." And yet he can relearn it to a certain extent if he orients himself to the directions of the text. For exactly there lies the particular repercussion of aesthetic enticement: to take in bit by bit an unfamiliar attitude and thus to broaden one's own horizon of experience. For the modern reader who is accustomed to admire that something new in a work which makes it stand out against the received tradition, it furthermore means a reversal of his aesthetic expectations when it is demanded of him that he not dismiss endless didactic digressions as boring; the medieval reader could find texts enjoyable for exactly that reason, for they told him what he already knew, and because it satisfied him deeply to find each thing in its correct place in the world-model.6 The aesthetic pleasure of such recognition certainly presupposes the experiential horizon of the medieval lifeworld, which is only still available for us if it is reconstructed. Therefore, it cannot again become imaginable for the modern reader without historical mediation. If access to immediate enjoyment of the text remains denied to him here, then he nonetheless wins double on the reflective level: an aesthetic bridge to the foreign life-world which speaks to him again from literary sources and is more perceptible than it would be from historical documents; and on the other hand, the contrasting experience that recognition, and not just innovation, can define and enrich the sphere of the aesthetic attitude. In the field of philology, however, historical knowledge has not only cleared away barriers to reception, but has often also erected new ones. T h e instance of Brunetto Latini's Tesoretto shows in an exemplary manner how an unrecognized aesthetic predecision can obscure the historical significance as well as the poetic qualities of one of the high points of allegorical representation-indeed, how it can

186


totally exclude it from the canon of the values of tradition. Positivism and idealism-while methodologically quite contradictory, nonetheless also dependent upon Romantic aesthetics of Erlebnis and a proscription of didactics-here share the same prejudice against the nonpoetry of allegorical representation, from the scaffolding of which "the author dumps all his knowledge down on top of us like a sack of potatoes." Vossler's interpretation of the Tesoretto proves to be an inverted reflection of classical taste, more interesting for that for which he was looking than for that with which he found fault in the text's supposedly hybrid structure: purity of style, uniformity of action,judicious harmony of part and whole, unity of form and content, shape and significance. The text which has been abused in this manner will be enjoyable again for a modern reader when one dismantles the classical barriers to reception, places oneself within the expectation implied by the text, and recognizes in which direction the rules of the genre are pointing, their having been changed by Brunetto. Then suddenly there appears the totally original "kaleidoscopic" principle of stylization, the ironic position (as opposed to the allegory of love imported from France), and the attitude of curiositas which here announces itself for the first time as an all-encompassing motif-that new dignity of one's own questioning, for which the allegorical "I" liberates itself and with which it crosses the threshold of the Renaissance. The most difficult thing is surely to find aesthetic access once again to the literary forms of medieval allegoresis which lie the furthest from us. The author, who was once compelled-for the sake of the GRLMA-to study all the twelfth- and thirteenth-century instances of this genre, can frankly confess that he occasionally felt this reading to be atonement for some sin, for which then the all-excelling Roman de la rose compensated him. In this work he discovered particular poetic charm in deciphering the behavior of a lady, whose essence remains hidden behind a series of personifications. As a first aesthetic bridge and a first result of this sifting, one can recommend to the modern reader an unappreciated gem like the Roman de la poire or the genre's jocular forms of play. Like all parody o r travesty, they make it thoroughly enjoyable to become practiced in the rules of the game and to take over the attitude which is demanded by a genre with which we are no longer familiar. Without noticing it, they lead us to the deeper aesthetic basis which even today can still--or again-make medieval allegorical poetry interesting, although through a contrasting experience: the perception of an inner world which represents everything which for the modern reader is the expression of subjective feeling, as the play and conflict of objective forces.


187

111. An Introduction to the Hermeneutic Concept of Alterity With this attitude of an already reflective aesthetic pleasure which presupposes a recognition of the contrast with modern experience, we have arrived at the second hermeneutic step, that of surprise through alterity. It is not by accident that this term became the focus of interest in the debate over Paul Zumthor's Essai de poktzque mkdikvale. Along with his usage, I follow Eugenio Coseriu's theory of language in order to identify, with reference to the hermeneutic problem of medieval literature, the particular double structure of a discourse which not only appears to us as evidence of a distant, historically absent past in all its surprising "otherness," but also is an aesthetic object which, thanks to its linguistic form, is directed toward an other, understanding consciousness-and which therefore also allows for communication with a later, no longer contemporary addressee.* A description of this alterity can begin with the observation that for us medieval literature is even more alien than that of the antiquity which is further away in time, for the latter-up until the threshold of the crisis of the universities in the sixties-had almost without dispute determined the canon of the ruling philological-humanistic education in Germany. Between the literature of the Christian Middle Ages and the aesthetic canon of our modern age there stands only an illusionary chain of an "unbreakable tradition." If Ernst Robert Curtius could ignore the fact that the reception of Aristotelian poetics and of the aesthetic canon of antiquity (which henceforth became classical) by Renaissance humanism cut almost all connections with medieval literature and art, his own respectable attempt-to oppose the German Third Reich's insanity for its own uniqueness with a belief in the continuity of the Latin development of the West-may justify this. The alterity of medieval literature became even more hidden by an older illusion of historical continuity, namely, by the nineteenth century's evolutionary model of history, according to which the beginning and essence of all later developments in European national literatures are to be sought in the vernacular texts of the medieval period. Of course, even preunderstandings which are post festum unfounded o r ideologically transparent do not by any means bring only "false" results to light. This is proved by the extent to which the former finding is capable of a reinterpretation when the paradigm which had oriented research has materially exhausted itself. One can infer the chances for a new knowledge of the particular significance of medieval literature from this period's breaches of continuity as well as from its character as an archaic, politically and culturally self-

188


sufficient historical world; these chances become more conceivable when one thinks of the concrete aspects of its alterity which have been covered up by the humanistic tradition's philological ideal and concept of autonomous art. The philological ideal, formulated in the age following the invention of the printing press, unconsciously equates literary tradition with written and printed tradition, and has therefore greatly overlooked the existence of a nonbook production and a nonreading, but rather almost exclusively aural, reception. The preeminence of the book not only misleads one to equate interpretation as the activity of the reading philologian with the original experience of the hearing public, and thus to miss the concrete purpose with reference to which the text was composed. The humanistic model of classical texts also makes the book into a "work," a unique product of its creator. Certain basic distinctions follow from this which are as self-evident for the autonomous art of the bourgeois period as they are inappropriate for the medieval understanding of literature: the distinction between purposefulness and purposelessness, didactic and fictional, traditional and individual, imitative and creative. Medieval literature is a literature whose texts did not arise from the classical (and, later, Romantic) unity of author and work, and by the overwhelming majority of their addressees, the texts could only be taken in aurallytherefore, not by the self-contented contemplation of the reader. These aspects of the alterity of the Middle Ages first make clear the great extent to which our modern understanding of literature is formed by the written character of tradition, the singularity of authorship, and the autonomy of the text understood as a work. The oral character of literary tradition is doubtless a symptom of the alterity of the Middle Ages which today cannot be fully realized by hermeneutic effort. The invention of the printing press is-to speak with Paul Zumthor-the event which more than any other has closed off medieval culture for us as "the time before." Anyone who has grown up as a reader can only with difficulty imagine how an illiterate could have seen the world without writing, and taken in poetry without a text-and how he could have remembered it. Even if the mass media are supposed to have brought us back closer to the medieval experience of a poetry which is not mediated by the book than the solitary and mute visualization of an individual reading does,g the modern listener can still hardly put himself back into a consciousness which had no choice other than that of aural reception. But familiarity with medieval literature may well allow us access to (orjustification for, if we haven't lost it) an enjoyment of texts which humanistic

THE ALTERITY A N D MODERNITY OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

189

aesthetics has undervalued if not forbidden. The self-submersion of the solitary reader in a book as work-that is so self-satisfying that it "means the world" for him--can describe the particular experience of autonomous art in the bourgeois era. And yet this relationship of the individual to the aura ti^"'^ work in no way exhausts the aesthetic experience of literary texts. The reader's pleasure can spring today, as it already did with the medieval listener, from an attitude which does not presuppose a self-submersion in the unique world of a single work, but which rather presupposes an expectation which can only be fulfilled by the step from text to text, for here the pleasure is provided by the perception of difference, of an ever-different variation on a basic pattern. The character of a text as a work is therefore not constitutive of this aesthetic experience, an experience as natural to the modern reader of detective novels as it was to the medieval hearer of the chansons de geste; rather, intertextuality is constitutive, in the sense that the reader must negate the character of the individual text as a work in order to enjoy the charm of an already ongoing game with known rules and still unknown surprises. Elsewhere, I have called this experience the plurale tantum structure of reception, and have explained it with examples from various periods and genres." Before and after the classical period of art, one encounters at every step forms of an aesthetic experience which are not related to the classical ideal of the work. Indeed, one comes across them in medieval literature to such an extent that the relationship to the text as a work-both at the level of production as well as the level of reception-is much more the exception to a rule. Here we catch sight of an essential aspect of the alterity of this literature. Let us begin with a well-known crux in romance philology, the problem of the "unity of the Chanson de Roland." Here the long-standing orientation of research, which considers itself strictly positivistic, must accept Eugkne Vinaver's ruinous critique, according to which the whole argument and result of the more than a thousand treatises which have been written since Romanticism on the question of authorship have no foundation in fact, but rather are the unexamined result of an implicitly applied aesthetics which every French positivist carries around with him since his schooldays spent with C ~ r n e i l l e .In ' ~fact, the old Romance epic poetry stands in a fluid tradition which cannot be traced back to the closed form of a work or original, and to impure or corrupt variants, and which therefore also requires special editing techniques. As recited poetry of the "formulaic style," which was more o r less improvised so that each performance left behind a somewhat different, never final form of the text, thechanson degeste was presented

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in installments with the structure of a sequel.I3 This ever-expanding cyclical movement yields yet another result, namely, to make the limits of the work appear as flexible and incidental. But the epic fable itself can also be viewed as not being final. With the cycle of the Roman de Renart, I hit upon the remarkable fact that the core of the cycle-the fable about the lion's court day-was retold no less than eight times. In this manner a series of later narrators always knew to give another occasion and another end to the judgment on the cunning fox. What positivistic research viewed as a series of "corrupt variants" of a lost original could be received by the medieval public as a succession of sequels which-in spite of constant imitation-always knew to develop an ever-new element of tension. This principle, which runs completely counter to the humanistic understanding of the original and its reception, of the purity of the work and the faithfulness of its imitation, is not only found in the Middle Ages on the level of popular literature in the low style. The great Latin works of the high style of the philosophical-theological epic which were composed in the twelfth century by the school of Chartres following the allegorical tradition of Claudian a n d Boethius-Bernard Silvestris's De uniuersitate mundi and Alain de Lille's Planctus nuturae and Anticlaudiunus, with which in the thirteenth century the Roman de la rose and finally Brunetto Latini and his Tesoretto tie in--can also be explained according to the principle of continuation within imitation and can be interpreted as sequels to a single allegorical fable. With this the question of the renewal of life within the progress of the world proves to be the motivating force of the literary series: in the mythical guise of a complaint by natura, it could always be remotivated and solved again, but it could also be critically turned against a predecessor in order to uncover his own unexamined mythology. As concerns the religious play, one need only be reminded here that it had its telos not in the self-enclosed whole of a freely composed work, but rather in salvation history, the events of which it commemorated with ceremonial repetition with each performance. Within the sphere of texts of the vernacular lyric, the manifestations of medieval intertextuality include not only the spread of "song sheets," or the tenrone improvised according to rules in public competition, but also even thepoksie formelle of the canrone. While ready to be considered as one of the beginnings of autonomous art, the canzone nonetheless was not isolated in the manner of a work, but rather was received asplurale tantum with the aesthetic charm of variation from text to text-as the absence of a definitive form in the handing down of the text (stanzas being rearranged, etc.) indicates.14


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All in all, these examples confirm a conclusion already arrived at by C. S. Lewis: "We are inclined to wonder how men could be at once so original that they handled no predecessor without pouring new life into him, and so unoriginal that they seldom did anything completely new."15 In the medieval understanding of literature, the singular work is generally viewed neither as a one-time, self-enclosed, and final form, nor as an individual production of its author, to be shared with no one else. T h e Renaissance first proclaimed such categories of the classical aesthetics of production, after the character of poetry as a work had attained a novel aura: the uniqueness of the original hidden in the distant past, the pure form of which is to be sought, reconstructed from out of the distortions of its use through the ages, and guarded from future profanation by an editio ne varietur. If it can be confirmed that the classical equation of work and original in general is only of humanist origin, then a hypothesis concerning the rise of the concept of autonomous art in the bourgeois era can be added: did the rising bourgeois class perhaps believe here that it was-in contrast to humanism as well as to the representative art of the princely courtsto create with its own power works of art in the form of contemporary "originals" which could compete with the past originals of antiquity, themselves incapable of being numerically increased?

IV. The Alterity of the Medieval World-Model A further challenge to literary hermeneutics lies in the alterity of an understanding of the world which C. S. Lewis so impressively knew how to present in all of its pre-Copernican features.16 In historical retrospect, the situation of medieval man appears to be at once archaic and laden with tradition, equally distant from the myths and rituals of primitive life-worlds, and from the systems and roles of industrial society, from elementary lack of knowledge and from modern knowledge which relies upon observation. Faced with the necessity of doing away with the contradictions between ancient culture and Christian belief-which the lack of discrimination between the various truth-claims of religious, poetic, and philosophical texts had only sharpened-medieval culture developed a model which allowed for "saving the appearances" and harmonizing the contradictions of heterogeneous authorities in such a manner that one can place this medieval world-model alongside Thomas Aquinas's Summa and Dante's Divina Cornmedia as its greatest work of art. In contradistinction to a Romantic expectation, medieval man was less a wanderer and dreamer than a codifier and system builder, always intent upon find-

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ing a place for each thing, and for each thing the right place, and not satisfied until even phenomena like love or war were codified to the last detail. It is obvious that the reconstruction of this world-model which is so distant from us would offer more knowledge of the collective imagination of the Middle Ages-and thereby, of its poetic experience of the world-than the heights of the history of ideas, or the substructure of medieval economic relationships. C. S. Lewis's most surprising finding is certainly that man's place in the universe was defined differently by theological doctrine on the one hand, and the cosmology of the world-model on the other: for the former, he stood in the middle of space, while for the latter, he stood on the edge!17If one follows C. S. Lewis's direction, namely, to imagine the pre-Copernican view of the cosmos, then the alterity lies in the fact that the medieval observer looked into and upon the starry sky at night, as if looking over the outermost wall of a city, while we look out; that to him the whole universe appeared as a bound ordering of spaces, already layered and populated with angelic essences, and filled with light and the music of the spheres, while we feel Pascal's horror of the silence iternel de ces espaces infinis when faced with the endless, empty, dark, and mute universe. This alterity furthermore includes the fact that for medieval man, the kingdom of nature remained limited to the sphere of mutability beneath the moon, reserved for natura in her astounding career in the Platonism of Chartres, while for us the laws of nature are supposed to govern the whole universe, with nature itself no longer signifying anything poetically since the retirement of imitatio naturae. T h e hierarchical ordering of essences in the cosmology, and the triadic principle which always offered instances of mediation between God and man, souls and bodies, indeed between all extremes, correspond to a representation of the conduct of things which is exactly opposed to the modern concept of evolution: while it was axiomatic for medieval cosmology that perfect things precede all imperfect ones, the originary cannot have any ontological priority over that which comes out of it for the developmental logic of the modern natural sciences (it is not accidental that "primitive" has assumed a pejorative significance for us).18 Thus even the object of art had an always already "built-in" significance for the medieval author; he did not have to search for it first, let alone confer it himself upon a reality without significance.l9 He wrote with the particular humilitas of the medieval poet, in order to praise and to extend his object, not to express himself o r to enhance his personal r e p u t a t i ~ n . ~ ~ T h e insights into the medieval understanding of the world which we owe to C. S. Lewis have as yet hardly been exploited as hermeneu-


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tic instruments for the interpretation of poetry as well as of forms of life. Today we may set alongside The Discarded Image the work of a historian which replaced the yellowed cultural histories with a sociohistorical approach, and which brought to light the communicative side of social modes of behavior via a structural interpretation of temporally contrasted sources: Arno Borst's Lebensformen im Mittelalter. T h e middle position of the Middle Ages-only hinted at by Lewis-in contrast to antiquity, to its archaic relatives, as well as in contrast to modern social formations, is here so developed in its alterity as to be almost tangible. Of particular interest to the literary historian is Borst's thesis that it is a mark of medieval expression "that they have a predilection for presenting living men in established modes of behavior," so that this period can stand as a paradigmatic "age of realized and effective forms of life," while 'yorm of life was understood in antiquity primarily as an ethical demand, and is understood in modern times increasingly as an unimportant condition."" T h e sphere of literature and art can certainly offer still more in support of this thesis if one does not content oneself with the--often paltrysource value of their imitative f ~ n c t i o n , but ' ~ rather inquires into the contribution of medieval texts and works of art toward the development, transmission, and legitimation of social norms. As soon as historical observation frees itself from the confining aesthetic of Widerspi.egelung which is so inappropriate for the alterity of this period, the latent history of aesthetic experience comes to light. This still unwritten history certainly stands closer to the slow change of social modes of behavior than it does to the grand history of events and actions. Thus it may be able to disclose from the so distant lifeworld of the Middle Ages forms of life which have become alien to us. Aesthetic experience gains this hermeneutic function not only through the idealizing and preserving contribution of art, but also as a medium of anticipation and compensation. One of the finest examples of the anticipatory function is the literary anticipation of matrimonial love since Chretien d e Troyes, which-according to the evidence provided by Heloi'se and Abelard-was not yet a sanctioned social mode of behavior in the twelfth century, and which was only recognized as a form of life in the late Middle Ages, when the new community of the house-family had replaced the earlier medieval clan-family .23 T h e menace to life was answered not only by religion and by the conventions of communal living which guarantee security, but also by the experience of art. It allowed for the illustration of abstract dogma as well as of the all-regulating world model; for the relief of man from the pressure of authorities; and for the satisfaction of his claim to

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happiness in yet another way than the consolation and other-worldly hopes of religion. Not only Dante's Divina Commdia, but even the most modest text of religious allegory, didacticism, and visionary literature-detaching themselves from biblical exegesis-had made the symbol system of medieval world interpretation visible for a wide public, as had the competing courtly and worldly vernacular poetries which had taken on an allegorical form in the thirteenth century. For the modern reader little more than a peculiar, abstract, and almost tiresome operation with personified concepts, allegory for the medieval public could represent not only the virtues and vices, but also the newly discovered inner world of the passions; not only the invisible hierarchy of religious instances, but also the happy world of fulfilled love which had been prefigured by troubador poetry and illustrated in the Roman de la rose. That which alienates us through indistinctness, cataloglike excess, and a lack of tension is only the other side of a poetry of the invisible, which might well constitute the most unique characteristic of the alterity of the Middle Ages. How inappropriate and even misleading it is to judge the literature and art of this period exclusively according to the modern, ideologickritische categories of the affirmation or negation of the existing order, can be shown by glancing, among other places, at the cosmological world model. T h e poetry and allegory of courtly love-which as a poetically mediated form of life competed with the religiously sanctioned institutions of marriage and sexual love, without expressly denying their norms-developed a unique topography which deviated from the theological as well as from the cosmological model in an interesting way. At the turn from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, the love allegory turned the model of the classical epithalamium upside down: the gods, Venus and Amor, no longer appear to the human pair as coming from outside, but rather the lovers themselves go on their way to seek out the love god in his own realm. This realm, however-topographically and ethically, with its three other-worldly spheres and the guiding function of the love god, a complete contrafactor of the Christian world order-has its paradisus amoris in the innermost circle and thereby constitutes a poetic-mythological counter-figure to the Christian-Ptolemaic world model, in which the heavenly paradise takes in the outermost, allencompassing spheres.

V. Contemporary Tendencies toward a Renewal o f

Medieval Studies

Contrary to the expectation that the symbolic system of the medieval interpretation of the world is of a closed nature which


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categorically rejects anything heteronomous as heathen, heretical, evil, and untrue (pagans are wrong and Christians are rzght-Roland, 1015), the poetry appears throughout to have claimed the license to cross frontiers; Andreas Capellanus, the theorist of fin amor, is here not a unique exception. Zumthor's provocative thesis-"The reference of the text is the tradition. It is in relationship to it that the significance defines itselfe-does not do justice to this transgressive achievement of aesthetic experience, although his Poitique mkdiivale has indeed built a new bridge between the alterity and the modernity of the Middle Ages.24Even if the poetic tradition, as the code already given, always puts itself in the place of anticipated realities (rialztis rqirentielles) in the language game of forms and "registers," and the individual voice is retracted in favor of a general grammatical and anonymous "I," the lyric experience nonetheless always goes beyond the affirmative function of once again confirming the authority of the world model as the single source of meaning. If one does not-in contrast to the current metaphysics of icriture-take the text as an ens causa suz, but rather as a vehicle of communication, then the receiving subject can not only discover the genesis of new significance in the enjoyment of formal variation, but can also become aware of the difference which always arises between the poetic and the nonpoetic traditions, between the insubordination of the beautiful and the authoritative meaning of the world model-thus not first arising with Zumthor's last act of an iclatement du discours, which he locates in Villon. Precisely since the text of the medieval lyric--contrary to the aesthetics and poetic praxis of modern icriture-is not constructed as an autonomous work or a copyright-claiming original,25but rather as a plurale tantum, that is, aimed at the variation and progressive concretization of significance, the poetic discourse here, in play with the code, is able to enrich the meaning of the code and thereby to surpass it. If Zumthor had given this different status of the text as a nonwork its due, then his interpretations would have had the benefit of the hermeneutic difference, interpretations which in their present form still lack a dimension of significance, given his unreflected symbiosis of medieval and modern "poeticity." New insight into the alterity of the Middle Ages and new self-knowledge of our modernity condition themselves reciprocally in the hermeneutic circle. T h e new poitzque midiffwale puts both the medieval and the modern lyric in a new light: the former can now be appreciated in its "circularity of song," as the play of language with and beyond itself, while the latter can be confronted with the fact that the medieval poet, however unselfconsciously, proves to be still more modern than the authors of the Editions du Seuil-with the supposed anonymity of their hypostasized texts-could dream.26

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If Zumthor's implicit hermeneutics points to the prejudice that the continuum of an unsurpassable poetic tradition-that is, kriture as opposed to parole-is the origin of significance, then the reverse can also be entertained, namely, that for the mediation of the alterity and modernity of the Middle Ages, "the disjunction . . . is the place at which significance becomes manifest." Walter Haug recently articulated this position in a programmatic inaugural 1ectu1-e.27Bertolt Brecht's aesthetics is the godfather here, deepened through Walter Benjamin's hermeneutics of dialectical montage. Disjunction is claimed in a threefold respect: historically as the moment in which the mediation of meaning breaks off (between medieval and modern literature, e.g., with the disparaging of the allegorical in the late eighteenth century); hermeneutically as the phenomenological correspondence of similar aesthetic experiences with different symptoms ("the actuality of the present casts its light upon historical correspondences and through these, as through an other, arrives at its own and for the interpretation of medieval texts self-under~tanding");~~ itself, as "the contradiction between the introjection of significance, and linear r e p r e ~ e n t a t i o n . " ~ ~ I have nothing against the argument for the first and second disjunctions, except that the examples used for such correspondences are not actually "phenomenological," for they always arise from mediation by modern aesthetic reflection, so that the prereflective level as the immediate access to aesthetic experience is ignored. But Haug's third disjunction seems to me to obscure the relationship between religious and aesthetic experience in the Middle Ages, rather than to clear it up. In this period, the breaking of continuity is in no way poetry's specific place for the manifestation of significance. It is much more the case that in the Middle Ages there was a contrary movement of aesthetic experience to retreat from religious experience first and foremost through the development and perfection of continuity, retreating from a religious experience which for its part answered such self-enjoyment of humanity's trials with the evangelical call for a world-negating conversion. T h e knight-errant's path does not first become significant through the episode of an "allegorical change" (Yvain's falling on his own sword; Erec's confrontation with Mabonagrin); it is already exemplary from the beginning with the claim to fulfill one's being within the horizon of extraordinary accident and election, res adventura and providentia specialis-that is, thoroughly analogous to the vita of the saint, but also contrary to it, having as a telos the worldly discovery of identity.30 In such contrariety one must also see that Haug tried to make his view of the "aftereffect" of the forms of thought and representation


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of biblical and theological exegesis on the worldly medieval epic3' accord with modern techniques of alienation. Here he is fully conscious of the hermeneutic difference in apparently similar symptoms of the world-understandings: "For the Middle Ages . . . the disparity and brokenness of phenomena are givens; and thus the task of constructing continuity and identity presents itself exactly here. . . . On the other hand, in a historical position such as that occupied by Brecht, in which a dominant continuity appears from the beginning as the inhumane, there remains only the possibility of shattering the contin~ity."~' But the medieval point of departure can be considered by one who names disparity and brokenness only insofar as the exegesis radicalizes the realities of belief such as the Fall, sin, conversion, and salvation in contrast to all immanent continuity of the world. Faced with this, then, even the medieval world model reconstructed by C. S. Lewis, with its harmonizing accomplishments, would already be an aesthetic objectification. In the meantime, to go this far presupposes a religious rigorism which in the Middle Ages might sooner be sought in the heretics of evangelical life than in the bosom of the church and the systems of theology, in which-to remark in passing-the explanation of the world in terms of a meaning derived from salvation history must in no way stand opposed to an explanation in terms of exemplary, moral modes of behavior: the former was built upon the latter as a legitimating s u p e r s t r ~ c t u r eIn it is precisely the . ~ addition, ~ worldly-allegorical poetry, which at the turn from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries was detaching itself from biblical exegesis, that demonstrates how the kind of "aftereffect" increasingly took on the form of competition, palpable in the-naturally unexpressedambition of the worldly poet to present aesthetic consistency instead of the revolutionary change in one's natural attitude toward life demanded by exegesis. The adoption of the motif of pity by the religious play is ambivalent. In figures such as Mary Magdalene or Longinus, which call for identification on the part of sympathizers, one can already see the crossing of an aesthetic frontier instead of a new form of religious e ~ p e r i e n c efor , ~ ~the native Christian virtue of pity remained dogmatically bound to the glona passionis and the divine ius talionis. The history of visions of the other world up to the Divina Commdza presents a striking development of the pity motif, which increasingly disengaged itself from its dogmatic ties until Dante finally articulated it as a basic conflict for his other-worldly pilgrim. T h e dogmatic phrase, Here pity lives when it is altogether dead (Inferno xx.28), can only dogmatically dispense with this conflict; the contradiction which aesthetic license had discovered between divine metaphysics of right and human pity,

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and not some dogmatic "solution," is to be the motive force of future interpretation. One can therefore record this as an instance of that which can again become interesting for us in medieval literature in the light of Brecht's aesthetics ("The playwrights who want to represent the world as changing and changeable must hold on to its contradictions, for it is these that change and make the world ~ h a n g e a b l e " ) .But ~ ~ this hermeneutic key which enables o n e to seize upon a surprising modernity--or, better, a historical correspondence-in the face of all appearances of difference can scarcely suffice to make visible the heart of the alterity of medieval literature, namely, there where it is a matter of representing not the contradictions, but the order and hidden harmony of the world. But perhaps a bit of modernity also lies hidden for us today in this alterity, provided that not only variation, but also duration makes possible an understanding of the world.

VI. Modernity in Alterity as a New Orientation T h e critical discussion of tendencies toward a renewal of the study of medieval literature should not allow us to forget the common orientation for the sake of a few differences. Put in the briefest possible manner, it is a new attempt to discover the modernity of medieval literature in its alterity. It hardly needs to be noted that "modernity" here is to be distinguished from the uncritical modes of an actualizing tendency which would find a contemporary interest exactly confirmed in the literature of the past. As opposed to such modernism, modernity means the recognition of a significance in medieval literature which is only to be obtained by a reflective passage through its alterity. The model character which this field of literature can provide for the current development of theories and interdisciplinary research in the human sciences might well be provisionally described as I already once tried to describe it elsewhere, in reference to the justbegun Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters. The Middle Ages exhibits the following traits in its literature, traits which admittedly are not often found combined in exemplary fashion: the model of a closed culture and society, in which art and literature are still understandable in the praxis of their normative functions; the at once archaic and schoolboy-like character of this culture, in which the cosmopolitanism of Latin textuality mixes with the everyday function of the spoken Romance vernaculars; the conservatism of a literature which developed its own principle of imitation and its own system of literature far from any reception of


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Aristotle, and which showed a surprising power of appropriation in the face of antiquity and foreign cultures; the pre-established, scarcely changing system of expression in this literature which cuts its own path from sign to symbol and which yet thereby brings forth a flexible ordering of genre-like patterns and "tones," within which the communicative achievement of the literature of a developing society evolved.36

In the following I would like to outline the areas, familiar to me from my own research, where in my opinion the interpretation of medieval texts can begin to define more narrowly aspects of such a modernity which open themselves to our present via the bridge of aesthetic experience.

VII. Animal Poetry as a Threshold of Individuation Medieval animal poetry, unlike almost any other sphere of texts, has been positioned in the history of scholarship up to the present under the unbroken influence of the philological paradigm of German Romanticism. While the study of epics has endured the crises of a number of paradigm-changes, the latest argument between Vozetzsch and Foulet here basically revived the distinction between folk and "high" poetry [Volkr- und Kunstpoesie] which was promulgated by the Brothers Grimm. In particular, the preunderstanding of German research rested upon the Romantic concept of the possibility of a beginning, which was to be sought prehistorically in the originality of a Germanic "animal saga" and which was to be located aesthetically in the unadorned purity and naivete of the so-called "animal tale." In contrast to this, French research, following Bkdier's example, proposed the historically confirmed development of the Roman & Renart as a literary process which could be genetically explained from Aesopian sources and the Latin model of Isengrimus. T h e alterity of medieval poetry first struck me when I realized that the Romantic explanation of the animal tale (poetry of nature as an initial understanding of man and animal) as well as the anti-Romantic interpretation of the animal epic (the satirically spun fable of the lion's court day) could be traced back to an inexplicit interest on the part of the author and his medieval public. It is not the life of animals in nature, but rather the naturae et mores hominum which are discovered in a new way in the mirror of the simple as well as literary forms of medieval animal poetry. T h e pleasure derived from Renart's and Isengrin's stories was more ambiguous than mere joy in the simple relationships and natu-

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ral characteristics of the animal world: it arose from aesthetic, moral, and finally even political reflection upon what the animal's essence could tell one about human nature. In the typical constellations of their animal figures, Aesop's fables already bring forth the roledetermination of human behavior-and thereby create difficulties for both the Christian and the feudal reception of this classical heritage. In the heyday of courtly poetry, a new experience of human nature assumed its most unique form in the analogy of feudal society with the realm of animals: in Renart's total adventure, the exemplary being of knightly heroes is led back at every turn to the unideal nature of man, to his ineluctable desires and weaknesses. As an antiheroic contrafactor of the courtly epic, it also brings to the fore a closed and ahistorical world of types and characters which has still not been sufficiently appreciated as an influential pattern for human self-interpretation. Looking back at this thesis, I in no way fail to recognize that it does not simply render superfluous the Romantic tradition of interpretation. The insight into the anonymity and oral transmission of the medieval epic has not only made Grimm's concept of a "selfnarrating" poetry of nature more comprehensible for us again. T h e category of "beginningness" also gains new significance if one demythologizes it in Grevinus's sense and relates it to the simplicity of representation of the "most general human relations from an evervalid point of view"; the later historical development of the potential for satire of the upper ranks also can be deduced and interpreted from the basic pattern thus ~ n d e r s t o o d Even . ~ ~ if one laughs at the search for the original German ("All of antiquity knew no joy in nature, and joy in nature is one of the basics of these poetries") as one of the most gorgeous projections of Romantic "woodsine~s,"~~ a distinction between the ancient and Germanic or, let us say, medieval traditions first recognized by Grimm nonetheless still remains valid: the bestowing of names of Germanic origin, which makes singular beings out of the antagonists and figures of the cycle. Between the generic names of the ancient figures of the fable and the proper names of the medieval animal epic lies a threshold of individuation. What does this threshold signify? T h e same poetry which had reduced the ideal, mental being of man to his creaturely nature, and then had unfolded this into a multiplicity of ethical characters, contrariwise confers the appearance of individuality upon its figures, not only through proper names, but also through the rule of the game that each species of animal may be represented by only one exemplar. At least two questions remain open in this strange, contradictory state of affairs and thus allow an investigation of the larger historical context to appear to be profitable. One is the character of the species

T H E ALTERITY A N D MODERNITY OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

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which is written into the faces of the animals, so to speak (according to H. Lipps)-not an objective character, but doubtless only read into the animals by man.39 T h e ethical characters of the animal figures must thus be interpreted from the perspective of historically changing motifs of human self-interpretation. T h e other question is the form of the individuality which in the cases of Renart, Isengrin, Brun, Noble, and so forth, surely arose from their literary uniqueness as fox, wolf, bear, lion. They thus present only an appearance of individuality: as the main figures of the animal epic, not yet a singular, but only a typical fate is fitting, which in the meeting with the knave Renart proves to be the misfortune typical to their natures. This appearance of individuality is nonetheless still the beginning of an individualization (however formerly underestimated by me). Although the epic heroes already embody a singular fate in the contingency of the action through their entanglement in historicomythical conditions, they nonetheless appear, in their exemplary perfection, as more one-sidedly characterized and incomparably less differentiated than their opposites in the animal epic-than Renart, Isengrin, and their like, who achieve exemplary significance through their imperfection. The beautiful has only one type, the ugly has a thousand: if one applies Victor Hugo's bold claim4' to our case, then Pierre de Saint Cloud's work dating from 1176-77 can be defined as a literary-historical step toward a new form of individuation. Renart's adventure, announced as "unheard of," not only plays down the perfection of heroic poetry and along with it the personified ideal of knighthood in favor of the imperfect nature and quotidian appearance of men. It thereby at the same time characterizes this material side of human nature in an unexpected multiplicity of types and roles. This literary threshold is reached at a time when persona-for the first time with Otto von Freising's usage--could mean not only the interchangeable (masks, roles), but also the unexchangeable indiuidualztas of secular man.41 In literature, the canon of the general is not broken through by, say, the biographical type of text, for which the "perfect fulfillment of the general norm was still to be valid for a long time as the highest form of individ~ality."~~ In order to break the spell of ideality-and that means here, the perfection of the good, the true, and the beautiful-which had taken on such a monotonous, thoroughly hierarchical form in the text of the vernacular epic, a new license is presupposed, allowing for the representation of human nature beyond good and evil in its imperfect cross section-a license which was first to become public in the fiction of the animal realm. Among the most tantalizing perspectives which open out of the Middle Ages onto the prehistory of our modernity is certainly the tracing

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of how this world of characters as types, being the mirror of various social formations, was historically transformed; and the tracing of the thresholds through which, in the progress of the modern age, individuals in their singularity took the place of ethical characters, to the point where no particular license was needed any longer in order to represent individual life without a transcendent o r social telos.

VIII. Allegorical Poetry as the Poetry of the Invisible Allegorical poetry has been so convincingly rehabilitated-for the Middle Ages, since C. S. Lewis; for the Baroque, since Walter Benjamin; and for literary hermeneutics, since Hans-Georg Gadamer-that it is no longer worthwhile to go back to the history of and reasons for its initial disavowal.43 But it is another question, whether the reawakened historical interest in this dry-as-dust group of texts can also be transformed into an aesthetic perspective. I see a far from exhausted perspective in the old basic definition of the allegorical modus dicendi, still used by Winckelmann, as making possible "the presentation of invisible, past, and future things." T o my mind, this not only opens up a formal relationship between such heterogeneous literary genres and traditions as allegoresis, personification, allegorical fiction, typological visionary literature, psychomachia, bestiaries, and love-allegory. It also establishes a connection of content, against the background of that which H. Blumenberg once called the stillunwritten ''Geistesgeschichte of the invisible," that "world, afar and beyond, of the invisible, which for the Middle Ages was at once the sphere of religious author it^."^^ Since that sphere cannot be represented mimetically, but only allegorically, medieval allegory can be interpreted as the poetry of the invisible, and its history can be rewritten under this title. Its Christian origin, then, would lie in the Pauline phrases to which medieval authors continually referred: that God's essence and magnificence are invisible, but are perceptible in His works since the Creation (Rom. 1:20); that man must undergo the battle of the soul with the body in an invisible theater (Gal. 6: 17); and, furthermore, that he must continually struggle with powers that are not of flesh and blood, with the invisible evil spirits beneath heaven (Eph. 6:12). In the progressive illustration of these three spheres of the invisible-the hidden beauty of the Kingdom of God, to which the world of the senses refers us back; the transcendent world-between of religious instances, between heaven and earth; and the transcendent inner world of the soul's struggle-I see today the sharpest line of demarcation in


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medieval literature between the ancient and Christian canons of the representable and of that which is worthy of representation. On the other hand, the distinction of a genuine poetics of Christianity appears to be historically less sharp: it was overshadowed in the Middle Ages by the particular predominance of a Platonic and neoPlatonic aesthetics which produced a rigorous "canon of transcendence" (M. Fuhrmann), and which almost completely intercepted the new beginning of a creaturely "realism," arising from the figural understanding of history as well as from the mixing of styles of the sermo humilis. T h e discussion, "Is there a Christian aesthetics?" completely convinced me that there is therefore an explicit poetics of Christianity only after a remarkable delay, namely, only at the end of the predominance of the Christian religion, at the threshold between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, with Hamann, Schelling, Chateaubriand, Jean Paul, and Hegel (J. tau be^).^^ T h e results of my research into the classical and Christian justifications of the ugly could today be reevaluated from the perspective of a poetry of the invisible. T h e polemical starting point for this research was the attempt to rehabilitate the thesis of Erich Auerbach's book on Dante, that "the story of Christ fundamentally changed the conceptions of man's fate and how to represent it,"46 against its apodictic rejection by Ernst Robert Curtius, for whom the substantial, uninterrupted continuity of the classical heritage (supposedly visible in a sort of natural history of topoi) made all distinctions between heathen and Christian antiquity unessential in the Middle Ages.47In Curtius's influential work, this model of interpretation so completely covered u p the alterity of medieval Christian literature, poetics, and art that both nonclassical phenomena like the sermo humilis, the mixing of styles in the religious play, or the typological explanation of history, as well as autochthonous productions of medieval literature such as the troubador lyrics, fell victim to the belief in Western continuity. This orientation toward the unbroken survival of antiquity also allowed for the misunderstanding of surprising aspects of genres such as the chanson de geste, which at most owes a couple of rhetorical patterns and literary topoi to the classical model of the Aeneid. While this genre, in full bloom in the twelfth century, is unthinkable without the reception of a specific late-classical heritage, namely, the abovementioned aesthetic canon of transcendence, the latent Platonic and neo-Platonic aesthetics certainly brought forth strange fruit on medieval soil-so strange that it falls right out of the tree of the Latin tradition's continuity. T h e chanson de geste developed a rarely broken set of rules upon the unquestioned dichotomy of beautiful and ugly, good and evil, Christian and heathen, that may, as the scarcely sur-

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mountable barrier of a dogmatic alterity, serve to explain why the medieval Christian epic did not cross the threshold to the modern age. T h e materials of the Charlemagne cycle were absorbed into the highly successful Arthurian romance, and in this manner were entirely taken in by the romantic epic of the Renaissance. For later readers who, after the high point of the Chanson de Roland, ventured upon the ninety other nearly forgotten epics, the division of all the plot's personae into perfect Christian heroes on the one hand, and enemies counter-idealized as evil on the other (when not simply abstract and strange) must have had a monotonous, all-too-heroic, and therefore unappealing effect--compared with the current success of comics or of Astirix. Nothing seems to be further from Christian humilitas than the medieval Christian epic with its hyper-correct separation of the heroic sublime from the practical everyday, and with the narrowest possible aristocratic ethos of rank that only admits the lower ranks to the fringes of the poem, and then with the attributes of the ugly vilain, only to exclude them totally in the end from the solidarity of the exclusively good. And yet the broad success of this genre in its time, sung by jongleurs at markets, is not to be doubted in the least!48 This paradoxical state of the medieval epic surpasses the Platonic canon of transcendence in its rigid formulation. If the countertypicality of the ugly and the evil corresponds to a great extent to its classical definition, as just being a privation of the good, the true, and the beautiful, and as ultimately referring to the invisible beauty of the divine order, there is nonetheless missing in the medieval epic and hagiographic traditions-as far as I can see-the attachment of the ugly to the good which is likewise asserted in Platonism. T h e beauty of ugly Socrates which is only visible to the inner eye was evidently without stylistic influence on the figures of the heroes in the Christian Middle Ages. T h e most interesting case of an inverted attachment of the beautiful to the evil-the corporeal beauty of the traitor Ganelon in the Chanson de Roland-in the end only again confirms the canon of transcendence, for Ganelon refers typologically to the fall of Lucifer. Here the poetry of the invisible rests upon the temporally most distant event, the fall from angelic beauty into the ugliness of the (medieval?) infernal princes, and perhaps also upon the mythological conception that nature itself was included in the fall into sin and thus became ugly. Is there a relationship between this and the fact that there is hardly any description of nature in the chanson de geste? In the Middle Ages, the fallen condition of nature is literarily manifest only in man himself, not represented in deformations of extrahuman nature. Only the antinaturalism of a post-Romantic modern period realized


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in praxis this postulate of the early Christian tradition (Prudentius), following the model of Baudelaire's Fleurs du ma1.49 But one does find an association of the ugly with the recognition of the good in the Victorin theory of visions, which, according to Uda Ebel, one can use as a key to visionary poetry.50T o make visible to worldly life the meaning of visions, the secrets of the otherworldly (following Theophilus's formulation), a journey from the visibilia to the invisibilia was called for which, according to Hugh of St. Victor, could ensue in two ways. In the first way, from which the three-tiered nature of the typology of visions can be explained, "the visibilia of this world lead through the sensibilibus similia of the described otherworldly to the invisibilia, the essence of God hidden behind the forms of appearance of the glimpsed otherworldly, o r hidden in the fut~re."~ In' the second way, by which the greater detail of the descriptions of the ugly in hell and purgatory can be justified, greater significance is granted to the analogical knowledge gained from the dissimilia: while the beautiful threatens to bind us to the world of the senses, the ugly via negationis awakens a stronger desire for perfection. Alfred Adler discovered, in the admittedly rare case of the Jeu de la Feuillie, that this mystical poetry of the invisible could also be transformed into worldly poetry; there, the student starting out for the university, in parting from his young bride, praises her in a curious way, publicly complaining about the decay of her bodily charms, but knowing that, through this dissimilis similitudo, he is secretly praising her beauty.52 T h e aesthetic canon of transcendence receives its sharpest formulation there where the relationship between the presence of the visible and the hidden evidence of the invisible transcends the possibilities for obvious representation and must appeal for a "not seeing, but still believing." The joining of that which is shocking and awful with that which is edifying-which one encounters continually in hagiography and which probably can only irritate the modern reader-stands in service to the religious doctrine of the gloria passionis. According to this doctrine, compassion for the suffering creature must be reserved for the heathens who see without recognizing, while it is expected of the believing Christian that he will set himself out of the present and find edification in thinking of the previously guaranteed blessedness of the saints and God's still-hidden justice. I have already mentioned that this dogmatic rigorism, often attested to in the legends of martyrs, allowed for a contrary process of aesthetic experience on various levels. It is in this context that the development of the motif of pity belongs (although not it alone), which in the popular otherworldly visions could occasionally yield such strange fruit. Here, let one only

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be reminded of the Nauigatio Sancti Brendani, in which the saint, moved to tears, obtains an extension of the weekend "until early Monday" for Judas, who is most hideously tortured throughout the rest of the week. If in such instances the aesthetic compensation is essentially an appearance of that which Jean Paul called the "poetry of superstition," then the high point of medieval visionary literature shows how a great poet knew to make use of the canon of transcendence in a different manner. With Dante, it legitimated the representation of a sphere of immanence formerly thought to be unworthy of representation: the secular world as the place of historically acting and suffering individuals. In the Divina Cornmedia, the world beyond, the highest object of the poetry of the invisible with all of its layered order, refers back to this world via the memory of a half-thousand personae. From the final fate of the damned, the penitent, and the blessed, there arises a sum total of worldly historicity, and with this the poem attains the great, already "modern" theme of a new poetry of the visible. A grandiose quotation from Jean Paul's Vorschule &r ~sthetik-from which stems my outline of the rise of allegorical poetry in the Romance vernacular-formulates beautifully as well as inexhaustibly the historical (although admittedly undatable) epochal change between classical and Christian literature: Christianity destroyed, like a Last Judgment, the whole world of the senses with all of its charms, pressed it into a grave mound, into one step toward heaven, and replaced it with a new world of spirits. Demonology became the proper mythology of the corporeal world, and devils, as seducers, moved within men and the statues of gods. All earthly presence evaporated in favor of the future of heaven. And what still remained for the poetic spirit after this collapse of the outer world? Why, that into which it fell, the inner one!

The symbolization of the extrasensory otherworld comes out of the negation of "the whole world of the senses"; the prefiguration of a still-invisible future follows upon the negation of all "earthly presence"; and the discovery of the inner world arises from the collapse of the outer one-this is how Romantic aesthetics saw the origins and possibilities of a "poetics of Christianity"! For Christian poetry, the truth of that which was to be represented henceforth lay in the invisible, so that it needed allegorical (or typological) discourse in order always to maintain a difference within the correspondence of form (or event) and significance. For the addressees, this difference embodied the appeal to imagine that which transcended the evidence of the sayable. When the difference between form and significance disap-


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peared, the signifiers only reified already-known signifieds, and allegorical discourse decayed into manifestations of literary automation. The resulting combinations of personified concepts, or the abstruse accumulations of distinctiones which can be raised to the level of the subtlest mannerism, contributed to no small extent to the ill repute of the allegorical modus dicendi. The discovery of the inner world can be traced along the steps which lead from a surprisingly abstract character through the formation of new fields of images up to the development of the enclosed landscapes of the soul. The abstract character of psychomachia results from the fact that by the struggle in the soul a strugglefor the soul can also be signified,just as the whole cosmos can be signified by the body of man, and the salvation history of mankind by the situation of a single Christian. T h e medieval tradition of the genre created new overlappings of images when the long-unrepresented individual soul stepped onto the stage in persona, to be fought over by virtues and vices; when the dreaming "I" of the lover in the Roman de la rose recognizes the ever-invisible "you" of the chosen lady from out of her changing figurations, from which the reader is supposed to glean the ideal story of a love-relationship; and, finally, when an already historical "I" knows to ask its own questions, and in Brunetto Latini's Tesoretto steps out from under the spell of ideal essences which prefigure all experience, thereby at once destroying the form of the genre. A new system of topoi of allegorical poetry which blossomed around the turn from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries can often be traced back genetically to the mystical writings of Bernard Silvestris and others; the motifs come out of allegoresis and gather together in image-fields or in constellations of personifications, forming a synchronic repertoire. At first, this was not infrequently of service to religious poetry, in order to remind the audience of the human situation in between fall and salvation, and was later usurped by worldly poetry to interpret the inner experience of the lovers in between solitude and consummation. The preferred image-fields for this poetry of the invisible were: the "four daughters of God," the "three enemies of man," the castellum anwris, the path and the gate, the hortw conclusus of paradise, the "tree of virtues," the armatura Dei. A history of the discovery of the inner world would always come upon two thresholds in this period. T h e first becomes definable through C. S. Lewis's statement that ChrCtien de Troyes could not concern himself with the inner world of the passions without at once falling into allegorical discourse; wherever the medieval poet becomes "psychological," he also has to become "allegori~al."~~ The second threshold comes to light with the epochal event that Guillaume de


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became due can scarcely be more nicely illustrated than through an anecdote from the history of scholarship. T h e editors of the GRLMA, faced with the difficulty of convincing a strong group of their colleagues of the not just chimeric existence of literary genres, were motivated as late as 1965 in a circular to call upon no less an authority than that of the Pope himself, against Croce's reigning individualistic aesthetics. It was Pius XI1 who, in the papal bull Divino afflante spzritu, had recently recommended the method of studying the history of forms, the method of the "literary history of the Bible" developed by Protestant theology, as the indispensable foundation for an understanding of Holy Scripture. T h e question of the "place in life" [Sitz im Lebenl--or, in contemporary terms, the social function and communicative achievement--of literary genres was in fact a particularly profitable and new one to ask of medieval literatur-e.57For this period, equally distant from the preliterary myths of an archaic society and from the autonomous forms of art of the bourgeois era, exhibits among the rising vernacular literatures a series of characteristics which make it interesting for the theory of literary genres. Here a literary communications system can be traced in statu nuscendi, from its first beginnings and with the successive insertions of the various genres. Here the literary evolution neither stands under the spell of an authoritative theory (as, for example, French classicism stood under the ruling concepts of Aristotelian poetics), nor follows the principle of individual creation (whereby one work arises against another), so that the history of genres can be observed in the progressive concretization of historical norms. T h e much-criticized lack of normative descriptions of genres proves in this respect to be the other side of the coin, and to be a lack which is thoroughly compensable hermeneutically. And since in this process a gap scarcely arose between production and reception, between the intention of the (mostly anonymous) authors and the expectation of their public, the primary social and communicative function of literary genres is also immediately to be assumed, and is in principle reconstructable, even if evidence from the medieval life-world is rather sparse. Perhaps today it can be seen as a result of the debate over the theory of literary genres that both the Platonism of atemporal definitions of essences and the nominalism of historically unique creations, both the expectation of "pure forms" and constant characteristics and the skepticism concerning the theorizability of any historical change at all, are scarcely still represented seriously. It appears much more that a growing consensus is taking shape, according to which literary genres as historical groups or families can only claim generality, not universality, and therefore also cannot be defined as classes according to

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characteristic^.^^ This "middle generality" between the universal and the singular corresponds to the status of norms in linguistic change, which according to Eugenio Coseriu historically and selectively consolidate the ideal possibilities of a language system into patterns of i n t e r a ~ t i o n .It~ ~also corresponds to the exemplary character of aesthetic judgment, which according to Kant does not fall under the rule-and-instance schema, but rather is constructed upon agreement; such an indefinite norm must be further defined by each new conc r e t i ~ a t i o nWith . ~ ~ the postulate that literary genres can be viewed as historical groups, their diachronic and synchronic investigation is in no way turned over to a merely intuitive understanding. A historical repertory of realized literary genres can very well be described and interpreted, diachronically as well as synchronically, via the heuristic approach which asserts the existence of universals in the form of textually internal and pragmatic components. But with this, it should not be expected that the specificity itself of historically realized genres can be traced out of the possible combinations of such universal genre-components per se. T h e step toward the demarcation and identification of a literary concretization is not to be achieved without a hermeneutic explanation of the preunderstandings of the horizon of experience. T h e concept of "sorts of texts," which unfortunately becomes ever more pervasive, obscures the boundary between universally definable text-components, and historically conditioned patterns of realization which are always composite and which demand the recognition of the particular system-individualizing dominant^."^' One can therefore only agree fully with Wolf-Dieter Stempel, who in 1972 at a colloquium on "sorts of texts" drew the conclusion "that one ought to draw back from the investigation of 'sorts of texts,' in favor of a description of the 'sorts of components' of textual communication, and of the systematics of their possibilities of c ~ m b i n a t i o n . "His ~ ~own suggestion takes off from discourse as discourse-action, and more particularly from various kinds of reference to the partner, and explains components such as direct or narrative discourse, actual delivery (e.g., recitation, performance), instrumental codes of elocutio (modi dicendi), sociolinguistic codes, and general components of content and reception. Since then, various projects for a theory of genres have been published by text-grammarians, semioticians, linguistic pragmatists, and communication theorists;'j3 with reference to medieval literature, there is above all the one erected by Paul Zumthor from typological characteristics of discourse. Most of these attempts still face the task of applying the preferred systematics of components of textual communication to a historical repertoire of literary genres. In

T H E ALTERITY AND MODERNITY OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

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this regard, by far the most advanced is Zumthor's Poitique mkdiiuale with its three-tiered system of types (the level of topoi in Curtius's sense), registers (the level of the choice and combination of types), and poetic genres (the level of modiles d'kcriture). Instead of a renewed discussion of his literary system of the "high genres," concerning which the most essential has already been said by Wolf-Dieter Stempel, Peter Haidu, and Pierre-Yves Badel, 1 would like in what follows to look into a sphere of texts which Zumthor's assemblage of instruments is least capable of including, although the texts are most informative for the question of the alterity and modernity of medieval literature. 1 am speaking of the so-called "simple forms," in the sense of Andre Jolles's morphology, or-already formulating it with reference to the Middle Ages-the sphere of the little literary genres of the exemplary. That it is here possible to delimit a medieval system of nine genres of exemplary discourse, I should like to prove with the aid of a catchwordlike overview (see the Appendix to this essay). It presents in provisional form the results of stillincomplete research,'j4 and can be developed later in its particulars; here it will only be explained in general, in reference to the historical specificity of the communicative norms. Along the way 1 also hope to be able to indicate what can be taken over for a model of textual communication from the overwhelming supply of universal (and ostensibly universal) components, and could be made useful for a primarily hermeneutical attempt at the interpretation of the horizon of expectations of a past literature. When Zumthor doubts that the theory of simple forms can be applied to medieval literature, because these forms are "not purely enough" represented there,65there come to the fore both the limits of his poetics and the misunderstandings which today burden the belated reception of Jolles's theory in France.'j6 The narrative shortforms appear in the Middle Ages for the most part as literary genres of exemplary discourse; they mediate a religious truth o r a profane teaching and are therefore primarily constituted from components of communication, of reference to the addressees' expectations, of the mediation of knowledge in various modi dicendi, and of implied modes of reception. They provide the nicest view of that which our so modish "narratology" prejudices or even suppresses when, for every imaginable literary o r historiographical genre, it presupposes narrative to be a uniform matrix, which it then at once divides up according to variants or sequences of action; these are themselves not infrequently only paraphrases of the Aristotelian categories of the fable (beginning, middle, and end). The selection and significance of events meanwhile turns out to be quite different when something is not

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directly narrated, but rather is cited, prophesied, interpreted, or testified to; when the speaker wants to awaken insight through a feigned example, or through a historia docet; and finally when a narrator has aimed at a fairy-tale-like unreality, a witty pointe, or a morally openended conclusion (see Appendix, 1.2). Such specific generic distinctions must escape a poetics which is primarily interested in the purely linguistic components of a text, and which grants such a precedence to the poetic function of language (that is, self-referentiality) that all other functions of language are almost eliminated.'j7 Components of textual communication and of social function are missing in Zumthor, both in his description of the narrative function of the lai (pp. 387-89), and in his generative model for the whole corpus of narrative short-forms (pp. 399-403). T h e latter has only two operative matrices: the linear construction of the plot and the status of the personae in the text; where, in this sphere of reference, generally characteristic distinctions come into view, such as with the question of didactic quality, these are made dependent upon the presence of an explicit moral, and thereby the specific ability to differentiate within this sphere of texts according to the implied doctrine is dispensed With such premises, it can scarcely be surprising that precisely the striking exception constituted by the Chatelaine de V e r g ~is said to come closest to the "ideal form" of the novella (as the "narrative montage" of a song it is not allowed any exterior reference, pp. 380 ff.); that not only in the lais of Marie de France (p. 384) but even in thefabliaux (p. 391), the "return of narrative upon itself" is found; that exemplum and legend--despite the opposition of intrahistorical and extrahistorical reference!-are said to be "scarcely distinguishable" (p. 392); and that in the end all historically established characteristics become "superficial characteristics," and thus inessential, when opposed to a "common deep-structure." For many, the less than modest formula of "a narrative discourse coherent both in its intention and in its structure" (p. 403) may imply the unintended moral, that in the last analysis it is more rewarding to differentiate than to identify, even in the most generative depths. . . . In a critique which representatively summarizes the state of German research, H. Bausinger casts light upon the misunderstandings suggested by Jolles's theory of simple forms because of its terminology which sounds so extravagant today. T h e controversial points are "the assumption of the ubiquity of the simple forms, their equation with genetic Urformen, and in connection with this the hypothesis of an unequivocal hierarchy of forms."69 What Jolles was looking for were simple forms "which are not comprehended within stylistics, nor within rhetoric, nor within poetics, perhaps not even within 'textual-


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ity,"' consequently preliterary forms which "occur, so to speak, in language itself without the assistance of any poet."70 As such, they lie in advance of the historically realized manifestations of a literary culture, but not as archetypes (which must be available to all periods), rather as possibilities which can be selected, realized, or also not realized according to cultural codes and social conditions. Considered methodologically, they have the status of heuristic categories: the communication system of the simple forms is characterized not by a supposed ubiquity, but rather by the particular selection and manner of utilization. That they arise not as the result of a conscious choice and activity on the part of the poet, but rather "occur in language itself," cannot be understood as a n anticipation of the selfreferentiality of modern poetic language. Jolles intended thereby a condition with which the philosophy of language and the sociology of knowledge are thoroughly familiar: that attitudes toward reality have the character of a preunderstanding resulting from prior experience taken in with the learning of one's native language, and that therefore they do not spring primarily from conscious selections. T h e great merit of the theory of simple forms is that it allows for the explanation of the implicit horizon of experience of such attitudes toward reality, o r such "heavenly bearingsw7'of world experience (as Jolles once strikingly formulated it). T h e idealist concept of a Geistesbeschaftigung, for a relation to the world, the horizon of which changes the significance of things for the person concerned, can therefore easily be replaced today with the concept of a "subuniverse" [Subsinnwelt], and can thereby be "operationalized." This concept of the subuniverses, introduced by William James for the style of being of different orders of reality, is used by the sociology of knowledge in order to grasp the spheres (or "provinces") of reality with finite meaning-structure in which, in all societies, the subjective experience of reality is arranged.72Such a subuniverse has in common with the Geistesbeschaytigung (occupatio) in Jolles's sense that it is "not constituted through the ontological structure of their objects, but rather through the meaning of our experience"; put another way, that "all experiences that belong to a finite province of meaning . . . point to a particular style of lived experience-viz., a cognitive style. In regard to this style, they are all in mutual harmony and are compatible with one another."73In each case the changeover from one province of meaning to another can be accomplished "only through a leap," or respectively, with the help of a formula for transformation (Jolles: "just put a princess from a fairy tale next to a princess from the novella, and you can tell the differenceHT4). When the accent of reality is bestowed upon a province of meaning, the other provinces of

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meaning appear only as "quasi-realities," including the everyday life-world which certainly represents the "primal types of our experience of reality," but so "that at the same time, from the scientific attitude or from religious experience, the everyday life-world can be seen as a quasi-reality."75 Since the sociology of knowledge has but now begun to work out a systematic typology of the various provinces of meaning with their particular cognitive styles, a problem of interest to both disciplines has presented itself: how do the great subuniverses of the everyday life-world, religious experience, science, play, o r phantasy, explored by A. Schiitz, Thomas Luckmann, and others, relate to the provinces of meaning of the simple forms of aesthetic experience, which are evidently still more finely arranged? With the qualification, "aesthetic e ~ p e r i e n c e , Jolles's " ~ ~ theory is to be rendered more precise, to the effect that his simple forms are concerned with the style of a world experience which is certainly preliterary, that is, still lying before the relation to art in the form of "works," but which yet already has an aesthetic character to the extent that it makes possible the thematizing and the mastering of various claims of reality, allowing man to gain an ever-greater distance from its demands, and to withdraw from pragmatic, everyday urgencies. Considered methodologically, the horizon of experience of the simple forms of aesthetic experience, which today for the most part is no longer self-evident for us, can be reconstructed with the assistance of a hermeneutics of question and answer.77What is and is not included at all in the horizon of expectation of a tale; what kind of religious experience made the legend possible; what type of events can be thematically relevant for an exemplum+ne hardly finds out this sort of thing from a generative model, but one does with the regaining of the fundamental question to which the former, or today's, reader could receive an answer from a text of this genre. So the tale answers the question, "What would the world be like, in which our wishes were fulfilled?"; the legend, the question, "How can virtue become visible in a man?"; the exemplum, the question, "What does the past teach me about the future?"; and so on (see Appendix, 1.4). With this, I am of course not maintaining that the former reader was conscious of such questions, or that today's reader first has to pose the questions in these formulations to understand the meaning of a tale, legend, o r exemplum. For the preunderstanding of a genre, it is only a matter of entering upon the direction of questioning which allows all events to be recognized as "parts of a whole," that is, as belonging to a particular province of meaning. But the implied direction of questioning must, via hermeneutic reflection, be thematized into an explicit question which is verifiable vis-a-vis the accord of the text's answer, if the


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tale's province of meaning is to be more closely distinguished theoretically and defined as a world of dreamlike fulfillment of happiness; the legend's province of meaning as a world of the increasing manifestation of the holy; the exemplum's province of meaning as a world of experience through stories (see Appendix, 1.4). The attempt to apply Jolles's theory of simple forms to a historical repertory of medieval literature, namely, to the Romance literatures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, confirms that the value of the system of nine forms (legend / saga I myth I riddle / aphorism / case / memorabile / tale / joke) cannot be more than a heuristic one. The conception that it is a matter of a self-sufficient system of genetic Urformen out of which literary genres must organically develop-a conception not even represented rigorously by Jolles himself-is totally historicized with the first glance at their medieval rearrangement. In the synchrony of the vernacular literature of the High Middle Ages, only five of the nine forms are represented: aphorism (as proverb) / legend I tale (as h i ) I joke (asfabliau) 1 and case (as itself, and as novella). Four other forms, missing in Jolles, must be added in order to complete the analogous communication system of the exemplary: parable / allegory 1 fable / exemplum. In answer to the question of the alterity of the Middle Ages, one can read from this historical inventory that the simple forms of the Romance literature of this period appear as already "literaried" genres of the exemplary, and therefore are only on the way to the narrative freedom which the fictional verse romance had already reached with Chretien de Troyes, but which the prose short-forms would first claim with the art form of the novella shaped by Boccaccio. From this historical inventory one can further read that the total system of the nine simple forms described by Jolles is first evident in the literature of the modern age, and therefore can only claim historical generality, not archetypal universality and completion. This does not detract from their important hermeneutic value: precisely their status of "middle generalitym-that they are not established in each period and in all literatures, but rather can be conceived, exhausted, forgotten again, reconcretized, rearranged, a n d extended as an open class of possibilities-allows for the inference of the particularity of a period's and literature's cultural code from the particular historical constellation of the forms. Thus, for example, it is significant for antiquity that Pindar's victory ode (contrary to Jolles) does not "make literary" the simple form of the legend, which was first created in the Christian era. On the other hand, it is not an incorrect analogy, but rather explains a provocative secularization of this genre of Christian transcendence, when one

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follows Jolles in associating the modern sports story with the simple form of the legend, for the sports story-think of the vita of a wellknown football star-similarly answers the question as to how athletic "virtue" can appear in a man and be directly measurable in his "record." And thus it also characterizes our modern age, that simple forms such as the proverb, thefable, the exemplum, or the tale have taken on an anachronistic character since Romanticism; they are collected, edited, and revised for textbooks, but they are no longer recognizably produced, with the exception of certain attempts which do so at the cost of reconcretizing them, against the grain, as art forms representing the heights of literary production. It was then all the more effective, after a long period of abstinence, for this age of mass media and subcultures to call the simple forms back out of their submersion: to post the proverb as an advertising slogan; to install the fable as a "thought model" in political rhetoric; to recommend the exemplum as a modern story for reflection; o r to transform the old idyll of the fairy tale into new worlds of happiness. An investigation of such recoveries of temporarily submerged genres could be contrasted with the more resistant, universal, and yet most rapidly deterioratable forms of the riddle and the joke. In considering the contemporary system of simple forms, however, one must bear in mind that the myth, which rarely appeared in the Christian Middle Ages and then only as a highly literary form, has experienced an astounding boom since the nineteenth century as a new mythos, on the basic level of the development and legitimation of political identities. Finally, the memorabile, not accidentally demonstrated by Jolles with the example of a newspaper report, lives and prospers today in the fait divers as well as in the reporting of contemporary history. It achieved its highest literary stature as the basic form of Saint-Simon's histoire particuliire, and then again in Johann Peter Hebel's didactic reworking of history, but it does not reach back behind the threshold of the modern understanding of history: its specific province of meaning, of a facticity the unfathomable meaning of which comes to light in scattered, unsubsumable details, lies on the far side of an experience of history, the consistency of which was guaranteed by God's ~ m n i p o t e n c e . ~ ~ In contrast to this, what does the medieval system of simple forms look like? Here our observations must necessarily restrict themselves to what has already come down to us in a literary form-while not yet in the form of a work-by virtue of having been recorded. It would be sheer idleness to uncover ex silentio the thoroughly imaginable simple forms of the riddle or the joke. Among the texts of vernacular literature, they appear at best in other genres as elements of a fable, but


2 17

evidently were not considered worthy of being recorded.79T h e fact that the myth was not produced can, on the other hand, scarcely be explained except by the suppression of pagan mythology when biblical world history and salvation history attained sole authority. T h e procedure of this suppression was the allegorical reduction of the stories of gods to the moral epithet, or to the personification of virtues and vices; the allegory arrested the myth, and then set in motion the observer as a pilgrim through the stations of an allegorical landThis structure of the allegorical plot as a journey and its s~ape.~O emanationist reversal (the appearance of a heavenly being who interferes in the process of the world) lie, as a simple form, at the basis of the great Latin epics of the school of Chartres. Cloaked in the allegorical garment (sub integumentum), new myths were here created on Christian ground in order to answer the fundamental question of the renewal of life. Similarly, the saga is comprehensible in the vernacular literature of our period only as the substratum of a large genre. T h e chanson de geste points back to it as a simple form just as, on the other hand, its competitor, the Arthurian romance, points back to the simple form of the tale. In the saga a historical event takes on the reduced (often scarcely recognizable) form in which it arrived at significance for the collective memory; most often this remains only a historically attested place or person's name, through which the chanson de geste factically roots itself in history. Its province of meaning is an ideal antiquity, the age of heroes of Carolingian Christianity ("the past such as it ought to have been"), not the Geistesbeschaftigung, "in which the world constructs itself as a family," and out of which, according to Jolles, the Nordic family sagas came forth." In the Romance tradition, the saga did not develop any independent simple form; the correlative to the so-called folk saga, which aims at the explanation of historical or demonic givens,82is only found in Latin anthologies of texts, designed for a priest's use, of which Caesarius von Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum is a good example. In the series of the nine little genres which, in my judgment, form a specifically medieval system of literary communication, the proverb is the shortest form. Its "place in life" is best conceived there, where it is called upon in the context of a plot to comment upon the situation in question; as when, for example, at the well at the meeting of the two pails, Renart enlightens the already once-fooled Ysengrin with the ironic commentary: "as the ones go, the others come, / It's the custom" (Quant li uns va, li autres vient, / C'est la costume qui avient-Roman de Renart, IV, 353-54). The experience of how the world runs (the "custom") is unforeseeable and yet necessary; the wisdom of the prov-

218


erb is therefore-in Jacob Grimm's unforgettable formulation-"not the product of solitary meditation, but rather in it a long-felt truth breaks forth like lightning." This is most beautifully illustrated by the uniquely medieval form of the Prouerbes au uilain: Often, as it seems to me,

I have seen many together,

T h e honest and the bad;

But he who's worth the least

Will be the one who chatters the most;

Nothing will make him quiet.

T h e bad wagon-wheel always screeches,

so says the vilains. (No. 33)

Since here the moral commentary is presented in advance (the reverse of the exemplum, in which the explained maxim is often first presented), the proverb "breaking forth like lightning" retains a moment of surprise which makes it superior to its rati~nalization.~~ If the proverb leads to retrospective insight into the unavoidable course of things, then the parable breaks through all the pragmatic urgencies of the everyday world in order to bring man to a conversion and change of his life. Precisely this appellative function par excellence, because of which the parable is to be considered as the prototype of the literary forms of Christian prophecy created with the New Testament, is scarcely found in the medieval tradition. In the Romance literatures only one instance is known to me which approaches the model of the New Testament in the specific openness toward the addressees. This is found in Joinville's Histoire de Saint Louis, in the chapter which tells of a difficult embassy which must be undertaken to the Sultan of Damascus, and on which hangs the liberation of Jerusalem. Brother Yves is given this embassy as an interpreter. Before his departure, the following occurs: As they went from their lodging to the Sultan's house, Brother Yves saw an old woman that was going across the street, and she carried in her right hand a vessel full of fire, and in her left a phial full of water. Brother Yves asked her, "What doest thou with these?" She answered him that with the fire she would burn u p Paradise, so that there should be none ever again, and with the water quench Hell, so that there should be none ever again. And he asked her, "Why would ye do this?" "Because I would not that any should do good to have the guerdon of Paradise nor for the fear of Hell; but only to have the love of God that is of [unique] worth and can do to us all good."n4

As in a parable, there are features from the most everyday world (drawing water, carrying a torch) which point to the most distant


219

world (the missing Kingdom of God); the antidogmatic message (denying the rewards of heaven and the punishments of hell); and the appellative openness (the addressee must say to himself that which remains unsaid). In the communicative situation, a simple old lady says that which otherwise could only be said with the authority of a "master." The meaning of her figural discourse is to encourage a radical conversion: if all men were willing to act, not in expectation of future reward, nor in fear of future punishment, but rather for the love of God alone, then this Crusade would at once end and the Kingdom of God could break out on earth. Since this memorable instance of medieval Ideologzekritik is probably a matter of a unique case in the history of the genre, the alterity of the Middle Ages is characterized once again by its dogmatic surplus. The subuniverse of religious experience extra ecclesiam is in this period almost exclusively thematized in the little genres of the allegory (the dit), the legend, and the miracle. T h e tendency to take away the extravagant character of figural discourses5 through allegorical interpretation, in order to transform it into direct doctrine, already begins in the New Testament (e.g., Matt. 13:18-23) and permeates the Middle Ages. The authoritative allegory makes itself master of the undogmatic parable through the procedure of decoding uninterruptedly the historia according to previously given norms of significance, the meaning of which ought to open up for the hearer of the figural discourse only from out of the pointe of the whole, and only ad personam. Nevertheless, the predominance of religious allegory was not as absolute as it is often taken to have been: its dogmatic monopoly on interpreting according to the duplex sententia was broken by worldly poetry around the turn from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, and even in the sphere of the simple forms of the exemplary, it stood in competition with other genres from the beginning. Of these, it is above all the exemplum and the fable which in the ancient tradition were already fully developed literarily, and which also were the object of rhetorical theory. Here let one only be reminded of the Aristotelian theory of paradigma (Rhet. 2:20).Its result for Christian lay instruction can be summarized to the effect that the exemplum as well as the fable fed upon the aesthetic evidence of the perceptible, but the fictitious example was covered by the greater power of the factual, and considered as an original model granted through action.86In Christian usage, the exemplum could be played off against heathen philosophy and its claim that knowledge of the true was reserved for conceptual thought and its logical means. The Christian conviction of the greater importance which must be due to the historically evident over the merely thought, to the eventful, percep-

220


tible act over the mere system of doctrine (Christus primo docuit factis quam verbis), can be a reason why the exemplum gained a new worth and literary rank with the spread of Christian teaching. It is different with the Aesopian fable: it was employed as a textbook, rather like a child's reader, for use in teaching Latin. An early adaptation, the so-called Romulus Nilantinus, to which the vernacular tradition referred since Marie de France's Esope, indicates how the fable entered into the tradition of the Christian Middle Ages, although not altogether smoothly.87The author-monk was evidently aware of the difficulties involved in making Aesopian fables serviceable to Christian instruction. The essential world of the classical fable is one in which all figures of the plot are inextricably bound to their natures, and are paradigmatic precisely because of the lack of freedom in their roles. The existential claim of Christian morality, on the contrary, demands room for the decision between good and evil. Between these two there gapes a contradiction which here was supposed to be bridged by a naive recourse to the Socratic doctrine that one does not knowingly do evil. For although the pious author subordinates Aesop to the Christian intention, ostendi vias malorum, confiirmavi vias bonorum, he recognizes Aesop's wisdom in showing us how to distinguish between the humiles atque sapientes and the malzvolos et insipientes. The fable's plot and its moral do not deviate so far from one another again in the later tradition of the genre. And yet the tensional relationship between plot model and doctrine remains the most interesting aspect of the "history of reception" of the fables of antiquity, the range of which was considerably broadened in the Middle Ages by the taking up of heterogeneous materials. Marie de France, for example, had no small difficulty in interpreting the Aesopian fable, with its inherent "theory of life for the subjugated," for a knightly Her apology, therefore, unnecessarily turned out to be a powerful reinterpretation of the fable. Since fable and apology are related not as instance and rule, that is, not in a relationship of logical subsumption, but rather stand in a relationship of perceptible model and exemplary norm of action, then the genre itself has the freeplay which each fable can reconcretize in the history of its reception. Legend and tale stand opposed to one another in the system of the little genres of the Middle Ages, in that the supernaturalism of the legend is to be believed, while the wonders of the tale presuppose a "suspension of disbelief," an enjoyment of the irreality of the action. And distanced from both of these genres is the farce, which in the medieval form of thefabliau denies both the supernatural truth of the legend and the inner-worldly transcendence of the tale, and instead presents the reality of the everyday life-world as an object of laughter.

T H E ALTERITY A N D MODERNITY OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

22 1

In the medieval context I have only one historical remark to add to the description of the legend's subuniverse as a world of the holy in the process of becoming evident, and to the definition of its modus recipiendi as imitabile, through which virtue is to become active and measurable. The perfection of perfectus, which does not allow for any change and which is exalted above pity and fear, evidently leaves so little room for the duration of active imitatio that the new norm of an imperfect hero had to be opposed to the twelfth-century model which had itself become unattainable. It was the fallible, quotidian bearer of the miracle of Mary who corresponded better to the need for sympathetic identification, but who then also could easily slip into a sentimental or magical relationship (e.g., with the holy as an emergency helper for all of life's situations). The tale, on the other hand, has not come down to us in the Romance tradition of the Middle Ages in its now-classical form which Jolles described with reference to Grimm's fairy tales. There is, to be sure, a medieval Little Red Ridinghood in Egbert von Liittich's Fecunda Ratis, and even in this version one can find the plot-structure of t h e talelike inversion, according to which the hero knows the answer before the question has been posed-which in this case means that the girl already has the gift (a red baptismal garment) before she is able to recognize its use (as an instrument for escaping from the But the expected marvel of the tale proves to be one of divine intervention (Mitigat inmites animos, auctor eorum, 485) which then the later tradition of the tale also rejected as a heterogeneous marvel from a legend. As if the province of meaning of fairy-tale-like wishfulfillment could not be tolerated on its own, the lai, which lives on its motifs, weaves in problems of courtly love; and the romance justifies it, when it discovers this province of meaning in the secretive aura of the matiire de Bretagne, with the claim to interpret the adventure's path to happiness as the experience of education through love. The nine little genres, which in my classification might constitute a medieval correlative to Jolles's system of simple forms, collectively suggest an analysis which considers the forms and pragmatics of exemplary discourse on the one hand and the gradual appearance of an autonomous narrator on the other. With this, I certainly do not mean to fuel the genetic illusion, as if it was a matter of a literary evolution which displayed continuity. The exemplary forms with their province of meaning remain permanently standing next to one another in synchrony: of course they exhibit diachronically internal changes of norms, but these do not reach the threshold at which autonomous narration first began. Referring to H.-J. N e u s ~ h a f e r , ~ ~ this threshold can be defined as the temporalizing and problematizing

222


of the older little genres: temporalizing the paradigmatic as well as fictional plot-model (with this, the already narrative genres of the tale and the farce are also transformed), and problematizing the normative, preexisting significance (the exemplary genres were drawn into, and discussed within, the casuistry of life's praxis). T o be sure, the later production of novellas in their great quantity repeatedly fell back into the old exemplary and farcical models, their function in the life-world having in no way been discharged by the invention of a higher narrative genre. The system-individualizing dominant of the high form of the novella can still not be grasped better even today than through Jolles's hypothesis of its medieval oripn in the simple form of the case, which we also recognize in this period as a separate literary form.g1 Thus our consideration ends with the genre which is the most complicated of the simple forms, and, with its open form, also the most modern. I began with a hermeneutic case which is complicated for the modern observer, but which, however, was not even a case yet for the medieval observer. As the motto says, it was still self-evident for thesage escrivein, that "the old things and the new 1 only together are good and beautiful." Why shouldn't we also rediscover in this alterity of the Middle Ages an aspect of its modernity for us?92

UNIVERSITY OF CONSTANCE (Translated by Timothy Bahti) NOTES 1 See Introduction to Vol. 1, Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters (hereafter referred to as GRLMA) (Heidelberg, 1972), v-xii. 2 [For Jauss's use of the concept of "concretization," see Felix Voditka, "Konkretizace literariniho dila" (1941), in Struktura y'uoje (Prague, 1969); and his own "Geschichte d e r Kunst und Historie," in Literaturgeschichfe a h Provokation (Frankfurt, 1970), esp. pp. 246-49. Tr.] 3 T h e expression history of effect [Wirkungsgeschichte] distorts this state of affairs, as H. Blumenberg has already made clear for the history of the reception of myths: "Significance . . . is a result, and not an established supply o r fund: myths d o not 'always already' signify what they are interpreted o r made out as being, but rather arrive at this out of the configurations into which they enter o r into which they are brought. Polysemy is a conclusion from their history of reception, reflecting upon their basic condition" (in Poetik und Hermeneutik, IV, ed. M. Fuhrmann [Munich, 19711, 66). 4 Pierre-Yves Badel, in his critique of Zumthor's PoHiqve m'diivale (in Poitique, 18 [1974], 259), has analyzed the considerably shrunken catalog of medieval texts which today still find more than a specialist's interest, and he establishes why "the savor that one tastes in 'old things"' is still a better approach to medieval literature than the new poetics of icriture. 5 The Discarded Image (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 8, 9. 6 According to C. S. Lewis, ibid. pp. 200, 203.


223

7 Above all in Peter Haidu's critique, but also with Pierre-Yves Badel, Wolf-Dieter Stempel, and Eugene Vance; see n. 25. 8 Eugenio Coseriu, "Thesen zum Thema 'Sprache und Dichtung,"' in Beitriige zur Textlinguistik, e d . Wolf-Dieter Stempel (Munich, 1971), p. 187. T h e language of medieval texts, as one from the past, makes the alterity of their world visible to us and at the same time, as one that is poetic, also makes this world accessible again in spite of the distance in time. That which, as a nuance of poetic expression, does not allow for accurate transmission only apparently stands opposed to the principal translatability of past poetry. All translation stands conditioned by the unending reception, that is, the progressive concretization of new significance, in view of which the ideal of a "true" o r integral reproduction of the significance contained in a text in its supposed totality represents a substantialist illusion. 9 Essai de poitique m'diiuale (Paris, 1972), p. 42: "The diffusion of printing . . . renders the last blow to the old universe globally perceived by all the human senses; it dissociates it, reduces it to a visual and linear perception. T h e signification of writing modifies itself." T h e estimate provided by Thomas Gossen gives a glimpse of this epochal change: at the end of the fifteenth century in France, out of approximately fifteen million persons, only about forty thousand could read. 10 Uauss's use of the term aura refers to the central concept of Walter Benjamin's examination of the work of art in the bourgeois era, in "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" (1936). now available in English in Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), pp. 217-51. Tr.] 11 "Der Leser als Instanz einer neuen Geschichte der Literatur," Poetica, 7 (1975), 341, from which I draw several passages in what follows. 12 A la recherche d'une poitique midikuale (Paris, 1970). 13 One owes these insights to the Romance philologist Jean Rychner, who with his pioneering work, La cha&on de geste: Essai sur l'art i&ue des jongleurs (Geneva, 1955). caused a change in paradigms in the study of Romance epics. 14 Daniel Poirion has brought to light the absence of the fixed form of a work in the case of the thirteenth-century prose romance: the various divisions and illustrations of different manuscripts yield so many interpretations by the scribes; and their practical use also indicates that such books were "an instrument that one manipulates, skims, consults, and reads slowly day after day" ("Roman e n vers et Roman e n prose," in GRLMA, IV/l [Heidelberg, 1977.)] 15 The Discarded Image, p. 209. 16 Ibid., pp. 51 ff., and also "Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages," in Studies zn Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. W. Hooper (Cambridge, 1966). pp. 41 -63. 17 "Their theology might be thought to imply an Earth which counted for a good deal in the universe and was central in dignity as well as in space; the odd thing is that their cosmology does not, in any obvious sense, encourage this view": "Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages," ibid., p. 46. 18 The Discarded Image, p. 220. 19 Ibzd., p. 204. 20 Ibid., p. 21 1: "For the aim is not self-expression o r 'creation'; it is to hand o n the 'historial' matter worthily; not worthily of ydur own genius o r of the poetic art but of the matter itself." 21 Lebensforrnen im Mittelalter (Frankfurt and Berlin, 1973), pp. 20, 21. 22 Borst therefore prefers verbal and written sources, with the reference "that medieval works of art illustrate the forms of life atmospherically, but d o not imitate them in the risk of their performance" (ibid., p. 22). 23 According to Borst, ibid., pp. 65, 70, and R. R. Grimm, "Die Paradiesesehe: Eine erotische Utopie des Mittelalters," in Festschrzi W. Mohr (Goppingen, 1972), pp. 1-25.

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24 Essai depoitique midiivale, p. 117; in what follows I take u p the critical debate which has been carried out by Pierre-Yves Badel, "Pourquoi une Poetique medievale?" Poihque, No. 18 (1974). pp. 246-64; Peter Haidu, "Making It (New) in the Middle AgesTowards a Problematics of Alterity," Diacritics (Summer 1974); Eugene Vance, "The Modernity of the Middle Ages in the Future," The Romanic Review, 64 (1973), 140-51; Wolf-Dieter Stempel, Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 210 (1973). 445-52. 25 See Vance, "The Modernity of the Middle Ages," p. 147. 26 Ibid., p. 146. 27 "Uber die Beschaftigung mit mittelalterlicher Literatur nach einer Lekture der asthetischen Schriften Bertolt Brechts," Tubinger Forschungen, Nos. 78 and 79 (1974), pp. 1-5; quotation from p. 5a. 28 Ibid., p. 5b. 29 Ibid., p. 4a. 30 T h e lion in Yvain (cited in ibzd., p. 3b), who almost commits suicide, can also be related to the guilty conscience of his lord as a contrasting reflection, which at the very least makes the comedy ambivalent. 31 Ibid., p. 2b. 32 Ibzd., pp. 3b, 4b. [Haug's formulation directly echoes those of Walter Benjamin's "Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen" [1940]: "The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action" (XV); and "The historical materialist . . . remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history" (XVI); in English in Illuminations, pp. 261, 262. Tr.] 33 See ibid., p. 2a. 34 See ibid., p. 3c. 35 W. Haug's epigraph, from Bertolt Brecht, Gesammeh W e r h , XVI (Frankfurt, 1967), 960.

36 GRLMA, p. xii.

37 See the paragraph o n Reinhart Fuch in "Geschichte der poetischen National-

literatur der Deutschen" (1835-42), cited from G. G. Gervinus, Schryten zur Literatur

(Berlin, 1962), p. 191.

38 Ibid., p. 203.

39 Gunther Buck in his review, in Ruperto-Carola, vol. 25, p. 294.

40 "Preface de Cromwell" (1828), in Oeuures dramatigues et critigues complites, ed. Fran-

cis Bouvet (Paris, 1963), p. 142.

41 According to A. Borst, "Statement" to Poetik und Hermeneutik, V l l I (forthcoming).

42 A. Borst, "Barbarossa 1971," in Poetik und Hermeneutik VIII.

4 3 Representative of the contemporary interest is o n the one hand, Verbum et

Signum-Beitrage zur mediauistischen Bedeutungsforschung: Festschri fur Friedrich Ohly, ed.

H . Fromm, W. Harms, and U. Ruberg (Munich, 1975); o n the other hand, Poitigue, No. 23, devoted to the problem of "Rhetorique et hermeneutique." 44 Galileo Galilei (Frankfurt, 1965), p. 14. 45 In Die nicht mehr schonen Kunste (Poetik und Hermeneutik I l l ) , ed. Hans Robert Jauss (Munich, 1968), pp. 583-610. 46 Dante als Dichter &r irdirchen Welt (Berlin and Leipzig, 1929). p. 20; in English in Dante: Poet of the Secular World, tr. Ralph Mannheim (Chicago, 1961), p. 13. 47 See Europaische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern, 1948), esp. p. 258; in English in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953). esp. pp. 254, 255. 48 T h e most informative evidence for this (and a tidbit for Ideologtekritik!) is from Jean de Grouchy's De Mutica (late thirteenth century): "That song is to be offered to the aged

225


and the working people and the common people, consulting it while resting from work, and hearing of the miseries and calamities o f i t h e r s , they might suffer thiir own more easily, and one may undertake his (own) work with more eagerness"; commented upon by Daniel Poirion, "Chanson d e geste ou epopee?," Travaux de linguistique et de littirature, Universite de Strasbourg, 10, No. 2 (1972), 13. 49 For particulars see Poetik und Hermeneutik I11 (1968), 60 1, 602. 50 "Die literarischen Formen der Jenseits- und Endzeitvisionen," in GRLMA, VIII, 184-89. 51 Ibid., p. 186. 52 Alfred Adler, Sens et composition du Jeu de la Feuilke (Ann Arbor, 1956). 53 The Allegory of Love: A Study of Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1953), pp. 30 and 113. 54 Its theological origin lies in the commentaries o n Genesis, the richness of whichstill unexploited by literary history-is best presented in Reinhold R. Grimm, Paradisus coelestis-Paradisus terrestris: Zur ~ u s l e g u n ~ s ~ l s c h i cdes h t eParadieses im Abendland (Munich, 1976). 55 Summary by Jurgen Habermas [of Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928)-Tr.], inZur Aktualitat WalterBenjamins, ed. S. Unseld (Frankfurt, 1972), p. 182. 56 See G. Hess, Die Landschaft in Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal" (Heidelberg, 1953). pp. 69 ff. 57 See my earlier short version in French, "Litterature medievale et theorie des genres," Poitique, No. 1 (1970), pp. 79- 101. 58 See the comprehensive report o n research by K. U'. Kempfer, Gattungstheorie: Information und Synthese (Munich, 1973). I agree with his own synthesis in the definition of genres as "communicative norms," but not in its constructivist foundation, as the following shall make clear. 59 Synchronic, Diachronic und Geschichte: Das Problem des Sprachwandels (Munich, 1974). 60 According to Gunther Buck, "Kants Lehre vom Exempel," Archiv fur Bepifsgeschichte, 11 (1967), 182. 61 uauss is using the concept of the dominants, developed by the Russian formalists Eichenbaum and Tynyanov to describe the dominant quality o r distinguishing feature of a literary work, usually the preeminence in the text of a particular property or of a particular group of elements. Tr.] 62 "Gibt es Textsorten?" in Textsorten: Differenzierungskriterien aus linguistischer Sicht, ed. E. Gulich and W. Raible (Frankfurt, 1972). p. 180. 6 3 See K. W. Kempfer, Gattungsthorie: Information und Synthese, and the volume, Les genres de la litfiratur-e populaire (PoHique, No. 19 [ 19741). 64 I rely here o n the still-unpublished results of the seminar which I gave in July, 1976, at the Centre d'Etudes medi6vales in Poitiers; and on my students' monographs,

which are indicated in n. 92.

65 Essai de poitique midiinale, p. 392.

66 T h e French version of Formes simples only appeared in 1972 (Paris, Editions du

Seuil).

67 Objections raised by Peter Haidu, "Making It (New) in the Middle Ages," p. 18,

and Pierre-Yves Badel, p. 255.

68 Objection raised bylVolf-Dieter Stempel, who provides examples for this and who

draws this conclusion from his whole critique: "One only becomes aware of this if one

does not d o away with the characteristic differences between the individual types of

texts as 'superficial differences' which can be traced back to a common deep-

structure. . . . For then either this deep-structure . . . proves to be insignificant, o r else

the superficial differences are in reality the same as the 'deep' ones" (Archin fur das

Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, p. 452).

69 Formen der "Volkspoesie" (Berlin, 1968), p. 60.

-

-

226


70 Einfache Formen, 3rd ed. (1929; rpt. Darmstadt, 1958), p. 10. 71 See Bausinger, Fonnen der "Volkspoesie," p. 54. 72 See Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World (Evanston, 1973). 73 Ibid., p. 23. 74 Einfache Formen, p. 196. 75 The Structures of the Life-World, p. 25. 76 Here 1 refer to my more extensive argument in my recently published book ASthetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (Munich, 1977). 77 [While drawing upon a tradition of hermeneutic historicism which runs from Vico through Schleiermacher and Dilthey, Jauss is referring here in particular to the methods of R. C. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford, 1939), and The Idea of History (Oxford, 1945); and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tubingen, 1960) (in English, Truth and Method [New York, 19761). See his own Literaturgeschichte aO Provokation, esp. pp. 183-87, and his article, "Goethes und Valerys Faust-Im Hermeneutik von Frage und Antwort," Comparative Literature, 28, No. 3 (1976), 201 -32. Tr.] 78 According to Thomas Holapfl, in his University of Constance dissertation on this genre (in preparation). 79 In the Proven~aldevinalh the riddle was raised to the level of a special, esoteric lyric form; see N. Pasero in Cultura neolatina, 28 (1968), 1-34. 80 According to Harald Weinrich, in Terror und Sprel: Probleme der Mythenrezeption (Poetik und Hermeneutih IV), ed. M. Fuhrmann (Munich, 1971), p. 61 1. 81 Einfache Formen, p. 74. 82 See H. Bausinger, Formen der "Volkspoesie,"p. 178: "The saga. . . seeks to banish the unheard of, the inexplicable, and that which oversteps the quotidian norms, to banish them into the explanatory categories and forms which have been prepared by folk beliefs and in traditional patterns of motifs. T h u s the uncanny is not only experienced in the saga, but also exorcised and banished." 83 T h e basic contradiction between ruled experience and the reality of life which is never capable of being contained was presented most profoundly by Cervantes in the relationship of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; I have written of this elsewhere, in " ~ b e dr en Grund des Vergnugens am komischen Helden," in Poetik und Hermeneutik VI.

84 Jean Sire de Joinville, The History of St. Louis, tr. Joan Evans (Oxford, 1938), p. 133.

85 Paul Ricoeur characterized the intention of specifically biblical modes of discourse

such as metaphor, eschatological aphorisms, and proverblike sayings as "to dissuade the

hearer from the plan of making something which displays continuity out of his life," in

Euangelische Theologze (special issue on metaphor) (Munich, 1974). p. 67.

86 In what follows I borrow several sentences from my statement on the exemplary in

Positionen der Negatiuitat (Poetik und Hermeneutik VI), ed. Harald Weinrich (Munich,

1976). pp. 31 1 ff.

87 In what follows I am referring back to the first chapter of my Untersuchungen zur

mittelalterlichen Tierdichtung (Tubingen, 1959), pp. 24-55.

88 A. Schirokauer, "Die Stellung Asops in der Literatur des Mittelalters," in Festschnjl

fur W . Stammler (Berlin and Bielefeld, 1953), pp. 179-91.

89 A formulation with which M.-L. Teneze has enriched the research of tales with a

fundamental category, in "Du conte merveilleux comme genre," Arts et traditions

populaires, 18 (1970), 1 1.

90 Boccaccio und der Beginn der Nouellistik (Munich, 1969).

91 See Paul Zumthor, Essai depoPtique mPdiPuale, p. 403, on Martial d'Auvergne's Arr6t.y

&Amour.


227

92 For the following overview, I can only here give a few bibliographical references, not any exhaustive documentation. M. Fuhrrnann has described, in outline fashion, the literary system of the little genres in antiquity in Der altsp-achliche Unterricht, 5 (December 1975). For the individual genres I refer to the following studies, to which I am also indebted in part for my formulations: (on aphorism) E. Rattunde, Li proverbes au uilain (Heidelberg, 1966); (on parable) W. Magass, "Zur Semiotik der signifikanten Orte in den Gleichnissen Jesu," Linguistics biblica, 15/16 (1972). 3-21, and Paul Ricoeur and E. Jiingel, "Metapher: Zur Hermeneutik religinser Sprache," in Evangelische Theologze (Sonderheft) (Munich, 1974); (on fable) H.-U. Gumbrecht, Introduction to his translation of Marie de France's Esope, in Klassische Texte des romanischen Mzttelalters, Vol. 12 (Munich, 1973); (on exemplum) R. Koselleck, "Historia magistra vitae," in Natur und Geschichte: Festschrift fur Karl Lowith (Stuttgart, 1968). Karl Stierle, "Geschichte als Exemplum: Exemplum als Geschichte," in Text als Handlung (Munich, 1975). pp. 14-48, and R. Honsteter, who is preparing a University of Constance dissertation on this genre; (on legend) Uda Ebel, Dm altromanische Mirakel (Heidelberg, 1965); (on tale) M.-L. Teneze, "Le conte merveilleux franqais," Ethnologic fran~aise, 2, Nos. 1-2, 97-106; (on fabliau) J. Beyer, Schwank und Moral (Heidelberg, 1969). and Robert Guiette, "Fabliaux," in Qustions d . littd'rature, I (Ghent, l960), 61 -86; (on novella) H.-J. Neuschafer, Boccaccio und der Begtnn der Novellistik (Munich, 1969). and the stillindispensable study by Erich Auerbach, Zur Technik der Friihrenaissancenovelle in Ztalien und Frankreich (Heidelberg, 192 1).

Appendlx An Ovewlew of the L ~ n l eLlterary Genre of Exemplary D~scourseIn the Mlddle Ages APHORISM 1 Commun~cat~ve

S~tuaeon

1 1 Who speaks? An anonymous au Who IS addressed? thorlty ( I we) a speech whlch 1s passed on (even to ~tself)

1 2 Modus Dlcend,

PARABLE

ALLEGORY

FABLE

the

A renowned author- A textually learned Orlglnally ~ t yto believers and exegete to the lay speaker to a gatherIng leg~t~mated the st111unlns~ghtful publlc through custom as (Jesus and hls dls clples) an author

C~tlnga proverb In Appellat~ve (antlan lmaglned and dogmat~c)preachpo~nted one sen- lng of a doctr~ne tence form

Interpretabon through Persuasion through allegoresls ( a l ~ u d a telgned example verb~s, aliud sensu oslend~t)

For the most part, a The everyday world peasantl~keenvlron- of expsrlence (onment cluding work), the spatially and tempoNatural cycles rally nearest thlngs often ~n relatlon to the farthest thongs

The world as the Reduction of contonstage for salvat~on gency t o a world hlstory, the events under the sheer of whlch are related conditions of the to the present time actlon: constant c~rcumstances

1 3. Province of

Meaning

1 3 1. Space

1 3 2 Time

1 3 3 Agents

L i v ~ n gbelngs and Relat~onships be- Man in contrast to Known (often comthings (each repre- tween men, also God and the powers plementary) characsentlng ~ t sspecles) events In nature of the world ters (therefore anlmals are favored), foreseeable roles

1 3 4 Plot model

For the most part P~erclngthe prob- Human amon w ~ t h - Model for the perb~part~te and wlth a able In the framework of ceptual recognltlon p o ~ n t e( ~ na consalvation hlstory of of a rule of action trastlng ~llustrat~on) the Fall and Redemptlon

1.4.1 Message (an answer to .I

What does everyday Whatshould I do. In What must I do In What am I gettlng experlence say order to experlence order to stand be- lnto when I take on about thls ~nstance? the truth? fore G o d s ludg- this role? ment? The world wlthln an Ironic perspective of reslgnatlon Such 1s lhfel

The K ~ n g d o m of God as the hldden meanlng of the world

The world In the The world of purllght of dogmall- poslvely ratlonal cally Interpreted be- action lhef

2 The Relabonsh~p

to Tradlllon

2 1 Dlachron~cally

Wldely spread In the Originally of an apvernacular tradit~on: pellat~vefunction. In In the Mlddle Ages, the M~ddleAges, alalso bullt lnto the most totally abfabhau and the ro- sorbed lnto allegorlmance, commented cal instruction (the upon In the Prov- d11) erbes au v ~ l a ~ n

Autochthonous med~evalgenre for the lnstructlon of laymen (after the end of the twelfth century)

In anclent rhetor~c, a form of lnductlve proof, in the Mlddle Ages, broadened through Dlck-andJane-bke usage

VS the preceptive Vs. the aphorism maxlm favorlng the exceptlon not the rule' vs allegory not to be decoded wlth a key (or a dogma)

Protest of the splrl- VS the exemplum, tual poet agalnst the whlch requlres a flctlons of worldlv hlstorlcal precedent (courtly) poetry

3 Place m L ~ l e 3 1 Modus Rec~p~end! Called In to comment Im~tatioas a unlty of Recogn~t~on and de- Taklng In a doctrlne upon a s i t u a t ~ o n recognltlon and coding of duplex per analoglam whlch has arlsen actlon sententla (parole coverte-parole overtel 3 2 Model of Behav~or A conversion whlch Chrlstlan norms for S e l f - r e c o g n ~ t ~ o n IS demanded (Du leadlng one s l ~ f ewlthln a role muss1 d e ~ nLeben (virtue vs vice) andern, [ ~ l l k e ] ) 3 3 Soclal (ldeologl- A stock of everyday Formallon or legltl Re~nforcement of Explanat~on of cal) FuncI~or expeuences shared matlon of a rellglous orthodox bellel worldly wlsdom. by Speaker and g r o u p - ~ d e n t ~ t y(a often formulated hearer whlch for parabolically hldden from the perspecthe most part evaiu- d~scourse renders bve of the oppressed ates the world protect on agalnsf negatively lhose fnal are 101 amonQ tne cnosenr

EXEMPLUM

LEGEND

TALE

The authority of a An anonymous wlt- An anonymous narteacher, to one will- ness, to the com- rator (a flgure of Ing to learn munlty of believers folk wlsdom), to a nalve clrcle of listeners (the chaln from "old" to "young")

JOKE (Fabhau)

NOVELLA

For the most part, an anonymous narrator, to a circle of hearers who seek

A narrator who appears as be~nglndiv ~ d u a l and well known, to a readlng publlc

entertainment

Demonstrat~on Testimony of a holy Narrat~onas 11 no Narrat~onalmed at a Narrat~onIn open through a historical llfe glven of reality were wlny pointe tenslon ("lf-anyoperative tension"), and withprecedent out any predecided signlflcance

Faclum probab~le, Slgnllke, restricted laudab~le, memora- to events whlch b ~ l e , locallzed ~n stand ln the relation soace and tlme actlve vlrtue-contirmlng marvel

F a m ~ l ~ a r , closed Everyday envlron- H~storicalconcretlspace vs strange. ment with the mul- zatlon of place and outer space tlpllcity of human time, a new clrcumactivities. vet wlth stantlalitv and l i An lmaglnary past caricatureli~eopt~cs cense to'descr~be ( 'once upon a wen the "unseemly" tlme"1

A famed person, Famed. canonized The hero as the of exemplary through person. the commu- transgressor nltv-on-the-maklno boundaries. oalrs of an actlon vs'the unbel~evlng, agents (according the duallsm of to Propp and supernatural powers Gre~mas)

Typ~calpersonae, lndlviduated persomostly of the lower nae In social roles ranks (distlnoulsned and conflicts by cunnini) and folly)

Plot deta~ls related to a tlmeless moral tvoe (solum ouod hiitabremesinarrandum)

Plot deta~lsrelated An unheard-of Inclto the discrepancy dent whlch raises a betweenexoectatlon moral case andfulfillnlknt

T y p ~ f ~ eIn d prede- Happenings whlch termlnatlon crlsls occur w ~ t h l n the (convers~on) t r ~ a l o r ~ n c ~ o l eof the (the ~ a s s ~ o nand ) , m~raculous ("adposthumous Influ- venture" vs eplc ence actlon)

What does the past How can vlrtue be- What would the Where can the According to whlch teach me about the come v ~ s ~ b lIne a world be lhke ~f our events manlfest norm lsthlseventto future? man? wishes were ful- theor cheerful side? be evaluated? illled? The world of storles The world of the The world of dream- The world wlthout a The world In the as a wealth of holy In the course of lhke wlsh fulfillment hlgher truth, as the autonomous probexperience becoming manliest object of laughter lemat~cof intersublectlve experience

Wldely spread In the Shaped by Boccacfolk t r a d ~ t ~ o nI.n clo as an autonoantlqulty a farce of mous form through the gods, apoph- the temporallzlng thegma, lacelle a and problematlzlng spec~al med~eval of older genres form the farces of (exemplum mlracle the anlmal eplc farce, and nla)

In antlqulty a F ~ r s t speclflcally mythlc-hlstorlcal formed In the era of paradlgm In rhetorl- Chrlst~an bel~ef a cal usage In Chr~s- substratum of the tlanlty an Instru- polltlcal legends of ment for the In- the modern aoe Structlon of laymen (movere et probare)

Wldelv soread In the folk ttadition; In the Middle Ages, only a substratum to the la, and the Arthurlan romance

Hlstor~calauthenticlty vs loglcal proof and vs feloned examples

VS the saga (rooted I n contrast to the In the collect~ve svmbollsm of the memory), and vs splr~tual,as well as the legend (a be- to the ~deallsmof lleved mlracle) worldly genres

VS the mlracle (wlth ~ t simperfect holv ones1 and vs the' exemplum (where vlrtue 1s an act of w~ll)

Recogn~zlnga rule Adm~rlng~dentlflca- Enloy~ngthe other of actlon In the tlon (vs sympathet- world of flctlon IC ldentlflcatlon ~n precedent the mlracle)

Removed from the ldeallsm of herolc poetry, as well as from the genres teach~ng a d ~ r e c t moral

Stupefact~on, plea- Surprlse and reflecsure In the po~nte, tion a laugh~ngrecognltlon

Imilab~le, that ex- Im~tabile,where vlr- Rel~ef from the Suspension of the An educated publlc's horts toward vlrtue tue becomes actlve, stress and earnest- norms and taboos discussion submmed or warns agalnst measurable, con- ness of the everyday of the ordered life to moral casuistry vice ce~vable Exempla maiorum Broadening and In a leglt~matlng confirmat~on of befunction, hlstoria Ilef, practically, the docet ~n a morallz- ablllty to appeal to ing fundlon removed the holy (salnts' from aesthetic Iden- names, emergency tiflcation help)

The utopla of a happy world, awakened through poetlc justlce

Only a contrasting Conversation as a "realism." rel~eved form of "emotional from norms wlthout observation of secuhavlng to call them lar life." and of reInto questlon flectlon upon social norms

From Hi(story) to Poem, or the Paths of Pun:

The Grands Rhktoriqueurs of

Fifteenth-Century France

Paul Zumthor into hi(story), hi(story) into the text . . . the equivocal term hi(story). Let us begin by granting that the term conveys notions which refer to three orders of facts: (1) chronicle, the sequences of events; (2) context, the circumstances which surround the particular phenomenon and are linked to the chronicle at one level o r another; (3) historicity, the total impact of organized internal marks, a set of notions formed by the conscious and unconscious mind of a given individual. T h e text manifests its subject and identifies meaning as what is said about the subject. While remaining outside, the actual event weighs upon the language of the text, making the parole possible, here and now. Situated between the present-absent author and the world into which he integrated himself, the fifteenth-century text calls, an echo from distant epochs, imposing upon us the thankless task of perceiving and defining its articulations.

I

NSCRIBING THE TEXT

But the above classification does not make for sufficient clarity. For instance, Molinet's Ressource du petit peuple belongs to a chronicle well known to us: its author served for two years as the indiciaire or historiographer of the duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, who was killed near Nancy on January 5, 1477. In the chaos of this defeat, Molinet, a family man of some standing, saw the materials of his world collapsing, in a literal and figurative sense. He set off in search of someone to serve, knocked at the door of the bishop of Liege, hoped to find refuge with good "king" Rene ["le bon roi" Rene I of Anjou, king of Naples, 1438-421. But at the end of August, he had an unexpected stroke of good luck: Marie, Charles the Bold's daughter, married Maximilian, the archduke of Austria. At this new household, which seemed to promise a speedy restoration of Burgundian power, Molinet was to regain his social position. But this very promise threatened the king of France, Louis XI, who sent into the Artois area, recently conquered by his knights, bands of archers and professional soldiers, causing devastation, fires, and destruction of crops. CopyrightQ 1979 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia

232


The starving Burgundian townspeople rebelled against the nobles; the French marched on Douai, burning Armentieres and the outlying districts of Valenciennes, driving the inhabitants of Arras from their city. Called to the rescue by the new duchess, companies of Germans and English concentrated at Valenciennes. Three successive truces between the princes, in 1478, 1479, and 1480, left pillagers and murderers [icorcheurs] roaming the land. Towns rebuilt their gallows; in a single day twenty-seven were hanged at Valenciennes. In the middle of an exceptionally hard winter, when a combination of famine and speculation on foodstuffs was crushing the poor, Marie of Burgundy gave birth to a daughter, named after her grandmother and godmother, Marguerite, the duchess of York, who came (in February, 1480) to the baptism at the Brussels Cathedral of Sainte-Gudule. In the months that followed, Molinet composed the Ressource d u petit peuple, the Temple de Mars, and the Testament de la Guerre, less than a year before the ephemeral peace of 1482 and the demise of the House of Burgundy occasioned by the sudden death of Marie. These events provide the brute extratextual material. During the same period, the Portuguese were building the fortress of Siio Jorge da Mina on the African Gold Coast. T o make a synchronic slice across the entire West, even the entire world, would be to bind together events seemingly disparate but linked together on a general level of intertwined causes. Forming multiple subunits hierarchically contained inside one another, the chronicle affects directly a number of individuals or objects, imprinting upon them a mark of varying profundity. Conversely, the discourse stands out from the real and the fictive universes, between what is posited as its reference (that for which it provides the Proper Name) and something of which it obscurely reveals the presence. One event may leave a mark on an entire generation; another may affect only you. Who knows? You write about what you claim to know, but who would ever agree to be reduced to that tiny aspect of himself which lives in his text? Certainly, boundaries cannot be imposed here; differences in range of meaning, however, can be recognized. I see as relevant to the rhetoriqueurs a chronicle of medium range, concerning events in the occidental French-speaking territories and their neighbors. Let us keep in mind the overall image of a world torn between new powers and old mythically sustained ones; princes in their courts filled with legists and marked by outmoded chivalry, cities of Flanders, Italy, and France in the hands of bourgeois oligarchies already losing control of the instruments of their good fortune. Growth was halted because of a recession only partly mitigated by a momentary recovery in 1475. The land routes to the Orient had

closed; the sea routes to the south and west would not be opened much before 1500. Money was scarce; the lower ranks of the nobility were impoverished; the proletarization of the urban artisans combined with a manpower shortage and an excessive number of archaic regulations. The French countries suffered even more than others from the disorders aggravated, if not caused, by the endless wars, which resulted in fewer deaths than is usually supposed, but in a terribly destructive season of organized banditry leaving behind men-at-arms to fend for themselves. T h e vassals revolted, the Franco-Burgundian conflicts broke out, and the Italian expeditions took place. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the worst was over, but during the crisis a political change had occurred: the princely administrations, with their cumbersome machinery, functioned indifferently to the crowd of minor lords; the armies of mercenary troops now used knights only for show and honneur. The dying feudal system is in its last convulsions; European dynasties attempt hostilely to consolidate themselves into a few families which reside in Aix, Moulins, Bourges, Orleans, Blois, Tours, Angers, Nantes, Dijon, and Malines in the Low Countries. These families fight for control of a world periodically ravaged by famines, epidemics, and an insidious criminality no longer restrained even by the tortures of a cruel justice thirsting for a quasi-magical vengeance. The moral certainties of the centuries are shaken; lacking a stable belief, men cling to a caricature of the past. The traditional modes of imagination and of behavior persist in an exaggerated form. Crowds hasten along the ancient pilgrimage routes. Kings and popes, Jacques Coeur and Christopher Columbus, dream from time to time of crusades. But from now on Constantinople is called Istanbul, a "Turkified" Greek term, and Jerusalem has been reabsorbed into eschatology. All that remains for Christianity is the conversion of the "Indies." The universities continue to construct Summae, as they did in the thirteenth century, but ever since Ockham and his disciples have dissociated philosophy from theology, philosophy moves towards a rationalization of the physical world while theology yields to a fascination with inner illumination, isolating amongst various intellectual endeavors the search for God. The mid-fifteenth-century deterioration in clerical mores fosters numerous heresies, for although Wycliffe and Jean Huss have long since died, their disciples near and far are legionLollards, Vaudois [Waldenses], Brethren of the Free Spirit. Savonarola is not burned until 1498 when Luther was fifteen years old. Spirituals [spirituels]flourish on the increasingly ill-defined borders of orthodoxy, swarming around noted recluses, penitents, o r popular preachers, peddling even in bourgeois households mystic

234


pamphlets brought from Germany and Flanders. This evangelism is sensual, fed with showy piety, calling upon idyllic and masochistic forms of the imagination, an ill-defined longing for purity, interrupted by flagrantly sacriligeous moments. Faith has become a matter of feeling, approaching perversion, a distraction from all thought of an uncertain future. Thus princes, such as Maximilian, consult the prophecies of Merlin and the Sybil; Christopher Columbus bases several of his calculations on Ezra and Isaiah. Seeking to deny chance, astrology battles with politics. Magic and the sorcery of peasant women, hitherto scarcely noted by the learned, become objects of study and official condemnations: Pope Innocent VIII's bull of 1484, Summis desirantes, is answered two years later by the Malleus maleficarum of two German Dominicans, a work destined to become the inquisitors' breviary in sorcery trials, expressly describing woman as the chief perpetrator of the opus diuboli. A feeling of universal inertia reigns, mundus senescit, but this feeling is accompanied by the cult of the subtly wrought object, worked beyond its primary function, a manipulation of unreality and dramatic tension, curves and countercurves. They paint with stone, sculpt color. The interests of the spirit are inverted, moving from a cosmos without a fixed center towards the self. In the midst of this disintegrating world appear the rhetoriqueurs, each in his own way tormented by a conscious inability to know the world o r express it in suitable terms. The older Thomist synthesis has collapsed. And yet this Europe of sound and fury, extravagances and ecstasies, is filled with an immense longing for peace, for some harmony contradictory to and providing an escape from disorder. Future utopias are born in these poets' pastorals. The past is gradually drifting further away from the present, as if the golden background of an altarpiece ceased to touch the figures depicted on it. Now, the past reveals itself to be indeed the past, while still managing to offer itself as a mythic figure for the future. The visual perspective of painting is generalized in the tendency to stabilize temporal relations in syntax; the late fourteenth century sees the invention and proliferation of mechanical clocks (at first conceived of as automata for reproducing the movements of the heavenly bodies and only later found to be capable of measuring the time of day). A distance separates man and the universe, a gap constantly apparent in the day-to-day mores and in the "civility" which is henceforth the mark of the ruling classes. People put on a nightshirt instead of snuggling naked beneath a quilt; they use a handkerchief in preference to the time-honored sleeves o r fingers. They even eat with a fork, codify table rules including the use of the symbolically aggres-

sive knife, and dissimulate bodily needs, distancing themselves from sex, blood, and waste. This recoiling and pending separation lead at the end of the period to the setting up of a "pedagogy" sanctifying and fixing the code for centuries to come. T h e same separation is found in space, where sailboats scudding along towards the Congo, the Cape, the "islands" of the Far East, constantly reduce the size of the shadowy zone in which the ancient scholars used to place the Monsters, an obscure crowd of beings halfway between man, beast, and demon, whose position in the universal adventure of Redemption was but obscurely noted. T h e newly gained knowledge may be forced into old, inadequate schemas by the often uneducated adventurers who report it and by the scholars who explicate it. Nevertheless, the discoveries still constitute a gain. Science and technology unite to speed the processes of communication: the invention of the caravel boat in 1440, progress in cosmography, the drafting of Belem's and Toscanelli's maps, the perfecting of navigational instruments for when one was no longer in sight of the coastline, an upheaval in all the customs and foundations of the imaginary. T h e triumph of firearms in the middle of the fifteenth century and the consequent gradual abandoning of ancient knightly combat helped multiply instruments of death and destruction. Simultaneously, however, the same technical expertise ushered in the era of the book: in 1470, about twenty years after the first Dutch o r German attempts, printing was introduced in Paris by academics for their own ends. It appeared in Lyons in 1475 and in Alost [Aalst] in Flanders the same year; then in Louvain, in 1474; in Toulouse, Angers, and Poitiers before 1480. About a century passed before printing gained full recognition: manuscript editions were still produced until about 1550. However, a circle of readers existed from the start, and a form of trade, both quite different from what they had been since the thirteenth century. Although other areas of knowledge and action showed in their way the same intellectual and imaginative tendencies, they were less important in forming the "chronicle" of our poets. For instance, physics and astronomy are mathematized and the changes in medicine are illustrated in quite different ways, even before Rabelais, by his contemporary, Champier, a humanist, a logician, poet, and moralist, and by the chaotic Paracelsus, a pietist suspected of magic, for whom the root and turning point of science is a passion, dm grosse Mitleid,"the immense pity." All the aforementioned facts are linked to the conditioning of our texts and provide the basis for their historicity. T o accept or refuse this world, as it exists in all its contradictions?

236


Only on the surface, on the rhetorical finish of the discourse, is the alternative formulated in this way. T h e extratextual constitutes the donnee; around the year 1500 the individual does not have at his disposal any analytical criteria, except for a few useless old commonplaces-the contemptus mundi, Roma perennis, Glory, the Wheel of Fortune, and so forth. The contradictions are thus all the more keenly felt even if not assumed. Hence arise, broadly speaking, two possible types of discourse. The first declares that the good world subsisting by virtue of certain religious, political, or merely worldly myths that ensure its fragile external coherence is also empty. A hollow shell-world, reduced to a splendid, pathetic appearance hiding not an absolute void, but a useless question without bearing upon anything. The other type of discourse, however, expands the referential contradictions, makes them more prominent, integrates them into its own mode, dislocating everything, positing an inverted world [monde a I'envers], absurd because admitting only aleatory relationships.

A wider discourse contains the empty world discourse which in its specificity shows us the phantasms of the larger realm. This wider discourse is that of the festival. I distinguish festival from carnival in Bakhtin's sense, the festival of the world upside down, although both notions constantly overlap in practice. It nevertheless seems to me useful to deal with the concepts separately, in order to make clear the diversity in the underlying tendencies and the mental attitudes both notions imply. Much has been written on the festival, for it fulfilled an important function in this society in crisis, marking out, week by week, almost day by day, the collective time of the city (for the festival is mainly an urban phenomenon), invading public life, overflowing, embracing it, substituting for shadows the sunshine of a fictive happiness. T h e festival emanates from units which function in part, and sometimes exclusively, to promote and enable endless rebirth-units such as the district (often confused in fact with the territory belonging to a family clan), the parish, the trade guild, certain fraternities or guilds, a political faction, the entourage of a great man. It establishes and justifies social hierarchies: the prince's triumph after his victory, jousts and tournaments, or, in a more private sphere, wealthy marriages, noble births and funerals. All these events are celebrated in a squandering of money, food, and luxurious clothing, every color, every piece of stage finery having a meaning and being displayed in a sumptuous heraldic setting in which entire streets and squares, decked with arms, standards, and precious fabrics, are filled with the splendor of the palace. Festivals of the orders of chivalry and liturgical celebrations

beneath the church arches magnify the moral values that forever rule the fate of the universe. Drinking bouts and processions of the corporations take place on their own fixed day; solid citizens in their warm fellowship are so moved by their own magnanimity that they distribute the remains of the banquet among the poor. The festival is a demonstration of what is and must be, its form always partly a spectacle to be participated in as well as watched. Herein lies one of the functions of every procession. But this one moves along the various streets between "scaffolds" upon which appear durnb shows and tableaux vivanik Sometimes the shows and tableaux move through the streets on pageant wagons. Often, a commentator explains a tableau; mime may be accompanied by a monologue o r dialogue. Verse inscriptions and mottoes set forth the sententia of each scene. On the boards, historical or mythological characters mingle with those acting out allegories. While painters and sculptors rarely depict female nudes, the organizers of the above entertainments frequently do so, presenting nymphs, goddesses, the embodiment of Truth. This era is the heyday of the entertainers, gathering in all public places, crowding around princes and important citizens: minstrels, dancers, and showmen, often organized into fraternities [confriries], leave their names on the expense accounts of rich houses. The high point of festival-organizing techniques is the royal Entry [Entrie], sponsored by the loyal cities. Texts appear at intervals along the procession route: read aloud o r written out on streamers, they make plain the dynastic sententia of the ceremony, constituting one result of the rhetoriqueurs' art.' One after the other, from scaffold to scaffold, unfold stage shows, public readings, scenes of mythological or allegorical figures or fictive representations of the prince, of his court, his councillors, and his adversaries. Confriries of poets play a role in most festivals; contests, the performing of songs as well as various sometimes satiric dramatic performances are also found. The confrhie of Tournai, taking part in the invocation to the Prince d'Amour, brings together thirteen burghers of the city who rival with one another in courtly behavior, piety, and that kind of local chauvinism that took the form of diatribes against Molinet, unconditional defender of the Burgundian dynasty. Such groups, spreading to Flanders and the Low Countries, brought into Burgundy the term chambers of rhetoric [chambres de rhitomque], and to France the termplys. Descended from old religious societies, thepuys, at the end of the fifteenth century, divide up among the northern regions and Normandy; the most famous of them are based at Dieppe and at Rouen, where the Puy de l'lmmaculie Conception, founded on the

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Dieppe model in 1486, devoted itself to composing chants royaux, ballads and rondeaux in praise of the Virgin Mary. Poetic contests take place on the basis of a refrain [palinod]provided by the "Prince" of the f a y : merchants, magistrates, and prelates share the honor of taking part in the activities and also the responsibility of financing them. We know the names of about thirty poet laureates prior to about 1520. Among these winners, on a dozen o r so occasions, we find rhktoriqueurs. In 1541, Fabri published what may be seen as the Rouen group's Art poitique, the date of which is important because soon thereafter the essence of the rhktoriqueurs' aesthetic survives only in the works of the F y s . Proclaiming, conserving, even perhaps creating the values upon which the city, the state, the saved Christians base or aspire to base themselves, the festival gives birth to two complex institutional forms, characteristic of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: the mystery plays and what I shall call the Court Game. Vast, enormously expensive spectacles, prepared over many months by an entire town, performed by dozens, even hundreds of actors and walkers-on before sumptuous sets and machinery, the mystery plays unfold their ten, twenty, even forty thousand verses during the space of several days, cutting, like blocks of intemporal time, into quotidian time. The texts earned some of their authors lasting fame: all the rhktoriqueurs mention Greban, composer of the Passion, as one of the great French poets, and Jacques Milet'sZstoire de la Destruction de Troye, republished several times between 1484 and 1544, was known as far away as Italy. Vocal and instrumental music combining to form a dialogue animated by a variety of rhythmic forms, the mystery play was preceded by a prologue setting forth, often by way of allegory, the meaning to be derived from the action, which was complex, loaded with episodes, picturesque digressions, comic interludes, mimed scenes. Usually the central theme concerned the story of Salvation: Christ's Passion, filled with subplots inspired by the Apocryphal Gospels or the producer's imagination, such as Andrk de la Vigne's Mistire de Saint-Martin or the mystery play on Saint Quentin, doubtless by Molinet. Ritualizing pity, feigning the tortures of Jesus o r the martyrdom of a saint, the actor occasionally faints with actual fatigue, real pain. Assuming a scapegoat role in addition to that of his costume, the actor takes on the latent violence of the people for whom he dies. A desymbolized one-way pseudocommunication,2 this alone is, reducing to naught our sufferings and sin. With a "profane" theme the effect is analogous to the spiritual one, since all history lies in God's hands and serves only to make plain His transcendence.

Two of the rhetoriqueurs work as producers of mysteries: Andre de la Vigne, in his Burgundian retreat at Seurre, and, in particular, Jean B ~ u c h e t When .~ staging a Passion at Poitiers, in 1508, Bouchet had the idea of using the still well-preserved ruins of the Roman amphitheater. The fame he won on that occasion led to his being put in charge of organizing the Entry of Francois I into the town in 1520. Between 1530 and 1540 his services were requested in Bourges, Issoudun, and Saumur. The actors in the mysteries were members of confr&ks of amateur actors recruited from the artisans, tradesmen, and clerks of the town. No professional distinction separates them from their public; only the ritual distinction marks them for the duration of the pageant. Set apart but not strangers, they are integrated with and shape the crowd in a unanimous participation. Rather than unfolded, this action is situated in a central place, a circle (tiers of seats around the town square) so that the eye penetrates and envelops it, leaving no hidden areas to mask its obvious artifice. But is it really a matter of artifice? The discourse shows or glosses, merely confirming what is already known. We are plunged back into the security not of origins but of eternity, a perfect stability which the chronicle serves to project distortedly upon the wall of existence. Momentarily making himself other, the actor assumes the totality of human space. From the moment he leaves his shop o r his pulpit, he rejects his own identity, denies his individual fate, negating existence by recreating life in such a way that life now appears to be no more than an imperfect imitation of the play.4 The entire world, for the individual man who contemplates, feeds off, o r dies because of it, has become fundamentally a theater: I mean here, specifically, that raised, visible stage, distinct but not completely separated, upon which is played a typical action maintaining an allegorical relationship to quotidian "reality." Beyond our sense of duration, in an eternal present lending meaning to the lived, such action is rigorously regulated, ritualized, and represented for the crowd by chosen personae, wearing identifiable insignia, but not really distinct from the crowd. Actors and spectawrs are projected back to the universal shaping moment, guaranteeing the irrefutable values. But, for princes, the real drama unfolds on a different stage, that upon which they play their own roles, on the boards and beneath the canopies of their assemblies, banquets, and festivals, along the roads leading to their wars. That quintessential theater, the court, is the center and emblem of the perennial universe. Meticulously ordered according to the rules of a representation both amusing and serious, it is staffed by nobles, clerks, minstrels, ladies, jesters, servants, and

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traveling artists summoned for a task lasting years or a single season. The protocol of daily gestures (eating, dressing, speaking, reading, as well as being born, loving, or dying), music, painting, poetry intermingles with history, one of the forms of eloquence, and with the sciences, at the time called artes. In these kings' courts the mores are often quite free, sexuality not yet being masked by the coming prudishness. Lovers of entertainment, of the beautiful fragile objects created for their palaces by cabinetmakers, painters, and goldsmiths, the Valois, in Paris, have long since turned away from the austereness of their cousins and other Capetian ancestors. The courts of the dukes of Orleans, Berry, Anjou, and Provence, like those of the states more or less integrated into the kingdom (Burgundy, Savoy, Flanders, Brittany), can be distinguished from the Valois courts, although each possesses its own style, the mark of its master's personality. In these unique places, being is identified with appearing, having with giving. But every manifestation is a dramatic one, an action coded according to predetermined actantial and functional [actantielles et fonctionnelles] structures. Being is defined by way of heraldic signals, devices [devises],the emblematizing of appearances. Wealth is diffused in expenditure, and private joy in public rejoicing. Rejoicing is ~eremonialized,~ but the ceremony is the mythified avatar of ancient chivalry. Court existence is realized in formulae which express it even as they parabolize it: the tension and aggressive ideology of the chivalric tradition of former centuries survives analogically as the mimesis of an archetypal narrative, even as Christ's passion subsists in the mystery plays. Like all the historiographers of the time, Molinet, in his Chroniques, merely records the scenes. The court stands out clearly, distinguishing inside from outside. The representation is related to its frame, like a picture; a frame and a limit, opposing contradictory notions, setting off a process of transformation. Sometimes, however, in incorporating the endless art of war, the representation moves beyond its frame, following the prince's expedition outside his court. The dead left behind form a synecdoche of glory. Outside is Villon; inside, the rhetoriqueurs. They are linked together by the relationship of inverted analogy. Without exception, the rhetoriqueurs, although never princes, were connected in some capacity with a court. In the twenty or so poems Marguerite of Austria left US,^ the texture and delicate ornamentation of the discourse reminds us more of the aristocratic poems of Charles d'orltans (who died in 1465)than of those works by rhCtoriqueurs whom Marguerite constantly gathered around her to "act out" the Burgundian great-

ness she incarnated. No doubt, when the poet is the prince, a certain distance is abolished, the distance in which panegyric flourishes. The radical opposition between the text and its object, between what is posited as real and what constitutes the mirror of the real, disappears: the contradiction no longer "works." The function of the role comes down to saying simply, "I." The social situation of the rhetoriqueurs, on the other hand, is defined by a relationship of subordination, strict on an economic level, and rendered official by some title conferred by the government machinery. Many rhetoriqueurs were trained in law, charged with juridical tasks at some stage of their career. Most of theni were clergymen in minor orders and some were ordained priests. But this double title did not always determine the positions the prince chose to bestow upon them. Thus, Jean Molinet, born in 1433 near Boulognesur-mer, probably belonging to a bourgeois family, completed his studies of the "humanities" in Paris and then spent several difficult years in search of a patron prepared to make use of his talent. At thirty-two (the threshold of old age in his day) he finally was taken on by the ailing duke Amadeus IX of Savoy, who died a few months later. Molinet then managed to maneuver himself into the court of Burgundy. Here, made a knight, attached to the chancellery of the Order of the Toison d'Or, he collaborated with the indiciaire ["chronicler"] Georges Chastellain, whose position the duke granted him in 1475. After the political crisis of 1477-81, which, as we have seen, was to provide the context for his Ressource, Molinet, by now a widower, received a canonry of Notre-Dame de la Salle in Valenciennes, and in 1485 had his position of chronicler renewed and elevated by Maximilian to that of archducal chronicler. In this double capacity he spent the remaining twenty-two years of his life. I consider his historiographic function the primary determinant in Molinet's court role. Similarly, the work of lean Lemaire, who had been tonsured in his youth and, like Molinet, ended his days as a canon in Valenciennes, evidences clearly the positions he held with Pierre de Bourbon, the comte de Ligny, Marguerite of Austria, and then Queen Anne, positions such as clerc de finances, paid poet, chronicler, inspector of the building site at Brou [where Marguerite of Austria built a now famous church]. Octavien de Saint-Gelays and Guillaume Cretin were primarily churchmen, relatively highly placed in the hierarchy. The former, by training a lawyer, became, in 1495, by favor of the king, bishop of AngoulCme. The latter was cantor at the Sainte-Chapelle, then treasurer of the chapel of Vincennes. Both were in the center of clerical life, where a new kind of intellectual was being formed, substituting

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for the Mag-tster of old, a scholar conscious of the links between his destiny and that of the city, possessing a useful kind of knowledge formed by man for men and mediated by appropriate means of pers~asion.~ The rhetoriqueur only attains and maintains his position, no matter what its function, through a prince's favor or the continuing protection of the powerful lords who introduced him to the prince and agreed to stand by him in times of trouble. Meschinot, sire des Mortiers, who bore arms under five dukes of Brittany, eventually became maitre d'hbtel to the Duchess Anne of Brittany. Andre de la Vigne became court poet first to Charles VIII, then to Queen Anne, and later chronicler to Francois I. Baude, protected by the dauphin (the future Louis XI), obtained the position of tax collector [receveur des tailles] for the Bas-Limousin region. Gringore was designated official "writer" of Louis XII. Similarly, Jean Marot, having also become secretary to Anne of Brittany, was chronicler to Louis XI1 before in 1514 passing into the service of Francois d'AngoulCme, the future Francois I. In 1510, Jean Bouchet, an attorney's clerk [clerc de procureur] obtained the position o f p o c u r e u r and "writer" for the duc de la Tremouille. All these poets thus remain dependent, day by day, upon underpaid posts given out sometimes one after the other, sometimes more than one at the same time. This patronage system awards varying sums for the composition of a particular text. The writers hope for material gains, board and lodging, a set of clothes for the new season, a New Year's gift, or, occasionally, help in times of sickness. But the master's mood is often changeable; a whim can condemn you to starvation, his death to immediate ruin. The situation of Molinet after January, 1477, amidst temporary stability o r while seeking the longed-for post, was constantly threatened by rivals; most rhetoriqueurs had to be forever vigilant. In such a setting, a writer's opinions are determined more by the economic interest of the moment than by deep ideological convictions. Jean Lemaire, quarreling with Marguerite of Austria, returns to the service of Queen Anne, now praising the French whom he formerly vilified. After two years the new protectress dies; the poet disappears into obscurity, leaving us not one document concerning his probably sad end. Even under the best of circumstances (unless the position occupied brings with it a prebend), one cannot speak about a salary in the contractual sense. The sums awarded vary from one master to the other, from one year to another. Jean Marot, in 1523, for example, receives 240 livres for his services to the king, but 120 in 1524. In 1485, as Maximilian's chronicler, Molinet is paid a total of 120 livres. Between 1501 and 15 17, Gringore receives from 100 to 150 livres for

each of six literary works, including the libretti for the Entries of four princes of the royal far nil^.^ When this situation weighs too heavily, the poet can play his servant's role with quiet humor. . . while revenging himself subtly in the text produced. T o a large extent, this state of affairs determines an entire poetics, a fact pointed out almost forty years Playing his role as the prince's delegate on the court stage, the poet is clothed in habits of such pomp that no one inquires about the person beneath them. A costume of language is made out of the fabric of a protocol woven from ancient, exhausted feudal traditions. At once song and discourse, verbal art brings into prominence the Great Game, engendering on the surface of reality figures homologous to the real ones but situated neither in time nor space. Every discourse grafted in this way onto the imaginary is organized by means of an exemplary internal harmony so gratuitous that ornament is indistinguishable from substance. The ruptures in the text that do occur remain concealed beneath the surface continuity. The trouvire's once pure song,1° now fictively individualized by the speaker, no longer proceeds from a single act: as a multifaceted dramatic spectacle, the song unfolds in a world of shimmering reflections upon which we gaze in fascination. The playing of this role calls for a double gift, possessed to the ultimate degree by the rhetoriqueurs-complete faith in the power of the word, in the wisdom implied by eloquence, and also unlimited confidence in the significance of history, or, more precisely, what from his lofty position the poet sees of it. The Recollection des merveilles aduenues, of which Chastellain rhymed the first 43 octets and Molinet, in 1499, the 106 others, chronicles noble lordly deeds, like a catalog of the arguments appropriate to what critics once called "occasional poems" (poimes de circonstance]. The table of contents of the first volume of the Dupire edition of [Molinet's] Faictz et Dictz tells of little more than military events (Complainte de Crdce, De Nus de Nuz, La Journie de Thirouenne), political events (Dictier sur Tournay, Sus ceux de Gand, Au roy de Castille), matters relating to the life of princes, their birth (that of Eleanor of Austria, of the future Charles V), marriage (of the Infantes of Austria and Spain), death (of Philippe le Bon, Marie of Burgundy, the Emperor Frederick, Duke Albert de Sassen, Henry de Berghes, Isabella of Castille, and Philippe le Beau), or miscellaneous events (the Naufrage de la Pucelle, Un pisent fait a l'empereur). A study of the tables of contents of the works of Saint-Gelays, AndrC de la Vigne, Jean Lemaire, Cretin, Jean Marot, and Bouchet would provide comparable lists. The above writings are concerned with presentation in the theatri-

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cal sense of re-presentation, not in the sense of representation, or feigned reproduction. This "circumstantial" discourse, even when encrusted with descriptive ornamentation, remains fundamentally persuasive rather than confessional, continually reiterating that the enunciating I is an adequate conveyor of the object referred to in the message. But this object is only a narrative potentiality, never fully realized. The poetic word is an intercession between an ephemeral order it does not mention and an eternal but unnamed order which it evokes. Certainly, the littera of our texts remains meticulously careful, loaded with those detailed allusions the fifteenth century favors in all the arts. And yet the named historical fact in no way constitutes a donnee: it is a matrix, a complex site of affirmation, interrogation, and denial. As the words are integrated into the discourse, they lose part of their status as sign, becoming no more than the particles of a parole having solely a global meaning. The prevailing meaning will be panegyric because of the conventions underlying the court universe; the "occasion" [circonstance] of the utterance does not provide its theme. The project is doubled; what is said acquiring substance when mirrored by what is not said. The general causes of the diffirance are to be found in the very nature of writing and in determining factors peculiar to the cultural forms of the "Middle Ages." Medieval poetic discourse does not in fact possess the flexibility enabling imitation of any unexpected development in the "real." It lacks all facility for grasping the extratextual in the act, a succession of moments bound together in contradictory scenes of empirical and unexpected accidents. Unlike more modern discourse, it was not to become infinitely adaptable. The extratextual offers this discourse a stock of indices, a reservoir from which the poet selects a small number of elements allowing him to read the traces of a truth detached from temporal and spatial vicissitudes. In this way, the discourse extracts from the event a meaning belonging to a different order. The historical element of the extratextual is elevated by the word to a "political" level, using the term in its old sense. The memory of facts, whatever the initial perception of them may have been, is (in)formed--set to work, poetically formalized-by an ideology. The tonal manipulations of the ideology, whether courtly, partisan, or polemical, are not particularly important here. By "ideology" I mean a set of intellectual and discursive schemas fulfilling a sociopolitical function of legitimizing the ruling order, implying certainty concerning relationships of which the origin is not questioned and the fragility is not proclaimed. The schemas ensure and reassure the collective consciousness by rationalizing it to provide

a veil over the contradictions of real life, rearranging them to provide localized consolation. I n the Ressource, Molinet presents himself as passionately proBurgundian and anti-French, but his discourse expresses his passion as an unconditional attachment to the aristocratic order, the source of truth and justice, if controlled by a virtuous prince. Without ever quite doing so, the text tends to center on itself-articulating an experience which is the text itself. Reference is thus established on the level of the totality, rather than the parts, like light haloing the text rather than beaming towards external objects. Undermining itself, the literal meaning ushers in a new level of meaning which is a neverfinished metaphor of the literal level. Unlike all other discourse, poetry dialectically negates while sharing elements of "real" communication. The dialectic attains substance through the mediation of the audience which ensures an infinitely renewable and changing concretization (to use Ingarden's term)." Fiction thus maintains a link with the "real" which is not that of existence but, rather, an indirect form of communication. Far from mirroring the context, the text intertwines with the various constitutive signifying systems: its own system reacts with the others according to laws that are no longer theirs, either actualizing what they exclude1 reject, or bridging their gaps, filling their lacunae. The social context is intimately bound up with the production of the "literary" object, but the question is, rather, to what extent does the social-made-literary lose any distinguishing quality? Instead of reproducing, the text re-produces it. Every discourse gives form to a prior content, imposing a particular syntax. Nothing in the text authorizes the reader to move directly from one level to the other. An ideological heterogeneity is likely to arise here. The ultimate product of society, the ideology does not in fact blend with the social but springs from the midst of the groups that live it, first emerging from the realm of desire, to be shaped by concrete situations, by politics, which almost succeed in effacing - the mark of the individual from everyday speech. But in poetry desire rises up again more vigorously, fashions the signifier, burdening it with phantasms. This signifying procedure opposes the Institution most radically when the Institution is most oppressive, bursting forth in accordance with rites inherent in language, producing impulses, moments of pleasure which introduce into the discourse a "disquieting" strangeness.I2 The rhktoriqueurs' court function is thus, on the one hand, official and closed, while, on the other hand, hidden but open. Closed in the relationship linking the poet to the prince; open in the text engen-

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dered by this relationship. One could compare the rhktoriqueur's social function with his poetic function and investigate the moments at which the two come together. Alternatively, one could compare those aspects of the writing that result from certain working relationships with those brought about by the investment of individual energy. Initially inspired by an actual event-a birth, marriage, battle, or death-which is simultaneously transmitted and undermined, the author sets up a theoretical surface eaten away from below by subterranean movements suggesting to the audience that the discourse unfolds in the fullness of a limitless space. Intention is subordinated by this inner tension and need for a fissure. In his official function as announcer and spokesman of the court, the poet is as indispensable to the state as the herald. Maintained and nurtured by the poet, public order is based in and on his discourse. Princes are sufficiently aware of this fact to tolerate optative nuances in the praises offered them. For example, "may you bring back Justice!" But the wish concerns a possible improvement, a restoration of order, and is directed at the master's acolytes, not at the master himself, the cornerstone of the entire court edifice. For years, Molinet, AndrC de la Vigne, and Jean Lemaire were propagandists of their duke's or king's undertakings, supporting a dynasty, a figure of identity and permanence, and an ethos of virtue personified by the prince. The arts of discourse, of which the poets are the masters, provide access to all knowledge: poets substitute for scholastic ratio the persuasive power of eloquent words. When the town, an expansion of the court, is becoming the controlling center of public life and the creator of the values polarizing that life, eloquence is in league with urban existence.I3 But the town is an ambivalent site where the prince's area is beset by a surrounding bourgeois milieu from which, at the end of the fifteenth century, it can no longer be clearly distinguished, creating a further tension and the need for a rejection by the rhktoriqueurs (and herein is their hidden function). If some of these poets, such as Bouchet, Gringore, occasionally Molinet, in their pietism or pacifism, reveal the active presence of bourgeois discourse in their text, all of them at least refuse to monopolize and save the coin of meaning. In aristocratic fashion, they despoil meaning. What they will not do is alienate their desire by investing it in possessions, in savings, or in anything other than itself. What is to be understood from their discourse is the law. What they write about is a violence circumventing the law, which in turn is constituted in the performative language of the prince. Court speech, based on knowledge of the law, is no longer

anything more than constative, figurative, but all figures are equivocal. I am not here alluding to the rare descriptive ornaments or topoi which sometimes seem to rise up overtly against the language of the law but are merely a doubling of the role, immediately recovered in the unity of the "game." Such would be Molinet's careful, goodnatured descriptions of the lower classes, or his statements in the Chronique praising the knightly valor of some peasants. Such also would be the theme found throughout the fifteenth century, that of the taedium curiae, the disgust with court hypocrisy. The real question the texts pose arises at another level, that of their production and of the contradictions this production suggests even as it moves beyond them. From this point of view, the rhktoriqueurs seem to me to have been obsessed, as a group, by the search for a mode of writing which would permit the repersonalization of the relation of the writer to what he writes. Although prisoners of the courts, these men had one place in which they could hide from their alienation-the inside of the poetic universe, i.e., the act of constituting the text. In an aristocratic world claiming for itself immutability, existence, beneath outward forms that had apparently gone unchanged for two hundred years, was becoming a rite and a spectacle. Here the rhktoriqueurs sought to make of language, and of language alone, the spectacle, the stage, and the actor. Imprisoned, of course, by ancient customs they had neither the power nor the inclination to question, inheritors of the imperfect intellectual tools of a prelinguistic age, possessing none of the means of analysis we now have, naive and partly duped, but driven by a dynamism clearly evidenced in many sections of the works they left us, these writers brought about, in the language inherited from the Middle Ages and in the mental structures the language sustained, a radical change-and I mean the word radical in its etymological sense. What the rhktoriqueurs "changed" is located somewhere in the deep zones where language is linked to meaning and meaning is rooted in language. They changed (tried to change) a sign into the primal algorithm, so that the totality of conclusions was affected beyond the old habits of composition which they retained under pressure from the surrounding milieu. Protected by their rhetoric, they worked towards a deconstruction of the hereditary poetic language (a legacy as irrefutable and constricting as the court rites). But they worked from within, disassociating traditional types, emptying out, through their hyperbole, the metaphoric references, and, by systematic redundancy, accumulating to the point of absurdity all the plays on language previous generations had used. They were rarely innovative,

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but pushed to the limit the tendencies inherent in the language for centuries. Unable to take the motor to bits, or even, perhaps, to understand its workings, they revved it up. Political discourse embraces and sustains all other forms of discourse, defining and circumscribing within the text the "horizon of expectation" of the public, made up of the court and the city, as represented by the court. The public therefore becomes a factor in the production of the text.14 The reader's horizon of expectation implies a norm allowing the text to be inserted into the continuity of history. In this sense, on the most general level, the text presents itself as both object and action. However, European society at the end of the fifteenth century, being in a state of conflict, is still in many respects bound up with the "paradigmatic" type of culture, the ideal of which is the incessant recourse to its own structures, loyalty to its archetypes. But there is already becoming apparent another type of culture, dedicated to change, to the forward flight of "progress," provoking the clashes and the first profound upheavals, which political discourse must seek to neutralize or mask. The result is an attenuation, even a reabsorption of the pragmatic function of the text. Being initially theatrical, its action does not become confused with "efficient" action. Ideologically, the text betrays the impact of a conjuncture, but the rhetorical interference muffles this effect so far as is possible. The figurative covering is usually composed of hyperbolical personal praise (of the prince, or his representative), which sometimes coats the entire surface and disguises the "deep structures" beneath the gleam of artificial light. In their turn, the deep structures present a sufficient degree of abstraction and stability for us to consider them as a latent and static narrative model. The dynamism of the text has no other space in which to unfold than in the designation of actants, because of the openings due to the complexity of the model. The model is in fact a double one, made up of two conceptual frameworks which do not readily unite. On the one hand, a general model contrasts two sets of interchangeable terms, describing the relationship between the prince and his people:

peace justice

versus

Iwar

tyranny

A narrative progression leads the discourse from one of these terms to the other along a circular route having four modalities: (a) the "historical" modalities:

(1) justice-tyranny-war-peace (or justice): or, from good to evil and then to the restoration of good. (2) tyranny-war-peace-justice: or, from evil to good. (b) the "prophetic" modalities: (3) war-peace-justice-tyranny, the latter term referring to a negative vision of a future from which it will be banished. (4) peace-justice, terms from the past projected upon the future (the promised restoration) versus tyranny, war, terms describing the present. When the utterance is limited to the terms of a single series, or even to one of the terms within a series, its narrative character is muted in favor of description. The first pair of terms (peace,justice) conveys a sense of identification; the second (war, tyranny), one of alienation, or more generally speaking, of "good" against "evil." The whole has as its subject and object respectively either the prince or the people, the former always fulfilling an active function, the latter, a passive one. T o the prince can be joined his agents (the nobles, the wealthy, the men-at-arms); the people can be qualitatively assimilated to the "poor," or represented, in a kind of synecdoche, by one of the "estatesw-peasants or merchants, country- or city-dwellers. On the other hand, a special model applies to the single term war which the Court cannot unequivocally connote as alienation or evil. We therefore find three new series of opposing terms, spelling out the means, the nature, and the consequences of combat: (a) undertaken by us versus by them (b) as being just versus unjust (c) as procuring glory versus dishonor. The term us unites both prince and people. The intervention of the idea of glory, whether true or false glory, throws off balance the separate existence and the various combinations of the groups of terms. Every political discourse exploits infinite variations on this schema and incorporates numerous amplifications, such as commonplaces, descriptions, and digressions. On the syntactical level, an investment [investissement] of values occurs, with few exceptions, by means of allegory. Finally, the narration is often enunciated in the first person; at the very least, the actor (the author) intervenes and saysl. The I becomes involved in a triple tension, with the discourse it pronounces, with that of which it does not speak, and with that which is not the I-a confrontation of terms at the heart of the analogical relationship thus posited between the means and ends of political power and those of the poet. Such discourse would be utopian if it were not connected to apluce, real though mythified, the prince's court, the very place for which

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Rabelais' Abbaye de Theleme will in 1534 provide an unrealized inversion. The first thrust then occurs of a movement that will run through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, inscribing into those centuries' history and political space a utopia, an ideal city situated nowhere. The rhetoriqueurs cannot resist such enthusiasm, but the need for panegyric distorts their efforts, and they are unable to direct their energies outside the palace which provides them with a living. T h e movement thus shrinks to a call for some sort of renouatio mentis similar to the one dreamed of by medieval reformers.15 However, this political discourse, whether or not inflected by a religious pretext, or adorned with the prestige of humanist erudition, is not the rhetoriqueurs only type of writing. It must constantly compete with other forms, having their own rules, sometimes transmitted to the fifteenth century from a somewhat distant past. The political discourse feeds off, absorbs, integrates other forms to its own aims, or alternatively, yielding to them, cracks beneath their weight. The diversity and apparent incoherence of medieval modes of thought and language survive and sometimes win the day. The romantic fiction of unity is absent from this aesthetic. T h e text is not one, if we insist upon such a term, except insofar as it exists, in multiplicity and contradiction. The fundamental heterogeneity of the cultural heritage conditions every poetic text of the time by way of the labor producing the text. Ideological traditions provide the substance of the content, while conventional topics supply the form. Although superficially altered here and there by minor innovations, the inertia of expressive forms has for centuries been shored up against the ravages of time. But in the fifteenth century, when medieval Christianity is toppling, the ancient coherence persists only on the level of "deformed" [molles] ideas. If by chance asserted, these ideas exist in a mood of trickery, of double meaning. T h e rhetoriqueurs' practice is closely linked to that of their contemporaries. Several Arts de seconde rhitorique ["arts of poetry"] invoke the authority of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poets. All the rhetoriqueurs had read the Roman de la rose and many drew liberally upon the didactic, satirical, moralizing works in which Jean de Meung gave form to the tradition. They knew, in prose versions, the last descendants of the chanson de geste and the roman courtois and were not completely unaware of the poetry of the twelfth-century trouut?res. Their "literary culture" did not go beyond this: nonetheless, a medieval repertoire, known by heart, preceded their poetry and necessarily conditioned some part of its structuring. But the repertoire no longer meets the expectations either of the poet or of the court, in spite of offering a solution (not identified as such) to problems of which it formerly fixed the terms, already outmoded by the

fifteenth century. Instead, the inherited medieval poetry sets up a conflict, the outcome of which may easily be either accepted (or studied) archaism o r parody. Tradition, a continuum of memory, establishing poetic reality a priori as self-determined, bears the trace of the successive texts which have embodied a model no one questions any more. The site of intertextual relationships, tradition confers upon what I write the status of a re-production which adheres, because of my desire for form, to a system conceived of as eternal. Enabled by tradition to incorporate a segment of individual experience, reproduction erases its own contingency. As implicit common knowledge, tradition organizes a kind of iconic code, defining the finalities external to the text, determining the manner of functioning, while conferring the authority emanating from the past, an authority projected as a program upon the future.I6 The formalizing design gives rise to and makes the text into an artifact situated at the point of convergence of all the traditions which in Latin or the vernacular had for several centuries tended to render the language opaque. Taking into account the tensions which continued for centuries to set "ancients" against "moderns," even within the traditions themselves (and allowing also for the innovative discoveries the tensions made possible), the rhktoriqueurs invented nothing. Working on a given, they humbly accepted their place in a universe they sought neither to challenge nor to dominate. However, while accommodating peaceably to the universe, they nonetheless pushed to the limit tendencies and laws until professed truths were distorted. The most conservative of poets, or, rather, appearing so on the surface, were they so underneath? One cannot but be struck by their constant, explicit desire for faithfulness to received models, by the careful detail of their definitions of "fixed forms," use of rhyme, strategies of sounds and words. Faithfulness and exactness are such dominant qualities that one is tempted to identify them with the poet's awareness of his necessary social role. But, simultaneously, the rhktoriqueurs applied these qualities to excess, concentrating on the most artificial aspects of artifice, accumulating redundancies until we are dizzied with words. Such a lack of moderation indicates a longing for change, as if the quantitative, after crossing a certain threshold of intensity, opened out onto a different quality, internalized, integrated with, and modifying the text even as it reinforces the continuing attachment of text to tradition. These, then, constitute the rules of the game of appearances, which are respected, respectable forms of behavior, their function still intact, demanding unconditional commitment, the result of a learned

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skill, sanctioned by the favor of the prince (the ultimate appearance) and the calm of daily observance. But such appearances are empty, i.e., without freedom. The minor role the rhetoriqueur plays in the Court Game is voluntarily assumed at the cost of an alienation which does not, however, go as far as final abnegation, total elimination of everything in the self which cries out to other ghostly selves. A crack appears in the facade of the court monument, zigzagging beneath the surface of the syntax, introducing incongruous figures in the midst of groups of words, sometimes into individual syllables, tearing them apart. For this reason, the text (if not its enunciator, for who could claim to know the enunciator as a real man?) knows itself to have been thrown like a net across the void and, eventually, admits as much. Nothing here is pathetically tormented, nothing lived in the tragic mood, but rather in the mood of drollery, of a kind of humor, black o r light-hearted, which, in the case of most rhetoriqueurs, is so well integrated into the writing that one cannot detect a genuine revolt. Nonetheless, a call for something different is audible. The game is a festival, but, as we have noted, the festival constitutes an ambivalent dimension of fifteenth-century society, its dynamism manifested simultaneously in two opposing, yet complementary ways. We must now consider one of these manifestations, that of the grotesque inversion, the "carnival," as it has been called since Bakhtin. T h e rhetoriqueurs' work, while contributing to the Festival of Order, participates in the carnival only slightly, unevenly and almost clandestinely. But we cannot understand their work without the carnival element. The carnival, a combination of discourse, gestures, and more or less ritualized forms of behavior recurring at regular intervals, projects upon experienced time the reality of another, circular time, outside which the carnival events would be inconceivable. In a cyclical manner, the carnival presents a spectacle with periodic returns analogous to those of the stars determining our destiny, thereby linking our fate to the occult, fertilizing powers of the universe. Without rules, but laden with emblems, symbols untranslatable into language, a collective game demands to be lived by the body itself, a brief marvelous suspension of prohibitions, respect, piety, and fear: an inversion of all hierarchies, which places on the circumference the many linked centers of the circle, sets forth all relationships in a new mood, unites contraries in a consoling misalliance, substitutes profanation and sacrilege for the customary practices, and exalts decay and death as signs and promises of rebirth and youth. But the function of such a game remains relative; its dynamism arises from the contradiction, on the level of the exercise of power, between the carnival group and society,

and from the ambivalence brought to the terms designating power. While a stranger to anything like direct, simple denunciation, and even more to outright condemnation, the game suggests that yes and no engender one another, outside all dialectics or any neutralizing effect, by being juxtaposed and coexistent.17 Hence arises the duplication of the carnival forms, both imprecation and good wish, man and woman in each other's clothes, the universal purification of laughter. However, rather than absolute derision, an open conflict and desire to reject, the permanence of the carnival in the heart of order illusbates a plurality, a dialogued mode of being-in-the-world. It shows the emptiness of all fullness, the fertility of sterile forms, everything that is manifested and revealed in another domain, but in an attenuated form, by the rhetoriqueurs' poetics and which could also be included within Bakhtin's definition of "carnivalesque literature." Such writing tends above all to weaken the rational, "monist" elements of discourse, being marked by a deliberate plurality of voices, a "dialogism" transgressing a law while maintaining the forms according to the law, as opposed to the "monologism" of a discourse referring to the law in a homogeneous manner. The term literature, here as elsewhere, sets up a screen between that fact and the observer. We are confronted with a group of techniques, traditional forms of thought and speech, picked up by the rhktoriqueurs, concentrated and often accumulated in redundant fashion in response to what might be called the carnival impulse of the century. In this sense, the writing of most of these poets constitutes an overall carnival gesture, subservient to the Court Game but nonetheless posited as carnival and, to a large extent, moving beyond any official raison d'ztre. I refer to this characteristic as irony, broadening the term to include every deliberate semantic break. "Ironically," being is exchanged with appearing [paraitre] in an ambiguous reciprocal reflection. Being "over is" [par est, with a pun on parait] great, handsome, or ridiculous, in the sense in whichpar, in Old French, marked intensity and, following the Latin per, made parvenir out of venir and pardonner out of donner. Irony can apply to a discourse embracing all creation under the eye of the prince, if not of God. Stuffing a pious song with disconnected lines from love couplets, or with puns on the saints, the rhetoriqueur, following a solidly based custom, alters the original message of these fragments which, in their ambiguity, become artifacts of another discourse. The superimposition is not a fixed one; the components of the text slide, opening a chasm filled by the listener's laughter. On a technical level, I distinguish two modalities of irony: parody, resulting from a contextual break, and contrast, the contiguity of dis-

2 54


cursive elements. The boundary between the two is hard to trace in an unbroken line, and overlapping areas do occur. Parody and contrast, in fact, make plain, by different means, a common tendency, the instauration of "folly." Bouchet's Regnars trauersans (1503), Gringore's Folles Entreprises (1505), and Brant's Narrenschff all declare the underlying folly of the "estates of man." No matter what the theme (the proposition generating the syntax of the text), this folly only has meaning in relation to the social universe, where inequality is the recognized law and oppression proceeds from a personalized source. Towards 1500 the resulting socialization of ironic writing determines and semanticizes every parodic or contrastive textual manifestation, even those which seem to concern only concrete elements such as sounds, lexical arrangements, and rhetorical manipulation. Parody, in the decentered center of the world, poses a "double unthroning," in Bakhtin's words,18 a cracked mirror, in which ordered figures are broken, reflected by other mirrors, concave or convex, pointing in various directions. Here, amongst the deformed forms, the image, not completely faded, of a living death is fertilized by various carnival masks. Parody, a constant in medieval poetic practice,lg is not primarily derision, except, occasionally, as a consequence and an afterthought. Going to the absurd limit required by the role adopted, it invades noble, scholarly, and even religious discourse, besetting the rhktoriqueurs' text, sometimes submerged, at others, particularly with Molinet, bearing all before it. The Sermon de Billouart transforms the homily into a scatological description; the Debat du uieux gendarme et du uieil amoureux changes the courtly tenson into the nostalgic dialogue of impotence, of the incurable softness of a member worn out by old age. In both cases, the text poses an antistructure, not by deconstructing but by contradicting a traditional, still too vigorous given. Parody functions in reference to tradition: the more stable and overt the tradition (that is, the more the figures typical of it are accepted as its "nature"), the more effective the parody. For this reason, at a time when the church, though shaken, had still lost nothing of its mythic power, games frequently tend to overturn religious discourse, without breaking the oratorical forms of religion. The tabernaculum invoked by Saint Billouart is the arse [cull; the meaning or fruit, using the preachers' customary metaphor, engendered is a defecation. The shared signifying system based on auctoritas thus incorporates elements which both mark and manifest the limits of socially useful language. Parody contradicts the orignal situation of the text reproduced. In varying degrees of density, a network of ambiguities indexes this con-

tradiction. Contrast, on the other hand, operates either on the level of units of content o r of stereotyped expression. In any case, the effect results from a relationship either with the intertext or with elements of the text. The contrasting procedures belong to an ancient tradition going back in France to the thirteenth or twelfth century, which creates a burlesque effect, either of the grotesque or "obscene" sort. The latter type of transgression scandalized early twentieth-century medievalists, more sensitive than the inhabitants of the fifteenthcentury court, who were aroused to liberating laughter. T h e "obscene" is either found in the narrative content, having to do with repressed manifestations of the sexual, or is bound up with the lexical coating by means of the oblique action of the double meaning.20 The ribald intertextual effect moves us to a register where truisms and spicy jokes, culled from common speech or carnival "theatrical" practices, are shaped according to the verse and rhetoric rules of official poetry, the thematic norms of which are thus violated. The "obscene" text forms a homogeneous contrast, the reason for the reader's changed horizon of expectation. The contrast is even clearer when the poem is written in a more refined genre such as the rondeau. An anthology containing various rhetoriqueur poems of this sort, the Jardin de plaisance (1501), is a repository of brief and condensed allusions signaling a desire for formal sophistication. Commenting upon a tapestry design showing a bergerie [pastoral], Baude composed the following Dit: Shepherdess: If you want to catch anything Shoot into my mound, Beneath my petticoat. Shepherd: Margot, you are foolish, I am pounding and rubbing my bow, But I cannot extend it.21

Here, the martial metaphor, lexicalized in the phraseology of the day (the male organ as a sword, a bow, or a spear), finds expression in contradiction, justifying our mocking laughter. This common stylistic procedure creates contrast by the superimposition of the regrets of old age upon the traditional theme. Sometimes added to the overall intertextual effect is another one, definable in terms of syllabic or lexical combinations which are distinctive in usually arising independently, from the rich homophonic and homonymic resources of French, whether in religious, courtly, or political statements. All pretty girls, writes Molinet in a poem to Philippe, "love kings [rozi] with all their heart." Now, roie in the slang of the time meant arse and roit

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meant stiff: puns of this sort are numerous. T h e two kinds of discourse so linked sometimes differ only in their social or situational connotation. ' ~ o l i n e t for , example, writes: Oh! the beauty for whom I suffer more ills [comporte]

Than for any cunt-bearing woman on earth [quiszls terre con ~ o r t e ] . ' ~

The seventy-six-line poem repeats the same pun thirty-eight times. The obscene line of the couplet, itself unambiguous, casts in an ambiguous light the first line, which belongs, lexically, to the register of fin amour. French syllables and words offer numerous possibilities of the same type--cu, vit, point-used extensively by several rhetoriqueurs. Usually, the poets place the ambiguous sounds in the privileged positions of the rhyme, loading the text with echoes, which, through repetition, eventually constitute a second level of meaning in the listener's mind, producing a unique and redundant semi.. Some poems increase the frequency of the conditional tense, and its endings, -roie, -roit, -roient, beat out their cheerful tune in the subplot of the verses, scarcely, dare I say it, penetrating the apparent surface. . . . Elsewhere, however, the pun extends to a phrase, a complete sentence forming two textual levels; the obscene, while interrupted, nonetheless keeps a certain coherence. This procedure is used by Villon in the Testament: a few homophonic games, or an obvious polysemy, impose upon the listener a multiple rule for decoding, applicable to smaller or larger sections of the statement.23On rare occasions, the obscenity is continuous, intertwining with an incomplete aspect of the text, producing a global contrast. Ribaldry is always allusive, referring back, by way of suggestive terms, to an imaginary context engendering neither fiction nor description explicitly. On the contrary, the "grotesque" describes beings, objects, sometimes situations. Transgressing rhetorical norms of decorum, separating the elements of consecrated "types," hyperbolizing these elements, producing thereby an effect of monstrousness, terrifying, laughable, or both at once, the grotesque is a caricature. Its threads are so tightly woven, so firmly attached to the frame, in the works of Molinet, Cretin, Gringore, Bouchet, and Lemaire, that one could quote as examples whole pages from their moral, political, or erotic writings. These two devices are signs of a negativity which another angle of vision perceives as an inverted positivity, a questioning of the entire discourse that binds them both together. An antimessage passes through the message; a reassuring littera produces a doubled sententia, reduced to nothing.

Other authors of the period employ the grotesque in a stereotyped form, such as the inverted praise of the lady in the sottechanson, or the "Bacchic" motif. But the rhetoriqueurs seem to avoid these procedures. No doubt such methods seem to them less apt to set up the internal contrast their parole needed in order to constitute itself. Indeed, in practice two kinds of burlesque contrast with one another. Springing from a gratuitous joke, or a desire to debase something, the first kind of burlesque is easily rationalized by the reader, since the overt idiolectal rules of the text allow him to detect the signals of the game and decode the joke accordingly. The second kind hides rules, evades the topic, obscures the coherence of the genre so that interpretation is reduced to an unanswered question. The verse favored by the poetics of the rhetoriqueurs belonged less to the first than to the second type of burlesque, impossible to separate from the games played with the textual material itself, letters, sounds, rhythms. Fermenting the text, these games form the chief characteristic of such poetry: the exciting license of language, fornicating with words which are formed into a denotative system violated by unexpected connotations. Irony is produced at two moments, not chronologically distinct but dialectically linked in a single process: (1) It aims at detaching the individual from his immediate mode of existence, projecting him outside customary areas of perception into an imaginary one governed by special laws. (2) Simultaneously, denouncing these same laws, it returns to the individual, who is separated from social reality and given over in all his vital spontaneity to a world of dis-ordered representations ensuring his coextensiveness with being. Against a common background of discursive analogues, the equivocal nature of words stands out, engendering a semantic instability, a source of pleasure but, as such, intolerable. The instability must be dispelled, usually by a reading act which attributes predominance to one of the components of the statement and decides to validate there the meaning. A hyperbolical act converts into persuasive declaration what the text presented as dissimulation and duplicity; the question etymologically present in the term eironeia is answered and in the following sentence negated. Varying in intensity, the effect of irony, although not always identical, moves towards the same end. Thus, bilingualism, mingling French and Latin in the same poem, normally creates a completely extrinsic opposition, which, however, can be internalized if it makes possible a quid pro quo, as do the clerks' jokes mentioned by F a b ~ - iSome.~~ times, the pun is only approximate: if the rhetoriqueurs ventured into

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this area, they would aim higher, appreciating, for instance, the following model rhyme offered in Langlois's Art VII: Nempe quam plurimos sumptus Et lors quant plus riz motz sont tuz. 25 Here, the two linguistic codes are juxtaposed, and the game consists in realizing their interchangeability. But the codes may coincide in a single statement. Even when concerning one word or a short, isolated syntagm, the double meaning is produced by our uncertainty about the language used. The rhetoriqueurs' use of puns was more exact than that of their predecessors. Molinet's words da malis can be read as a curse o r as the name of Dame Alice, a whore. The pun is "a minimal working unit of the signifiermZ6 which becomes more complex and predominates. In Molinet's work, scholars have identified a number of banal puns, borrowed from popular riddles. All the rhetoriqueurs, with differing degrees of persistence and success, compose puns. "Let him who wishes to use his skill choose amusing puns," Molinet declares in his Art. His Dutch disciple, Casteleyn, on the other hand, differing from his master, deplores this figure of speech as an abuse typical of the French-speaking poets and their imitato~-s.27 Most of the treatises published by Langlois provide a definition of pun, insisting on these suggestive games, "full sounding," occupying a privileged position amongst many procedures favored by the rules. T h e purely technical point of view of the theorizers of the time led them to describe the phenomenon in exaggeratedly concrete terms: Molinet drafts lists of words o r syntagms having a double meaning, some of which extend to two, three, or four syllables, as in sansonnet, sans son net, sans sonnet, sans son est, and so on. Broadening our perspective, we shall notice amongst the rhetoriqueurs a deliberate exploiting of the possibilities of the linguistic system, which provides for neutralizing lexical oppositions by means of phonemic convergences. The practice was widespread, a sign of the writers' desire (diffused throughout, but always implied in the discourse) to break with the apparent and artificial unity of meaning, a longng to reject the unity of the fiction, somewhat as does thefigura etymologica. Of course, none of our poets expressly formulates any such intention. It is nonetheless true that a reciprocal instrumental relationship is posited between poetic discourse and the search for equivocality. A very ancient tendency of medieval aesthetics may well be reappearing here with new vigor, seeking to define the poet's task through his use of what Isidore, in his Etymologme VIII, vii, calledfigurationes obliquae. But the definition is to be formulated in the manner favored by a century which, more than others, delighted in witty remarks, enigmas, moralizing, scatological

or licentious ambiguities collected in anthologies (such as the Demandes joyeuses en forme de quodlibets published in Paris in 1498 by Trepperel), a n d used to punctuate the sermons of popular

preacher^.^^ I distinguish between micro- and macro-textual puns: the first play upon at least two elements, combining phonic identity with the greatest possible semantic difference. The linguistic elements related by homophony (and, on occasion, by homography) each refer to a different type of discourse, one obvious, the other suggested. The effect remains the same whether the element is a syllable, a word, or a syntagmatic group. Marking some important part of the argument, a prose pun can arise anywhere. In verse, it may fall on a syllable within the line, usually indicated by the rhythm, but its most prevalent position is at the end rhyme. Such a positioning is not the result of mere chance. In fact, every rhyme can be thought of as being fundamentally a pun because of the equivalence, maybe a very approximate one, established between the rhymed words. For writers of the Arts [de seconde rhitorique], the puns on rhyme, exemplified in the rime iquivoquie, can cover entire words or groups of completely homophonic words. T h e double meaning will be more readily identified and more effective when the rhyme extends to a larger number of syllables. Puns covering one, two, and three syllables are frequent. Here and there, the verse lends itself to a four-syllable rhyme, such as this one of Molinet's: Homme miserable et labille,

Qui vas contrefaisant I'abille,

Menant estat dhordonni,

Croy qu'Enfer est dks or donni.'"

The procedure remains flexible and, from syllable to syllable, can refer to wider and wider units of discourse. For instance, the end of a line quoted by Fabri, "Dame ruse m'a" ["a lady has tricked me"] may also be understood as "D'lme ruse m'a" ["a trick of the soul has me"].30 From the single syllable we can move to an entire line, the furthest extent of the punning rhyme. Guillaume Cretin, particularly adept, covers the full range of possibilities. A verse epistle of his to Charpentier contains 120 decasyllabic lines, rhymed almost completely in homophonic couplets. The poem could almost be described as a series of 60 repeated verses, identical phonically and having a double semantic interpretation:

NEW LITERARY H I S T O R Y

A celle fin qu'en mes ditz contreface Assez le fin, pour face contre face Vers et respons accorder, plume ay prire, Vers serris pontz, ou beaucoup plus mespise L'accis de court que se visse mes sens . . . Lassez de cour, plaisir n'y ay, mais sens . . . Tournay, entour sa folle outrecuydance Tournaye: entour s'affole oultre qui d a n ~ e . ~ '

T h e pun penetrates every structural level of the text. Meaning is itself plural: the ambiguity of poetic discourse forms the initial assumption of the implicit doctrine of which the Arts merely present the practical consequences. This doctrine tends toward what would be a macro-structural pun embracing the entire discourse. Several rhetoriqueurs attempted this tour de force. But because the phonemic structure of French prevents very lengthy homophonic series, the poets worked mainly on syntax, producing, in another area of the language, an effect different from that of homophony. It relates less to the denotative meaning than to the general connotation resulting from the connection between the elements. The poet links together, in a single statement, divergent or contradictory assertions which would normally require a series of several statements. Such a linking implies the possibility of a double reading, for it is the intrusion into one discourse of another, presupposed one. The reader is forced to disassociate the message and recognize a dialogic structure in the text: two voices unite in the parole and challenge one another. The homophony permits a lingering doubt, suggesting a different reference. The syntactical pun overturning the proposition can be achieved in two ways: (1) a displacement of lines or hemistiches, as in Andre de la Vigne's eulogy of tripe-sellers/condemnation of the Basoche [legal clerks], which becomes a vituperation of the first group and a panegyric of the second by cutting the decasyllables into two series of pentasyllables. (2) More often one finds another structure: a series of lines in rhymed symmetrical segments, each containing a negation in the middle, forms a sentence. Reading from left to right connects the negation to the terms following it. A backwards reading places the negation with the terms to the left of the line. For instance, several of Molinet's litany-type pieces list in a single statement contrasting qualities and failings attributable to the French, the Burgundians, to men, or to women. In Bouchet, these attributes are applied to officers of the law and to the natives of Poitiers. I quote Molinet : Women are gentle, not rebellious, Shining gems, not dark pearls,

Lovable, not distant, Truthful, not lying.32

From right to left, "Rebellious, not gentle, are women," and so on for sixteen lines. Fabri proposes a more complex structure: seven decasyllabic couplets, read from left to right, spell out one after the other the commandments of seven Virtues. Read in the opposite direction, the lines spell out the commandments of the seven corresponding Vices. The transformation extends to the rhythm, rising (4-6) with the Virtues, falling (6-4) with the Vices.33 No matter what their form and moment of impact, punning games constitute the most pertinent common characteristic of this poetry. What, after all, is the pun [iquivoque]if not the exaggerated, incongruous, rich manifestation of the hidden place in which language and meaning coalesce. Doubling the elements of the text, the equivocation introduces an excess of presence, at the farthest limits of the bearable, designating even an absence. An excess of language, a challenge, the pun enables the rhetoriqueurs to escape the social rites, affirm the central value of the exceptional. Nearly drowning the reader in a rich sauce of cliches, the poet creates the linguistic power source allowing him to survive, to validate his proper prop-el form as different, outside itself. Once used, the punning term incorporates a question: the syntagms open up an alternative for which they provide the elements. The reader, perforce, makes a choice from moment to moment; but each of his choices leads to the next. Once produced, the word and syntagm produce in their turn by dispersing their effects. Reading now does not consist in detecting convergences that provide a basis for unity but rather in discerning points of diffraction. The punned question cannot be formulated either in or by the text but merely signifies the coexistence of incompatible elements, without in any way justifying or providing a way of exploring further such a coexistence. It denies beginnings and origins without substituting any other notion for them. Where is the true meaning, the initial donnee, hiding? No reply. The pun thus rejects the contradiction detected by common usage. Breaking the paradigmatic links, the chains of ideas, the pun is a sophism, a universal paradox. I n a way, it is related to the metaphor, suggesting a logical absurdity on the primary level of communication, organizing a schema for liberation in the text, introducing a principle of plenitude. The connotative power of the statements, when it is let loose, transforms the word, or line of verse, making of them not the signs they might have been, but sources of multiple suggestions, unclear, resisting all codification. It is less a question of ambiguity (which

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implies that only one of the possible meanings is required by the context) than of an endless semiosis based on a split signifier. T h e pun thus exploits the room for play that meaning provides. But the game is faked. The poet and his addressee both belong to the court, the stage where each holds forth in his own way. Here, thanks to the force of the equivocal paradox, they no longer belong to the same company or place. Which of them will be the first to realize this fact? For this reason, no doubt, the pun often becomes comical and teasing. Laughter is a revelation, self-confidence, the y k l o 6 ~6~uto~ of the Homeric gods, the sorcerer's laugh, in the moment of emptiness where a conspiracy of words forms, while unforeseeable connections are set up. At this moment the opus operates; at this privileged moment the work demands to be judged. However, meaning is not destroyed. There is no trace of antilanguage orfatrasies3*amongst the rhetoriqueurs. Their poetics aims not at a deconstruction of linguistic structures in and of themselves but of their signifying processes. Our poets are concerned not so much with rejecting an order as with questioning the univocal nature of the values of their world.

(Translated by Annette and Edward Tomarken, Miami University) NOTES 1 Bernard Guenee and Fran~oisLehoux, Les Entries royalesfraqaises de 1328 a 1515

(Paris, 1968); L. Brind'amour, "Rhetorique et theLtralit6," Studi mediolatini e volgari, 23

(1975), 9-57, and 24 (1976), 73-133.

2 Rainer Warning, Rezeptionsiitthetik (Munich, 1975), pp. 162-225.

3 Henri Rey-Flaud, Le Cercle mamue: essai sur le thihtre en rand a lafin du Moyen Age

(Paris, 1973), pp. 137-42.

4 Jean Paris, Univers parallZles: 1 , Thkhtre (Paris, 1975). pp. 15-23.

5 Daniel Poirion, Le PoZte et le pnnce (Paris, 1965). pp. 49-54. See also pp. 65, 78,

91 -92; and Frances Yates, "Elizabethan Chivalry,"Journal of the Warburg Institute, 20

(1957), 22-25.

6 F. Thibaut, Marguerite d'Autriche et Jean Lxmaire a2 Belges (1888; rpt. Geneva, 1970),

pp. 37-65.

7 G. Vasoli, La dialettica e la rettorica dell'umanesimo (Milan, 1968), pp. 3, 35.

8 Henri Guy, Histoire de la pobie fraqaise au XVIe s2cle: I , L'Ecole des rhktoriqueurs

(1910; rpt. Paris, 1968), pp. 225, 280; and Philipp A . Becker, Zur romanischen

Literaturgeschuhte (Bern, 1967), p. 551.

9 R. Wolf, Der Stil der Rhetongueurs (Giessen, 1939), pp. 8- 13.

10 Paul Zumthor, "De la Circularite du chant," Poktique, 2 (1970), 129-40.

1 1 Warning, pp. 13-23, 35.

12 Julia Kristeva, La traversb des signes (Paris, 1975), p. 13.

13 Vasoli, pp. 29, 35. 14 Hans Robert Jauss, Literaturgeschichte ak Provokation (Frankfurt, 1973), pp. 169, 183-89. 15 Louis Marin, Utopiques: jeux d'espace (Paris, 1973), pp. 87- 114. 16 Paul Zumthor, Essai de poitique mLdiivale (Paris, 1972), pp. 75-82; and Umberto Eco, L a Structure absente (Paris, 1972), pp. 192-93, 215- 16 (Italian original, 1968). 17 Mikhail Bakhtin, La PoLtique de Dostoi'ewsky (Paris, 1970), pp. 169-78 (Russian original, 1963); and L'Oeuvre de Fraqois Rabelais et la culture pqpulaire (Paris, 1970), pp. 187-275 (Russian original, 1965). See also N. Mesnil, Trois Essais sur l a f t t e (Brussels, 1974), pp. 15-17, 38-40. 18 Bakhtin, L'Oeuvre de Fraqois Rabelais, p. 175. 19 Paul Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1963). 20 Guido Almansi, L'estetica del osceno (Turin, 1974), pp. 131-94. 2 1 A. Scoumanne, Henri Baude: Dictz moraukpourfaire tuptsserie (Geneva, 1959). p. 94. 22 Noel Dupire, ed., Les "Faictz et Dictz" de Jean Molinet (Paris, 1936), pp. 729-31. 23 Evelyn Birge-Vitz, The Crossroads of Intentions (The Hague, 1974), pp. 29-33. 24 A. Heron, Pierre Fabri, Le grand et w a i art de pleine rhitorique (1889-90; rpt. Geneva, 1969), 11, 118. 25 Ernest Langlois, Recueil d'artr deseconde rhitorique (1902; rpt. Geneva, 1974), p. 317. 26 Fran~oisRigolot, "Rhetorique d u nom poetique," Poitique, 28 (1976), 474. 27 Langlois, p. 249; and S. A. P. J. H. Iansen, Verkenningen i n Matthijs Casteleijm Comt v a n Rhetoriken (Assen, 1971), pp. 108- 18. 28 See B. Roy,Devinettes fraqaises du moyen rige (Paris and Montreal, 1977); and Michel Zink, La Prddication en langue r o m n e (Paris, 1976). pp. 271-76, 287-91. 29 Christine Martineau-Genieys, Les "Lunettes des Princes" de Jean Meschinot (Geneva, 1972). pp. 26, 36. 30 Heron, 11, 47. 3 1 Kathleen Chesney, Oeuvres poitiques de Guillaume Cretin (1932; rpt. Geneva, 1977), pp. 279, 276. 32 Dupire, pp. 332, 846-47. 33 Heron, 11, 48. 34 [The fatrasie is discussed by Bakhtin in ch. 6 of L'Oeuvre de Fraqois Rabelais; in English, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), pp. 422-23. It is there defined as "a form of verse composed of an absurd string of words, linked by assonance o r rhyme but with no meaning and no single theme." For further discussion of the form, see Paul Zumthor, Langue, Texte, Enigme (Paris, 1975), pp. 68-88. Tr.]

On the Alterity of Medieval Religious Drama

Rainer Warning

F

is a central category of traditional hermeneutics. All understanding, says Dilthey, begins with the foreignness of the past. T o understand is to make the past present so as to reexperience it. This process is thought to succeed uniformly, since in all its foreignness the past remains linked to the familiar in an encompassing community. For Dilthey this is the community of an omnipresent flow of life, which links the historical objectivations of the spirit with the interpreter's present. What is past can be assimilated Bnd what is foreign can be transposed into familiarity because the historical scholar is no different from the historical actor. "Interpretation would be impossible if manifestations of life were entirely alien. It would be unnecessary if they contained nothing foreign. Therefore, it lies between these two opposing extremes. It is necessary wherever there is something foreign which the art of interpretation is to familiarize."' Thus for Dilthey foreignness is nothing other than distance which can and should be overcome by interpretation. Clearly this is not the foreignness which is meant by recent scholarship which, increasingly often, has been talking about the otherness, the alterity, of medieval l i t e r a t ~ r eThis . ~ alterity is the reverse of the traditional hermeneutic category: not trust that historical distance can be overcome, but rather reflection on the difficulty or even the impossibility of overcoming this distance, reflection on discontinuity, on the unavoidable limitation in perspective which leads the interpreter to see through the romantic illusion of virtual contemporaneity with his object. T o be sure, this still will not bring a specific alterity of the Middle Ages into view. For the unavoidable historicity of the interpreter affects literary studies in general, and not only those of the medievalist. A specific alterity of the Middle Ages thus can properly only mean a specific blockage with respect to the object of study, which in return must inevitably influence the descriptive models. This blockage can be quickly described by saying that we have only texts where institutions were at issue,3 and that there are insuperable OREIGNNESS

Copyrighto 1979 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia

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limits on a reconstruction of these institutions via the extant texts. We know that these texts only represent relics of institutionalized performances and that it would be inappropriate to treat them as if they were what we ordinarily understand as literature. But all scholarly discussion since the beginning of literary scholarship has been bound to this very notion of literature. For Dilthey there was no question but that the linguistic manifestation of the spirit always represented its perfect objectification, and however far modern structuralism may be removed from the romantic metaphysics of the objective spirit, its faith in the "text" remains equally great. But this text, as we have increasingly been made aware in recent years, is only the linguistic manifestation of a speech act which, qua act, stands in institutionalized contexts of acting; consequently, a theoretical grasp necessitates taking these pragmatic contexts into account. Opening text theory to the pragmatic correlate of the linguistic sign could offer a chance of doing justice to the alterity of medieval texts. T o be sure, such attempts will have to abandon the ideal of linguistic formalization and enter the comparatively uncertain realm of historical pragmatics, whose institutional bases are not easy to unearth. Religious drama is perhaps the genre which demonstrates most forcefully the alterity of the Middle Ages. Its investigation reaches back to the beginnings of the discipline of philology, and this study has always stood under the influence of romantic hermeneutics. It seemed to be vividly demonstrable how a literary genre developed out of liturgical origins and in return made possible the rebirth in the very bosom of the church of a theater which had been suppressed for centuries. And if this theater was forbidden in the fifteenth century, this was explained by its coarseness and excesses; the question was not raised whether perhaps these very features were essential to the institutional setting of the plays. Those who did raise this question succumbed immediately to the pull of another hypothesis which was equally prejudiced by organicism: the hypothesis of a popular mimetic instinct newly triumphant at last after centuries of suppression and increasingly infiltrating what was intended as Christian drama. Both hypotheses had the same perspective and points of reference: the origin and history of the genre were viewed and described as a prehistory flowing continuously towards fulfillment in the theater of the Renaissance. This very perspective transferred to these texts the coupling-a customary one, to be s u r e - o f drama as a literary genre and theater as an institution and consequently distracted us from what in the case of religious drama is the decisive question: the institutional setting to which it stood witness. We know very little of this setting, but what we

ON THE ALTERITY OF MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS DRAMA

267

do know prompts the assumption that the concept and the descriptive models of what we understand as drama are fundamentally inappropriate to these ludi. The "absol~teness"~ of modern drama, i.e., the separation between the internal situation of performance and the external one of reception, does not come into consideration for religious drama. The "as if" of these plays does not constitute what we call fiction, but remains a form of ritual. In such cult play the internal and external situations coincide. Even when acted in front of a congregation, it is always acted as if to represent the congregation, which in turn acts the role of mankind. Thus, religious drama is not autonomous after the fashion of a self-contained fiction performed before spectators, but is rather the institutionally autonomous performance of a ritual. This institutional autonomy marks a clear distance from the institutionalized church cult which gave rise to it and on which it superficially continued to depend so long as it endured. The critical distance from which the church itself followed the origin and history of these plays is an implicit confirmation of their institutional autonomy and of their consequent rivalry with the official cult. For if these plays remained a form of ritual, this also means that the ritual was performed as play so as to respond to needs which clearly were no longer satisfied through the customary channels of religious dispensation. What on the surface appears to be the continuous emancipation of commemorative rites into a concrete image is more adequately described as a rivalry of two institutions which the church ultimately settled in its own favor after several centuries of toleration. The beginnings of religious drama in the enacted dialogues of liturgical ceremony are well known. They are identical with a tendency toward translating the commemorative repetition of Christ's passion into concrete, mimetic representation in vivo which developed within the official rite itself. This tendency begins as early as the seventh century, with the rise of liturgical allegore~is,~ which endeavors to project Christ's passion onto the various phases of the liturgical ceremony, and its first high point is the so-called Visitatio Sepulchri. This is a scenic representation which elaborates the three Marys' visit to the grave in Mark xvi: 1-7. It emerged during the tenth century within the framework of Easter Matins and quickly incorporated dther narrative complexes such as the race of the apostles to ;he tomb and the appearance of the risen Christ to Mary Magdalen. Beyond the liturgical framework this tendency finally reaches its goal in vernacular plays. In the course of a development lasting for three centuries religious drama successively encompasses the whole of sacred history, from Old Testament prefigurations on through to Jesus' return to his heavenly Father. So the formula, "from rite to drama,"

268


which has served as the basis for hypothetical reconstructions of the beginnings of ancient drama, seems to be visibly and strikingly documented in historical times. No wonder, therefore, that it reappears even in the title of 0. B. Hardison's Chrirtian Rite and Christian Drama i n the Middle Ages," a study that can claim the great merit of having replaced the concept of organic growth by that of structural identities. T h e formula itself, however, remains unchanged, and it seems indeed so self-evident as to be beyond question. Nevertheless, it will be necessary to problematize precisely what seems most self-evident. For if, superficially, religious drama repeats the process by which ancient drama was emancipated, still this repetition takes place in the framework of an anthropology where it is at root inadmissible. In the framework of his theory of archaic institutions, A. Gehlen speaks of the "absolute cultural threshold" of monotheism, and he sees this threshold demarcated in part by the emergence of a rite which is oriented toward the one, imageless, invisible God and exhibits a tendency toward minimizing its representational ~ o n t e n t If . ~ that is correct, then the reverse tendency toward enrichment of the representational content giving rise to religious drama cannot be routinely introduced and asserted. In fact, the seemingly self-evident formula, "Christian rite and Christian drama," suppresses the no less self-evident theological criticism which the supposedly Christian drama encountered even in its earliest period of liturgical allegoresis and which, as is well known, led up to a general ban on the plays in the fifteenth century. T o this corresponds the fact that the history of the plays itself does not display a continuous unfolding, but, quite the reverse, displays clear breaks in continuity whose upshot was that the impetus for the mimetic representation moved away step by step from the sacramental nucleus of the liturgical rite. What appears on the surface as a continuous development from the allegorized mass via the Visitatio Sepulchri to vernacular plays is in actuality three independent traditions which preserved a relative independence down to their common end in the fifteenth century. This applies first of all to the relationship of liturgical allegoresis and the Visitatio Sepulchri. However much both belong to a common tendency toward concrete representation, it must be equally emphasized that the Visitatio emerged within the framework of the Easter Matins and not in the mass and thus in the sacramental nucleus of the liturgical rite. And a corresponding displacement applies to the relationship of the liturgical Visitatio and vernacular drama. With the Visitatio, a mimetic representation did, of course, encroach upon the space of commemorative repetition and kerygmatic pronouncement:


269

the scene is performed by a group of clerics who step forth from the chorus and act and sing ad imitationem mulierum or angelorum in a place designated as the sepulchre, which in most cases can be identified as the altar.* But the liturgical framework remains completely intact. Thus the imitatio, for instance, does not lead to costuming, but only to cautiously symbolic utilizations of the customary vestments and ritual vessels. The Marys do conceal their heads ad modum mulierum, but with liturgical attire (amicta, humerale, capitapa). The rubrics speak neutrally of parare o r induere, and occasionally of ornare (more muliebri ornatis). The clerics do not represent what they are not, but within their roles they remain clerics and as such executants of a liturgical ceremony. Correspondingly, the subsequent history of this ceremony is not marked by unrestricted elaboration, but on the contrary by a clash of liberations and restrictions. of representational outbreaks and varying forms of theological self-restraint. As already mentioned, the Visitatio Sepulchri underwent substantive as well as textual additions, to wit, first the race of the apostles and then the christophany before Mary Magdalen. Yet it is striking how tentatively it accepted these substantive additions. Among some four hundred extant texts, only eighty include the apostles' race and only twelve the christophany. And even this hesitant acceptance cannot be portrayed as a developmental process. The most highly elaborated type, the so-called Visitatio 111, consisting of the scene with the Marys, the apostles' race, and the christophany, does not mark any sort of developmental terminus, but rather is found chronologically alongside of Visitatio I (scene with the Marys) and Visitatio I1 (Marys and apostles' race). And vice versa, the simplest type, just the scene with the Marys, which constitutes three-fourths of the corpus, still occurs in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. Thus with respect to substantive additions the liturgical Visitatio seems to practice a kind of voluntary self-restraint which sets it sharply apart from the vernacular tradition. Only in the latter, outside the liturgical realm, do representational interests really get free reign. The break in continuity with the liturgical tradition is unmistakable. T h e performance no longer takes place on hallowed ground, butforis januam, that is, in front of the church or in the marketplace; the performers are no longer-at least, not exclusively-clerics, but laymen; these laymen now represent what they are not, and their roles undergo a quantitative elaboration which is entirely without parallel in the liturgical realm. If the vernacular Easter play immediately starts with a length of over one thousand lines, then we can no longer view this merely as the elaboration of the nucleus which it does retain from the liturgical Visitatio 111, particularly since the Visitatio

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I11 itself represents rather an exception and not a developmental terminus. The twelfth-century Old French Play of Adam corresponds to no known liturgical model, and the passion play also originated independently, not as the prelude to an expanded Easter play.g Thus scholars have been entirely correct in differentiating medieval religious drama so as to distinguish between liturgical ceremonies such as the Visitatio on the one hand and vernacular plays or ludi on the other, thereby emphasizing the discontinuity of two traditions rather than deriving one from the other via an organic developmental schema. T h e following discussion will be concerned with the vernacular tradition, and the hypothesis, which was prepared by the preceding considerations and can now be formulated, is that this tradition could only be constituted in opposition to the very religious cult to which it was seemingly subordinate. If the Easter play invariably retains the Latin nucleus of the liturgical Visitatio and if vernacular play down to the great passions of the fifteenth century by and large preserves a liturgical substratum, then at bottom this can only be so as to usurp the Christian kerygma for an institution which in reality undercuts it. The rite which constitutes its institutional nucleus and which it transforms into a play has no exemplar in the Christian liturgy. Instead it must be created out of whole cloth by means of dramatic elaborations. How this happens will now be shown through two particularly revealing examples: Jesus' appearance to Mary Magdalen in the garden in the fourteenth-century German Easter play and the portrayal of the passion in fifteenth-century French mysteries.

Jesus appeared to Mary in Joseph of Arimathea's garden. We have seen that this incident already served to open the liturgical ceremony. It goes back to John xx: 11- 16, where the text reads as follows: But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, and seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say unto her, Woman why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will


27 1

take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.lo

Jesus suddenly stands before Mary. Why she commits the initial error of taking him for a gardener John does not say. The appearance is not of interest in itself, since knowledge is achieved not through images, but in the word: yesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master." Nevertheless, the passage leaves us with the question of the root of the misunderstanding, and it suggests for an answer that Jesus actually appeared disguised as a gardener. In such a reading, however, the kerygma of divine summons and the myth of divine metamorphosis would come into direct opposition. For the metamorphosis-as Hans Blumenberg has pointed out-is essential to the myth, and indeed to its very genesis, namely, as an anthropomorphosis. The gods lose their terror when they change their form, and with these transformations they become the objects of mythical narration. "Everything which follows," says Blumenberg, "can be explained from the effort not to be understood as metamorphosis or not to permit metamorphosis in the world."ll In fact, kerygmatic seriousness is incompatible with the humorous play of metamorphoses. But our gardener Jesus is by no means free of the very suspicion of playing with Mary Magdalen after the fashion of the metamorphoses of pagan gods. Not, of course, as Jupiter played with Alkmene when he appeared to her in Amphitryon's shape, but still in principle entirely comparable. But seen thus the passage conceals a theological scandal and was indeed actually felt to be one. As a highly revealing proof of this can serve a homily discovered by the Abbe Bourgain, who attributed it to Anselm of Canterbury. This attribution may be doubtful, but the theological rigorism of the text is obvious. Its whole argumentation is governed by the strategy of blunting the central point of irritation in the meeting, the phrase, "supposing him to be the gardener":12 When Mary thus grieved and wept, and when she had said these things, she turned herself back and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus, and Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? With a great grief then in her heart she had seen thy form suspended on the cross not long ago before her very eyes, and now thou sayest, why weepest thou? On the third day preceding she had anointed thy hands, by which she had often been blessed, and had seen thy feet-which she had kissed and watered with her tears-fastened with nails, and now thou sayest, why weepest thou? She thought thy body borne away, to which she had come to anoint it, that she might somehow be consoled, and thou sayest: Why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? Sweet master, why, I ask, dost thou provoke the

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spirit of this woman? Why dost thou provoke her soul? Thou knowest that she seeks only thee, she loves only thee, despises all things for thee, and thou sayest: What seekest thou? She hangs wholly on thee, remains wholly in thee, and despairs wholly of herself, she seeks thee, that she may seek nothing, think nothing except thee. Perchance she knows thee not because she is not in herself, but is beside herself for thee. Why therefore dost thou say to her: Why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? O r dost thou think that she may say: I weep for thee, I seek thee, if thou hast not first inspired her and said in her heart: I am he whom thou seekest and for whom thou weepest? Or dost thou think that she shall know thee so long as thou shalt wish to hide thyself? When she, supposing him to be a gardener, said to him: Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. 0 surpassing grief! O miraculous love! This woman, as though covered by a dense cloud of griefs, did not see the sun which, rising in the morn, was beaming through her windows, and which was now entering through the ears of her body into the house of her heart! But since she was faint with love, the eyes of her heart were darkened with this love so that she saw not for very seeing: for she saw not Jesus, because she knew not that it was Jesus. 0 , Mary, if thou seekest, wherefore mistakest thou Jesus? Behold Jesus comes to thee and seeks from thee what thou seekest, and thou supposest him a gardener. What thou supposest is true indeed. But yet in this thou errest, since supposing him to be a gardener thou dost not know it is Jesus as well. For he is Jesus, and he is a gardener, for he sows all good seed in the garden of thy soul and in the hearts of his faithful. He plants and waters all good seed in the souls of the saints, and he is Jesus who speaks to thee. But perchance thou mistakest him not that speaks to thee. Thou seekest him dead and knowest him not alive. Now in truth I understand this to be the cause for which he went away from thee and for which he appeared not to thee. For why should he appear to thee, since thou didst not seek him? Indeed thou didst seek what he was not, and didst not seek what he was. Thou didst seek Jesus and didst seek not Jesus, and in thus seeing Jesus, thou knewest not Jesus.

Thus the troubling point is directly addressed: how could Jesus, who knew exactly why Mary was weeping and whom she sought, nevertheless feign ignorance and ask precisely that? Our author himself, indeed, does not say that Jesus acted ignorant, but rather that he had hidden himself, and he tries afterwards to give the reason. Mary, he says, sought Jesus, but did not seek him correctly, namely, not with the mystical "eyes of the heart." With her physical vision she wanted to find him who was preparing to penetrate her heart "through the ears of her body," that is, through the word, and thus came the regrettable occurrence: "Behold Jesus came to thee, and thou supposest him a gardener." Thus the reason for the misunderstanding is sought in Mary, and not in the appearance of the risen one. The "gardener" is a product of seeing - with false eyes, and the question is not even addressed whether perhaps the cause might have been that a gardener


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actually appeared. Of course, Jesus is also a gardener, but as a mystical gardener who sows good seed in the hearts of believers he reveals himself only in the word, he is identical with the 'Jesus who speaks to thee." Thus the argument is consistently directed toward completely acquitting the deity of any responsibility for the misunderstanding. In particular the explanation which is suggested by the passage in the Bible and which is in fact the obvious one is not simply rejected, but rather completely evaded: namely, that Jesus might in fact have appeared to Mary as a gardener. The radical displacement of the whole incident into mystical imagelessness, meanwhile, is only possible because the homily does not need to take a position toward the simple statement, "she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing." But when the scene is presented live, then it must declare its colors; the misunderstanding demands outright to be motivated by the figure appearing at the altar. One might well be eager to know what ceremony and drama will do with this scene. Our very first example, a tenth-century Visitatio I11 from Fleury, makes the constraints of representation unmistakably clear. For there the cleric appears, as the rubric unambiguously states, "attired like a gardener" (preparatur; in similitudinern hortolani).13 This already carries the ceremony a step beyond the biblical model, which left open this very point, and confronts it with the question, Why did Jesus actually present himself as a gardener? What this question unleashes is shown by a ceremony from Coutances. Here too Jesus first appears "in the costume of a gardener" (in habitu Ortolani),14but he does not reveal himself as such. Immediately after Mary's demand, "Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me, and I will take him away," he disappears, in order to reappear immediately (probably two clerics divided the role) dressed in liturgical vestments with a cross in his hand, and only then does he reveal himself with the exclamation, "Mary!" With this something decisive has happened to the Fleury version: while there Mary recognized the divine voice despite the gardener's dress, now correct hearing is tied to the change of dress with which it coincides. The word, through which alone the Christian God is revealed, has been deprived of its power of revelation. The transposition into visibility has dissolved an incident centered on a kerygmatic moment and has returned it to the sphere of metamorphosis. Now it is characteristic of the tendency of the liturgical ceremony that it was clearly uncomfortable with this solution. The late Coutances ceremony (fifteenth century) forms an exception and must already stand under the influence of vernacular play. The liturgical tradition is concerned with preserving the specifically kerygmatic import of the scene and thus either leaves the appearance in the garden

2 74


unmotivated, as in the Fleury example, or else, as is the case in all remaining texts, it immediately confronts Mary with a Dominica persona, without reference to the garden and the gardener. And even this solution clearly still seemed problematic: barely a dozen ceremonies adopted it. Altogether different is the vernacular tradition, which, so to speak, ignites the theological scandal of the latent metamorphosis and removes the whole scene out of the kerygmatic sphere. Jesus now actually plays games with the unsuspecting Mary, explicitly passing himself off as a gardener and, in an intentional misunderstanding of her question, casting upon her the suspicion of a rendezvous in his garden. It is immediately evident that the play has moved away from the kerygmatic sphere and back to that of myth. The first indications of a naturalistic, pagan understanding of the Eastertime resurrection result from the sexual connotations of the rendezvous motif. These indications are strengthened by the elaboration of the gardener's role itself. In the Vienna Easter play Jesus acts angry about the crushed grass and herbs in his garden, for they are his concern: "I cannot attend to you: I must dig my garden. I am preparing my parsnips and putting them in my wallet, and I'll go off with them to market and buy myself some bread to nourish my body around this Eastertime. Now sweetly go away: the Jews are just about to come, and who knows what may happen to you if they catch sight of you! Therefore I say to you: seek your lord elsewhere!"15 In quite a remarkable way the resurrection is associated here with the garden, that is, with the world of nature. In the "Eastertime" Jesus nourishes his body with a loaf of bread which he purchases in exchange for the parsnips from his garden. It would be tempting to understand this allegorically, for instance referring the bread to the eucharist or the garden and the gardener to the Song of Songs. But the garden allegories in the exegesis of the Song of Songs concern the passage (iv: 12) where the bridegroom compares the bride to an enclosed garden, and of course this tradition has to do with Mary, the mother of God, not with Mary Magdalen. On the contrary, the garden of Christ in the Easter play is not the product of Song of Songs exegesis, but rather the product of a playful development of the gardener's speech, and this development cannot be given a consistent allegorical interpretation either in the totality o r in detail. Jesus has not prepared his garden-that is, his realm-for Mary Magdalen, but the reverse: he sends her away, has no time for her, since he needs to buy his bread. A eucharistic loaf, however, would certainly have to be donated by him to nourish not himself, but the faithful. Here and everywhere in the details of his gardening activity quite obviously play motifs are present, transform-


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ing the resurrection into a naturalistic framework incapable of being allegorically defused. This naturalism is much cruder and stranger in an Easter play from Sterzing. There the encounter begins with the customary "Woman, why weepest thou, whom seekest thou?" from the liturgical ceremony (following John xx: 15) and then abruptly falls into the coarse tone of insinuations about a rendezvous: Salvete salvete! said the wolf to the bull. God be with you, beautiful lady, and tell me at once: whom do you seek in tears, o r what have you lost? Tell me out loud. It isn't right for good women to run into the garden mornings like servants, as if they wanted to wait for the boys. I can't tell you; if you have any complaints, be off somewhere else with them. Or d o you think it makes me happy when you trample on the plants? Get your evil skin packing, and leave the garden, get back to school, o r I'll grease yourjoints so that you won't want to come back for three whole days.16

What this gardener Jesus has in mind with his threat of greasing her joints becomes clear right afterward. He is raising plants in his garden from which a salve can be made for dealing with troublesome women: And I will share my roots, long and short, with you, they help old women drive away wrinkles, when they wash with them, they'll shine like beggars' wallets. They also help hair, I'll tell you, they make it rough as a duck's beak and yellow as a raven's tail. And if any man I can aid has a bad wife who doesn't obey him, let him take a load of the root and a quint from an oaken cudgel and grease her with good thrashing ointment and not stop until her back is as soft as her belly, and then see if she won't want to obey."

Evidently the public in Sterzing needed such balms: the gardener Jesus in another Sterzing Easter play can outdo the above-named product with an even better one: It is a root named beaverball. If any lassie here is loose and lost her maidenhood three o r four years past, let her ask for the root, and let her dig it in the dark, then she will be a maid like her mother was, after her twelfth child was born. I have another root called afterblow. If any maid desires swelling breasts, let her make a balm with it and spread it all over, and they will be smooth as an ape's arse and hard as glass.18

With a view to such passages Eduard Hart1 spoke of inconceivable coarseness, of squalor, filth, altogether "no very pleasant manifestation in the history of religious poetry" and a "vivid example of the sinking and inner dissolution of the genre."'$ Scenes entirely comparable in their excesses, however, can be found so often in vernacular

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Easter plays that they really have to be viewed as an essential feature of the genre and not as an indicator of its collapse. They display in all its clarity the direction in which the drama took its motifs. In the context of the biblical model the reference to a hortulanus is insignificant. In John it probably relates to a Jewish tradition according to which 'yudah the gardener" is said to have removed Jesus' corpse in anticipation of a possible swindle, so as subsequently to use it to discredit the Christian lie.zo The play is assuredly ignorant of this background. It makes God himself the gardener and thus begins precisely where it can interpret the resurrection naturalistically. The phallic symbolism of the "roots" is unmistakable, as is altogether the cultic character of such excesses. Their sources lie outside the Christian realm. That the same motifs are found in Shrovetide plays from SterzingZ1and were possibly borrowed from them is the most unambiguous possible proof of their heterogeneous character. A certain tradition in folklore studies has even gone to the point of viewing the Easter plays as a derivative phenomenon in the sense that the Church used it as a way of undercutting an earlier Germanic tradition of cultic springtime plays.22But obviously there is no wish to undercut what is performed widely and in the open. And vernacular Easter plays are largely characterized by precisely this kind of widespread and visible acting out of a pagan n a t u r a l i ~ m Thus . ~ ~ whatever may have existed in a non-Christian substratum seems to have achieved a demonstrable performance tradition only within the Christian realm. The decisive question then becomes that of the self-conception of a Christian drama which was amenable to this kind of performance. Clearly, the only possible basis was a highly ambivalent sense of Easter, oscillating between Christian resurrection and pagan rebirth. For in examples like the above, the pagan element by no means condenses into a self-consistent inversion or negative foil setting off the Savior as conquest and Christian counterpart. Rather the very figure of the hortulanus embraces at once naturalistic excess and the Christian idea of salvation: "Goodwife! I will tell you, he whom you seek was buried, and he is joyfully arisen and goes toward his father's heavenly kingd ~ m . That " ~ ~is the beginning of the same speech which ends with the thrashing balm. This is not a contrast pregnant with significance, but rather Christianity is understood here in pagan terms and paganism is conceived in Christian ones. The kerygma penetrates the cult play, without being integrated by it, but also, on its side, without finally forcing it under its truth. This gardener Jesus remains bivalued, ambivalent; he is the risen one of Christianity and simultaneously the pagan god of the year, carrier and guarantor of natural salvation, given rebirth at Eastertime by the garden in which he was buried.


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The truth relative to the formula "Christian rite and Christian drama" can now be seen. On first glance the vernacular play seems only to elaborate the framework which it retains from the liturgical Visitatio. Meanwhile, the manner in which this elaboration takes place appears in the perspective of the official Christian rite rather as a regression than as an emancipation. For to the degree in which the play unfolds a naturalistic treatment of the resurrection, it no longer commemorates an event from Christ's passion, but rather celebrates a periodic rebirth, the periodic victory of life over death. The Christian kerygma regresses into the very myth within whose negation it had once been articulated. With this remythologizing of the kerygma, however, the play wins back its institutional autonomy. If by retaining the Visitatio it seemingly subordinates itself to the sphere of influence of the official rite, nevertheless exactly what the Christian kerygma represses and what it still continually cites in the name itself returns de facto: the pagan ostarun, the cult ceremony of springtime rebirth. The official Christian rite is an institution within the absolute cultural threshold of monotheism. As such it is essentially commemorative and not mimetic. But from mere proclamation, from an essentially imageless approach to Easter, no play can be constituted, for play is, anthropologically speaking, precisely a sublimation of the mimetic rite, that is, of an essentially representational activity. Gehlen defines this sublimation as the "transformation of a formally uniform [here: representational] activity so that its center of gravity changes its significance and passes into a predominantly internal, predominantly conscious adaptation which is poor in action."25 The play must retreat behind the kerygma, so to speak, in order to restore representation as an anthropological category. That is why it needs the reference to the gardener which is so casual in the Bible. For only the hortulanus provided with the attributes of renewed fertility, but not the transfigured one revealed only in the word, can truly be "played." The metamorphosis relieves faith of the weight of its assumptions; with its sexual excess it translates the meaning of Easter into the visible world of public actions, no matter how these actions may have appeared in non-Christian cult and custom. Thus the liberation of the representational impulse culminates in "ludic regression." The sexual aggressiveness of the gardener toward Mary Magdalen does not pervert a Christian biblical spectacle, but rather constitutes the Easter play as a cult drama. Under the aegis of the garden metamorphosis, it wins itself a ritual nucleus which at the same time, in accordance with Gehlen's definition, it sublimates as a play. For it is not Jesus himself, but rather Jesus playing a hortulanus, who praises his roots and balms. The metamorphosis constitutes an infor-

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mation gap between the ignorant Mary Magdalen and the informed public, and this information gap displaces the sexual excesses into the remoteness of ironic figuration. This does not prevent the hortuhnus from turning past Mary toward the public and thereby immediately suspending the ironic structure. What is decisive is the simultaneous presence of both features-the information gap, which marks the play as a play, and the address to the public, which does not destroy illusions, but rather incorporates the public into the dramatic world. Such details permit a very nice demonstration that the play is autonomous as an institution, but not as a theatrical spectacle, as a selfcontained fiction. The public's relation to this sort of play can best be described as what H. R. Jauss has called "associative identificati~n."~~ It is no longer included as the participant in a cult, but it remains nevertheless associated with a dramatic action in that it itself takes on a role: the role of the immediate object of the play's cultic significance.

Excess, though of an entirely different sort, is also to be met with in the passion play. If it is ever proper to speak of an absolutely archaic alterity in medieval drama, then certainly it is with reference to the central scenes of suffering in these plays. The briefest indications, often only hints in the Gospels, turn into thousands of lines, filling two and more days, garnished with unsurpassable cruelties and performed before a crowd numbering ten thousand and more. This Jesus is abused in word and deed; he becomes the target of a vast spitting contest; streaming with blood after being crowned with thorns, he has his beard torn out; the road to Golgotha begins when his purple coat is torn off, reopening the wounds to which it has adhered; blunt nails have been specially manufactured for the crucifixion; the holes are intentionally drilled too far from one another, so that the arms can be yanked apart with great ropes; the same with the nailing up of the feet, so that ultimately, as the torturers confirm with pleasure, the bones can be counted one by one. If these plays relate to a position in dogmatic theology, it is Anselm of Canterbury's so-called doctrine of s a t i ~ f a c t i o nThis . ~ ~ doctrine replaces the concept+entral for the whole tradition of primitive and early Christianity-of the divinization of man in consequence of the incarnation by that of a surrogate penance. In the fall man injured God's honor and must make satisfaction by a return victory over the seducer. This victory has to be as difficult as the devil's victory was easy; in fact, as a victory honoring God it must be of the greatest


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difficulty imaginable. Such a victory can only consist in the "difficulty" of death: "The victory must be such that it conquers the devil through the difficulty of death" (I, 2 2 ) .Jesus took this death upon himself and achieved in it the victory which mankind owed to God. The burden of Anselm's argumentation is thus directed at the voluntary death of the god-man, not at the particular circumstances of the death. This is all the more true of the medieval reception of this doctrine. If not the necessitas of the death in general, then at least that of its particular circumstances is called into question, and the commentators limit themselves to a demonstration of mere convenientia. This argumentation no longer begins, as that of Anselm still did, with the plan of salvation, but rather with the biblical fact of the crucifixion, which is now proven to be the most fitting means of salvation. The demonstration, as is shown by the relevant passage in Thomas (Summa theol. 111, qu. 4 6 ) , has a strongly defensive interest: the biblical details of the most shameful of all deaths are rescued, so to speak-for the most part by typological projection back to the Old Testament-from the theoretical possibility that a minima passio would have sufficed to redeem the human race from all sins. However, appropriateness (convenientia) would have it that Jesus underwent all kinds of suffering ( 4 6 , 5 ) . Thomas counts among these kinds of suffering, among others, those of the various limbs of the body. This encompasses all the tortures reported in the Bible, but not more. His interest is directed toward attributing the various torments to different limbs and senses, but not toward picturing them in detail. In this he differs as sharply as possible from the plays, to which precisely the details come in handy. If the excesses of the passion plays are not called forth by the teachings of the doctrine of satisfaction, they do still find a ready theological justification from the tradition of passion mysticism. This in turn receives fundamental impulses from the interest in Jesus' crucifixion which was stirred by the doctrine of satisfaction, but the interest is turned-initially at least-toward the sympathetic spectator, not back toward God's wounded honor. Thus in the Mystire de la passion by Arnoul Greban28the central concepts of contemplacion and campassion appear right at the beginning of the prologue (19915, 19908), in the center of which the familiar mirror imagery is developed, according to which the passion is supposed to help the devout spectator to ease the patient endurance of his own sufferings. Like the works of the mystics, the passion plays too are a summons to the imitatio Christi, to discipleship in suffering, and this with the emphasis of visible representation, senssiblement, par parsonnaiges (19956), as Greban says. In passion mysticism originates not only the idea of compassio, but also the motivic substratum of the historia passionis which is to ignite

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this compassion. In fact, it is in this tradition that we find the whole arsenal of motifs of suffering staged by the passion plays. The invention of these motifs followed the typological model of figura and imwith reference to Christ's saying, "all things must be fulplement~m,~!' filled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me" (Luke xxiv:44). It was thus linked up with the typological interpretation of Christ's passion, of which the rudiments can be found in the synoptic Gospels themselves, and the historia passionis was written up following this procedure. Consequently, the authors of passion mysticism are better informed than the synoptics in every way, but they invent nothing for which they cannot offer a typological writ. Above all the deutero-Isaian songs of God's suffering servant and likewise the psalms of mourning turned out to be particularly fruitful sources. Meanwhile, passion mysticism does not prescribe the manner in which the drama receives and stages the motifs which it takes over. For example, the motif of spitting, of which the Gospels contain only a bare mention (Matt. xxvi:27, xxvii:30, and Mark xiv:65, xv:19), receives its first intensification in the Dialogus beatae Mariae et Amelmi: "He was spat upon so that he appeared like unto a leper."30 Incomparably more drastic yet is the spitting competition, for instance in the Arras passion, which even Greban was unwilling to take over in the following detailed form: First Sidonian: We must do honor to our King; his snout is all dirty. 1'11 draw a line here: since we have no water, we must wash him with spittle. He who best shall bespit him will win a gallon of wine, but you must spit dead in the center of his face. Third Jerusalem-Dweller: Should it be spittle or snot that we spit into his face? 1st Sid.: Spit out whichever you wish, the nastier the better. 1st Jer.: I think you'll see some worse shots than that one. Pick the winner, Jake! Second Tyrian: You let fly a good gob, but it's too far over by his ear. 3rd Jer.: Let's spit as a group, that's my idea. 5th Sid.: Well said! All together now. See! I got him in the side of the face. 2d Jer.: See! In the mouth and on the cheek. 1st Sid.: Spit higher, I recommend, spit hard; get it into his nostrils-May God grant him ill fortune! He'll be well-turned-out then! What did you think of that one? 2d Sid.: A pretty shot, right between the eye and the nose. Just look at that now, look at that! Got him square in the chin. I spit pretty well that time; a little higher and I'd have won. 3d Sid.: I think he smiled. If there's no better shot, I've won for sure. 5th Jer.: Look there now, I got him! I hit squarely in the middle. 3d Jer.: You crussea the line. Thares: That's right; so we have to start over.31


28 1

Such elaborations of typologically developed motifs are no longer covered by the typological code itself. Particularly refractory is a ritualization of the scene, already noticeable in our example, marked by structures of linguistic repetitions. All medieval mysteries exhibit more or less clearly similar ritualizations. They are particularly insistent in the great passions of Arnoul Greban and Jean Michel, which incorporate fully worked out, rondeau-like refrains into the speeches of the torturers. Thus Greban structures as follows the famous game of blind-man's bluff which the torturers play with Jesus. Malcuidant: Well, then, prophesy: tell zcs who struck you that blow.

Dragon: You are so wise and handsome, well, then, prophesy!

Goulu: I'll find out in no time if his wisdom is worth a leek. Well, then, prophesy,

tell zcs who struck you that blow.

Bruyant: He's gone to dreaming on us, the lizard. What we've done is no more

than a joke to him. Let's wake him up!

Estonni: How?

Bruyant: With blows, as long as we can keep on swinging.

Malcuidant: T h e better to apply [?I such solid blows, Let's wake him up.

Dragon: How?

Malcuidant: With blows.

Dragon: By golly, Malcuidant, you're not taking this seriously, your blows are

not ringing out. Let's wake him up.

Goulu: How?

Dragon: With blows, as long as we can keep on ~winging.~'

Here we see clearly the framework of a rondeau triolet with the rhyme and refrain sequence A B a A ab A B (see the Old French original), which appears first in a pure state, then with the refrain lines broken by stichomythia, and which accomplishes a decided ritualization of the action. This procedure reaches its climax with the scourging, where from the very first line of the refrain the stichomythia is broken u p into performative speech acts of ritual beating. Broyefort: What d o you seek? Here is what you've been looking for.

Pilate: Come forward, boys, and take your place. Catch your breath, gather

your strength, and return him to me so badly beaten all over, that there's no

place left to strike him.

Griffon: And a one!

Orillart: And two!

Brayart: And three!

Clquedant: And four, and the fijth for good measure.

Griffon: Here's fool's meat! And a one!

Orillart: And two!

Brayart: And three!

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Claquedant: And four!

Broyefort: Griffon, you're not counting fair. You count one and strike three

times.

Griffon: So when I get to ten, make an X. I d o it just for fun! And a one!

Orillart: And two!

Brayart: And three!

Claquedant: And four! And the fj'th, for good measure, who'll give him that one?

Griffon: If you want my opinion, you should go at it, let him have it.33

Precisely in the late Middle Ages, as is well known, the Jews found themselves exposed again and again to accusations of ritual murder,34 and it seems entirely possible that such accusations also affected the structural development of the passion. Scenes like the one just quoted would then be a kind of play within the play, Jewish ritual within the historia passionis, blind brutality for which the compensation is the gloria passionis which is always present to the consciousness of the spectators. In fact, Greban has the torturers term their own activity a jeu which causes them esbat, delight (e.g., 19737 f., 20833, 20816, 20909,20953). This links this jeu to the perspective of those who find pleasure, fun, delight in the martyrdom and implicitly determines the perspective of the audience as one of compassio, of sympathetic beholding. The question is only whether explanations like these are sufficient, o r whether they are perhaps not designed to bury far more important questions: the possibility of latent functions which might hide behind the manifest rationalizations and justifications of these horrors. Let us not forget: the elaboration of the passion which is undertaken by mysticism and a fortiori by the play is not required by theology or dogma. What we have here is rather a gigantic incorporation of matter excluded by the Bible and by dogma, and what must be primarily of interest is the impulse which stands behind this incorporation, but not possible justifications of the incorporated matter. In actuality the perspectival linkage of ritual excess to the jeu of the torturers cannot conceal the fact that the Christian ludus itself rediscovers its own interests in this very jeu; indeed it can only constitute itself as ludus through this very jeu. The mystical tradition does not offer a model of ritual representational action to which the play-in the sense of Gehlen's previously quoted definition--can relate as a sublimation. On the contrary, mysticism largely screens out action components, and thus the actual passion itself. It focuses its glance on the sufferer and his wounds; the actors are not discussed.35 But the play stages these images of suffering senssiblement, par parsonnaiges, as Greban says, and in addition to the sufferer himself the active participants, such as the torturers, are included above all among these parsonnaiges. The comparison with the hortulanus is apposite: just as


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the vernacular Easter play acquires a substratum of ritual action under the protection as it were of the metamorphosis into a gardener, so the passion play wins its own ritual nucleus via the jeu of the torturers. This jeu then stands under the sign of an unresolvable ambivalence for which precisely a phenomenon like Greban's ritual rondeawc is extremely illuminating. For the care with which the performative speech acts of the refrain technique coordinate speech and action reflects a ~ t y l i z a t i o nwhich ~ ~ is irreducible to a merely perspectival characterization of the torturers. In these ritual rondeawc thejeu of the tormentors, which is the represented action, is indistinguishable from the encompassing dramatic action of the ludus. The torturers become the executants of a ritual which is represented as a kind of play within the play and in which at the same time the drama of the Lord's own suffering finds its ritual foundation. It is possible that there was already a ritual substratum prescribed for the mysteries of the passion outside the Christian realm, even if this is yet more difficult to demonstrate here than in the case of the Easter play. The few pieces of evidence which have been adduced mainly in the English domain hardly support the postulate of an archetypal royal ritual persisting like a substratum according to the model of A. M. Hocart's Kingship (1927) and Lord Raglan's Hero (1937). But here too the decisive question is not what may or may not have existed in such a substratum, but rather what self-understanding governed a play which unfolds the passio Christi in such ritual extremes. The course of the action betrays a highly ambivalent conception of sacrifice, inseparably combining the Christian commemoration of God's self-sacrifice as a unique occurrence in the history of salvation with an archaic scapegoat ritual. This ambivalence likewise defines the distance of the plays from the Christian ritual of the mass. For the transformation at the center of the mass does not refer directly to Golgotha but to the Last Supper, and it is certainly no accident that the liturgical tradition developed no ceremony of the passion comparable to the Visitatio Sepulchri. In the drama, on the other hand, the Last Supper is only a station on the road to a representation of the crucifixion, which replaces commemoration by sanguinary action. Thus exactly what the bloodless sacrifice of the mass so subtly represses returns in the cultic excesses of the drama: the archaic impulses of the sparagmos, that process of destruction, of dismemberment of the victim, which is intended to provoke the divinity to reestablish the interrupted relationship to the sacrificial community.37 In these cult plays we are further removed than ever from the formula, "from Christian rite to Christian drama." The reception of these excesses requires an equally ambivalent de-

2 84


scription. First of all, it is important that even the typological symbolism of the motifs must escape a public unacquainted with mystical theology. Thus the public was confronted directly with the ritual staging of the motifs. This did not exclude compassio as moral identification with the sufferer, but only on condition that the compassio won out over the temptation of emotional identification with the bloody game. Precisely because compassio demanded identification rather than contemplative distance, identification could always turn into unthinking pleasure in the represented horrors.3s Thus it is again the element of staging, of active representation, which is altogether foreign to mysticism and which forbids us from unquestioningly equating the institutional function of these plays with their official self-conception. Rather we must take into account the possibility that the popularity of these plays was based less on their manifest function of moral instruction than on a latent aggressive function diverted into drama. Passion plays blossomed in a period when scholastic speculation was incessantly striving to demonstrate God's omnipotence and the powerlessness of evil. Anselm's doctrine of satisfaction marks the historical commencement of this theocentric speculation on o m n i p o t e n ~ e . ~ ~ As is well known, it was unable to shape the historical reality of the epoch, which stood under the sign of mythic anxieties, and not of kerygmatic certainty. And if the mysteries by Greban o r Michel cite the doctrine of satisfaction in their introductory Paradise Trials, their ritualized staging of the passion itself fits them seamlessly into an epoch shaped by witch fever and anti-Semitism, fear of devils and demons, astrological superstition, and a collective confessional neurosis.40 In the face of the minima passio, which, according to Thomas, would have sufficed for the salvation of mankind,41 the maxima passio staged in these plays appears as nothing less than the symptom of a cosmic anxiety which the omnipotent deity of the nominalists was evidently unable to banish, if indeed he did not actually, however indirectly, give birth to it. However much the psychoanalytical implications of the maxima passio must be stressed in opposition to a harmonizing theological interpretation, it is equally necessary to emphasize that these rituals of the passion remained staged plays. Like every institution, the institution of the passion play is not simply an expression of anxieties, does not simply originate in these anxieties, but is rather a specific, to wit, a "ludic," form of conquering them. Varied elaboration is a central aspect of this specifically "ludic" form. From a sequence of mysteries of the passion like those of Arras, of Greban, and of Michel, it could be shown in detail how elaboration of content and formal variation go hand in hand. The genuine rite knows neither the one, constant elab-


285

oration nor the other, constant variation. It is characterized by the fixity of the formulas once they have been found. Play, on the other hand, always has the freedom to add new details, abandon others, and refine the formal presentation. Thus in particular Greban and Michel could handle the basic framework of the rondeau dramatique with the greatest flexibility and adapt it with ever-renewed variations of the refrain to the different phases of the event. The impulse is to outdo the models in artistic mastery. Mastery, however, remains dependent on service to the cult. It is a mastery in inventing and presenting horrors. The play character of the ritual and the ritual character of the play remain indivisible. Play produces excess; excess presents itself as play. This indivisibility must also have shaped the circumstances of the performances. The murder of the scapegoat is staged, not carried out. The congregation selects those who are masters of role playing. But here, too, it is true that mastery in role playing eventuates in recreating the presence within the cult of the character being acted. If the traditions are accurate according to which the actor playing Jesus was mortally wounded by a blow from the lance of the L o n g i n u ~then , ~ ~ they do not document some kind of breakdown on stage-these plays had no stage in our sense-but rather the cultic seriousness of a play in which fiction and reality had not yet separated. The actors do act in front of the congregation, but they do so as representatives of the congregation. The cultic significance of the role is betrayed by its ritual transmutation into a performative. Role playing is a kind of ritual performance; ritual performance remains role playing. This unity of play and reality is no longer accessible to our experience. We can only cautiously struggle to reconstruct it, always bearing in mind that our efforts may fail. Yet the effort is still salutary. For in every case it makes us conscious how greatly what we understand as play is conditioned by history. Medieval religious plays are cult plays. This gives them their specific seriousness, and therein lies their insuperable hermeneutic strangeness, their alterity. UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH (Translated by Marshall Brown)

NOTES 1 Wilhelm Dilthey, Der A u p a u der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt, 1970). p. 278. 2 The concept arise in the debate about Paul Zumthor's Essai de poitipue midiivale (Paris, 1972) and was developed programmatically in Hans Robert Jauss, Alteritat und

286


Modernitat der mittelalterlichn Literatur (Munich, 1977), esp. pp. 14 ff. (with further references); see also Zumthor himself in "Mkdikviste ou pas," Poetigue, 31 (1977), 306-21. 3 By "institution" here and in what follows I understand typical orientational models in social contexts, more particularly the placement of texts by genre within their particular "seat in life." With regard to medieval literature this essentially means their performance in typical use situations. 4 O n this "absoluteness" see Peter Szondi, Theork des modernen Dramas (Frankfurt, 1963), pp. 15 f. 5 For a critical presentation of its history and function, see the author's Funktion und Struktur: Die Ambivalenzen des gelstlichen Spiels (Munich, 1974), pp. 43 ff. T h e following exposition resumes and continues the results of this work. 6 Baltimore, 1965. For a detailed discussion of this book, see the author'sFunktion und Struktur, esp. pt. 1, ch. A. 7 U r m m c h und Spatkultur (Frankfurt and Bonn, 1964). p. 57. 8 Fundamental for the tradition of the liturgical ceremony are Karl Young, T h D r a m a of the Medieval Church (1933; rpt. Oxford, 1962), Vol. I, together with Helmut de Boor, Die Textgeschzchte der luteinlschen Osterfeiern (Tiibingen, 1967). It is d e Boor's particular merit to have demonstrated the inappropriateness of a developmental approach, replaced the notion of "stages" by the concept of type, and distinguished between the Visitatio as a ceremony and vernacular drama. 9 For a fuller account see Funktion und Struktur, pp. 158 ff. 10 11 Maria autem stabat ad monumentum foris plorans durn ergo fleret inclinavit se et prospexit in monumentum

12 et vidit duos angelos in albis sedentei

unum ad caput et unum ad pedes ubi positum fuerat corpus Iesu

13 Dicunt ei illi

mulier quid ploras

dicit eis

quia tulerunt Dominum meum et nescio ubi posuerunt eum

14 haec cum dixisset conversa est retrorsum

et vidit Iesum stantem

et non sciebat quia Iesus est

15 dicit ei Iesus

mulier quid ploras quem quaeris

illa existimans quia hortulanus esset dicit ei

domine si tu sustulisti eum dicito mihi ubi posuisti eum

et ego eum tollam 16 dicit ei Iesus Maria

conversa illa dicit ei

rabboni quod dicitur magister

Quoted from Biblia Sacra Jwta Vulgatam Verswnem, ed. Robert Weber, O.S.B. (Stuttgart,

1969).

11 "Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos," in Terror und Spiel:

Problem der Mythnrezeption, ed. Manfred Fuhrmann (Munich, 197 l), pp. 11-66 (quo-

tation o n p. 33, n. 47).

12 Cum Maria sic doleret et sic fleret, et cum hec dixisset, conversa est retrorsum et

vidit Jhesum stantem et nesciebat quia Jhesus est, et dicit ei Jhesus: Mulier, quid ploras?

Quid queris?

Ipsa paulo ante occulos suos, cum magno dolore turn cordis sui, viderat speciem suam (tuam) suspendi in ligno, et tu nunc dicis: Quid ploras? Ipsa in die tercia ante unxerat manus tuas, quibus sepe benedicta fuerat, et (viderat) pedes tuos, quos deos-


287

culata fuerat et quos lacrimis irrigaverat, clavis affigi, et tu nunc dicis: Quid ploras? Nunc insuper corpus tuum sublatum estimat, ad quod ungendum, ut se quoquo mod0 consolaretur, veniebat, et tu dicis: Quid ploras? Quem queris? Dulcis magister, ad quid, queso, provocas spiritum hujus mulieris? Ad quid provocas animum ejus? T u scis quia te solum querit, te solum diligit, pro te omnia contempnit, et tu dicis: Quid queris? Tota pendet in te, et tota manet in te, et tota desperat de se, ita querat (querit) te, ut nichil querat, nichil cogitat (cogitet) preter te. Ideo forsitan non cognoscit te, quia non est in se, sed pro te est extra se. Cur ergo dicis ei: Cur ploras? Quem queris? An putas quia ipsa dicat: T e ploro, te quero, nisi tu prius inspiraveris et dixeris in corde suo: Ego sum quem queris et quem ploras? An putas quia ipsa cognoscat te, quamdiu volueris celare te? Ut ipsa existimans quia ortolanus (hortulanus) esset, dixit ad eum: Domine, si tu sustulisti eum, dicito michi ubi posuisti eum, et ego eurn tollam. 0 dolor innumerabilis! 0 amor mirabilis! Mulier ista, quasi densa dolorum nube obtecta, non videbat solem qui mane surgens radiabat per fenestras ejus, qui per aures corporis jam intrabat in domum cordis sui! Sed quoniam languebat amore, isto amore sic occuli cordis caliginabant, ut non videret quoniam videbat: (non) videbat enim Jhesum, quia nesciebat quia Jhesus est. 0 Maria, si queris, cur (non) agnoscis Jhesum? Ecce Jhesus venit ad te, et quid queris querit a te, et tu ortholanum (hortulanum) eurn existimas! Verum quidem est quod existimas. Sed tamen tu in hoc erras dum eum, si ortholanum (hortulanum) eurn existimas, non Jhesum non agnoscas. Est enim Jhesus, et est ortolanus (hortulanus),quia ipse seminat omne semen bonum in orto (horto) anime sue (tue) et in cordibus fidelium suorum. Ipse omne semen bonum plantat et rigat in animabus sanctorum, et ipse est Jhesus qui tecum loquitur. Sed forsitan eumdem non agnoscis, quia tecum loquitur. Mortuum enim queris et viventem non cognoscis. Nunc in veritate comperi hanc esse causam pro qua a te recedebat et pro qua tibi non apparebat. Cur enim tibi appareret, quoniam non querebas eum? Certe querebas quod non erat, et non querebas quod erat. T u querebas Jhesum et non querebas Jhesum, ideoque videndo Jhesum, nesciebas Jhesum. Quoted from Abbe Bourgain, La chazre francaise au 12' siicle (Paris, 1879). pp. 380 f.; as to Bourgain's attribution of this text to Anselm, see p. 30, n. 1. T h e homily is not to be found in S. Anselmi Opera Omnia, ed. Fr. S. Schmitt, 6 vols. (1938- 1961; rpt., 2 vols., Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt, 1968). 13 Young, I, 395. 14 Young, I , 409. 15 Ich kan deyn-jo nicht gewartin: ich mup graben meynen garten, ich bereyte meynen pastarnag vnd stose den yn meynen sag vnd wil d o mete czu margkte loffin vnd mir des brotis kewffin, das ich irnere meynen leip keyn desir osterlichen czeit. nu gang engelich von mir: dy Juden werden kommen schir! wer weys, wy dyrs mochte betayn, worden sy dich sichtig an! dor vmb sage ich dir yo: suche deynen herren andirswo! Lines 940 ff., quoted from Eduard Hartl, Dm Drama &s Mzttelalters, Osterspiek (Deutsche Literatur in Entwicklungsreihen, Reihe Drama des Mittelalters Bd 2) (Leipzig, 1937; rpt. Darmstadt, 1964), pp. 74- 119.


16 Salvete salvete! sprach der wolf zu dem stier Got grup euch schone frau schier und-sag - mir zu dieser stund: Wen suchstu so weinund,

Oder was hast verloren?

Des sag mir an zoren.

Es ist aber nit frommer frauen recht,

Dap sie laufen als die knecht

Des morgen in den garten,

Als sie der knaben wellen warten

Ich kan dir nit sagen,

Hastu icht zu klagen,

Das verfiir anderswo.

Ei d u meinst ich sei dein gar fro,

Dap d u r mir niedertritst das kraut?

Get resch ir bose haut,

Und get aus dem garten

In die schul zu den gelarten,

Oder ich smier euch eure glieder,

Dap euch in drei tagen nit lust herwider.

r Drama 02s Mittelalters in Tirol (Innsbruck, 1850), pp.

Quoted from A. Pichler, ~ b e dos 143-68 (quotation o n pp. 152 f.).

17 Auch wil ich mit euch teilen die wurzen,

Die langen und die kurzen,

Die wol fugen den alten weiben

Do mit sie die runzen vertreiben,

Dap sie sich mit waschen,

So werden sie glitzen als die betlertaschen.

Auch fugen sie wol zu dem har,

Das sag ich euch furwar,

Dap es werd rau als ein entensnabel

Und gelb als ein rabenzagel.

Auch wer indert ein man,

Da fur ich wol kan,

Der d o hiet ein boses weib,

Das nit fuget seinen leib:

Der nem der wurzen ein lat

Und aus eichen knittel ein quintat,

Und salb sie allenthalben

Mit der guten prugelsalben,

Und hor nit e auf:

Ir sei dann der ruck so weich als der bauch,

Und schau dar nach dar zu,

O b sie nit gern seinen willen tu.

Pichler, pp. 155 f. 18 Das ist ein wurzen, die heipt bibergeil,

1st indert hie ein diernl geil,

Die iren maidtumb hiet verloren

Vor dreien oder vier jaren

Die sol nach der wurzen fragen

Und sol sie in d e r finster ausgraben,

So wird sie ein maid als ir mutter was,

O N T H E ALTERITY O F MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS DRAMA

Da sie des zwelften Kinds genas.

Noch hab ich ein wurzen, die heipt nachschaden,

Wolt indert ein maid gemeite Brustel haben,

Die sol machen daraus ein salben

Und damit smiern allenthalben,

So werden sie glatt als ein affen ars

Und hert als ein kraglats glas.

Pichler, pp. 42 f. 19 Das Drama des Mittelalters, Osterspiele, pp. 203 f. 20 For further particulars see Hans von Campenhausen, "Der Ablauf d e r Osterereignisse und das leere Grab," in Tradition und Leben (Tubingen, 1960), pp. 48- 113, esp. pp. 82 ff. 21 See Sterringer Spiele 24, 11. 584 ff. and 649 ff.; 21, 11. 51 ff.; 4, 11. 293 ff. (ed. 0 . Zingerle [Vienna, 18861, Wiener Neudrucke 9 and 11). All these examples come from physicians' plays. Their adoption into the Easter play-an Easter carnival inversioncould be based on the tradition of Christ as a doctor o r pharmacist, which developed following Augustine, De doctrina christiana, I, 14. On the iconography of this tradition, see W. -H. Hein, Christus als Apotheker (Frankfurt, 1974). I am grateful to Christoph Cormeau and Heimo Reinitzer for pointing out the connections which are sketched here. I have pursued the attribution of the cultic excesses here discussed to the carnival exclave of the risus paschalis in Funktwn und Struktur, pp. 107 ff. 22 This orientation is represented above all by R. S&mpfl, Kultspiele der Gemanen als Ursprung des mittelalterlichen Dramas (Berlin, 1936). 23 Worth particular mention in addition to the hortulanus episode is the transformation of the sale of the balm into a shopkeeper's Fcene. See Funktion und Struktur, pp. 78 ff. 24 Gut weib! ich wil dir sagen, Den d u suchst, d e r was begraben,

Und e r ist erstanden froleich

Und fert in seines vaters himmelreich.

Pichler, p. 154. 25 Unnensch und Spatkultur, p. 261. 26 ~sthetischeErfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik, I (Munich, 1977), 227 ff. 27 C u r D e w Homo, ed. F. S. Schmitt, O.S.B. (Darmstadt, 1956). This doctrine appears as the dogmatic substratum of the passion plays, particularly in the so-called Paradise Trials framing the Mystires of Arnoul Greban and Jean Michel. T h e Paradise Trial is a debate among God's four daughters, Justitia, Misericordia, Veritas, and Sapientia, developing the divine plan of salvation. For its tradition see Hope Traver, The Four Daughters of God, Diss. Bryn Mawr 1907. 28 Ed. Omer Jodogne (Brussels, 1965). 29 See in particular the essays of F. P. Pickering, "Das gotische Christusbild," Euphorion, 47 (1953). 16-37; Literature and Art in the Middle Ages (London, 1970); "Irrwege d e r mittelalterlichen Geschichtsschreibung," Zeitschrift fur deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 100 (1971), 270-96. 30 Patrologia Latina, CLIX, 227 A: "consputus fuit quod quasi leprosus apparebat." 31 Lines 14610 ff., quoted from the edition of J . M. Richard (Arras, 1891); Old French translated by Robert Cook: Le premier d e Sidon:

A no roy fault porter honneur,

I1 a son musiel tout honny,

J e feray une roye cy,

Pour ce que d'eaue point n'avons,


Laver lui fault d e racquellons, Cellui qui mieulx le racquera, Ung lot d e vin il gaignera, Mais racquier faulra ou moillon. Le IIIe d e Jherusalem:

Esse salive o u moucquillon Qu'on racquera empres son nez?

Le premier d e Sidon:

Racquiez lequel vous volez, Le plus ort est tout le meilleur.

Le premier d e Jherusa1em:Je croy qu'il y ara pieur, Avisez lequel, Jacopin. Le 11" d e Thiry:

T u as locquiet un beau loppin, Mais il va trop devers I'oreille.

Le IIIe d e Jherusalem:

Racquons d'accord, je le conseille

Le Ve d e Sidon:

C'est bien dit, nous sommes d'accort, Ve la et la j'ay sur le bort.

Le IIe d e Jherusalem:

Ve la es dens et sur la joie.

Le premier d e Sidon:

Racque plus hault, je te le loie, Racque fort, fiers en la narine, Que Dieu lui envoie ma1 estine, I1 sera bien appareillie. Avise la.

Le 11' d e Sidon:

C'est bien ale, I1 est entre l'oeil et le nez. O r avisez la, avisez, L'ay je assis sur le menton! J'ay racquiet d e bonne facon. S'il fust plus hault, j'eusse le pris.

LC 111' d e Sidon:

I1 me semble qu'il e n a ris. S'il n'y a meilleur, je l'aray

Le Ve d e Jherusalem:

O r avise droit la, je I'ay, J'ay racquiet droit ens o u mouillon.

Le IIIe d e Jherusalem:

T'as passe la roye.

Thare:

Ca mon, I1 nous convient recommencier.

32 Lines 20932 ff., ed. 0.Jodogne: Malcuidant: Or, prophetire maintenant qui t'a baillk ce horion. Dragon:

T u es tant saige et advenan: or, pophetire maintenant.

Cflulu:

Je scaray tout en ung tenant se son sens vault ung porion Or, pophetize maintenant qui t'a baillk ce horion.

O N T H E ALTERITY O F MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS DRAMA

Bruyant:

I1 nous songe cy le moron;

noz faiz ne luy semblent que truffes

Resveillons k!

Estonne: Bruyant:

De qmy? De bujjes, tant que n o w pourrom ramonner.

Malcuidant:

Pour raplastir ces grosses buffes, resveillons k!

De quoy?

Dragon:

De buffes.

Malcuidant: Dragon:

Et dea, Malcuidant, tu te truffes: tu ne fais point tes coups sonner! Resueillom k! De quoy ?

Goulu: Dragon:

De buffes, tant que n o w Pourrom ramonner.

33 Lines 22798 ff., ed. 0.Jodogne: Broyefort:

Que plaidez vous? Voicy quanque vous demandez.

Pylate:

Avant, garsons, vous vous rendez!

Reprenez alaine et vertu

et le me rendez tant batu

d r tous lez qu'il n'y ait que batre.

Griffon:

Empreuf.

Orillart: Brayart:

Et dew. Et trois.

Claquedant:

Et quatre et k cinguieme de surcrois.

Griffon:

Telz metz faut il a ung follatre Empreu.

Orillart: Brayart:

Et dew. Et trois. Et quutre.

Claquedant: Broyefort:

Griffon, tu comptes sans rabatre: pour ung coup tu en frappes trois.

Griffon:

Quand ce sont dix, fais une croix: je ne le fais que pour esbatre. Empreuf.

Orillart: Brayart:

Et d e w . Et troir.


Claquedant:

Et quatre.

Et le cinquieme de surcrois,

qui luy donra?

Griffon:

Se tu m'en crois

baille luy hardiement la touche.

34 O n this see Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews (New Haven, 1944), along with W:E. Peuckert, Die grosse Wende (Hamburg, 1948), pp. 134 ff., and Peuckert's entry in Bachtold Staubli, Handworterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, Vll, 727 ff. 35 O n this see M. Zingel, Die Passion Chri.sti in der Mystik des deutschen Mittelalters (diss. Berlin, 1956), p. 118. 36 T h e rondeau, originally a dance song, is also found in religious drama from the fourteenth-century Miracles de hrotre Dame onward and develops a distinct tradition of the so-called rondeau dramatique. It serves as hymn to the deity, as song of prayer and of praise, as chant of mourning for the fallen angels, etc. T h u s it is an overarching principle of stylization which shapes more than just the passion scenes. Cf. L. Miiller, Das R o d e l in denfranzosischen Mirakelspielen und Mysterien des. 15. und 16. Jhs. (Marburg, 1884), pp. 63 ff., and Henri Chatelain, Recherchrs sur k versfran~aisa u 15' si2cle (Paris, 1907), pp. 214 ff. 37 O n this see Claude Lkvi-Strauss, Le tote'misme aujourd'hui (Paris, 1962). pp. 295 ff., and Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice (1898; rpt. London, 1964), p. 44. 38 O n this see the discussions of the ambivalence of associative identification which Jauss develops in connection with Augustine's critique of heathen drama (~sthetische Erfahrung, p. 15 1). 39 O n this see Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimitat der hreuzeit (Frankfurt, 1966), Part 11, which speaks of "theological absolutism" as the signature of the nominalistic epoch. 40 O n this see W. -E. Peuckert, Die grosse Wende (rpt. Darmstadt, 1966). and H . R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays (New York, 1969), a particularly impressive account, drawing o n socioeconomic backgrounds, of this collective neurosis. 41 See above, p. 279. 42 O n this see Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Ploy (London, 1964), p. 27; see also W . Muller ,Der schawpielerische Stil im Passionsspiel des Mittelalters (Leipzig, 1927), pp. 136 ff.

Mervelous Signals: Poetics, Sign Theory, and

Politics in C haucer's Troilus

Eugene Vance . . . in forme of speche is chaunge . . . Troilur and Crisqrde

there has been an astonishing increase of speculation within the humanities and social sciences about the nature and function of language as a system of signs, a system perhaps primal to all others constituting human culture. The study of literature has become especially receptive to the post-Saussurean debate on the nature of verbal signs, and for good reason: if literature can be said to exist at all, it exists only as signs--or rather, in the written letters signifying those signs. Paradoxically, as modern semiology and its cousin disciplines reveal, with time, their aporias, hence, the limits of their utility, we are simultaneously discovering to what extent a radical anxiety about the sign and its functions has always marked the consciousness of the West. More and more we are discovering that if there is any future for semiology, it lies to a large extent in a reflection upon its own rich past.' One consequence of this new archaeological interest in the notion of sign is the growing awareness that during more than a thousand years, the most resourceful minds of what we call the Middle Ages speculated unceasingly, often passionately, about the nature and function of language as a privileged system of signs. Indeed, one could perhaps claim without exaggeration that sign theory, as it developed within and across the three branches of the trivium, or the three "arts of language" (artes sermocinales), is the most singular feature of the intellectual coherence of the Middle Ages, seen as a phase of Western culture. In any case, between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, the debate about signs repeated and renewed itself many times over, until the humanists, who invented the concept of the Middle Ages in the first place, altered the nature and purpose of that debate in a profound way, as Cesare Vasali, Nancy S. Struever, and others have shown.2 My purpose in this article is, first, to set forth a few commonplace medieval notions about the relationship between the order of verbal URING THE LAST TWO DECADES,

Copyrighto 1979 by New Literary History, T h e University of Virginia

294


signs and social order; and second, to show how a poet-in this case, Chaucer--could incorporate this metalinguistic consciousness into his strategies of composition. I shall refer principally to the Troilm and Criseyde, though one could examine with much profit other works of Chaucer (the Book of the Duchess, the Home of Fame, and the Canterbury Tales, for instance) and also many of the sources of Chaucer's poetry, and find there a semiological consciousness that is no less acute. In this text I shall not attribute any special meaning to Chaucer as an intentional, sentient center whose nature I might hope to grasp, but shall concentrate on the poetics of the Troilm itself with regard to fundamental ideas about language that were available, in one form or another, to any literate mind in the later Middle Ages. Given the highly syncretic nature of medieval culture, I shall not attempt to establish any genealogy of influences, though such a goal is in itself perhaps not to be disdained.

I. Speech and Society The notion that the order of language constitutes the living order of society was already central to a tradition of classical oratory that any poet such as Chaucer, Dante, or Petrarch knew very well. Built around the explicitly "linguistic" spaces of the agora and theforum, the classical city was thought to owe its very existence to the operations of ~ p e e c h In . ~ his De oratore, for example, Cicero says that it is speech that distinguishes men from animals, and it is speech that has the power to unite men in a single place, to extract them from their bestial and savage condition, to bring them to civility, and to sustain laws and justice (I.viii.33). Furthermore, certain tendencies in the Bible reinforced a classical consciousness of the twin problematics of signs and of culture in the Christian West. The story of Babel teaches that the linguistic dispersion of mankind was a consequence of his pride; conversely, the story of the Pentecost teaches that the presence of the Holy Spirit overcame the linguistic divisions between men as political creatures through direct knowledge of the Word.4 In St. John, where the whole of existence is equated with the Word, sign theory becomes strongly ontological. But it is no doubt St. Paul, in whom Neoplatonic doctrines of signification received their most cogent scriptural articulation, who is to be considered as the major instigator of a specifically Christian semiological consciousness in the W e ~ t . ~ As doctrine, medieval sign theory tended to revolve around certain all-enduring questions: If God is ineffable, how can we name God? How does divine grace act through the mouths of men as they utter

MERVELOUS SIGNALS

295

the sacraments? Do words (book, man, tree), which are only conventional, signify things that exist as universals? O r only as individuals? O r as concepts? Is there a relationship between the parts of speech (partes orationis) and the structure of reality? How do we know whether our propositions are true? Such questions stem from a metaphysical outlook that may seem remote from the concerns of our own time, yet as an intellectual matrix of the past, they gave rise to reflection about every aspect of man as a relational creature, since they questioned the role of language as a mediator between man and the God he yearned to know, between man and his fellow man, between man and things, and even between individual man and his knowledge of himself. "A sign," says St. Augustine, "is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the sense^."^ Natural signs, such as smoke that signifies fire, a blush that signifies shame, signify "naturally" o r automatically, without there being any will o r intention to signify. However, conventional signs (bird calls, speech) do involve a will to signify (volens signficandi). Because the Middle Ages was basically anti-Cratylistic in its conception of verbal signs (which are the signs proper to man), holding that the bond between signifier and signified (signans and signaturn) was merely conventional, medieval thinkers grasped not only the reiationship between free will and signification, but also the contractual basis of signification (secundum id pactum et placitum, quo inter se homines irtu signa j i r m a r ~ n t )and, ~ by extension, the idea that the order of discourse could be considered as the living expression of a social or political order. St. Augustine held, indeed, that the orders of society and of speech were connatural. Since men could not be firmly bound to each other in society unless they could speak to each other, he argued, they assigned significant sounds to things so that they could exchange thought^.^ Such ideas not only endured, but became more elaborate among the scholastics. Vocal sounds, according to St. Thomas, are signs of passions in our soul, that is, of effects that the experiences of things cause in our minds. Vocal sounds that are verbal signs are so by human "institution," and the "institution" of signs is a sine qua non of social order: "Now if man were by nature a solitary animal the passions of the soul by which he was conformed to things so as to have knowledge of them would be sufficient for him; but since he is by nature a political and social animal it was necessary that his conceptions be made known to others. This he does by vocal sound. Therefore there had to be significant vocal sounds in order that men might live together. Whence those who speak different languages and find it difficult to live together in social ~ n i t y . "St. ~ Thomas elaborates further upon the relationship between written language and social order.

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Since society in its most extended sense is constituted as an order existing not here and now, but abstractly, it was necessary for man as a social creature to find a means of abstracting his speech in order to satisfy the needs of society as an abstraction of the here and now. Writing is precisely such an instrument, and it follows that for the later Middle Ages, social order in its most extended sense is embodied in the order of the written text.1° St. Augustine was the first great postscriptural Christian theoretician of language, and most of his thoughts about signification endured throughout the Middle Ages, even in polemical environments disposed against Augustinianism as a whole. Among the most influential thinkers to explore problems of signification (often as ethical problems) was the twelfth-century English schoolman and friend of Beckett, John of Salisbury. In the beginning, we are told (following Augustine), Hebrew was man's natural language which "mother nature gave to our first parents and preserved for mankind until human unity was rent by impiety, and the pride which presumed to mount to heaven by physical strength and the construction of a tower, rather than by virtue, was leveled in a babbling chaos of tongues."" In his Polycraticus John of Salisbury embarks upon a careful classification of the different kinds of sign.12 Though speaking man disposes only of shifting and conventional signs in his discourse, John, in his Metalogicon, nevertheless equates the operations of this discourse with the very existence of the body politic: "Deprived of their gift of speech, men would degenerate to the condition of brute animals, and cities would seem like corrals for livestock rather than communities composed of human beings united by a common bond for the purpose of living in society, serving one another, and cooperating as friends. If verbal intercommunications were withdrawn, what contract could be duly concluded, and what instruction could be given in faith and morals, and what agreement and mutual understanding could subsist among men?"13 That the body politic may be characterized not only by a plurality of competing social and economic groups but also by a plurality of speech variants was a prominent notion in medieval theories of language, especially theories of style or genera dicendi. The most concrete reflection upon such questions is to be found in preaching manuals emanating especially from the Franciscans and Dominicans, of which the treatise by Umbertus of Romanus, fifth master-general of the Dominican order, is a good example. "Without preaching, which scatters the word of God like seed," writes Umbertus, "the world would be sterile and produce no fruit."14 However, in order for the seed to be fecund, the discourse of the preacher must be accommodated to the

MERVELOUS SIGNALS

297

character of the specific audience being addressed; hence, to preach properly calls for an acute metalinguistic consciousness. Umbertus sets himself the task of making a complete inventory of the different groups within society which the preacher might have to address, and the second part of his De eruditione praedicatorum undertakes as its task to describe the sermones ad status (or codes) which the preacher must master if he intends to preach to any given group in society. Umbertus's classification of social groups by status provides no less than one hundred different categories of audience to be found among the species of man.'Vn less elaborated form, an analogous preoccupation with genera dicendi is to be found in late medieval rhetorical theory as well. As Douglas Kelly reminds us, we are not dealing, here, with superficial questions of style, but with questions of content too." T h e decorum of each genus dicendi commands not only the style or level of our discourse, but the choice of an appropriate subject matter as well. Moreover, a speaker's choice of audience and discourse is a moral choice. Thus, the fourteenth-century Franciscan Domenico Cavalca declares that those who preach only to high or noble persons and to the well educated (litterate)are "adulterers of the word of God" (adulteri della parola di Dio).17The pertinence of such questions to the homiletically oriented Canterbury Tales is obvious. Although most of the ideas to which I have so far referred are elaborated within and about the sphere of Latinity, such ideas were not irrelevant to poets laboring in the vernacular, all the more as later medieval theoreticians insisted that the concepts that they were elaborating in Latin were universals belonging to a general grammar of human speech and not to any specific language: as Bacon put it, "grammar is one and the same by substance in all languages, though it may vary accidentally [from language to lang~age]."'~ Not everyone will agree with my contention that from its earliest phases, continental vernacular poetry embodies almost invariably some immanent doctrine of signification-or what we may call a "poetics" of the sign-but it is indisputable that with Dante, who was the first vernacular poet to reflect systematically about his art, poetics, politics, and sign theory are inseparable. Moreover, although medieval grammarians and logicians tended to ignore the primacy of the phonetic or subsemantic structures as a factor in the production of meaning, Dante's grasp of the "noble subject" (subiectum nobile)'%f signs begns right there, albeit at the level of the syllable and not the phoneme. The syllable, for Dante, is that basic unit of sound which combines with other syllables to produce a meaning that is separate and different from those sounds, yet structurally homologous with them. According to their combinations of sound, polysyllabic words

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may be classified hierarchically into categories that he calls "childish," "feminine," and "manly." The manly category of sounds is the superior one, but this category is itself comprised of two subtypes of sound patterns that Dante calls "rustic" (sylvestria) and "civilized" (urbana). When properly realized, "urban" discourse is a harmony of contraries, that is of "groomed" (pexa) and "hairy" or "shaggy" (irsuta) sounds which, together, produce a "fair harmony of structure" (pulcram armoniam c~mpagznis).~~ Dante's conception of language as a series of binary phonetic patterns is very much in agreement with the observations of modern linguists, though, unlike Dante, few modern linguists have stressed the possible homology between combinatory patterns of sound and of patterns of society.21 Dante believed that verbal signs are proper to the nature of man as a creature situated midway in a hierarchy of being between angels and beasts. Angels enjoy total knowledge of each other, whether directly or through God, and so do not need verbal signs (signa locutionis); beasts, on the other hand, are guided wholly by the instincts of their species, and may know one another adequately through themselves (per p-op-ios alienos cognoscere). But man is both a rational and an individual being. Being corporeal, he cannot enjoy the purely spiritual knowledge of angels; being individual, he cannot know his fellow creatures through himself: hence, the necessity of signs.22 Vernacular speech (as opposed to Latin) is not only a historical condition of the self in its relationship to other selves comprising society,23but it is thanks to the vernacular that Dante even exists, since his mother and father came to love each other in Italian and then begot him.24For a poet to compose a song (cantio) of words is to "bind up" (ligare) sounds, and in this operation the poet's function as "author" joins that of the monarch as "authority." One binds up vowels, which are the "soul and juncture" (anima et legume) of the word, while the other binds up the souls of individual men into a harmonious civil order.25Words are the "seeds of actions" (seme d'operazione), and it is the obligation of those in "authority" to plant these seeds so that with time they will fructify properly in the life of the c ~ m m u n i t yJust . ~ ~ as medieval rhetoricians like Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland equated the high, middle, and low styles of poetic discourse with the functions proper to the three distinct social classes of their time,27so too Dante stipulated that the poet of the high or "tragic" style (stylus tragicus) should write on noble subjects that are most fitting to the activities of the ruling class: these are love (amor), defense or public safety (salus), and virtue These are the themes of Chaucer's Troilus. Especially important for our purposes is the fact that Dante brought to vernacular poets a consciousness of the historicity of their

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own speech-indeed, with Dante the historical doctrine of the translatio impirii is refurbished, as it were, into what might be called a doctrine of the translatio linguae. Adam was thepimus loquens, and his language was Hebrew, which was the universal language until the fall of Babel, after which Hebrew was preserved by the Jews only until their dispersion. Man being a most unstable and variable animal, his speech cannot be any more enduring o r continuous than his customs or clothing; hence, grammar was invented, with Latin as its mode of manifestation, to provide stability to the order of speech so that the different societies of history might communicate with the p a ~ t . ~ V h i s is a broadly taught notion in the Middle Ages, but what is particular to Dante is his insistence, despite the universality of Latin, upon the "nobility" of the vernacular: it is only through the vernacular, he argues, that the individual may gain access to Latin, or grammatica. 30 With Dante, then, beliefs about the homology between the orders of discourse and culture become articulated as a full-blown philosophy of history, and such doctrines were to be amplified during the late Middle Ages and the R e n a i ~ s a n c e .I~n ~England, attitudes towards rhetoric as a political instrument remained ambivalent. As Lois Ebin has shown, Lydgate is very positive in his conviction about "goldyn" language and the well-being of the state, and his political poetry, including the Troy Book, makes connections between eloquence and political virtue explicit.32In Chaucer, by contrast, the "rhetor" came to be seen as a powerful and dangerous figure who subverts the well-being of society: such is the case with the Summoner, the Pardoner, and the Wife of Bath, all of whom are answered by the Nun's Priest, a paradigm of Christian eloquence, not in the high, but the "mixed" style. In either case, medieval attitudes towards the relationship between language and history are close to certain of those in our time. As Benveniste writes: "History . . . is not necessarily a dimension of language, it is only one of its possible dimensions; nor is it history that makes language live, but rather the inverse. It is language which, because of its necessity and its permanence, constitutes history."33

11. Language and Troy Among the numerous legends that medieval poets inherited from classical antiquity, the legend of Troy seems best to have lent itself to a narrative in the "tragic" style (in Dante's limited sense of the word), whose themes were most properly love, war, and virtue. The legend of Troy not only brought to poets such as Chaucer a repertory of

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thematic material fully consonant with medieval canons of style, but it constituted, as well, a narrative whose authoritative tragic form could bring a certain artistic finality to all of the deepest potential of medieval courtly poetry, a poetry otherwise yet lacking-with the exception, perhaps, of the story of Tristan-in the supreme dignity of a mature tragic vision (in the broad sense). Supposedly the first in an open-ended sequence of great cities of classical antiquity to "fall" (Troy, Thebes, Alexandria, Rome . . . ), the story of Troy had nourished, in the medieval consciousness, an understanding of the principle of macrocosmic history itself, seen as a cyclical violence of becoming. Such beliefs were reinforced by the Boethian theory of tragedy, centered on the figure of Fortune's wheel, whose cycles catch up the proud, exalt them, then work their fall. An awareness of this principle compelled every medieval political establishment sooner or later to ask itself this ominous question: When, if ever, must ate become the next Troy? Troy, Chaucer writes in his translation of Boethius, was destroyed in a just war of revenge when Agamemnon "recovered and purgid in wrekynge, by the destruction of Troye, the loste chambirs of mariage of his b r ~ t h i r . "However, ~~ to a good poet, the archetype of Troy's fall exemplified much more than a drama of political revenge, for only at its most superficial level does the historia of Troy deal with the sacking of the city at the hands of the Greeks. Indeed, from Homer onward, the real fascination that the life and death of Troy held for poets was less the clash of enemy heroes than that network of more subtle forces of destruction at work within the city's walls: for instance, breakdowns in fundamental laws upon which man's survival as a political creature depends. By refusing to punish or expel Paris, the polis reveals its inner corruption, its negligence of justice, and, finally, its weakness. Especially in Chaucer, as we shall see, the spatial disposition of Troy as a dramatic setting-as a town sick with love from within, besieged by hostile forces from without-gives rise to a plot whose structure is basically contrapuntal, in this sense: though Chaucer's narrator recounts only the erotic tragedy of Troilus (Chaucer's narrator shares most of the blindness of his unheroic heroes), we of the audience are always capable of seeing beyond the violence of erotic passion, the "hertes werre," to that larger, untold, and seemingly forgotten violence of the martial realm unfolding outside the city's walls. In Chaucer's Troilus, walls prove to be only false boundaries, since they do not, in the final analysis, protect the knights and ladies of Troy from answering to the harsh claims of history. Such a counterpoint of plot is not, of course, unique to Chaucer. Already in Virgil (who was

MERVELOUS SIGNALS

30 1

himself following Greek models of epic and tragedy) there is a constant pairing of sexual delinquencies and civil calamities-or, more rarely, a pairing of their opposites: continence and peace.35 Finally and more importantly, however, the legend of Troy offered to poets an occasion to explore their consciousness of language, of language as the living expression of the social order-and even of language as the medium of poetic art. Once again, such a consciousness is already acute in Virgil, who was no doubt influenced by Stoic theories about the universe as logos and about speech as a privileged mode of action (ethical or otherwise) in such a universe. One will recall, for instance, that the fall of Troy is instigated not by a battle, but by a speech: is it not the deceitful narrative of Sinon that persuades the Trojans to open the city gates to the wooden horse? Similarly, Aeneas's own narrative of the fall of Troy is delivered before Dido, Queen of Carthage; and however innocent his "intentions," the effect of his discourse is catastrophic: as his story unfolds, Dido falls fatally in love with its winsome teller. Once again, a city (this time Carthage) will fall heir to all the violence of human nature as that violence is communicated through (if not incited by) speech-and, more specifically, to the degree that Aeneas's narration may properly be called "epic," through epic language itself. Virgil's strategies of linking narrative with historical causality testify to a highly paradoxical self-consciousness, one which may perhaps be described by this sentence of Jean-Pierre Faye: "Because history is consummated only by being narrated, a critique of history may be practised only as a narrative about how history, in narrating itself, is a c c o m p l i ~ h e d . " ~ ~ If a sociohistorical consciousness of language, including narrative language, embedded in Virgil's story of T r o y could be both heightened and refined (as I will shortly show), by Chaucer, this is no doubt in part because of certain historical perspectives that came to prevail in late medieval Europe. As is well known, the legend of Troy nourished the political identities of newly emerging European nations, faced with the task of inventing their own historical past. Though the Historia Britonum speaks already in the eighth century of the Trojan origins of Britain, it was only in the twelfth century, with the Historia regum britanniue of Geoffrey of Monmouth in England, and with the chronicles of Saint-Denis in France, that myths of Trojan "origins" really began to grip the political imagination of Europe.37It is interesting to speculate whether Chaucer might have seen in the relationship between the Trojans and the besieging Greeks some deep analogy with the relationship between English and a more prestigious continental eloquence, or, even more specifically, between the com-

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peting languages of English and French in his own country (e.g., only in 1362 was it decreed-in French-that lawsuits should henceforth be conducted in E n g l i ~ h ) . ~ ~ Such questions of "intention" in Chaucer cannot be definitively answered, yet it is safe to venture that, at a time when the several tongues of Europe had become emblems of new political entities, Chaucer's project of writing Troy's story "out of Latyn in my tonge" was no empty ideological gesture. T o the contrary, one may infer from many obvious features of Chaucer's artistic development that he was capable of grasping clearly, and even of exploiting, the fundamental ambiguity of his cultural role as translateur, as Eustache Deschamps called him, which is to suggest that as he wrote Troy's fall into the English tongue, Chaucer perceived both the triumph and the danger of proclaiming, with a newfound but tenuous Englishman's pride, that his culture was not only heir to, but perhaps even a rival with, the revered classical "auctours" of the past. This is a rivalry that Chaucer at least superficially abjures at the end of his poem: But litel book, no makyng thow n'envie, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes, where as thou seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan and Stace. V.1789-92

Still, merely for Chaucer to situate his text in such a lineage of poetic "tragedies" is to assert not just the vitality, but also the fragility, of English culture: "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall" (Prov. 16:18). Cannot history as a cyclical violence of becoming translate itself into one more terribly English cycle? Is not England, as heir to Troy, now in line to have a great fall? Machaut, as a Frenchman whose country had been long at war with England, had, of course, his own prophecy to give to the English: Destruiz serez, Grec diront et Latin: Ou temps jadis estoit ci Angleterre. 3"

Whatever Chaucer's personal view of history may have been, by drawing the story of Troy from the remoteness of the past, Chaucer was able not only to emphasize the relationship between diachronism and linguistic change, but also to show, dramatically, what are the social causes of that very diachronism in which speech continually becomes different from itself: . . . in forme of speche is chaunge Within a thousand yeer, and wordes tho

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That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so . . .

11.22-25

111. Speech as Action As a general principle, Chaucer shared with many other major authors of the late Middle Ages what may be called a "performative" linguistic consciousness: that is, an acute sense that speech is a kind of behavior by which many different types of social acts are achieved. Though the strategies particular to poets such as Dante, Petrarch, Machaut, or Boccaccio differ greatly in detail, each poet obliges his reader to become aware of the encoding and decoding of utterances as radically distinct acts corresponding to distinct sets of motives in interlocutors. Anxiety among poets about notions such as "truth" and "meaning" in language-if not about "interpretation" as a whole-is clearly a reflection of a more systematic skepticism among later scholastic thinkers such as William of Ockham which remained very much centered on problems of language. Since intramural relationships are exclusively favored in the Troilus until the last book, it is hardly surprising to discover that the principal sphere of action of the story's characters should be words-as opposed, for example, to swordblows and even kisses. A locus of the body politic, Chaucer's Troy is a locus of speech. Beyond the fact that the narrator of the poem speaks to his audience as a discrete persona, an "I" whose mediating awarenesses and intentions are always equivocal, even within the story the primacy of speech over all other forms of action becomes obvious if we observe how much of the poem's substance is devoted explicitly to conveying the utterances of its characters, or else to describing the delivery or reception of these utterances. Although it is not possible, in the case of the Troilus, to establish truly rigorous metalinguistic classifications with regard to what follows, but rather, only to indicate poles or tendencies within the poem as a linguistic whole, I have found, first, that only about three-eighths of the Troilw consists of narrative where the narrator simply informs us about deeds o r events comprising the action of the poem: these may be called, with J. R. Searle (and hence, with qualifications, with J. L. Austin), propositional or constative utterance^.^^ But, as I have already implied, a considerable amount of this propositional o r constative discourse is devoted to the reporting of how or why utterances are delivered and received by interlocutors in the poem: hence, its function remains strongly metalinguistic. Second, about one

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half of the poem is composed of the direct discourse of characters in dialogue with each other, or else in implicit dialogue, as in prayers, oaths, invocations, vows, exhortations, admonitions, invectives, deliberations, etc. Since these utterances constitute the main body of an erotic tragedy-which is to say that the narrative fulfills itself through speech as action and reaction-we may propose, again with Searle and Austin, that these utterances are always illocutwnary or perlocutwnary. In the former, a speaker does more than to refer or say, but performs some other action as he speaks, such as to declare, describe, assert, warn, order, promise, etc. In the latter, as Searle puts it, "is the notion of the consequences o r effects such acts have upon the actions, thoughts, or beliefs, etc., of hearers" (persuading, angering, seducing, repressing, convincing, inspiring, edifying, etc.). Third, there is a small proportion of utterances (less than one eighth of the poem) which, for lack of a better term, I shall call "exclamatory," since they d o not postulate a fiction of dialogue or of intersubjective communication, but occur, rather, as lyrical "cores" which mark the main "stations" in the progress of erotic passion. They are in the main vocalizations of emotion (joy, grief, fear, despair, etc.) which accomplish little outside of the action of their execution. Paradoxically, although these outpourings are presented dramatically as though they were spontaneous with-and entirely personal to-the character who is exclaiming, the lyrical cores in the Troilw are generally examples of conventional lyric types drawn from the high courtly vernaculars of Italy and France-the aubade, the planctus, the canzo, the hymn, etc. During such pivotal moments, all other action is suspended, and "pure" speech moves to the center of the stage in order to speak itself across the lips of individual man, its by-product and most cherished fiction: in Chaucer's Troilw, it is at moments of intensest passion that man is at his most conventional, a paradox that I shall explore in a moment. Though by line count these lyrical cores are relatively minimal compared to the bulk of the poem as a whole, they are nevertheless all-important in their central command over the events that lead u p to or grow out of them. That Chaucer, compared to his French and Italian sources, heightened the lyric element of his art has long been recognized by his critics, but what has not been properly understood is that these lyrical cores are not merely ornamental, but rather, generative, with regard to the narrative in which they occur. That courtly erotic lyric gives rise to semantic structures which can be amplified into larger discursive units that we call "narrative" is obvious, and the centrality of lyric discursive structures to structures of narrative was fairly clear, it seems, to Dante. There is a primacy of

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poetry (metrice), Dante says, over prose (p-osaice), since prose writers derive both their examples and language from poets; but even within poetry itself the lyric canzo is quintessential: "Since, therefore, poems are works of art, and the whole of the art is embraced in canzoni alone, canzoni are the noblest poems, and so their form is the noblest of any. Now, that the whole of the art of poetic song is embraced in canzoni is proved by the fact that whatever is found to belong to the art is found in them; but the inverse is not true."4' Put in other terms, one may conceive of the Troilus as a complex texture of different kinds of utterances which tend to distribute themselves between the constative as narrative, the illocutionary, the perlocutionary, and the exclamatory, as in the following schema:

(narrative) Although in practice these axes of speech performance constantly disrupt each other-as when the voice of the narrator "exclaims," or when the speakers in the poem "narrate," or as when exclaiming is "narrativized" as indirect discourse-such disruptions are precisely a major source of the metalinguistic consciousness that the Troilus provokes in its readers: whenever utterances are dislocated from their proper functions and rearticulated in new speech acts, a problematics of meaning passes to the foreground. Each time a speech act is transposed from its original or proper context or code, a whole set of new intentions and referential factors is necessarily introduced, and we of the audience are always caught in a movement which compels and simultaneously frustrates a hermeneutic reflex: if meanings of utterances can be transformed into their contraries, are not meanings perhaps nonmeanings? Chaucer often carries his strategies of negation (of negation) in signification very far. Consider, as an example, Pandarus's "reporting" of Troilus's complaint, originally uttered in solitude, to Criseyde. A single speech act centered on the shifter "I" is refracted through five different intentional and interpreting consciousnesses. If we may assume that no speech act as an encoding by a speaker is identical to the one that is a decoding by a receiver, it is

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possible to schematize, in the following way, the transformations of meaning or intention that occur as a given speech act is refracted through a multiplicity of consciousnesses. Since the "I" of Troilus's speech is already that of a very conventional lyric voice, I shall assume that the first "instance of discourse" is only virtual, given a priori as code; I am assuming, also, that Chaucer's poem was written with the understanding that it too would become a part of the tradition from which it derives. We may call this network of utterances which extends from the "present" moment in speech both backward and forward in time the axis of intertextuality ( K r i ~ t e v a )T . ~h~e axis of intertextuality cuts across all of the different levels of fiction of the Troilus, making apparent to what extent the conventional nature of verbal signs preempts the "reality" of the instance of discourse in the speaking subject. Poetic language does not express, by its conventions, the consciousness of the desiring individual, but determines the operations of that consciousness: i

Encoder

Decoder

Tradition

\

Troilus

Chaucer

/ \ /

\ / \ /

Pandarus (as overhearer)

Pandarus (as reporter)

Criseyde

Narrator

Audience (as reader)

Audience (as critic

o r poet)

r

Tradition

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307

The power of poetic language-a power deriving at once from its prestige as a traditional emblem of the aristocracy and from its intrinsic beauty-is such, then, that its conventions dictate the structure of Chaucer's historia, to be understood as both story and history. The speaking individual does not appropriate courtly discourse; rather, it appropriates him. As they relinquish their autonomy from conventional poetic signs, individuals also lose their capacity to refer: reality, or history, in other words, "imitates" language. The justification for such peculiar inferences about poetic mimesis in the Troilus warrants, however, special discussion.

IV. The Poetics of "Reality" Let us begin with some descriptive remarks and say that the exclamatory axis of lyric in Chaucer's Troilus corresponds to a general tendency of verbal signs to become divorced, under certain circumstances, from their ordinary functions of communicating (which include expression, reference, and reception); hence, their tendency to become opaque. This happens whenever the poetic element (in the sense that Roman Jakobson gives to that term) is so dominant that the formal rituals of the poetic performance constitute fetishistic goals in themselves. As these rituals become self-fulfilling, all other circumstances which motivate people to speak and to understand become subordinate. The exclamatory axis of the Troilus may be said to be opposed to the narrative (or constative) axis of the poem-that is, to speech which is seemingly "transparent." By "transparent," I mean speech which does not call attention to itself as a mediator of thought, but seemingly conveys from one mind to another some nonlinguistic reality (experiences, objects, events) and simultaneously effaces itself with minimal obtrusiveness. However, as I have intimated earlier, the Troilus is basically an autotelic poem where the supposedly nonlinguistic events which the narrative axis is destined to convey are, in fact, highly linguistic events. By this I mean, first, that the exclamatory axis of the Troilus is invested with vital forces that devolve less from individual erotic passion than from the passionate nature of homo loquens at his most generic level, of man specifically as a maker (poeta)of signs; and, second, that all other classes of utterance in the Troilus may be considered as mediations by which these arch-conventional, transpersonal lyric "cores" establish themselves as intelligible human events (accidents) disposed as a linear sequence which Chaucer calls his "historie." T o speak thus of the different functions of language in the Troilus is to suggest that we are dealing, ultimately, with different

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modes of experiencing reality--or rather, with articulations of different aspects or levels of reality, thanks to the different operations of language as a medium of cognition. Though I believe that there is nothing anachronistic in the claim that Chaucer, as a medieval poet, belonged to an intellectual world which was perfectly disposed to seeing correspondences between modes of language and modes of being, for convenience let us remain momentarily with modern descriptive terms and propose that the lyric (or exclamatory) and narrative (or constative) axes of the Troilus correspond respectively to those complementary cognitive dimensions of verbal performance that linguists call the paradigmatic and the ~ y n t a g m a t i cThe . ~ ~ paradigmatic axis of speech is disjunctive, and involves mental acts of association or substitution based upon a relationship of equivalence between two terms, regardless of whether that relationship involves a principle of identity or opposition. The syntagmatic is linear and conjunctive, and embodies thought that is sequential and transformative. T o propose that the lyrical axis of the Troilus, in which the process of cognition is most closely allied to the phonetic substance of speech, might be a motivating source of paradigmatic structures of signification is nothing new, since poets and linguists alike have been telling us for some time, each in his own way, that phonetic structures of meter and rhyme tend to generate isomorphic structures at the level of meaning. But modern descriptive terminology is useful only up to a point. If we are to understand how a medieval poet such as Chaucer might have seen in the different functions of poetic language manifestations of different aspects of reality, we must try to situate medieval poetics in what we may suppose to have been its proper metaphysical habitat. It is well known that the Christian Middle Ages inherited from the Greeks a wholly compatible metaphysics of poetic speech. The Greeks tended to consider prosody, especially metrics, as a branch of music. In the temporal and harmonic structures of music the Greeks saw expressions of the physical laws of the cosmos (itself a "tuning") as a whole. Similarly, for St. Augustine, the phonological structures of poetic discourse derive essentially from music, understood as "the art of proper measuring" (Musica est scientia bene m o d u l ~ n d i )The . ~ ~ term measuring refers either to the performance of regular movement by a body, or else to the principle by which some body is moved. Proper "movement" in music is harmonious, which is to say that it expresses proportions that are cosmic and universally intelligible: simply by enjoying harmony in music we may intuitively infer that our souls themselves consist in a sort of harmony.45 I n poetic language, harmony originates in the metrical foot, physi-

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cally determined (so it was thought) by the mathematical relationship of the short to the long syllable in duration, which is 1:2. This proportion is the same, moreover, as the one that pertains in the relationship of the unique creator of the universe to the multitude of created t h i n g ~ . ~ Wonly o t does the metrical foot express in itself a principle of identity in otherness, but the regular occurrence of this foot in verse brings to utterances that are semantically diverse a quantitative value which is constant: in different instances of speech we are asked to perceive zdentical quantities of sound: again, but at another level, unity in diversity. Since they are both subsemantic and translinguistic, such relationships do not, in themselves, signify; but they do determine the conditionsfor signification: the capacity for signification in poetic language will be the means by which these equivalences will be made intelligible. Moreover, if one includes rhyme among the "musical" resources of poetic language (as did medieval i-hetoricians under the terms similiter desinens), then one will observe how instances of rhyme in the Troilus constantly intrude upon the linearity of syntax with homophonies whose couplings invite us to ponder their peculiar and often elliptical binarities, constituted as semantic equivalences based on similarity, opposition, or contiguity. (Here are a few random examples: bridel/ydel, gladnesse/distresse, pleasaunce/governaunce, adventurelcure, strecchelwrecche, namelshame, frelcruelte, godnesselwikkednesse, welleIHelle, Allaslsolace, noblenesslbrotelnesse, daunceldesesperaunce, offendelamende, lepelslepe, savelrave, ooktstrook, redeldede, quykenlstiken, deethlbreeth, Eleynelpeyne, Criseydeldeyde, etc.) For the most part, these nearly subliminal equivalences manifest themselves independently of the dramatic context of the story and of the intentions of the speakers (including the narrator) who enact that story: these are people for whom courtly poetic language is "ordinary" language. Hence, the equivalences of rhyme remain only minimally significant. At times, though, it is possible for us, at least, to glimpse to what extent "history" in this hyperpoetical habitat is determined by a kind of deadly verbal-rather, poetical-positivism. For instance, one of the most frequent rhymepairs in the Troilus is "joye/Troye," so nearly alike in sound, so agreeable to tongue and ear, yet so grimly counterpoised in an antithesis whose sweep includes the very trajectory of history itself, of which Troy is the paradigm: there can be no "joy" in "Troy." T h e more relationships of equivalence are extended into the semantic and thematic surfaces of language, the more such relationships implicate the nature and motives of man as a concept-making and communicating animal. It is precisely at this threshold between cognition and expression that medieval theories of language were

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most rigorous, and within the discipline of rhetoric the categories of utterance called "tropes" and "figures of thought" drew special attention not only as resources of style, but also as deeds by which man could disclose or conceal the truth. Tropes are instances of speech in which, whether out of necessity or for ornamental purposes, a substitution occurs in which some signified (signatum) is presented through a signifier (signans) that is improper to it, thus breaking the conventional bond between signifier and signified.47 T o suggest that medieval poets such as Dante and Chaucer might have seen the intelligible surface of poetry, including narrative poetry, as a process of semanticization that begins at the level of subsemantic structures of language, including structures of meter and rhyme, should not seem problematical for critics who follow the work of linguists such as Jakobson, Benveniste, and Greimas, who also consider the semantic surface of speech as an integrative process in which a certain isomorphism pertains between the subsemantic and semantic structures of language. But what is perhaps less easy for modern readers to understand is that for the medieval poet, the subsemantic stratum of language is not tied up merely with the physiology of phonemic production, but also with universal, cosmic, and metaphysical principles of which one intelligible surface is language. This implies a notion of mimesis unfamiliar to us, namely, that reality in a poem such as the Troilus does not derive primarily from the nonlinguistic world of created things to which its language seems to referfor these are mere accidents-but more properly from the less tangible order of phonetic structures in which the universal laws of the cosmos are embodied. Narrative events are generated, then, less by life than by lyric, and this is perhaps the sense of Dante's insistence that prose writers (posaicantes) derive both their language and their examples from poets. As John Burrow says of Chaucer's age, "English audiences in Richard's time were not particularly interested in the verismo of contemporary life and love; and they certainly had not yet developed a taste for story-telling in prose-perhaps the first of English dhimeurs was Sir Thomas Mal101-y."48 Narrative mediates or translates into the dimensions of time and space the more universal "truth7' of lyric. Such attitudes explain at least in part why medieval lyric poets tended to strive not for originality, but rather for perfection; not for individuality, but for abstraction and universality. They explain, likewise, why in the Troilus the language of its central hero should derive from the most conventional resources of medieval lyric-hence, the vague sense in Chaucer's critics that he has "medievalized" the legend of Troilus and Criseyde. But Chaucer was not uncritical about the conventional language of

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medieval lyric; and if the tragedy of Troy and of history is the narrative that lyric must "generate," it is because those who live by its conventions are guilty of a serious misuse of language as an instrument of man's highest faculty, which is reason-and not passion. If lyric reveals what is most universal in man's nature as a speaking and desiring animal, and if lyric is at the basis of the tragic style, Chaucer's narrative does more than to mediate lyric utterances to a world of palpable events: through narrative Chaucer also explores what are the social consequences of that style and, more practically, what the motives are of those who live by its conventions.

V. Ethics and Signification Whether or not semiological theories of the later Middle Ages are important to our understanding of medieval poetry, it is obvious that poets themselves understood, at least pragmatically, the ideological implications of their subject matter and their style, and that this understanding was often determining with regard to those concrete rhetorical strategies which make medieval poetry seem, paradoxically, so deeply conservative, yet so radically inventive. Such strategies are often both very refined and very concrete (for instance, Machaut's De fortune me doi plaindre is an ingenious attempt to coordinate movement of melody with the thematic topos Fortunae rota v o l ~ i t u r )Such .~~ strateges often involve, moreover, the inscription of what we would consider a critical consciousness into the very performance of what is being criticized: narrative, in the later Middle Ages, is often an interpreting performance, in accordance, perhaps, with the more fecund Greek term hermeneuein, of which the Latin interpretare is but a pale reflection.50 It was a canon of medieval rhetorical theory that the prevalence of tropes was a mark of the "serious" or "tragic" style. If tragedy is both a structure of experience and a style of language, obviously no serious poet who takes up, with the legend of Troy, the very tragedy of history can escape seeing the pattern of history as a consequence of the rhetorical functions of his discourse, including figural functions. Indeed, the tragic plot itself, as it was commonly understood in the Middle Ages, is nothing other than the linear realization of an oxymoron: "Tragedy is to seyn," writes Chaucer in his translation of Boethius, "a dite of prosperite for a tyme, that endeth in wrec~hidnesse,"~~ and this, of course, is the story of Troilus, "In lovynge, how his aventures fellen/Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie" (1.3-4). Troping, one will recall, involves the substitution of an improper signified for a

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proper one: troping is a dislocation of the sign as a conventional bond of signans and signatum. If we consider that bond as a social pact which is the very foundation of social order, then we can see the tragic configuration of history as the just fate of any society that lets itself be determined, as does the society of knights and ladies of Troy, by what we may call "Pandarus's law," since it is the verbal magic of Pandarus that catalyzes the events of this poem: "By his contrarie is euery thyng declared . . Eke whit by black, by shame ek worthinesse, Ech set by other, more for other semeth, As men may se, and so the wyse it demeth." (1.637-44)

As a basis for understanding, such laws are against nature: "For contrarious thynges ne ben nat wont to ben ifelawschiped togydre. Nature refuseth that contrarious thynges ben y j ~ i n e d . "In ~ ~Pandarus's verbal universe, "truth" can have no place, since language proffers meaning that is always different from itself; nor, finally, can there be any enduring troth between lovers. Pandarus is a strategist without telos, a man without center, a man of "wordes white" (III.1567),whose experience of life is vicarious-that is, made of substitutions of aliud for zdem, both in his sexual life and in his language: "To ese his frend was set a1 his desir" (111.486). Hence, the self-defeating nature of his desire, which is only the desire to desire; hence, too, Pandarus's automatic assumption that Troilus, forsaken by Criseyde, will also seek some fast substitute in another woman. The game of desire is played by Pandarus above all in theplay of language, that is, in the equivocalness of signs proffered "Bitwixen game and ernest, swich a meeneIAs maken wommen unto men to comen" (111.254-55). T o the extent that love is a mere game, its manifestation in language is innocent: medieval speculations upon lying were careful to exonerate deception perpetrated in play and jokes, which, according to St. Augustine, are clearly distinct from lying.53But to the extent that Pandarus's white words are in fact earnest, or intentional, Pandarus does more than to deceive (fallare); he is both mentiens et fallens, to echo Augustine's distinctions. As an artificer of words in a courteous and noble world, Pandarus is not constrained by the high style, but when opportunism dictates, he quickly falls back on the humbler and supposedly more practical "truths" of the lower, less noble styles in order to expedite the coupling of women to men. Such departures from the noble style may be neutrally identified by modern linguists as "code-switching," but in the context of medieval poetics they identify Pandarus as a moral

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relativist of a socially subversive sort. He is an abuser of sermocinacio, a term sometimes translated as "dialogue," but one that applies more generally to the congruence that must prevail between speech and rank of speakers, and a transgressor of ydioma, which is the art of making a person's speech appropriate to his character. Chaucer, through his characters, transgresses such constraints of discursive decorum precisely in order to instigate in his readers a moral consciousness of language that his narrator and characters themselves do not share.54 Already in the basic dramatic setting of the Troilus we encounter strategical designs by which Chaucer underscores the vitiation of social order that attends decadence in the use of language. Broadly speaking, Chaucer's Troilus is the story of an erotic tragedy that unfolds within the walls of Troy, a city of lovers besieged in war and a locus of love's language. The experience of Troilus ("little Troy") is therefore but a synechdoche (pars pro toto), a fragment, of that larger violence occurring outside the city's walls. Seemingly, what happens inside belongs only to the sphere of love; what happens outside belongs only to the sphere of war. As readers, with Chaucer, of an epic tradition, we know, however, that this war, which is really the war of all history as becoming, has been initiated by an erotic transgression, by that breaking of "trouthe" (troth + truth) which occurred when Paris, a Trojan, absconded with Helen, a Greek; we also know (with our Boethean philosophical wisdom) that this war will be perpetrated yet again and again through successive erotic transgressions in that future which is our past and also (unless we use signs properly) the future of England itself: the Troilus as an English poem is both history and potential prophecy. In spatial terms, therefore, we have a dramatic setting in which any occurrence, in the speech of lovers, of the conventional oxymorons of violence (flames, wounds, dying, etc.) scarcely fail to point outward to an extramural violence that is not figurative, but real. Troy is a city where people have forgotten how to use signs properly, and as a result their erotic discourse of love is ornamented with figurative violence of the most extravagant sort (arrow-wounds, hemorrhaging, chopping, slashing, evisceration, starvation, drowning, chaining, madness, snaring, convulsions, hangng, poisoning, imprisonment, dismemberment, suicide, enslavement, etc.). But all this violence is materializing historically outside the city's walls. These characters speak so poetically that they are voluntarily blind, as we must not be, to the referential context of their figures, which is the war between the Trojans and Greeks. In creating a dramatic structure where a world of speaking lovers is circumscribed by the hostilities of a military siege,

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Chaucer is in effect placing language-more specifically, lyrical, poetic language--on a stage whose context is historical; and it is precisely because the actors upon that stage d o not know-or have forgotten-history, that history "happens." Violence that is supposedly inexistent because it is merely figurative violence becomes the real consequence of figuratiuity as primal violence itselj-primal not because it originates in material things, but rather in the signs by which we know (or refuse to know) those things. Thus, through the dislocation of the proper relationship between signifiers and their signifieds, men (and women) lose their capacity for knowing the truth unequivocally, for upholding a troth, and lose, finally, even their capacity for action-except, of course, in language as false action. We are not dealing, here, merely with instances of dramatic irony, but rather with deep-seated convictions of a late medieval poet about the danger that arises when words as conventional poetic signs are vitiated and cannot refer properly. The narrator of the poem is of course the first willingly to abandon strict usage of verbal signs for more "poetic" substitutions of improper for proper terms, in accordance with the norms of the high style-hence, his self-confessed pride in speaking of a sunset thus: T h e dayes honour, and the hevenes j;e, T h e nyghtes foo-a1 this clepe I the sonneCan westren faste. . . . (11.904-6)

This infatuation with style is as morally debilitating as it is excessive, for the narrator has also been the first to ignore the theme of salw, or public safety, which is similarly proper to the high style. Rather, the narrator makes it clear that the war outside the city is important to him only insofar as its events pertain to the heart's war between Troilus and Criseyde. Though the narrator mentions the erotic transgressions that have caused the war to break out in the first place, he declares in a conspicuous occupatio that for him to speak of the war itself now would only be a digression: But how this town com to destuccion Ne falleth naught to purpos me to telle; For it were here a long- digression Fro my matere, and yow to long to dwelle. But the Troian gestes, as they felle, In Omer, or in Dares, or in Dite Whoso that kan may rede hem as they write. (1.141-47)

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This suppression of the epic story of Troy in favor of the romance of Troilus stems, of course, from his own frustration and despair in affairs of the heart. Like Pandarus, the narrator substitutes vicarious, literary love, the love of letters, for the real thing, though in doing so he denatures the very heroic tradition which he names and in which his poem is situated. This patrimony of heroic texts constitutes nothing less than the collective memory of society, and must therefore be respected if society is to endure, as Chaucer himself implies in The Legend of Good Women: And if that olde bokes were aweye Yloren were of remembraunce the keye. (Text F, 25-26)

The fictive narrator of the Troilus is a bad reader and writer of historic, and the subversive imbalance in his ethical values is recapitulated more explicitly by the misuse of literature committed by other characters within the story. Indeed, the narration of the great wars of history is welcomed by the courtly ladies of Troy not as moral edification, but as a mere pastime to amuse them while the men are away. Thus, when Pandarus, having become a procuror for Troilus, rushes to Criseyde's house in his friend's behalf, he finds the ladies gathered there ingenuously diverting themselves with the romance of Thebes, that is, the tragedy of another classical city destroyed by war. Pandarus excuses himself graciously for intruding upon the story. "Is it of love?" he asks, "0,som good ye me leere." But the harsher lessons of war are of no interest to Pandarus, for when he finds out what they are reading he says, "A1 this I knowe myselve,

And a1 th'assege of Thebes the care;

For herof ben ther maked bookes twelve.

But lat be this, and telle me how ye fare.

Do wey youre book, rys up and lat us daunce,

And lat us don to May som observaunce."

(11.106- 12)

I n this overrefined "paved parlour" of poetry and laughter which makes so light of the burdens of history, the dead letter of war ignites the very spirit of love. We of the audience do not share, of course, such a dangerous finiteness of consciousness, for if the narrator can speak only metaphorically of love as an "encircling" of Troilus's heart, as a siege, we cannot escape seeing the heart's war as a synecdoche for the Trojan war, which is in turn a synecdoche for the macro-

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cosmic violence of history as becoming. Moreover, the repressed moral significance of the story of Thebes will emerge with time, for it will be Cassandra who reveals to Troilus the tragedy of his destiny, and she uses the story of the fall of Thebes as a parallel (V.1458ff.). Each horizon of reality in the universe of Troilus and Criseyde corresponds, at least potentially, to a distinct state of consciousness in the morally alert reader whose mind will not fail to move outward from the specific to the general, always by a process of analogy which can be stated as follows: Troilus : Criseyde :: Troy : Greece :: Being : Fortune. This latter pair is of course Boethian: Fortune as "executrix of wyrdes." (Wyrde means "destiny" or "fate," being the equivalent of fatum, which is in turn derived fromfor, the verb "to speak"-fate as discourse.) The extensively analogical structure of Chaucer's poetic world induces in his readers a moral perspective upon the limited nature and functions of poetic language. For convenience, the analogies that are immanent in the universe of the Troilus may be expressed spatially as a series of concentric circles turning together upon the individual experience of Troilus himself: Fortune

Though the narrator himself declines to explore what lies beyond the specific "cas" of Troilus and his "swete €0" Criseyde, the sheer abundance of supposedly figural violence in the language of the poem points constantly to the "real" story outside, to a universal historia which, if we too use signs improperly, will presumably become our own story as well. If we may take for granted that Chaucer understood, whether in-

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tuitively or rationally, the ideological and metaphysical dimensions of the dramatic setting that he created, in my opinion, much of the fascination of Troilus lies in those numerous poetic strategies by which Chaucer manages to stage in our "dyrkyd memorie" those very historical events of Troy's fall that the narrator himself tends to repress, with the consequence that these intrude with more and more intensity upon our consciousness as the story moves toward its conclusion. In other words, what interests me in this poem is the manner in which Chaucer makes one story "tell" another story that is only latent or virtual, yet all-important because it is universal. It is these metanarrative strategies, these procedures of totalization, that shall preoccupy US now.

VII. Love as War The "fall" of Troilus begins when, in an excess of pride, the young soldier, instead of attacking the Greeks who have besieged Troy, verbally assaults the god of love as his mortal enemy. Cupid takes swift revenge upon the words of the aggressor by firing his conventional arrow of desire. The historical violence of the battlefield is now denatured by poetic convention, and the gesta of epic are psychologized as Cupid's arrow inflicts upon a hero its purely sexual wound: upon seeing Criseyde, Troilus is "Right with hire look thorugh-shoten and thorugh-darted" (1.324). T h e young soldier retreats to his bedchamber and indulges in an extravagant heroics-not of the sword, but of song. This is the first lyrical "core" of the Troilus, and Chaucer's gesture of lifting Troilus's song from Petrarch's Canzoniere ought not to be dismissed as a mere "lyrical ornament," nor even as the graceful tribute of a young English poet to a revered continental master, but as a more wily attempt to challenge the consecrated conventions of the medieval erotic lyric with the logic of narrative, a harsh logic that would succeed in linking the latent violence of the "tragic style" to full-blown historical events that are its consequence. Moreover, Petrarch's song itself may perhaps have been seen by Chaucer as an artful but dangerous reduction of a heroic narrative world, since it too resonates with classical metaphors which call to mind the wanderings of other amorous heroes-Odysseus, for example, or the less temperate Aeneas, buffeted by the storms of Juno's wrath: "A1 stereless withinne a boot am I Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, That in contrarie stonden evere mo." (1.416- 18)

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The politically anarchic force of Troilus's very conventional sentiments of love is expressed by the Trojan prince himself, who declares in an unintentional prophecy of Fortune's future sovereignty over Troy: "For myn estat roial I here resigne Into hire hond, and with ful humble chere Bicome hir man, as to my lady dere." (1.432-34)

Just as it would be difficult for us not to see the flames of Juno's funeral pyre in the Aeneid as the narrative fulfillment of all those instances of metaphorical flames of passion scattered throughout the previous books of the Aeneid, so too it is hard for us not to see a connection between the "hot fir of love" that burns Troilus and the flames that are destined to consume Troy." Moreover, Pandarus, as he counsels Criseyde to use her Venus-like element to "quenche a1 this," uses an image which would doubtless stir the hearts of the firemen of Troy as much as the hearts of its lovers: "Nece, alle thyng hath tyme, I dar avowe, For whan a chambre afire is, or an halle, We1 more ned is, it sodeynly rescowe Than to dispute and axe amonges alle How this candele in the strawe is falle." (111.855-59)

The more the narrator escalates the erotic psychomachia in which Troilus revels, the more he condenses Troilus's exploits in "real" battle to a few cursory hyperboles, to a kind of epic shorthand indulged in only so long as it relates to his progress in the tribulations of sexual desire. For Troilus fights not for salus, o r civic well-being, but only as a lover: But for non hate he to the Grekes hadde, Ne also for the rescous of the town, Ne made hym thus in armes for to madde, But only, lo, for this conclusion: T o liken hire the bete for his renoun. Fro day to day in armes so he spedde, That the Grekes as the deth him dredde. (1.477-83)

Moreover, each of Troilus's gestes in war is swiftly converted into some equivalent success in the more precious skirmish of love:

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But Troilus lay tho no lenger down, But up anon upon his stede bay, And in the feld he pleyde the leoun; Wo was that Grek that with hym mette a-day! And in the town his manere tho forth ay Soo goodly was, and gat hym so in grace, That ecch hym loved that loked on his face. (1.1072-78)

Pandarus constantly subordinates the horrors of the macrocosm to the frivolity of the microcosm, as in this moment when he greets Troilus at dawn after a night of languishing: This Pandarus com lepying in atones, And seyde thus, "Who hath ben we1 ibete With swerdes and with slynge-stones, But Troilus, that hath caught hym and hete?" And gan to jape, and seyde, "Lord so ye swete!" (11.939-43)

Pandarus nullifies the terror of warfare by comparing it to the far keener pleasure of love when he brings to Criseyde the "good news" of the day: not that the war is ended, but rather that Troilus is falling for her. Criseyde, who knows nothing of Troilus (much less of her other destiny, which is to fall in love with a Greek) answers Pandarus's good news with an unwitting pun on die (one of the many in the poem), a pun which is at her own expense because it is prophetic: "Now uncle deere," quod she, "telle it us For Goddes love; is than th'assege aweye? I am of Grekes so fered that I deye." "Nay, nay," quod he, "as evere mote I thryve, It is a thing we1 bet than swyche fyve." (11.123-26)

Now Pandarus begins to narrate the war, and in accordance with "Pandarus's law" (where everything is declared by its contrary), the topic of warfare becomes, in his discourse, a mere aphrodisiac. Both Hector and Troilus, he says, have only a "litel wownde" (Troilus's wound being, of course, Cupid's); and as Pandarus recounts the action he does all he can to psychologize the soldier's conquering sword into a "sharpe kervyng tolis" of a less epic sort: "Now here, now ther, he hunted hem so faste, Ther nas but Grekes blood,-and Troilus.


Now hym he hurte, and hym a1 down he caste;

Ay wher he wente, it was arayed thus:

He was hir deth, and sheld and lif for us;

That, as that day there dorste non withstonde,

Whil that he held his blody swerd in honde.

Thereto he is the frendlieste man

Of gret estat, that evere I saugh my lyve,

And wher hym lest, best felawshipe kan

T o swich as hym thinketh able for to thryve."

(11.197-206)

Pandarus's incendiary success in exciting Criseyde's curiosity (curiositas is generally a prelude to lust in medieval and renaissance narrative) is only intensified by the interruptions, the digressions, the "diffisioun of speche" with which he delays the recounting of his "good news." Here Chaucer seems to be calling attention to the relationship between amplification of narrative as a deferring and the paradox (broadly understood by medieval poets) that improper desire is really only the desire to desire. In any case, just as Criseyde's curiosity flourishes on obstacles, so too her libido will feed itself on a rhetoric of violence and of negation in which both she and Pandarus freely indulge, though not suspecting that by doing so they are only promulgating the destructive forces of macrocosmic history. When Pandarus confesses (vicariously) Troilus's love for Criseyde, he draws his dagger and threatens to cut his own throat: if Troilus must die of love, he says, then the two friends must "die" (another sexual pun?) together. This gestural rhetoric is complemented by a more subtle verbal game of negative suggestibility: for instance, Pandarus swears vehemently that Troilus desires "naught but youre frendly cheere" (is the figure "naught," o r "0,"yet another sexual pun?), and that without it this "upright" young man will soon be slain: "I se hym deye, ther he goth upright, And hasteth hym with a1 his fulle myght For to be slayn, if his fortune assente, Allas, that God yow swich a beaute sent!" (11.333-36)

Criseyde instantly picks up the game: after a few lamentations and a curse of the god Mars (why not Venus?), she agrees to save Pandarus's life by granting Troilus her "good chere" (chere derives from the Latin, caro, flesh). Then she leads on with a question, "Ye seyn, ye nothyng elles me requere?" Now she concludes, with ambivalent haughtiness, that "Ne shal I nevere of hym han other routhe" (11.489). It may be

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suggested that Chaucer is dramatizing through narrative and dialogue-and at the same time demystifying-a very basic tendency of conventional courtly love lyric discourse to function negatively, that is to generate itself by constantly negating the existence of (or the hope, or the possibility, of) "joie" as sexual p1easu1-e.~~ Just as Chaucer personifies in Pandarus the perversion of verbal signs that can occur in the production of meaning, so too he dramatizes a similar perversion in the process of its reception. A striking example of this occurs when Criseyde is first smitten with love for Troilus. Hearing the sudden hue and cry of the townsfolk welcoming their victorious hero back into Troy, Criseyde goes to her window to observe the spectacle. So partisan is the narrator to the transforming power of her libido that he too all but forsakes the broader social dimension of the event and purveys to us only what Criseyde herself chooses to see: "to beholde it was a noble game." Before her creative glance, Troilus appears as a young, bareheaded-and quite phallicyoung blade, astride a mount that spontaneously begins to bleed before her very glance, even though its master rides the lucky beast "ful softely." Now fully given over to Criseyde's unbridled fantasies, Troilus looks better to Criseyde than Mars himself (the god she has just cursed), a comparison that implicitly identifies Criseyde herself with Venus-indeed, Venus herself is prevailing over this scene from her sphere in the heavens above. As viewed from Criseyde's window, the potency of the young knight in arms becomes suddenly very equivocal: what could the narrator mean when he speaks so blithely of Troilus's power "to don that thing?" What thing? So lik a man of armes and a knyght

He was to seen, fulfilled of heigh prowesse;

For bothe he hadde a body and a myght

T o don that thing, as well as hardynesse . . .

(11.631-34)

Criseyde's response is to anticipate in her mind's eye the false erotic paradise that she and Troilus will indeed create for each other in the next book of the poem: And ek to seen hym in his gere hym dresse, So fressh, so yong, so weldy semed he, It was a heven upon hym for to see. (11.635-37)

This "heaven" is all the more vivid for the traces of violence in Troilus's battered armor and for the many arrows stuck in his shield which (except for the one in his heart) he has victoriously withstood in

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his warlike service of love. Appropriately-again, to Criseyde's earsthe crowd now applauds, in the return of Troilus, the coming of their "joye": this is of course a key word of the erotic lexicon of courtly art, and there is no doubt but not one of its semantic features in the Middle Ages was that of its modern French cognate, jouir. Troilus responds to the 'tjoy" of his admirers with a modesty that is nothing less than devastating, for it is precisely this sign of vulnerability in the young hero that overwhelms Criseyde like a fatal potion: "Who yaf me drinke?" she cries, and now an antiphony of blushes between Troilus and Criseyde removes any doubt about the potential reciprocity of their affections as lovers. In short, undertaken in love, the violence of combat has proven itself to be fiercely erotogenicreversible though that proposition will be, since in the turn of events war, too, has been, and will be, begotten by love. Assuming that the fascination of the scene of Troilus's triumphal return to town derives from Chaucer's skill and humor in dramatizing, through Criseyde, the equivocal nature of conventional signs, both visual and verbal, we may safely venture that Chaucer is responding, entirely within the strategcal resources given to him as a poet, to hotly debated semiological issues of his age, if we are to judge by the concerns of late scholastic philosophers, especially the English Franciscans, Scotus and Ockham. Though it would not be possible to do justice to such a claim in this context, suffice it to say that these thinkers responding with new rigor-and with new skepticism-to the tradition of Aristotelian logic (a discipline devoted to the task of defining rules for making true propositions in spite of the equivocal nature of signs) tended more and more to see "truth" as something that cannot be known-much less communicated-by individuals except within the existential limitations of individual experience." Later scholastics became highly concerned with the discrepancy between words as conventional signs, and the individual things, and the individual concepts, that those conventional words signify. Because verbal signs are conventional, individuals are always prone to using--or misusing-these signs in accordance with their own conceptual needs or desires. Not only poets of the later Middle Ages, but painters as well, had their own "formal" ways of responding to---or of exploiting, as the case may be-the equivocal nature of signs. One may think, for example, of the numerous paintings of Venus and Mars, where the nearly nude god slumbers, amidst his weapons, after the labors of love (not war) beside his conquering goddess.58 O r one may think of the innumerable paintings of Saint Sebastian, whose nearly nude body has been pierced with earthly arrows but whose gaze-is it pain or

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rapture?-is fixed on the Virgin Mary. O r one may think of St. Theresa's rapture, so carefully caught by Bernini, as she imagines union with Christ as a release from her condition as a mortal (and sexual) creature. I n all of these instances we are dealing with a rhetoric of desire in which things come to signify whatever in "proper" speech they would ordinarily exclude. While Chaucer did not call into question the validity of figurative violence in mystical experience, he did, on certain occasions, convey the moral obligation of man as a social creature to respect the proper relationship between signifiers and signifieds. Such notions ofpopietas were characteristic of an antirhetorical strain which has remained a constant tendency in Western theories of language. Boethius, as translated by Chaucer himself, put it thus: "Thow has lernyd by the sentence of Plato that nedes the wordis moot be cosynes to the thinges of whiche thei speken" (111. pr. 12, 205-7). Chaucer did not hesitate to assimilate such attitudes into his own moral framework: The wise Plato seith, as ye may rede,

The word moot nedes accorden with the dede.

If men shal telle properly a thynge,

The word moot coseyri be to the werkyng.

(Manciple's Tale, 207 - 10) But intellectual history will not, by itself, show us how Chaucer exploited ideas as a poet, or how he perfected strategies for dramatizing ideas in a manner that sets the poet apart from the schoolman. It is obvious, I assume, that the erotic tragedy of Troilus and Criseyde is analogous to the larger process of universal history, and that the "fall" of Troy is prophesied and staged not just once, but many times over in Chaucer's poem, from the moment when Troilus first collapses in his bed. Analogy is common to both poets and logicians. However, there is a less logical yet very important dramatic progression in the Troilus with regard to the manner in which Troilus's (and ultimately Troy's) "falls" relate to reality, and one may describe this peculiarly poetic progression in the following way. In Books I and 11, the "falls" of Troilus, while they may be said to occur at least as minimal physical acts, are purely figurative gestures which orchestrate, so to speak, a rhetorical performance in which there is a translatio of the violence of the battlefield into the sphere of erotic desire: here, the primal events remain verbal, and the relationship of love to war is essentially parodic. However, in Books I11 and IV, as the lovers begin to act out of their desire in concrete physical deeds, the sphere of love is no longer merely a rhetorical parody, a mere shadow of war, but

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becomes invested with a specific course of events of its own which are now a comic reduction of the battlefield of history. In the last part of the Troilus there is a gradual convergence of the real actions of lovers with the real forces of the war as history, and of history which began, moreover, with a sexual transgression: Troilus's "swete fo" will finally desert Troy (as her father had done) and fall in love with a Greek, and the fates of both Troilus and Troy will merge into a single historical destiny. Thus, the progression in the plot of the Troilus (given in language) is doubled by a far more profound "story" about language, especially poetic language itself, in its relationship to history. Such a progression merits illustration. In Book I1 of the Troilus, the language of war is at least thrice removed from reality when the narrator narrates Pandarus's narration of Troilus's narration of love's (already figurative) wound. In this multiple filtering out of reality, the epic heritage of Troy's siege is almost completely desemanticized by the rhetoric of courtly lyric and romance. Pandarus, one will recall, though he could hardly be called a military leader, has held a strategical session with Troilus in a palace garden, beside a well, to "speken of an ordinaunceIHow we the Grekes myghten disavaunce" (11.510-1 1): words about words about war. This garden, in Pandarus's skillful reporting, becomes a merger of the medieval locus amoenus of erotic love and Edenic innocence. Though Chaucer's iconography is not always strictly programmatic, the well in the garden may symbolize both the element that is proper to Venus (water) and the paradisiacal Well of Life in Revelation 22:l. Pandarus and Troilus sport together in this garden like innocent Cupids, and here is the game of war at its most frivolous and absurd: "Soon after that bigonne we to lepe, And casten with oure dartes to and fro." (11.512-13)

Suddenly Troilus becomes tired and falls into a trance in which he dreams of love and utters a complaint to Cupid-this is one of the more prominent lyrical "cores" of the Troilus-and he bewails his erotic wound. The heroic young prince is not only reenacting Adam's loss of primal innocence, but Mars's erotic downfall in a coma of heroic inactivity as well-this is a common theme of medieval and renaissance painters. Interestingly, it is precisely at this moment of archpreciousness in speech and gesture that the overallegorized themes of Fortune and death point outward to the flames of Fortune and history that will finally engulf both the passionate prince and the city of lovers for which he is named:

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"For certes, lord, so soore hath she me wounded,

That stood in blak, with lokyrig of hire eyeri,

That to myn hertes botme it is ysounded,

Thorugh which I woot that I moot nedes deyen.

This is the werste, I dar me nat bywreyen;

And well the hotter ben the gledes rede,

That men hem wrien with asshen pale and dede."

(11.533-39)

In Book 111, with the consummation of their love, Troilus and Criseyde pass from language to irrevocable action; consequently, the previously internal barriers to love are now superseded by the stress of real obstacles and events in the world of Troy: henceforth, the lovers' destinies as individuals will become more explicitly enmeshed with the larger forces of history. Book I11 itself, however, seems at first to proffer a romantic oasis that is still perfectly autonomous from the tragedy of the war unfolding outside. Yet if there is a seeming autonomy in the bedroom comedies in which Pandarus, with his strategical "engines" of speech, "shapes the coming" of Troilus to Criseyde, there are also numerous indices that compel any diligent reader to sustain in his memory a narrative counterpoint between the stories of Troilus and Troy, even though the latter story remains almost subliminal. Chaucer's strategies of translation (translatio, transsumptio) are often subtle, and make special demands upon our readerly acuity if we are to catch the flashes of prophecy that cut so impersonally through the bedroom comedy and the impassioned utterances of the lovers, orchestrating them with a terror that the lovers themselves do not detect. For instance, as Troilus anticipates his forthcoming rendezvous with Criseyde, he vows to Pandarus that he will love Criseyde faithfully; yet he simultaneously prophesies the death both that he himself is fated to experience as a consequence of his love and the subjugation of Troy after its defeat: "But natheles by that God I the swere, That, as hym lyst, may al this world governe,And, if I lye, Achilles with his spere Myn herte cleve, al were my lif eterne, As I am mortal, if I late or yerne Wolde it bewreye, or dorst, or sholde konne, For al the good that God made under sonneThat rather deye I wolde, and determyne, As thinketh me, now stokked in prisoun,

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In wrecchidnesse, in filthe, and in vermyne, Caytif to cruel kyng Agamenoun." (111.372-82)

Nor is Criseyde shielded from being identified with the larger designs of Fortune, the strumpet-goddess of whom she is the unwitting agent. Accused-falsely--of loving Horaste, Criseyde bewails precisely the principle that she herself is destined to fulfill: "0brotel wele of mannes joie unstable!" (111.820). Indeed, her subsequent oath of innocence to Troilus is certainly equivocal: "untrewe1To Troilus was never yet Criseyde" (111.1053-54) [Italics mine]. Moreover, in Book I11 Criseyde, no virgin in the first place, reveals that she is no more espoused to proper significations than she is to the cause of monogamy: rather, she is as much a gamesman of signs as Pandarus, as we learn when Pandarus "dissuades" Criseyde from leaving his house (and Troilus's bed) in a rainstorm: "I seyde but a-game, I wolde go." There are of course many strategies by which Chaucer sustains a dim aura of epic history around his almost fabliau-like intrigue of nocturnal bedroom adventures, but it is from the sequence of actions themselves that we may view the bedroom as a comic reduction of the great battlefields of history, and indeed, of a rather Virgilian history at that: just as a Venereal rainstorm in the Aeneid drives the two venatores, Dido and her Trojan prince (Troilus's brother) to seek refuge in a cave, where the royal pair commit their empire-wrecking fornication, so too a "huge rayn" and "a weder for to slepen inne" will unite Troilus and Criseyde in the same bedroom; and just as Sinon's lies allow the Greeks to sneak soldiers into Troy in the belly of the wooden horse, so too by the "engyn" of speech Pandarus will introduce Troilus, who has been concealed all evening in a closet ("stuwe"), into Criseyde's bedroom through a trapdoor; just as Troy falls, Troilus collapses in a less than heroic faint before his sweet foe: The felyng of his sorwe, or of his fere, Or of aught elles, fled was out of towne; And down he fel a1 sodeynly a-swowne. (111.1090-92)

Chaucer suggests, moreover, that if Pandarus is "author" of all these antiheroic farces, the vicarious thrills that he derives from this miseen-scene of a high courtly poetics are subversive with regard to a nobler patrimony of heroic poetry whose purpose is to move men to action in fulfillment of duty. For while Troilus and Criseyde skirmish

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together in bed, Pandarus seeks out less exalted flames to warm him-those of the fireplace-and he feigns to distance himself from their sporting by pretending to read an "old romance" (111.979-80). Pandarus is not just sexually impotent: he is a "bad" poet and an enemy of the republic. In Books IV and V, however, the vicissitudes of Fortune that the lovers have so extravagantly bewailed in the secret "stations" of love's progress begin to manifest themselves more distinctly as concrete political events, as public affairs unfolding in public places, thereby forcing us to situate the individual destinies of Troilus and Criseyde in a more precise historical-and poetical-determinism. We see them now as the social animals that they must be. One will recall that Criseyde's father, Calkas, who has betrayed his native city to become counsellor to the Greeks, now becomes anxious for his daughter's safety in Troy and convinces the Greeks to offer the Trojan prisoner Antenor in exchange for Criseyde: henceforth, the seemingly autonomous events of love and war become sadly congruous, even though love itself will remain, throughout the Troilus, the prism through which the larger tragedy of the macrocosm--of Fortuna Major-will be refracted. Thus, in this poem, Troy itself will not fall, only Troilus; and Criseyde-for all the worldly joy that she has bestowed-will be the agent of his misfortune. But in the passions of individuals we still detect resonances of the larger, anarchic forces of history, such as when Troilus self-indulgently wishes that his personal catastrophe had befallen Priam, or his brothers-anyone but him: "Allas, Fortune! if that my lif in joie

Displesed hadde unto thi foule envye,

Why ne haddestow me fader, kyng of Troye,

Byraft the lif, or don my bretheren dye. . . ?"

(IV.274-77)

As the moment draws near when Criseyde "moste out of the towne," all of the figurative language about love and death in the high courtly style becomes progressively invested with a stark reality that the characters themselves cannot fail to grasp, if only dimly. The creation of physical distances in the last book brings to the narrator of the Troilus a perspective of finality that now includes history:5g But Troilus, now far-we1 a1 thi joie,

For shaltow nevere sen hire eft in Troie!

(V.27-28)

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Nor can the characters of the poem remain blind to the macrocosmic turn of events: "Now blisful lord, so cruel thow ne be Unto the blood of Troye, I praye the, As Juno was unto the blood Thebane, For which the folk of Thebes caughte hire bane." (V.599-602)

Troilus also ponders his defeat by Cupid as a tragic example for future writers (and readers) of history ("storie"): "Whan I the proces have in my memorie How thow me hast wereyed on every syde, Men myght a book make of it, lik a storie." (V.583-85)

Troilus wanders reminiscing through the streets of Troy and onto the city walls, as if through some kind of metonymy (of place with experience) he can recover at least the memory of love. At the same time, he spatializes his love, and by doing so underscores the tragic bond between his individual fortune and that of the city for which he is named. Criseyde too engages in a sad metonymy of place-with-person from her side of the landscape: the picture, being seen, sees the seer seeing: the vanishing point of perspective is a statement of both presence and absence: Ful rewfully she loked upon Troie, Bihelde the toures heigh and ek the halles. "Allas!" quod she, "the pleasaunce and the joie, The which now a1 torned into galle is, Have ich had ofte withinne tho yonder walles! 0 Troilus, what dostow now?" (V.729-34)

VIII. Conclusions If Troilus and Troy must succumb by what is in reality a single violence whose twin visages are love and war, right to the end of his poem Chaucer staunchly abides by his principle of refracting the larger pattern of history through the prism of love-or rather, through the dark mirror of love's language. In concluding his poem, Chaucer could perfectly well have fallen back on the straight narrative

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of Troy's destruction and he still would have held our attention; yet it is precisely at this moment that Chaucer becomes most critical of poetic art as afictio rethorica, to use Dante's term (DVE II.iv), and critical, as well, of the reader who has indulged his desire in the love of letters. For in the last book of the Troilus, not only is man's nature as a sign-making creature revealed in all of its weaknesses and shortcomings, but in Diomedes we glimpse the potentiality of conventional signs to become vehicles of the most despicable cruelty. Thus, while other poets of Troy's legend chose to glut us with the splendor of heroic swords and cut arteries, Chaucer remains centered upon language as a privileged field of aggression; and so he probes that more quiet calamity that begins in the dislocation of signs in the desiring psyche, where promises, meanings, values, and truth are quite simply forgotten. Criseyde is Fortune's agent on earth, and because Criseyde is "slydinge of corage" (V.825) she will allow the wheel of history to turn without resistance: "bothe Troilus and Troie town/Shal knotteles throughout hire herte slide" (V.768-69). The opening assault in this war-become-words where Troilus will be undone is made by Diomedes, a young, handsome Greek "of tonge large" who is less a soldier than a cunnilinguist. The narrator hates Diomedes ("he that koude his good"); nor is Diomedes ashamed to reveal his cynical self-seeking in his very first words: "He is a fool that wole foryete hymselve" (V.98). His initial public gesture is to lead off Criseyde's horse "by the bridel," the horse being, as I said, an ageless symbol for the passionate or appetitive self, the rein being a symbol for the faculty of reason by which one governs passion. Diomedes himself will call attention to this gesture later (V.874), and Criseyde will give him her horse, which was originally Troilus's, just before "she yaf him hire herte" (V.1050). Diomedes welcomes Criseyde from the hands of Troilus with a speech "of this and that," and lest the conspicuous banality of his circumlocutions conceal from us the evil of his erotic aggression, Diomedes calls attention to his own bad faith in speaking: "I shall fynde a meene,/That she naught wite as yet shal what I mene" (V. 104-5). Indeed, Diomedes is well schooled in the science of persuasion, for when he speaks of Calkas's possible "ambages," he proudly defines his terms: "That is to seyn, with double wordes slye,/Swiche as men clepen a word with two visages." (V.897-99). Diomedes is a perverter not only of loving hearts, but of language: "A1 sholde I dye, I wol hire herte seche! I shal narnore lesen but my speche." (V.797 -98)

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Diomedes's lechery is exerted strictly within the conventions of courtly discourse, yet it progresses with stunning swiftness; for in contrast with Troilus's shamefast inarticulateness (he who, even in a pinch, "Ne myghte o word for shame": III.80), Diomedes offers Criseyde first his "aid" (as a good knight should), then friendship, then "service," then love-all this in less than seventy lines. Criseyde's defense in this logomachy of love is flawed from the start:

. . . she naught his tales herde But her and ther, now here a word or two. (V.178-79) Chaucer now switches our attention to Troilus, who has collapsed in his empty bed in Troy, another "fall," and who begins a complaint in the mode of the traditional ubiest of medieval lyric, a complaint whose despair is so absolute that Troilus will come to question the ways of God to man. That this collapse of Troilus in the "hertes werre" (V.234) is but a synecdoche for the larger workings of Fortune in the Trojan War is suggested not only by Troilus's dream that "he sholde falle depe/From heighe o-lofte," but also by the "fir and flaumbe funeraUIn which my body brennen shal to glede" (V.303-4) which augurs the fate of a whole city of lovers about to be sacked and burned. I n hearing of Troilus's dream, Pandarus (like Pertelote in the "Nun's Priest's Tale") dismisses their prophecy as being unworthy of credence: "Allas, allas, that so noble a creature As is man shal dreden swich ordure!" (V.384-85)

Pandarus's counsel is that Troilus should ignore these supernatural signs-these "mervelous signals" as Chaucer calls them in the House of Fame (459)-by forgetting them in new adventures of lust: "Ris, lat us speke of lusty lif in Troie That we han led, and forth the tyme dryve." (V.393-94)

Since medieval sign theory necessarily involves a problematics of memory (all corporeal signs recall--recordare-to us the incorporeal images residing in our memory), Pandarus's advice to Troilus that he "foryete or oppresse" the cause of his languor touches upon a notion that is implicit in the Troilus, namely, that the tragic violence of history originates in that most human flaw of forgetfulness: Dame Philosophy,

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by contrast, teaches above all remembrance, as we read in Chaucer's translation of Boethius: "For certes the body, bryngyng the weighte of foryetynge, ne hath nat chased out of your thought all the cleernesse of your knowing. And if it be so that the muse and doctrine of Plato syngeth soth, a1 that every wight leerneth, he ne doth no thing elles than but recordeth, as men recorden thinges that ben foryeten" (Metrum 11, Prosa 12). Boethius agrees with Lady Philosophy, adding that we forget knowledge a first time when our soul is joined to a body, and a second time whenever the soul is overwhelmed by passion. Fortune and Criseyde are two figures who promulgate the principle of forgetting, one at the level of empires, the other at the level of individuals. Moreover, since man is a creature who knows and communicates only through signs, it is through willful negation or misuse of signs that Criseyde "forgets" Troilus, as when she gives to Diomedes the very brooch that Troilus earlier had given her "for remembraunce of me" (V.1691). But it is especially in written signs, whose function in the Middle Ages was also held to be commemorative, that Criseyde transcribes (in her letter to Troilus) what is obviously a chronicle of amnesis. In written speech too is change: This Troilus this lettre thoughte a1 straunge, When he it saugh, and sorwfullich he sighte. Hyrn thoughte it lik a kalendes of chaunge. (V.1632-34)

But then, perhaps the "original" sin of forgetting lies with Troilus himself, not for "placing his faith in the wrong woman or in a bad woman," as Muscatine has written, "but in the fact that he places his faith in a thing which can reflect back to him the image of that faith and yet be incapable of sustaining it." However one chooses to diagnose the human failures of Troilus and Criseyde, in my opinion the principal interest of the last book of the Troilw, if not of the poem as a whole, is the remarkable detail with which Chaucer reveals the "slydynge" of Criseyde's unrecording "corage" (V.825) beneath Diomedes's verbal onslaught, and it is clear that this drama of adultery may be considered as the narrative surface of a deeper transgression of signs. Diomedes is a pragmatic semiologist, and a devil, and his cunning is never concealed from us, as to How he rnay best, with shortest taryinge,

Into his net Criseydes herte bringe.

To this entent he koude nevere fyne;

T o fisshen hire, he leyde out hook and lyne.

(V.774-77)

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Moreover, the bait that these lovers cast before each other is not always just verbal, but includes body signs as well. Criseyde, for instance, lets her hair tumble "Down by hire coler at hire bak behynde," and though the history of epic hair has yet to be written, it seems obvious to me that this is a symbol of potential dissoluteness-in contrast, for example, with Spenser's Alma, the lady of Temperance, whose "yellow golden hearelwas trimly wouen, and in tresses wrought" (Faerie Queene II.ix. 19). Nor should we discount Criseyde's "browes joyneden yfere" as a sign of a lecherous disposition, if Curry's theories about the iconography of medieval portraiture are to be belie~ed.~O The principal assaults of Diomedes are verbal, though, and the principal capitulations of Criseyde are in kind. Thus, after their first meeting, Criseyde "Graunted, on the morwe, at his requeste,/For to speken with hym at the leeste" (V.949-50). Though her motive is supposedly both to refute before Diomedes her father's predictions that Troy must fall and to defend the Troilus that she loves from comparison with any Greek, she only praises her father's wisdom, and her own refutation of pejorative comparisons of Troilus only turns into flattery of Diomedes: "That Grekis ben of heigh condicioun,/I woot ek wel. . . . And that ye koude we1 yowre lady serve,/I trowe ek wel, hire thank for to deserve" (V.967-68; 972-73). And now her flattery, which has perhaps been undeliberate, gives way to a very deliberate, whopping lie: though she admits to Diomedes that she loved her first husband, now conveniently dead, she denies having loved Troilus. Or is it conceivable that Criseyde's "lie" is a revelation of a truth that is only more shocking, that she never did love him? "But as to spek of love, ywis," she seyde, "I hadde a lord, to whom I wedded was, The whos myn herte a1 was, ti1 that he deyde; And other love, as help me now Pallas, Ther in my herte nys, ne nevere was." (V.974- 78)

It is entirely in line with Chaucer's metalinguistic priorities in the Troilus that Criseyde's first overt act of infidelity-the act that makes possible all others-should be an act of speech, rather than one of a more carnal sort. Chaucer has given us a vivid anatomy of deception and lying, both of its motives and its potential effects, and Chaucer's fascination with such speech acts in the Troilus-as well as in the Canterbury Tales-is quite simply a medieval poet's manner of exploring, within the poetic conventions given to him by the authors of the past, the problem of lying. When Chaucer's critics say that he "me-

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dievalizes" the story of Troy, they should also take cognizance of a Platonic impulse in Chaucer-one that is evident already in the Book of the Duchess-to explore (not logically, but through strategies of poetic composition) the danger that poetry as conventional signs will denature, falsify, or subvert the truth of being. It is precisely with regard to the notion of truth that I shall venture few words about the ending of Troilus. Truth is a term pertinent not just to the ethical dilemmas of the characters in the poem, but also to the very problematical status of the poem itself as a fictio rethorica, to use Dante's expression once more. How can truth be expressed in a discourse that systematically veils truth? These are questions that Chaucer seems to have anticipated, but let us make a few remarks about the very word truth as a noun or substantive. It is well known that grammatical theory in the Middle Ages always remained rooted in ontology: nouns name substances; but names do not tell us about the manner in which these substances exist: to do that is the role of the predicate. Bursill-Hall summarizes the grammarians' attitude toward nouns, as opposed to verbs, in the following way: "The Nomen has as its meaning function the mode of the static, rest and determinate understanding which it expresses by means of the mode of being (modus entis) in contrast to the Verbum which signifies by means of the mode of becoming (modus e ~ s e ) . " The ~ ' noun truth refers, then, to something static, to some God-given spiritual ideal; the way in which truth exists must be expressed by verbs forming the predicate. But how could a moral poet such as Chaucer take it upon himself to name, without compromising them, all of those substances which define man's highest ideals in a narrative discourse that treats not of God's ways, but of sinning man's? How can the syntax of narrative complete itself except at the expense of everything a priori that is ideal, perfect, universal, etc.-all the more since the very economy of narrative involves reversals, negations, or transformations of whatever material is subjected to structuration in narrative? In a suggestive article, the late Adrienne R. Lockhart shows, precisely, that ethical absolutes that are named in the Troilus--honour, worthinesse, manhod, gentillesse, and trouthe--do indeed become subject to a "pattern of semantic deterioration" and a "debasement of meaning."62 Lockhart quite justly sees "trouthe" as "the most central but the most difficult concept of all," and she concludes that the "pattern of semantic deterioration" which she observes in the Troilus is "a metaphor for the artistic process itself; in that sense, the structural pattern of debasement of meaning parallels the central moral issue of Troilus and Criseyde, as it is explicitly stated in the epilogue."63 These profound insights can be extended, moreover, with regard

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to Chaucer's strategies at the very end of the Troilw. In making "trouthe" the central issue of the Troilw, Chaucer is inviting us to judge not only his all-too-human characters, but also the very language of poetry itself, thanks to which these characters "exist." But is poetic discourse really competent to indict and judge itself, without promulgating new and perhaps even more serious errors? I n the light of this question we may understand why, instead of concluding his narrative of Troilus's ordeals in a world where all deeds carry the flaws of the mortals who execute them, Chaucer radically breaks with the story of Troy and depicts Troilus in the "holoughnesse of the eighthe sphere" (V.1809), where he sees face to face (with "ful avysement"), that is, beyond the darkness and enigmas of mortal knowing, into the @mum mobile. In the light of this same question we may also understand the sequence of speech acts by which Chaucer peels back the concentric layers of fiction which correspond to the different spheres that make up the onionlike universe of his poem. One will recall that from his sphere in heaven, Troilus laughs at the woe of mortals, "And dampned a1 oure werk that foloweth so/The blynde lust, the which that may nat laste,/And sholden a1 oure herte on heven caste" (V.1823-25). In damning our work, Troilus is in effect damning the "I-thou" of the fictive pact between narrator and reader, an unholy pact which has too long distracted us from less erroneous modes of apprehending truth. Suddenly the narrator exhorts us, the unregenerate lovers of the "worldes brotelnesse," the "yonge fresshe folkes he or she," to renounce our vanity and to love the God in whose image we are made. Then he condemns the "rascal" gods that the poets of antiquity worshiped and the "olde clerkis speche/In poetrie" (V.1894-95) that separates men from the truth. Having dispersed, now, the fiction not only of his poem but also of his narrator and audience, Chaucer addresses, in their place, the "moral Gower," another English moral poet who sought, as he himself put it, "The common vois which mai nought lie"64and who languished for an unrhetorical world of proper significations where, Gower says, T h e citees knewen no debat

The people stod in obeissance

Under the reule of governance,

And pes, which ryhtwisness keste,

With charite tho stod in reste:

Of mannes herte the corage

Was schewed thanne in the visage;

T h e word was lich to the conceite

Withoute semblant of d e ~ e i t e . ~ ~

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MERVELOUS SIGNALS

Next, Chaucer addresses "philosophical Strode," a n English logcian-that is, a man whose intellectual goal was by definition to restore truth to the speech of man. Chaucer asks these two Englishmen T o vouchen sauf, t h e r e n e d e is, to correcte, O f youre benignites a n d zeles goode.

(V.1858-59)

Finally, Chaucer addresses the source of all true language, the Logos itself, in the person of Christ, who is consubstantial with the God he perfectly mediates, and whose triune mystery is known as an enigma that is not poetic (hence, apocryphal), but divine. Trouthe, then, lies less in worldly things to be spoken or learned than in a movement, a progress, leading first from poetic fable to moral history, then to philosophy, and finally to prayer and illumination. The conclusion of the Troilus lies not in the completion of a narrative sequence, but rather in a sequence of distinct speech acts which break from narrative itself and lead the believing reader to an unmediated presence of the "uncircumscript" illuminating Word.

NOTES 1 It is with such a purpose in mind that I organized a colloquium entitled "L'Ar-

cheologie du Signe," held 2- 12 August 1977 at the Centre Culture1 International de

Cerisy (France),and whose proceedings are currently being prepared for publication.

2 La dialettica e la retorica dell'Umanismo: 'Tnvenzione" e "Metode" nella cultura del XV e

XVI secolo (Milan, 1968); The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970).

3 Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pens& chez les grecs; itudzs de psycholo@ histongue

(Paris, 1965), pp. 153-55.

4 Acts 2:l-6.

5 For a recent introduction to medieval sign theory, see Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of

Language (New Haven, 1968).

6 Augustine De doctrina christiam II.i.1, as translated by D. W. Robertson, Jr., in On

Christian Doctrine (New York, 1958), p. 34.

7 Confessions I.xiii.35.

8 De ordine II.xii.35.

9 Aristotle, O n Interpretation, Commentary by St. Thomas and Cajetan, tr. Jean T . Oesterle

(Milwaukee, 1962). Lesson 11, 2-5, pp. 24-25.

10 Ibul., p. 25. 11 John of Salisbury, Metalogicon 1.8, tr. Daniel D. McGarry (Berkeley, 1955). 12 John of Salisbury, Polycraticus, esp. bk.11. 13 John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, I. 1. 14 ~ m b e r t u sof Romanus, De eruditione praedicatorum, tr. under the title Treatise on Preaching by the Dominican Students, Province of St. Joseph, ed. W. M. Conlon, OP (London, 1955), p. 48.

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15 For a n interesting semiological study of Umbertus, see Maria Corti, "Structures ideologiques et structures semiotiques dans les Sermones ad statw d u XIIIe sihcle," forthcoming in the proceedings of the colloquium mentioned above in n. 1. I am personally grateful to ~ r o f e s s o rCorti for her generous discussions with me o n many pdints pertinent to this essay. 16 Douglas Kelly, "Mati2re and genera dicendi in Medieval Romance," in A@roaches to Medieual Romance, Yale French Studies 51, ed. Peter Haidu (New Haven, 1974), pp. 150 ff; see also his "Specialite e t invention des topiques: logos-argumentumamplificatio abbrevatio," in the proceedings of the colloquium mentioned above in n. 1. 17 Domenico Cavalca, Frutti della lingua de fra Domenico Cavalca, ridotti alla sua Vera lezione (Rome, 1354),ch. XXV, pp. 206-7. I have greatly benefited from my conversations with Daniel Lesnick o n late medieval preaching. 18 "Grammatica una et eadem est secundum substantiam in omnibus linguis, licet accidentaliter varietur"; as quoted by G. L. Bursill-Hall, Speculative Grammars of the Middle Ages (The Hague, 1971).p. 38. 19 De vulgari eloquentia I.iii. Subsequent allusions to this text are given in my notes under the abbreviation DVE. Citations in English are from Philip H. Wicksteed, ed., Latin Works of Dante Alighien, tr. A. G. Ferrers Howell (London, 1904),pp. 1 - 123. 20 DVE 1I.viii. 21 An exception is Emile Benveniste, "Structure d e la langue et structure d e la societe," in Probllmes de linguistique gknkrale ZZ (Paris, 1974),pp. 91 - 103. 22 DVE I.ii and iii. 23 Convivio I.xii. 24 I b d . , I.xiii. 25 Zbid., IV.vi and 1 V . i ~ . 26 Zbid., IV.ii. 27 Les artspoNiques du XZZe et d u XIIZe s3cle. ed. Edmond Faral(1924; rpt. Paris, 1962), pp. 86 ff. 28 DVE 1 I . i ~ . 29 Zbid., I.vi-ix. 30 Conviuio I.xiii. 31 Nancy Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970),pp. 121 ff. 32 Lois Ebin, "Lydgate's Views on Poetry," Annuale Mediamale, 18 (1977),76- 106. 33 Benveniste, Probllmes de linguistigue ginirale ZZ, p. 3 1. 34 Chaucer, Boece, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston. 1957), IV. metrum 7, R. 1-10. All references to Chaucer's writings are to this edition. 35 See Eugene Vance, "Warfare and the Structure of Thought in Virgil's Aeneid," Quaderni urbinati di cultura clacsica, 15 (1973),1 1 1 - 62. 36 Jean-Pierre Faye, Thkorie d u rkcit: introduction aux "langages totalitaires" (Paris, 1972), p. 9:"Parce que l'histoire ne se fait qu'en se racontant, une critique d e I'histoire ne peut Ctre exercee qu'en racontant comment I'histoire, en se narrant, se produit." 37 Bernard Guenee, L'occdent a w XZVe et XVe s2cles: les ktats (Paris, 1971),p. 126. 38 Albert C. Baugh, A Hittory of the English Language (New York, 1957),p . 177. 39 Ballade 2 1 1, as quoted by Daniel Poirion, Le Prince et le polte: L'ivolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut a Charles d'Orlians (Paris, 1965),p. 109: "You will be destroyed. T h e Greeks and Latins will say: 'In times gone by, here was England.' " 40 J. R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, 1969), chs. 2 and 3;J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (New York, 1965). I accept Searle's claim that no speech act is not some kind of performance, and that "constative" utterances d o not enjoy a neutral, detached existence.

MERVELOUS SIGNALS

337

41 DVE II.iii, p. 76. 42 Julia Kristeva, Semiotiki, recherches pour une se'manalyse (Paris, 1969), pp. 113 ff. 43 I use the terminology of Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston, 1967). pp. 303 ff. 44 Augustine De musica I.ii.2. 45 Zbid., I.ii.3. 46 De trinihte IV.ii.4. 47 See Faral, Les arts poe'tigue, pp. 89 ff; also James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1974), pp. 20-21, 182-91. 48 John A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain Poet (London, 1971), p. 51. 49 Dietrich Kamper, " 'Fortunae rota volvitur.' Das Symbol des Schicksalsrades in der 8 (Berlin, 1971), 357-74. spatmittelalterlichen Musik," Miscellanea Me-, 50 Jean Pepin, "L'hermeneutique ancienne," Poitique, 23 (1975), 291 ff. 51 11. Prosa 2.70. 52 Zbid., 6.80. 53 Augustine De mendacio ii.2, iii.3. 54 Margaret Anderson, "Some Functions of Medieval Rhetoric in Chaucer's Verse Narrative," Thesis Yale 1963. 55 Vance, "Warfare and the Structure of Thought," pp. 131-39. 56 For a generative study of antithesis in lyric discourse, see George Lavis,L'Expression de l'affectzvite' dans la pobie lyriquefra-aise du moyen-rige (XZZe-XIZZe s.): e'tude se'mantique et stylistigue d u re'seau lexical joie-dolor (Paris, 1972). See also my review in Speculum, 50 (1975), 332-35. 57 Gordon Leff, William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester, 1975), pp. 2 ff. 58 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1957), pp. 78 ff; also, figures 53 -57. 59 See P. M. Kean, Love Vision and Debate, Chaucer and the Making of English Poehy (London, 1972), I, 147. 60 See note on V.813 in Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 834. 61 Bursill-Hall, Speculative Grammars, pp. 118- 19. 62 Adrienne R. Lockhart, "Semantic, Moral, and Aesthetic Degeneration in Troilzcs and Criseyde," The Chaucer Review, 8 (1973), 101. 63 Zbid., pp. 116-17. 64 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. G. C . Macaulay (Oxford, 1901), Prologue, v.124.

65 Zbid., 106-14.

Models and Antimodels in Medieval Culture

Maria Corti

N EUROPEAN SEMIOTICS the need has been strongly felt over recent years for a clarification, an investigation of the links between historical context, sociocultural models, and literature. If France, whose orientation is different, is left to one side, then in the European geographical scene Russia, Poland, West Germany, and Italy all give evidence of an intersecting of two points of view, semiotic and historical, an intersection whose sociological implications are analogous if not homologous to the intersection, in another cultural area, of linguistic and pragmatic viewpoints. That it is a question of homology might be inferred from the pedigree of Italian semiotics whose branches can be traced back to well-rooted national traditions of philology, historical linguistics, and history of the language:' the very concepts of conservation, innovation, andsituation reproposed by semiotics and pragmatic linguistics had already found here fertile and profitable terrain (one need look no further than certain fundamental essays of Benvenuto Terracini). It is against this Europe-wide semiotic background that the work done on cultural typologies in the Soviet Union, in particular that of Yu. Lotman and B. Uspensky,' stands out markedly. In terms of Lotman's approach, every culture is a modeling system, and it follows that to the realities of its various epochs there will correspond models, models which in his concrete typological investigations Lotman assimilates into linguistic structures; thus, he can speak of a paradigmatic type (semantic, symbolic: for example, the Middle Ages), a syntagmatic type (for Lotman, the age of Peter the Great), an aparadigmatic and asyntagmatic type (the Enlightenment), a paradigmatic and syntagmatic type (idealism). However, since the construction of culture is found to be always open-ended, nonfinite, such that it can contain within itself what is "different from" and contrary to itself, it follows that any model will in practice be applied to cultural parastructures, to quasistructures, so that it will be impossible to make it coincide with structure in the strict sense of linguistics. This is a limitation imposed on enthusiasm for the model of which Lotman and Uspensky themselves are well aware, and it has been

I

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discussed by the Polish scholar Stefan Zolkiewski in an as yet unpublished paper for the 1973 conference in Milan of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS) (Segre in the text cited clarified this problem in all its implications). We are thereby led to reflect on two aspects of the question readily applicable to medieval culture and far-reaching in their implications. They will form the argument of the present article and may be summarized as follows: (1) the type of modeling system used by medieval culture for selfdescription; (2) the existence of an "other" which tends to produce an antimodel whose ultimate outcome is specularity. Our starting point for the first question may well be Lotman's affirmation concerning the cultural self-model: "A self-model represents a powerful means of 'self-adjustment' for a culture, since it bestows upon it a systematic unity, and determines from several aspects the qualities it will possess as an information-storage system. We have to deal, though, with a reality on a different level, and which merits investigation in its relation to the level of the texts."Vt is just this reality of a different level which requires thorough examination in the case of medieval culture. As is generally known, around the year 1000 a trinitarian conception of society came to prevail. A ternary social schema based on the tres ordines of oratores, bellatores, laboratores, can be represented as a triangle with at its apex the oratores, i.e., the personae ecclesiasticae, and at its base the two other classes, the warriors and the peasants.* It is true that at the end of the ninth century the schema can be glimpsed in the glosses to the version of the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius, whose author is King Alfred of England; nonetheless, in the course of the tenth century one finds again either hybrid models which go back to social categories deriving from late antiquity (Rather of Verona) o r dualistic models (clerics/laymen; freemenlslaves), or else anthropological schemata (coniugati, uirgines, etc.). Thus it is only with the eleventh century that the ternary pattern, simplifying, and at the same time erecting barriers between classes, barriers fatal as destiny, decisively affirms itself to such a degree that for two centuries to come it dominated culture uncontested. It is more a question of categories than a social matter (women, for example, are not accommodated within it); it neither creates nor reflects active ties o r social conflicts, despite the fact that it is endowed with a sign function of considerable weight, which explains why it is found in many mutually autonomous civilizations, as both Benveniste and Dumezil have in detail demonstrated." From a semiotic point of view, the most stimulating aspect of this ternary cultural model, which we find put forward not by theologians

MODELS A N D ANTIMODELS I N MEDIEVAL CULTURE

34 1

and preachers alone but also by historian^,^ is the fact that it affirms itself as an exemplary projection of the Trinity, which by its means reveals itself in the world. Society, rendered thus hierarchical and, as a consequence, consecrated, becomes the signum of the Trinity, so that its value is not intrinsic but lies in this participation in the divine model. The divine adjective thus becomes pregnant with meaning, for it indicates not merely the quality of the model but also its genesis: in other words, the ternary model, represented iconically by the triangle, implies that the philosophy of the Middle Ages is no cultural creation, but an iconic principle of construction of the world whose origin is in God. In the same manner, for Dante in the Paradiso (xxviii. 55-56), the nine spheres of heaven are referred to the nine angelic orders, whose projection they are. A conception of this kind is fraught with consequences. In the first instance, what does not fit into the model does not exist at the level of signs, the only level which in religious and cultural terms is endowed with meaning; it lives at an existential level as error, discord, an element that is negative and entropic (i.e., pluralizing and centrifugal). Hence the semantic charge of the term ordo, at once juridical and religious, and the rigidity of the codes of behavior hegemonic culture imposes. In the second instance, if the ternary model is divine in nature, it follows that it is the duty of society to remain static, fixed, immutable, without there being any possibility of movement from class to class, or any possibility of a proliferation of classes under pain of betraying the program laid down by God for mankind. In the third instance, and as a consequence of the abovementioned divine program of meek, unmurmuring immobilism, man, like the other creatures, must set his sights on rendering stable the volume of information which is proper to him; and this entails a rejection of knowledge for knowledge's sake. It is with what for us seems a rather worrying show of energy that Saint Bernard denounces those who "scire volunt . . . ut sciant," victims of a damaging spiritual disposition, curiositas. Hence it is that the various preachers condemn no less roundly that other form of mobilism, which derives from actual physical wandering, whereas the healthy Christian ought to feel tied to his surroundings, his authentic locus deputatus in the divine model. Here begins a delineation of some of the oppositions which can be deduced from the model, and which are quite early codified: high 1low; closed / open; immobile 1 mobile; ordered 1 disordered. With a footnote: a considerable degree of sign consciousness on the part of official culture and a consequent separation of the plane of existence, where the res are to be found, and the symbolic plane, wheresigna are located (these being the only conveyors of knowledge), had from a typological standpoint effects which are antithetical to those found in a culture founded on

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res, for which living is a never-ending attempt to unravel the rules of an existence whose unceasing play is their modification. We have said that the existential plane becomes a sign zone only in virtue of the locus assigned the various res and guaranteed by the hierarchy of the general symbolizing model: an extreme example, and a highly instructive one, might be the Liber de statu ecclesiae by Gilbert of Limerick (c. 1106- 1139). In its first part at least it is in the form of a commentary on an Ecclesiae depicta imago, i.e., on one of those iconic representations which in the manuscripts would have accompanied the text.7 In this depicta imago the triangular model is applied, in the guise of pyramids inscribed one within the other, to all the microstructures and macrostructures of society. In an explanatory supplement Gilbert warns that the fact that the various pyramids narrow towards the apex symbolizes how strait is the gate and how narrow the way for those who, placed high in the ranks of the hierarchy, must act as leaders for mankind, as also for those who set their feet on the path of spirituality alone: "Et tota quidem imago pyramidis formam praetendit: quia inferius ampla est, ubi carnales et coniugatos recipit; superius autem acuta, ubi arctam viam religiosis et ordinatis proponit. Nec sola generalis forma superius arctatur; sed et singulares formulae, quas ipsas continet, in supremo acuuntur" ["And indeed the entire image displays the shape of a pyramid, since the lowest part is broad, encompassing the carnal and the married; the upper part, however, is narrow, as it offers a strait way for the religious and those in orders. Nor is the general form alone narrow at the top, but also the individual shapes, those very things it contains, are sharpened at the very highest point"] (c. 997). The first pyramid, contained in all the others, is the "parochia, quae in summo sacerdotem habet" (then below the parish priest are found the seven gradus of ecclesiastical hierarchy, corresponding to the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost). But the parish, like other more all-embracing ecclesiastical structures, is itself a social structure inside which the parishioners are arranged to accord with the pattern of the tres ordines. T h e second pyramid is the monasterium; the third the episcopatus, a structure ecclesiastical and social; the fourth the diocesis; the fifth the p-imatus, which may embrace as many as six dioceses; the sixth the Ecclesia generalis. T o each ecclesiastical power there corresponds a lay power, governed by the saeculare jw; hence are derived the pairs papa-imperator, p-zmates -rex, epzscopus -comes, sacerdos -miles. Three aspects of Gilbert's operation are in a certain sense exemplary: the first is the way he focuses on the unified physiognomy of culture, i.e., on the unifying aspect of the model itself, for it is reflected in each microstructure in exactly the same way as-to take u p a simile much used in

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the Middle Ages-the same image is reflected in a mirror, or on a smaller scale in each of the fragments of the same mirror once it has been shattered.' Further, the frequency with which the semantic field of the speculum recurs in the titles and in the course of medieval theoretical treatises is in itself semiotically indicative. The second noteworthy aspect of Gilbert's operation lies in his insistence on the concept of inclusion, of miroir dans le miroir, what we would call today mise en abfme, whereby each triangular structure is contained, included in another larger triangle, like boxes one within the other. At this point the series of oppositions listed above, as the result of extrapolation from the model (high / low, closed /open, etc.), is susceptible of progressive increase: pogressively included /' excluded. The third contribution of Gilbert's operation lies in the stress he lays on the model's iconic figuration, on the spatial formalization of culture, for the result is that verbal message and iconic message are complementary-a fact which, as well as being most illuminating, is also of decisive importance for the history of the model of the tres ordines itself. Nor are these all the insights of a semiotic order which De statu ecclesiae has to offer us: since the pope, like Noah in the ark, leads the human race through the waters (c. 999), Gilbert establishes a typological correspondence between the two, which thereby becomes a linking of the prefiguring and of what is prefigured; hence the episode of the ark, guided by Noah in the Flood, takes the form of an allegoria in factis of the ruling of the world, i.e., of the tres ordines, on the part of the pope; in the same way, on the iconic level, the ark,f i p r a mundi, cannot be other than tricamerata. So this fwaefipratio, too, merely serves to confirm the divine origin of the ternary model. An illuminating variant of the different pyramids is the triangle that can be constructed from the words of Gilbert: at its apex stands Christ, while at the two angles at its base we find Noah and the pope respectively: a strange enough triangle that bestrides the structures of time and space, at one and the same time diachronic and synchronic; its apex in heaven and its base on the earth, the triangle is the ultimate product of a wider process of hierarchical consecration. We have already said that res take their place in official culture insofar as they lend themselves to the attribution of a sign function which will endow them with a pertinent locw in the general model; women, for example, do not so fit in, and are completely left out of account by theorists of the tres ordines. Hence Gilbert's embarrassment when, in his all-enveloping description of society, he finds himself faced with them and cannot tell what to do with them. He is, in consequence, full ofjustifications, almost of excuses, as he accounts to

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the reader for the fact of naming them and for his notes concerning them: "Qui autem sub his gradibus intra sinum parochialae Ecclesiae continentur, trifarie dividuntur. Ex quibus superiores in pyramide oratores intellige; et quia quidam ex eis conjugati sunt, ideo viros et feminas nominavimus. Sinistrales vero in pyramide aratores sunt, tam viri quam feminae. Dextrales quoque bellatores sunt, viri atque feminae. Nec vero feminarum esse officium orare, arare aut certe bellare; sed tamen his conjugatae sunt atque subserviunt, qui orant, et arant et pugnant" ["Moreover, those things comprised under these degrees within the jurisdiction of the Church are to be divided in a threefold way. Understand by those at the top of the pyramid the learned class, and since some of them are married, we have therefore mentioned both men and women. Truly, on the left of the pyramid are plowmen, both men and women. Also, on the right are the warriors, both male and female. Truly it is the position of women neither to speak, plow, nor (certainly) fight; nevertheless, women are married to, and serve, those who speak, plow, and fight"] (c. 997-98). Women have absolutely no officium, no function on a cultural or sign level, but on the existential plane they are wives o r servants of men so that it is with an aim of descriptive accuracy in the anthropological order that Gilbert says he names them. There is a further justification: after all, God's mother is a woman, and if one names her, why not name the others? Without fear of contradiction it can be stated that in the eleventh and in part in the twelfth centuries women, whether noble, peasant, or slave, had as yet no claim to enter into a sign-function model. This right they will attain to in the course of the twelfth century with socioeconomic changes, increased urbanization, the formation of small, closed family nuclei; this function of theirs will further develop in the thirteenth century to the point of giving rise, in a new social model of the various status, to a hierarchical structure involving women, the multa genera mulierum, religious and lay; for these latter Mumbert of Romans will create a hierarchical pattern within which social locus will be explicitly codified: going from the mulieres nobiles to the burgenses divites, to the iuvenculae saeculares, to thefamulae divitum, right down to the mulieres pauperes in villls and the mulieres mere trice^,^ each with its relative code of behavior, forcefully normative.

Everything that is new, extraneous to the model, everything that contradicts cultural stereotypes, thereby finding itself located beyond the confines of collective memory, finds it difficult to gain a foothold. This holds good for all periods; each time there appears in a culture


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an ideology or a program which is in any measure deviant, a conflicting semiotic reaction is triggered off within the society between the "different," which requires new structuring models, i.e., new semiotic structures, and what has already been codified and which is thus with its differently oriented structures dominant. T h e conflict is all the more marked when the initial system is closed, ordered, hierarchic, as the medieval system was. If for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we add the striking circumstance that the ternary model, which is trinitarian and divine, is in consequence furnished with signs respectively positive and negative (+ = eternal and - = historical), it at once becomes clear how difficult was the task faced by those who theorized and popularized the ternary system when, from the twelfth century on, social infrastructures with the rise of the urban economy underwent an irreversible change: from the class of the laboratores there slowly emerges a society of small craftsmen, merchants, and citizens, which expands horizontally in contiguous development and diversification, endangering the general verticality of the model, and very obviously calling for new modes of classification. There came a moment in which official culture realized that there had been a noticeable decline in the triadic model's information capacity. T h e result is that a phase of conflict and theoretical hybridism is in the thirteenth century followed by a remarkable attempt, on the part most especially of the Dominican order (in the persons of Thomas Aquinas and Humbert of Romans), to adapt to the new society a general "signifier" or articulated model, which would describe it and yet not find itself in contradiction with the earlier model of the tres ordines. T h e path to be followed had already been suggested by just such formal elaborations as those of Gilbert of Limerick, referred to above, models which tended to iterate the process of inclusion. T h e most magnificent, and, on its own terms, the most successful experiment of all is that of the General of the Dominican order, Humbert of Romans (+1277), in Combining the suggestions of the his De eruditione praedicator~rn.'~ inclusive ternary model with the rigorous organization of Aristotelianism, he endeavors to create a new model of order for society, given that for some time past, with the explosion of city life and of the economic energy of the merchants, such order seems to have been lost to it. T h e result is a new, all-embracing hierarchic structure taking in omne hominum genus, a structure which is richer and more original than the inclusive ternary model because it is less repetitive, and because it does not merely limit itself to successive mises en abime of one and the same model. As already remarked," Humbert takes as his starting point one hundred social status; these he sees as closed social microstructures, or else as macrostructures no less closed, going on to

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adopt alternately a technique of contiguity and a technique of inclusion in order to make them fall into the general model. Since the lower groups are inscribed within the higher, and communication between groups is virtually nonexistent, the criteria of the subdivision turn out to be those of a coincidence between the hierarchy of social structures and the hierarchy of power. Furthermore, with the coherence of one who wishes to affirm a model of reality which will institutionalize the distinction between the existential level and the sign-culture level, he excludes from his hierarchic schema the trade Guilds themselves, the famous merchants who constituted the very framework of the money-based citizen-centered economy.I2 With them he will deal, though as an apostle of souls, in his Sermones ad omne negotiorum genus, in sermo XCI (In mundinis) and sermo XCII (In mercatis), but he will be unable to fit them into a semiotic cultural structure which could serve as their consecration.I3 In other words, Humbert modifies the earlier ternary pattern, making it less repetitive and mechanical, broadening its potential applicability in social terms, though in substance his formalizing operation is analogous to that of those who theorized the tres ordines themselves; i.e., once a new forma pyramidis has been assumed as a grid, it is simply superimposed on the society of the time. T h e result is inevitable: anything which does not fall within the bounds of the model cannot exist within the culture. Thus is perpetuated a basic lack of correspondence between reality at the level of the res and reality at the level of the signa; the model remains parastructural.

Before we turn our attention to what will not fit into the two great pyramidal models of the tres ordines and of the status, to that which remains "different," "other," with the possibility, it may be, of generating out of itself an antimodel, a footnote must be added concerning the pragmatic function of the models themselves within the universe of the Sermones in Latin and of the vernacular sermons. On the one hand, there is the general model; on the other, society, the actual public; between the two are the preachers, who give currency to the model and, with their norms for behavior, apply it. Exactly how is the model brought to bear? There exists in this sense a typology of the pragmatic preaching situation which forces us to distinguish, in the first place, between patterns and micromodels for sermons and the actual drafting of real sermones themselves. T o the first category belong the Sermones ad status contained in the De eruditione paedicatorum of Humbert of Romans; this general of a religious order brings to-


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gether the experience of a long life, as Master of Arts at Paris, as scholar, preacher, and cultural organizer, putting it at the service, between 1266 and 1277 (the year of his death), of the most important pragmatic function his friars were called upon to undertake: preaching. Hence it is that the Sermones of Humbert, insofar as they constitute "patterns" for sermons, are also metacommunicative texts, i.e., texts which have been put together at the level of reflection on communicative activity. Thus their message is aimed at receivers who are not members of the general public; the readers of this text will become in their turn senders, but of oral messages to the public, senders of sermons. Humbert of Romans's first aim is, then, to teach his readers how they are to introduce into the consciousness of the collectivity the cultural hierarchical model he elaborates. T o this end he sets up patterns for sermons whose general structure is constant and, in any case, already codified (thema, auctoritates, exemplum), and whose variants, as they are put into practice, bear a direct relationship to the social status of the hearers, of the public. Humbert is aware, that is, that once hierarchies have been created and consecrated, the rules of the game must still be observed, and the single sermo must be made to enter into a wider conceptual system, adapting itself to the logic of the different social classes. Thus it is that different norms for behavior can be derived from the same "quotations" (thema, auctoritates) and can be put forward in different fashion to accord with the status of those who are to receive the message. Quotations are also frequently repeated with the aim of impressing them on the collective memory, for, in fact, the preachers are only too well aware that the model they offer corresponds only in part to reality, to culture as it is experienced in its concrete practices. T h e sermones themselves frequently give evidence of the gap, of the clash between models and society, and of the consequent need to plan out means of modifying aberrant aspects of cultural behavior. In other words, the preachers impose a self-model, which owes its creation to their own particular culture, on a society which tends increasingly to break away from it; thus it is that the sermon comes to generate sectorial behavior norms.I4 Humbert of Romans further suggests that his friars prepare their sermons in the two genera linguarum, Latin and the vernacular, given that within one and the same community there coexist cultural circles at a higher level (where Latin is used) and at a lower (with use of the vernacular), and also heterogeneous culture whose codes are, we would say today, creolized. All this is perfectly clear from the description Jacques de Vitry gives of Paris in his Historia Occidentalis, chapter 7, "De statu parisiensis civitatis."'This placing side by side of sermons

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in Latin and sermons in the vernacular, with its recognition that two linguistic codes can exist within the social order, is the only concession to the polyglotism of medieval culture that will be found within the world of preaching. The rules of behavior which the preachers impose on the temporal components of the different status have been built u p on the basis of rigid spatial and modal oppositions, whose codification we have seen realized thanks to the inclusive pyramidal model. In fact, it is the viewpoint generated by this cultural model which sets in opposition on the ethical plane certain spatial structures, such as closed I open, outside I inside, and it is from these that the modal opposition immobile 1 mobile takes its rise. And so the preachers rebuke the vagantes, all those who leave the place assigned by God for their dwelling, unless pilgrimage or the orders of a superior are involved. So, too, lay women are strongly advised to stay at all times inside the house, without leaning out of the window either, for outside equals danger, sin, the devil himself. That they should go to church is alone permitted, for that place belongs to God, and it is a closed place; they must be on guard, though: outside the church is its opposite, the square, an open place, where the devil is quick at his work. Once again it is to the general model that reference must be made in order to explain the plurivalency of behavioral symbols; in this sense Humbert of Romans's attitude to women is absolutely typical: they are now accepted within the hierarchical framework, but wherever possible placed so as to correspond with the status of their menfolk, conforming to a distribution criterion arranged from the higher to the lower. It is this same criterion which presides over allocation of behavioral models, and of their corresponding symbols; obviously it is not behavioral models in the modern sense that we are concerned with here; rather with a kind of praefigurationes of the female status contemplated by the social hierarchy. T h e nobiles have their model in the Virgin Mary, who was of the House of David, or they have other models no less aristocratic (St. Agnes, St. Catherine, etc.); the burgenses have St. Elizabeth, or the widow Judith, etc; the famulae, Hagar, handmaid of Sarah, etc. For those in the lowest place on the scale, the meretrices or incendiariae mundi, there is Mary Magdalene; but since Mary Magdalene was highly regarded by Christ, who kept her close to him, this must surely have signified that socially she was of noble blood, and so we find her presented as a chitelaine from the neighborhood of Jerusalem. Indeed, to ensure her patents of nobility at the level of the sacred as well, she is suitably provided with a praefiguratio all her own; so it is that in the Speculum humanae salati ion is'^ she is found prefigured in the biblical episode of David, who having sinned sexually, is rebuked by the prophet Nathan. Prosti-


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tutes, though, Humbert says, should not get the wrong idea: since they are not by nature noble as Mary Magdalene was, attempt at redemption on their part will be no light matter. An examination of the use made of the auctoritates too, though space does not here permit it, would also confirm their manipulation for pragmatic purposes, providing as well a trajectory of their semantic shifting (an extreme case is that of the Song of Songs-the Canticum canticorum) within the space defined by the cultural model.

A first shift towards the margins of the model is effected when hierarchic relationships are not transgressed, but changed in function and meaning. For example, in twelfth-century vernacular poetry the substantial difference of rank between the lady, object of the troubadour tradition, and the shepherdess of thepastourelles, who can never aspire to courtly love, is the same as that which in Humbert of Romans separates mulieres nobiles from mulieres pauperes in uillulis; in other words, while the hierarchic relationships are isomorphic with those of the model, a number of shifts have been effected with regard to the cultural function of persons and things. For, while the troubadour lyric operates a metaphorical transposition of the images of fealty and servitude of the feudal structure, assimilating the service of love to service both social and divine, and operating a shift on the ethical plane alone (in that the lady is married), the situation becomes much more complex in the world of thepastourelle: the class difference between knight and uillana, manifested in the literary form of the "contrast" (debut),obviously derives from the codified social hierarchy, but the consequences which, on a historical level, are made to derive from this are, on a literary level, not merely twofold but in mutual contrast.I7 Let us examine the well-known pastourelle, L'autrierjost'una sobissa, by Marcabru: whether the poet's sole aim is, as Kohler would have it, restoration of an earlier traditional courtly morality, or whether, as Roncaglia and Biella maintain, he has no such intention, there is no doubt whatever that he, through the mouth of the knight, "polemically contrasts the native sound common sense of the rural environment with 'courtly' libertinage,"'8 reaching the point of describing the woman as corteza uilana; in other words, and on the best hypothesis, he calls into question the overall credibility of the consecrated hierarchical model, initiating a new kind of social controversy which will, particularly in the south of France, lead to substantial satire.

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On the other hand, thepastourelle genre illustrates the development of another strand whose standpoint is antithetical-there are traces of it already in the ninth chapter of the treatise De amore of Andreas Capellanus, which is entitled De amore rusticorum,'%hen the knight is authorized to profit from the love of the peasant, since the affair belongs to the sphere of existential reality and takes place naturaliter, so that it does not call into question the notion of loyalty towards the Lady, for it is signum only of a courtly love, i.e., of a love which takes place on a higher sign-culture level.

Medieval culture, though, also offers situations, manifestations, texts, extraneous to the model which serves for its self-definition, elements which are not official, open towards the different, the discordant, the opposite with respect to official codification, i.e., open towards the second term of the oppositions dealt with above (high / low, closed / open, outside / inside, immobile I mobile, ordered / disordered, and of others to which we will refer further on). Descriptions of this world of dissent, the work of clerici vagantes, histriones, joculatores, goliards, etc., are few and far between. Official texts pass over it in silence, a silence which should remind us that "exclusion mechanisms become more highly articulated and more differentiated in the work of those intellectuals who, with different degrees of competence, are called upcn to administer just such exclusion^,"^^ both on a theoretical and on a pragmatic plane; it ranges from the interdiction of silence to outright condemnation. Silence is the most effective instrument of "forgetting," an arm of whose use Lotman and Uspensky speak in the context of cultural mechanisms: "Culture constantly excludes specific texts from its particular sphere. T h e history of the destruction of texts, of their extromission from the collective memory bank, runs parallel to that of the creation of new texts . . . . It is worth bearing in mind that one of the most accentuated forms of class struggle in the cultural sphere is the requirement of obligatory forgetting with regard to specific aspects of historical experience." And, we should add, to account even more satisfactorily for empty spaces in the tradition, that much transgressing material of the twelfth century has been lost because it never was written down, but entrusted to oral transmission, since the fact of writing it could have involved sender and receiver both in mortal peril.'' And yet this "different," transgressing culture, wherein the devil is God's rival on equal terms and where those histriones which the official


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culture brands as ministri Satanae are triumphant (see Honorius of Autun in his Elucidarium 11, 18, in PL 172, 1148), developed and, difficulties notwithstanding, accumulated information, slowly becoming institutionalized alongside official culture itself. T h e most striking aspect which all manifestations of this "difference" have in common is the stress they lay on the bodily nature of things, i.e., on just that element which another of the oppositions of official culture had rejected: spirit lflesh. A lowering of the sublime is thereby effected in such a way that the mark + is shifted to the material (the body, sex, excrement) which is thus transformed into a symbol of fecundity, into the signum of universal cosmic value (the signa reappear, their roles inverted mirror-imagewise). This reversal of positive and negative signs involves all oppositions pertinent to the model; the high / low opposition, homologous to that of spzrit IfZesh, is turned upside down not merely on the individual plane but at the level of the collectivity as well, since it is the people who are the chief carriers of these material, bodily values. For the people, the area, loci deputati, of ludic manifestation is the public square, the arena, the fair, the market place-spatial structures that are open, and consequently potentially in the power of the Evil One, as the consecrating oppositions closed / open,finite / nonfinite had made clear. T h e spirit lflesh antithesis is accompanied by others which complement it: serious I comic, wise 1 foolish, official truth I extraofficiul truth. Bakhtin rightly remarks of popular festivals that "elles semblaient avoir CdifiC a c6te du monde officiel un second monde et une seconde vie auxquels tous les hommes du Moyen Age Ctaient mClCs dans une mesure plus ou moins grande, dans lesquels ils vivaient a des dates determinees. Cela creait une sorte de dualit6 du monde" ["they built a second world and a second life outside officialdom, a world in which all medieval people participated more or less, in which they lived during a given time of the year. . . . this [created a sort of] two-world follows that the most striking concentration of this c o n d i t i ~ n " ] .It~ ~ counterculture, the medieval carnival, is seen by Bakhtin as a "fCte du temps, celle d u devenir" ["feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal"], as, that is, something which moves yet again in the direction of the second element of the opposition mobile I immobile, whence its "abolition provisoire de tous les rapports hierarchiques, privileges, regles et tabous . . . Elle portait ses regards en direction d'un avenir inachevk" (p. 18) ["temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. . . . It looked towards an unachieved future"]. At this point, though, one has the impression of oversimplifying, if,

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in the wake of Bakhtin, without due distinction one adopts the expression "popular tradition" for the phenomena just referred to, and for those we will now go on to consider; it is certain that people in Romance-speaking areas-and, of course, they were not alone in this--developed and, in terms of their oral traditions, added to traditions, which were not only different from, but antithetical to, those of the cultured ruling class; it is no less certain that the various manifestations of the comic had a dissident, alternative function within the system; in this respect, Bakhtin touches on the vital point when he stresses the difference between the official character of the comic in the Greco-Roman world (the triumph of a Consul at Rome, accompanied by all kinds of popular quips) and its all but clandestine nature in the medieval period, once exception is made for social phenomena such as carnival and merrymaking on specific feast days, tolerated as the signs of the utopian character of a nonhierarchical universality. Yet, even when all this has been taken into account, space must be given to the problem of the passage from oral tradition to written tradition, for it is written tradition which has come down to us. There exists, in other words, within the official culture a layer of learned persons who absorb the motifs of lower-level culture, making them their own. T h e extent to which this mode of writing is an active or a passive process must be decided case by case; what is beyond doubt, though, is the fact that transgressions with respect to the general cultural model are produced within the culture which has generated the model itself. But this is an aspect we shall be returning to. By the same token, ludic manifestations of corporality (images erotic, obscene, grotesque, in the iconic or in the verbal field) are charged with so heavily negative a connotation for the official, codified culture that a number of consequences ensue, one of which is particularly significant, almost exemplary: histriones and meretrices are brought together to form a single, exceptionally deplorable, human category. As Casagrande and Vecchio, on the basis of their detailed research into higher-level culture, have clearly shown, "the element that unites them in this condemnation is, first and foremost, their use of the body and its gestuality for ends that are illicit and mundane: the jongleur uses his body as a vehicle of communication, the prostitute uses hers as a token of e~change."'~ What brings these twostatus together, then, is primarily the use made of the body. and of parts of the body exclusively within the existential sphere, as if the world of the res could hope to be complete in itself. What is more, histriones and meretrices make use of complementary signs of a purely bodily message: makeup, disguise, masks, all elements which themselves become charged with the vital and corporeal. A realism, and a grotesque one at that,

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appears as a form of communication which is antithetical to that the cultural codes offer, codes for which the parts of the human body have no value unless in function of something else which is not corporeal, on the basis of the general principleper vzsibilia ad invisibilia. It is from just such a sign standpoint that Gilbert of Tournai in his sermon Ad monzales (n. 4 in the already cited edition of Carla Casagrande) will put into effect-by means of a deformed reading of the Song of Songs (Non est hec pulchritudo corporalk de qua 1audatur)-an organic passage from the parts of the female body to symbols of virtue: one will remember that beautiful feet symbolizejustice; beautiful hands, mercy; beauty in stature, wisdom; and so forth. This for Gilbert is most consoling. He further dwells on it with the use of a simile which compares this projection of symbols onto the female body with the operations of those painters who overlay their primary material or grossus color with other colors, this time refined colors. From our chosen semiotic point of view, it is of interest to point out not only that the pyramidal model with which twelfth-century culture described itself is unable to absorb the "different" into itself so that it leaves to culture the characteristic of an open phenomenon; what is most interesting of all is to observe the relationships that are set u p between the model and what is "different," the moment this latter begins itself to be ritualized and institutionalized. T o begin with, we must stress yet again the mediation of an intellectual class, made up of clerics, university students, jongleurs, whose cultural standing is well within the ranks of official culture, and who lead, mediate, and articulate the explosion of what is "below," acting as a sort of intermediate cultural class. It is to the abilities of intellectuals such as these that we owe, for example, the texts of the sacred parodies, both paraphrases of the kind published by N o ~ a t i , ~like ' the Missa potatorum with its delightful combinatorial play of rhetorical structures, and also the burlesque Passions and erotic-sacred texts, with their lively polyglotism which will, in due course, influence the parody genres of the Romance literatures. All these texts, which suggest an extratext of whose solid existence there can be little doubt, have all their papers in order from a literary point of view; one need go no further than examination of the play they make with phono-timbric structures, their refined utilization of the universe of signifiers for comic-realistic effects: the graphic rendering of the typical calls of hunters, of merchants at the fair, of imprecations. Transgression in the form of sacred parody, Novati observes, is an earlier and more frequent phenomenon in France than in Italy, where from the earliest times parody was primarily political and there was less comic-realistic treatment of sacred material. Novati wonders why but suggests no

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definite answer (pp. 2 16- 17). T h e explanation may lie in the greater power and prestige of the hierarchical and feudal model in France, which would have made transgression more imperative, whereas on the Italian side of the Alps the Communes already provided society with new images and models of social coexistence. T o go back to the general problem of relations between the hierarchical pyramidal model and its "other," and to the coexistence of these two aspects as a moment of a typology of medieval culture, stimulating evidence is to be found both with regard to the model and to its "other." Try venturing into the territory of this latter, which by the very fact of setting itself up in direct antithesis to the model, of bringing to the fore the alternative element of the various oppositions, ends u p in some measure with a reproduction, an upside-down reproduction, of the model dissented from. By dint of ritualizing the antithesis, it is a mirror-image of the model which results, and this is quite soon institutionalized. Signs of such a process are not far to seek: in the unrivaled feast of carnival, for example, the fool, i.e., the chief demystifier of cultural stereotypes, was crowned king in function of a mirror-image parody hierarchy (the signifier "king" is referred to a new signified, "fool"), a process which appears anew in the festa stultorum, where the upper ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchy were mock-nominated in their correct order in the person of a false archbishop, bishop, abbot (in some areas, even a pope).2' Thus on the feast day of the Innocents a child was elected episcopellus and placed on the bishop's throne; ludus it may have been, but it was a ludus which gave the hierarchical principle in reverse. One particular is most indicative: at these feasts even the order of clothing was reversed, trousers being placed on the head, an operation which is entirely symbolic, and which in some measure reflects the depiction of jongleurs headdownward such as they actually appear in the miniatures which accompany the texts of higher-level culture. An analogous technique is found in the products of sacred parody writing, where formal structures of the religious texts are reproduced-those, for example, of the mass-by means of phonic-morphological and syntactic parallelisms put together with striking technical ability. These even involve shifts in phonological series (so that voiceless consonants become voiced, fricatives become bilabial, like vivit which becomes bibit), which seem to imitate the pronunciation of rustics or of the potatores at the height of their carousing. In the Missa potatorurn phonic parallelism and semantic contraposition between the liturgical text of the mass and its parodistic paraphrase achieve results at once brilliant and remarkably comic; but it is surely no accident that at the climax of the rite paraphrased, the Communio, we meet a reference to the tres ordines, clerici,


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domini, rustici, so transposed as to represent their complete desecration from the point of view of social c~existence.'~ One has no difficulty understanding how it is that one of the symbols of so-called popular culture is Janus, the double-faced pagan deity: high seriousness in one direction, and with a comic-grotesque leer in the other, symbol in a certain sense of the dichotomy sacred and profane, serious and comic, but also of the contrast between past and future. If the discussion were to move on to the terrain of the visual arts-frescoes, sculpture, tapestries, stained glass, and so on-into the world of the plcturae quae sunt libri laicorum, we would find this dichotomy reproduced in accurate figurative terms, model and antimodel rubbing shoulders within the sacred enclosure of the cathedral. There is movement too on the terrain of such culture as is nurtured under the shadow of the authenticating pyramidal model: to begin with, there is an attempt on the part of a number of people to neutralize and to empty of significance from within the transgression of the "different" in such a way as to create the conditions for its subsequent insertion into the model. Typical in the twelfth century is the division of the artes operated by Hugo of Saint Victor in his Didascalicon, a work which envisages the possibility of a new doctrinal activity in the form of a scientia ludorum, from which is generated the theatrica, one of the seven artes rne~hanicae.'~ As for the notion of ars mechanica, the medievalist Franco Alessio has well observed the way twelfth-century theoreticians for the most part speak of it in a deliberately aseptic manner; in other words, philosophy, in no sense abdicating its formalizing and modelizing activity, "is sufficiently free when faced with the ars rnechanica to feel that it is incumbent upon itself, because, and to the extent to which, it is disinterested doctrine, to decide on its own terms concerning the value, the collocation, the origin, the sense, the forms of the ars mechanica within the framework of which philosophy disposes for understanding man and nature" (p. 85). An indication of this can be seen in Hugo of Saint Victor's attempt to insert into the general model these uncomfortable artes mechanicae, born out of new kinds of status, the expression of a developing technology within urban civilization. This indication lies in the fact that he fixes their number at seven. Hence Alessio observes: "This sacred fixity is no accident" (ivi, p. 123), i.e., it is a deliberate calculation aimed at limiting spread of the "different," of new techniques and social activities, while at the same time reproducing the already extant schema of the artes liberales: a sevenfold grouping for the body since there already exists a much more elevated group of seven for the soul. Dominating the new and providing it with rules is already in part to exorcise it.

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If, in the light of this, we now turn to the theatrica or scientia ludomm of the Didascalicon, it becomes at once evident how fatal it was that it should have been deprived of its true character as dramatic art, which would have brought to the forefront the histriones and the ideology of the antirnodel. Relevant to our discussion are the findings of Casagrande and Vecchio in the article we have cited: Hugo has created "a theoretical stage purified and neutralized by a process of spatiotemporal isolation, and by expelling the characters whose role should be to tread it." In other words, in order to "forget" (in Lotman's sense) histriones, mimes, acrobats, pipers, and all the theatrical entertainments they offered, Hugo limits himself to putting forward an abstract, sacred model of the theater, beyond space and time, analogous to what Humbert of Romans had contrived in the sphere of his sermones ad status when he omitted to mention, within the turba popularis, the m e r c a t o r e ~ . ~ ~ An inversion, ideological and behavioral, is offered by the Franciscan order in the person of its creator, St. Francis of Assisi, who did not hesitate to describe himself as "God's jongleur." Once again a mirror image, though this time in favor of the antimodel, absorbed and imitated by the opposite faction, its full transgressive charge intact, and sustained by the singular sanctity of the "poor man of Assisi." Nor is it mere chance that this phenomenon is found in Italy, or that it lasts so short a time: the length of an exceptional lifetime; indeed, Carlo Ginzburg has already pointed out for the case of St. Francis the connections that exist with the antivalues codified in the medieval carnival: "His very lifestyle is typical of the carnival. From the carnival comes Francis's exhortation (though slightly different affirmations at times modify this) to his own body: 'Enjoy yourself, brother body.' From the carnival comes insistence on allegory. . . . From the carnival too what a nearly contemporary chronicle attributes to Francis before Pope Innocent 111: when the pope exclaims, 'You are more like a pig than a man. Go therefore and preach to the pigs,' Francis rushes out and rolls in a pigsty, to return covered in filth and say, 'Now listen to me.' Marvelously carnivallike is the kiss Francis gives the beggar. T h e originality of Francis's religious genius lies in this: in his attempt to identify the paradox of the carnival with the Christian paradox itself."'" This time, though, the mirror-image character is not institutionalized. Once the man with his legendary magnetism disappears, the Franciscan order soon reverts to the mummified model, hierarchical and sacred, and this remains true even when we admit that the use they made of it was less rigid than that made by the Dominicans: at times, here and there, the codified antinomies of the

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model (high / low, closed / open, etc.) are disturbed for them by the memory of the sublime extravagance of their teacher-founder.

In the light of the foregoing, here is a well-known text, familiar within our culture, which now gives us a message both more complex and more specifically ideological: this text is the Dialogus Salomonz$ et Marcolphi, for brevity hereafter referred to as Dialogus, despite the fact that the title given the work by its best editor, W. Benary, Salomon et M a r c o l f ~ s seems , ~ ~ to us more satisfactory. This because, in effect, from the point of view of literary genre, it is only the first part of the text which can be called a dialogus, or disputatio, or certamen, or altercatio, for the second is alternatively made u p of sections in dialogue and of narrative sections, closely related the one to the other and influenced by the literary class of the exempla. Leaving to one side here the question of the work's hybrid structure-it needs discussion apart-we shall devote our attention to the first part, that which, in the critical edition, in fact bears the subtitle Dialogas. What we find is that i t is absolutely emblematic of o u r antithesis between hierarchical-sacred model and antimodel; this antithesis is approached from the transgressive vantage point, which means that the text must have been composed within the cultural layer of those intellectuals whose delight it was to demystify the higher-level model, and of whom we have spoken above. T h e period of composition of the work in the form in which it has come down to us was the one which most readily lent itself to this kind of operation, the twelfth century itself," though some of the thematic sectors which have gone to making it up are earlier in date. Two cultural realities, sacred the higher, profane the lower, stand contrasted within the dialogue structure of the work thanks to two figures connoted to the utmost degree: on the one side, the rex, who is Solomon, and what is more, the wise man par excellence, the chief auctoritas of upper-level culture, who in certain texts even becomes a praefipratio of Christ himself;?' on the other, a villein, a rusticus, turpissimus (it will be recalled that the histrio is by definition turpi.5 as Casagrande and Vecchio in the article cited clearly document), who delivers his auctoritates in the form of proverbs, not, as at a first reading might appear, casually or capriciously employed, but used oppositively, often in a subtly allusive fashion, with respect to those of Solomon; thus it is that the place they occupy has been predetermined on the basis of the textual layout of the controversy or exposition of opposites. T h e author is beyond question a scholar who has no diffi-

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culty handling all the material of the auctoritates, which are made to undergo refined combinatorial arrangement. It is the revaluation of popular proverbial wisdom which would seem most highly significant; it is a wisdom which celebrates the physical world and the day-to-day experience of workers and technicians, and it is set against the maxims of a higher-level culture pronounced by Solomon and indeed often deriving from the Solomonic tradition in the various collections of sentences. T h e author has aptly chosen a literary genre closely connected with the actual practice of dialectics as ars apponendi et respondendi, dialogue seen as conflictus or certamen, where any given reality was susceptible of description in terms of a binary discourse, with an antinomic, appositive formal structure. At this point the sign function of the two interlocutors, who assume the roles of model and antimodel, becomes explosive, whence derives the dramatic element which the verbal impetuosity of the uncouth Marcolph brings to the disputatio, and which at a distance of centuries will completely have disappeared from the conception of the world in the mouth of Bertoldo. Marcolph is no invention of the composer, or of the various composers of the text as it has come down to us; he is the product of a socioideological context and of a transgressive operation. Thus this dialogus is, in our view, much more than merely an archetype of villein satire; such a way of considering it scales it down excessively and blunts the cutting edge of its message, for it is this which constitutes the prime means of expressing dissent from a culture which persists in basing itself exclusively on the auctoritates of the past and in paying no heed to new aspects of work and technique. Some of Marcolph's answers are, as we shall see, typical in this respect. Before going on to look at specific exchanges in the Dialogus, it must be stressed once and for all that Marcolph ends up as victor at the end of each section of the text insofar as he tires or reduces to silence his solemn antagonist, and this is in itself a clear enough sign of the demystifying function of this text. For example, at the end of the Dialogus, i.e., of the work's first part, we find: 141a S: b M: 142a S: b M:

Fessus sum loquendo; iam requiescamus! Non obmittam loquelam meam. Non possum amplius loqui. Si non potes, humiliter confitere te vinctum et da quod promisisti.

[141a S: b M: 142a S: b M:

I am worn out with talking. Now let's rest! I won't leave off talking. I cannot talk any more. If you can't, confess yourself beaten and give what you have promised.]


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Whereupon those of Solomon's entourage describe Marcolph asfollw, utilizing the opposition wise 1foolish we mentioned above, and suggest driving him forth with blows. Solomon commands that Marcolph be well saturatus and then sent on his way. Marcolph's parting shot is: "Satis paciar quidquid dixeritis. Sed ego semper dicam quia: ubi non est lex, ibi non est rex" ["I will suffer whatever you command. But I always say that where there is no law, there is no king"]. At the close of the work an almost surrealist cunning saves Marcolph from death; he cannot find the tree on which it would please him to be hanged. T h e prank, the comic spirit, a blow forever struck against the normative model of existence, the expedient of the villein, bring the booklet to a close, as so many emblems of the indomitable vitality and strength of the people. If the paired exchanges of the two disputants are looked at in slow motion, it becomes clear that there is always something suspended above them, the shadow of the consecrating model with its oppositions (high I low, spirit /flesh, etc.), and it will further be noted that to the antitheses of themes and values there corresponds an antithesis of language: the two characters express themselves in terms of two alternative cultural codes. Typical in this sense is the consistent presence of the obscene, thematic and linguistic, in Marcolph's replies. T h e text opens with the opposition high /low embodied at the situational level: Solomon is seated on his throne, placed on high (Prol. 1: Cum staret Salomon super solium David), a throne that is, furthermore, that of David, while Marcolph stands at his feet, small and thickset (Prol. 8: Statura itaque Marcolfi erat curta et grossa), with all the characteristics, be it noted, of the carnival mask, from his physiognomy down to his clothes coloris turpissimi. Memorable are the opening exchanges of the discourse on the genealogy, high and low, of the two: 2a S: Ego sum de duodecim generacionibus prophetarum. . b M: Et ego sum de duodecim generacionibus rusticorum [2a S: I am descended from twelve generations of prophets. . . . b M: And I of twelve generations of peasants],

to which corresponds in the second part of the text, though it is couched in metaphorical key, an antithesis between those who wield power (chapter one, the ascendentes and discendentes) and thefabe i n olla bulientes, where the ambivalence o f f a v a should not be lost sight of, for it is at once a food typical of the poor and a symbol of fecundity. He who is placed on high is wise; he who is lowly is stupid. One striking example will suffice:

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19a S: Doctrina et sapiencia in ore sapientis debet consistere. b M: Asellus in messe semper debet esse. Ubi pascit, ibi renascit; ubi pascit unam plantam, quadraginta resurgunt; ubi cacat, ibi fimat; ubi mingit, ibi rigat; ubi se volutat, ibi frangit glebas. [19a S: Learning and wisdom must dwell in the mouths of the wise. b M: An ass must always be in the harvest. Where he grazes, he brings new life; where he eats one plant, forty grow again; where he shits, there he fertilizes; where he pisses, there he irrigates; where he wallows about, there he breaks up the clods.]

The polysemy to be understood in Marcolph's replies is consistent and refined: the ass is the villein as opposed to the wise man, but it is also a symbol of the resurrection and multiplication of life, as Bakhtin has clearly shown (p. 200, dealing with the f6te de l'hne). Thus it is a symbol of the vital force of the laboratores. We might here say of our author what Contini says of Matazone da Caligano, namely that he moves "on terrain favourable to the peasant."33 The text guides us gently towards a satire of codified wisdom, by means of the obscene grimace: 89, S: Da sapienti occasionem, et addetur ei sapientia b M: Infarcire ventrem, et addetur tibi merda. [89a S: Give the wise an opportunity, and wisdom will be added unto him. b M: Let the belly be stuffed, and shit will be added unto you],

where the author also plays on the opposition spirit lflesh, the opposition which the work most insists on. At times, though, there lies below the surface of the exchanges real social dissent in the form of an antithesis between what is pedicated and the fact itself, between the traditional sentence and the dramatic reality which stands against it: 3Ya S: Qui guod novit loquitur, iudex est iusticiae et veritatis. b M:

Episcopus tacrn~hostiarius efficitur.

[39a S: He who says what he knows is the judge of ,justice and truth. b M: A silent bishop becomes a sexton.] 43a S: ( b n t r a homznam potentem et aquam currentem contendere noli! b M: Qui vulturem scoriat, durum volucrem plumat.

MODELS AND ANTIMODELS IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE

[43a S: Don't strive against a strong man o r a rushing stream. b M: He who flays a buzzard, feathers a hard bird.] 53a S: Sermo regis debet esse immutabilis.

b M: Cito retornat, qui cum vulpe arat.

[53a S: The word of a king must be immutable.

b M: He turns quickly who plows with a fox.]

57a S: Qui avertit aurem suam a clamore pauperis, ipse clamabit et non exaudietur. b M: Perdit suas lacrimas qui coram iudice plorat. [57a S: He who turns his ears from the cry of the poor will himself cry out and will not be heard. b M: He loses his tears who weeps before a.judge.1

We observed above that the opposition spirit /flesh is that which is most rich in discursive effects, and it is rendered more complex by others: conventional wisdom / technical expertise, aseptic culture / everyday reality, all emblematic of a model and of an antimodel which is its mirror image. The same opposition is realized at a linguistic level, where the Solomonic monolinguism stands against a solid plurilinguism on Marcolph's part (technical, agricultural language, traditional proverbial expressions, use of obscenity, etc). Some examples: 8a S: Mulier bona et pulchra ornamentum est viro suo. b M: Olla plena de lacte bene debet a catto custodiri. [8a S: A good and pretty woman is an ornament to her husband. b M: A pot full of milk must be guarded well from the cat.] 12a S: Mulier pudica est multum amanda.

b M: Vacca lactiva est pauperi retinenda.

[12a S: A chaste woman will be loved by many.

b M: A milk cow will be maintained by the poor.]

14a S: Mulier bene formataet honesta retinendaest super omnia desiderabilia bona. b M: Mulier pinguis et grossa est largior in dando iussa. [14a S: A well-formed and chaste woman should be esteemed above all desirable goods. b M: A fat and gross woman on being ordered is more generous in giving.]

This last example is of some significance, both because it links the Solomonic maxim to the sermon tradition, and, in particular, to the

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sermon Ad coniugatos and Ad coniugatas, and also because of the realistic equivalence between mulier and meretrix in Marcolph's reply. Other replies of Marcolph too must be referred to the opposition spirit ljlesh within the confines of a vigorous realism: 35a S: Erudi filium tuum ab infancia et doce eum bene facere. b M: Qui suam bene nutrit vaccam, de lacte sepe manducat. [35a S: Instruct your son from infancy and teach him to perform well. b M: He who takes good care of his cow often drinks milk.] 51a S: Non est amicus qui non durat in amicicia.

b M: Merda de vitulo non diu fumat.

[51a S: He is no friend whose friendship doesn't last.

b M: Calf shit doesn't stink long.]

One notes a propensity for excremental imagery, for coprolalia, assimilated by Bakhtin to the transgressive character of the "different," as it breaks away from the cultural model of higher-level culture. There is even desecration such as this: 38a S: Quator ewangeliste sustinent mundum. b M: Quator subposte sustinent latrinam, ne cadat qui sedet super eam. [38a S: T h e four evangelists support the world. b M: Four underpinnings support the toilet, and he who sits above them will not fall.]

This exchange was judged unacceptable by the vernacular translator and Marcolph's reply beyond any conceivable uncouth impertinence, and as a result both thrust and parry are not found in the Italian.34 There are times when the twofold exchange of king and peasant, instead of being oppositive, says the same thing from two different points of view; for example, the ethical and the technical: 80a S: Ne dicas amico tuo "vade et revertere, et cras dabo tibi," cum ei statim possis dare. b M: "Ad tempus faciam" dicit qui non habet upturn utensile. [80a S: Don't say to your friend, "Go and come back again and I will give it to you later," when you should pay immediately. b M: He says, "I'll d o it sometime," who doesn't have the proper equipment.]


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O r else, the abstract and sententious and the realistic and obscene: 118a S: Mulier pulchra ornamentum est viro suo. b M: In collo alba est ut columba, in culo nigra est ut talpa [118a S: A pretty woman is an ornament to her husband. b M: She is white as a dove at the throat, but she is black as a mole at her buttocks.]

T h e most extreme point of such dissent is reached in connection with certain topoi of the realistic-popular tradition-the topos of wine, of poverty, of satire of the law-which in this text take the form of motifs which reflect on the sociopolitical order: 21a S: Luxuriosa res est vinum et tumultuosa ebrietas. b M: Ieiunus est pauper qui ebrius sibi videtur dives. [21a S: Wine is a lustful thing and drunkenness riotous. b M: T h e poor man is foolish (ieiunus) who when drunk thinks himself rich.]

This maxim of Marcolph is not merely dramatically iconic, but is built up in terms of parallelism and antithesis of the most refined rhetorical workmanship: ieiunus 1 ebrius, pauper 1 dives, est 1 sibi videtur; drunkenness loses its negative connotations (lustful and riotous) to become the only way in which the poor can reach a liberating imagination. It is no accident that these two lines are also missing in the vernacular version. T h e high 1 low opposition of the cultural model calls into play in this text frequent implications of the antinomic order rich /poor: 93a S: Sacietate repleti sumus; referamus deo gracias! b M: Iubilat merulus, respondit ei cuculus; non equaliter cantant saturatus et ieiunus. [93a S: We are filled to satiety; we are renewed, praise god! b M: T h e blackbird rejoices, and the cuckoo responds to him. T h e full and the hungry d o not sing alike.] 106a S: Non omnes omnia possunt. b M: Scriptum est in breve; qui non habet caballum, vadiat cum pede. [106a S: Not everything is possible to everyone. b M: It is briefly written that he who has no horse must go on foot.]

As for the theme ofjustice, the connection is always made between its opposite and the higher positions on the social pyramid (compare

3 64


part two, chapter eight, pages 9 and 10); as a consequence, the behavioral sphere which pertains to natura is in this text, as in the pastourelle of Marcabru, more valid than that which is dependent on social convention and social codes rendered operative through a didactic apparatus imposed from above; there is a very fine episode, almost an exemplum, in part two, chapter eight, where the cat Solomon has trained twice resists the temptation to seize the mouse Marcolph draws from his sleeve, only to hurl himself upon it the third time; Marcolph comments: "Ecce, rex, coram te probavi melius valere naturam quam nutrituram" (5-6). Marcolph, brother to a prostitute (part two, chapter seven), the son of peasants, turpzssimus villein, whose very name is barbarian, wins out over Solomon, just as, a century later, in a different socioeconomic and cultural environment, Bonvesin da la Riva lets his rose lose to the violet in his famous Disputatio; times have changed, the setting has changed, even the types of antitheses adopted have been profoundly modified, but the violet is able to win because, as Bonvesin puts it, "ella e plu utile, guardand comunamente," i.e., from the point of view of the social community, whereas the rose represents the higher levels of power." Marcolph, born into a context far removed from that of a busy thirteenth-century Italian Comune, symbol of a "difference" with respect to the official cultural models, less uncouth than at a first reading he might seem, is a brilliant creation, almost the literary reflection of that layer of intellectuals who were aware of the need to resist the exaggerated authority of a model offered them by the official and dominant culture. There are many ways in which intellectuals can make themselves useful to culture, and among them there is this of breaking an ideal of perfect order, or, at the very least, of demystifying it, by presenting it to us upside down.

UNIVERSITY OF PAVIA (Translated by John Meddemmen) NOTES 1 Cesare Segre, Serniotica, storia e cultura (Padua, 1977); in particular, ch. 4, "Tra filologia e teorizzazioni: Strutturalisrno, serniotica e storia." See also Maria Corti, "Questioni di rnetodo nella critica italiana contemporanea," in T. W. Adorno et al., La critica forma caratteristica della civilta moderna (Florence, 1970), pp. 79- 110. 2 Yu. M. Lotrnan, "I1 problerna del segno e del sistema segnico nella tipologia della cultura russa prima del XX secolo," in Ricerche semiotiche, ed. Clara Strada Janovit (Turin, 1973), pp. 40-63. Yu. M. Lotrnan and B. A. Uspensky, Tzpologia della cultura (Milan, 1975). Yu. M. Lotrnan and B. A. Uspensky, Serniotica e cultura (Milan and Naples, 1975).


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3 Yu. M. Lotman, in Tipologia della cultura, p. 73.

4 Jacques Le Goff, La civilisation de l'occzdent midiival (Paris, 1965), pp. 32 1-25; for Le

Goff the schema, which derives from the churchmen, sets out to subjugate the warrior

caste to the clergy.

5 Georges Dumezil, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinw: Essai sur la conception indo-euro@'enne de la socie'tiet sur les origznes de Rome (Paris, 1941). Emile Benveniste, "Symbolisme social dans les cultes greco-italiques," Revue de l'histoire des religwns, 129 (1945). 7- 16. 6 For example, Gerard of Cambrai ( + 105 1) in Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensium, M G H , VIIII, Script. VII, pp. 474-85. See alsoDocumentisulla teoria trinitaria della societa, A/ I, Dal IX secolo a1 XII secolo, "Ciclostilo di un Seminario dell'Ist. di Filosofia Medievale dell'universita di Pavia." 7 PL 159, 997. Gilbert (c. 1106- 1140) from the Danish colony of Limerick in Ireland, and perhaps himself of Danish birth, began a religious reformation of the island; he was abbot of Bangor until 1139, Legate of the Holy See in Ireland. He presided over the Council of Rathbreasail (c.11 18), was friend and follower of St. Anselm. See Ganes, Series Eplscoporum Ecclesiae Catholkae (Regensburg, 1873). p. 227; Cf. Louis Gougaud, Les chritientis celtiques (Paris, 191 I), p. 358; John Begley, History ofthe Diocesis of Limerick (Dublin, 1906). 8 This comparison is also found in Slavonic medieval literature, for example in the Czech writer Thomas of Stitnyho quoted by Lotman in his article "K probleme tipologii kul'tury, in Trudypo znakovym sistemam, 111 (Tartu, 1967), 30-38 (Italian translation in I sistemi di segni e lo strutturalism sovietko, ed. Remo Faccani and Umberto Eco [Milan, 19691, pp. 306-18, on p. 314). 9 See the fine anthology Prediche alle donne delsecoloXIII, ed. Carla Casagrande (Milan, 1978) "Nuova Corona", n. 9. 10 Humbert of Romans, "De eruditione praedicatorum," in Bibliotheca Maxima Pahum, XXV (Lyon, 1677). This work has been studied chiefly by Carla Casagrande in her as yet unpublished book (a thesis presented at the University of Pavia and directed by Franco Alessio) with the title "La teoria della predicazione domenicana di Umberto d a Romans: Sociologia e valori." She examines the sociological aspects of the statw as they relate to Humbert's preaching models. 1 1 Maria Corti, "Structures ideologiques et structures semiotiques dans les 'Sermones ad status' d u XIII' siecle," paper read at a seminar at Cerisy la Salle dedicated to "L'archeologie d u signe," 2-12 August 1977. Now in the author's I1 Viaggzo testuok (Turin, 1978). 12 Henri Pirenne, Histoire iconomique et sociale d u Moyen Age (Paris, 1963), particularly ch. 2, par. 2. 13 For the concept of cultural "forgetting," see below. 14 See, for the question of the didactic of the models, Yu. Lotman, "Problema 'obui-enija kul'ture' kak ee tipologii-eskaja charakteristika," in Trudy po znakovym sistemam, 111, 167-76 (see Tipologza, pp. 69- 8 1). 15 Jacques d e Vitry, Historia Occidentalis, ed. J . F. Hinnebusch (Fribourg, 1972). 16 Speculum humanae salvationis, e d . J. Lutz and P. Perdrizet, I, I1 (Leipzig, 1907). Further, "Speculum humanae salvationis," in Volktandige Faksimile Awgabe des Codex Cremifanensis 243 des Benediktinerstifts Kremsmunster, ed. Willibrord Neumiiller, O.S.B. (Graz, 1972). 17 Ada Biella, "Considerazioni sull'origine e sulla diffusione della 'pastorella,' " Cultura neolatina, 25 (1965), 236-67. Erich Kiihler, "Marcabrus 'L'autrier jost'una sebissa' und das Problem d e r Pastourelle," Roman. Jahrbuch, 5 (1952); then in Trobadorlyrik und hofischer Roman (Berlin, 1962); we have made use of the Italian translation " 'L'autrkr jost'una sebissa' di Marcabru e il problem della Pastorella," in Kiihler, Sociologia della

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fin'amor. Saggz trobadorici, ed. M. Mancini (Padua, 1976), pp. 195-215. Aurelio Roncag-

lia, Le piu belb pagzm delb btterature d'oc e d'oil (Milan, 1961).

18 A. Roncaglia, p. 276.

19 Andreae Capellani Regii Francorum, "De amore," Libri tres (Munich, 1964), I, XI, pp.

235-36.

20 Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, "L'interdizione del giullare nel vocabolario

clericale dei secoli XI I e XI11," in Atti dell1 Convegno del "Centro di Studi sul teatro medievale e

rinascimentab," Viterbo I977 (Bulzoni, 1978).

21 Francesco Novati, "La parodia sacra nelle letterature moderne," in Stvdi critici e

btterari (Turin, 1889), pp. 177-3 10.

22 Quotations are from the French translation. which we have used: Mikhail Bakhtin,

L'oeuure de Fran~oisRabelais et la culture popvlaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance (Paris,

1970). p. 13 (italics are the author's own). T h e English translation is from Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1968). 23 Casagrande and Vecchio. 24 Novati, pp. 186-91. 25 See Bakhtin, pp. 83-91. 26 T h e Missa potatorum is published in Novati, Appendice 11, Testi inediti, pp. 289-300. 27 PL 176, 760. See for this aspect, Alessio. "La filosofia e le Artes mechanicae nel secolo XII," Studi medievali 3" s., 6 (1965). 71 - 161. Also Casagrande and Vecchio. 28 We refer to Alessio's article (cited in the preceding footnote) for the history of the acceptance, modification, and rejection met with by Hugo of Saint Victor's model of the Artes mechanicae. In his Appendice 11 Alessio gives an interesting text of Robert Kilwardby ( + 1279). De ortu sckntiarum, in which that author takes a firm stand against recognition of the theatrica in the cultural sphere: ludi, of which many manifestations in pagan culture are listed, in theatro, in gabellis, in gymnasiis, in amphiteatris, in antis, in conviuiis, in fanis, ought not to be permitted in Christian society because they are entertainments of the Devil; in consequence the theatrica is detestanda et impugnanda, 29 Carlo Ginzburg, "Folklore, magia, religione," in Storia d'ltalia, I, I caratteri gemrali (Turin, 1972). pp. 603-76, o n p. 615. 30 Salomon et Marcolfus, "Kritischer Text mit Einleitung, Anmerkungen, Ubersicht, iiber die Spriiche, Namen- und Worterver-zeichnis, herausgegeben von W. Benary" (Heidelberg, 1914). See, in addition, Piero Camporesi, La m c h e r a di Bertoldo (Turin, 1976). T h e text has been reedited by Camporesi with the title Dialoguc Salomoni et Marcolphi in Appendix to Giulio Cesare CrocelLe sottilissime astuzk di Bertoldo: Lepiuceuoli e rzdicolose simplicita di Bertoldino (Turin, 1978). T h e same text also republishes the first printed vernacular version of the Dialogus (Venice, 1502). 3 1 Benary's Introduction, pp. viii-ix. T h e problem of socioideological demystification within the Dialogus is touched on by Camporesi. La maschera di Bertoldo, pp. 64-65. 32 For example, in the Speculum humanae salvationis see tables 71 and 72 of the edition edited by J. Lutz and P. Perdrizet, and table 83. 33 In Poeti del Duecento, ed. Gianfranco Contini (Milan and Naples, 1960). 34 Obviously they are absent both from the 1502 edition (cited) and from the 1550 (also venetian) edition, reprinted by Luigi Emery in Appendix to Giulio Cesare Croce, Bertoldo e Bertoldino (Florence, 195 1). 35 Maria Corti, "I1 genere 'disputatio' e la transcodificazione indolore di Bonvesin d a la Riva," Strumenti critici, 21-22 (1973), 157-85, on 177. ~

-

Comments on H. R. Jauss's Article Paul Zumthor

I

T IS with pleasure that I respond to New Literary History's invitation to express some of my reactions to reading the text of H. R. Jauss. I find myself, nevertheless, placed in a delicate situation. On the basic issue, and on all of the questions examined by Jauss, I am in perfect agreement, even if some of the examples that he cites (such as the animal epic) are less familiar to me than others. First of all (since I do not believe that this is what NLH expects), I must restrain the impulse that prompts me to praise his essay and to underline in doing so both its methodological and general theoretical importance. What Jauss questions (by pointing out the problematical) is the relationship existing between the Middle Ages and the medievalist. It is the mode of knowledge that we as men of the last quarter of the twentieth century can claim with respect to the object that we propose to study and which while studying we define. Indirectly (in the pages concerning allegory), the interrogation deals with the knowledge that the Middle Ages had of itself and with the ways which we can know that knowledge. I have no doubt but that these are the real problems, and perhaps, from our standpoint, the only real problems. The few points where I notice a divergence between Jauss's position and mine result less from this general point of view than superficially from terminological differences or, in a manner less easily reducible, from the differences in our respective intellectual backgrounds, and from certain presuppositions implied by these backgrounds. Although I have lived a very small time in France, I am aware of having been strongly influenced and sometimes confused by the work accomplished there in the last fifteen o r twenty years, often among those very little concerned with the Middle Ages. Hence inevitably (and in spite of a constant effort not to allow myself to be captured by one mode of thought) certain of my orientations, choices, or metalanguage, compared with those of Jauss, inadvertently bring out our divergences rather than the long-term convergence of our efforts. What undoubtedly permits me to comment is the generosity with which Jauss repeatedly cites and discusses my Essai depoitique midiivale and takes into account reactions provoked by it. It is not a question of polemics but, on the contrary, of responding to a tacit invitation and of reexamining several propositions of that work. The reexamination

Copyrighta 1979 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia

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is all the more compelling since the Essai is already six years old. Since then I have written LA Mmque et la lumiire (Paris, 1978),and it takes up again diverse and fundamental questions from a rather different perspective (one can see this in the article included here and inspired by this book). In 1976 I published in Poktiqw, 31 (1977), a theoretical article, "Medieviste ou pas," which it seems to me converges with several of the theoretical positions of Jauss (who published an essay in the same issue, again taking up some of our common themes). Moreover, beyond this partial identity of our concerns, I have noticed in the past few years a remarkable similarity in the work of numerous medievalists in their questioning the nature and genesis of our critical discourse. I have little doubt but that today this is a whole LpktLmi (to use the term of Michel Foucault) which is currently stirring up interest in our field of study. The question of first importance can be formulated in a simple, if not crude, way: Why, in 1978, the Middle Ages? Why and how? In order to justify the interest in medieval studies for a man today, Jauss has recourse to three rather general arguments, and it is not necessary to add others: aesthetic pleasure, alterity, and the fact that medieval texts furnish us with a coherent "world model." These three arguments call attention to different levels of observation, and the conclusions that one can draw from them do not appear to me to be of the same order. Perhaps one can establish among them a hierarchy of subordination and bonds of dependence which would be of importance as such to the critical vision. From one to another of these levels, relationships of implication are established: the existence of a "world model" implies, for whoever notices it, a pleasure. But the nature of this pleasure implies the perception of an alterity, a term which remains to be defined. "World model," if I correctly understand this expression, refers not to representations but to the whole set, more or less closed, of rules which function for us as rules for decoding, valid for the operations used by whoever constructs this model. It is clear that this construction cannot be a point of departure. This would be like defining the Other before having heard of it. It is rather the end point of the critical process, even though one cannot completely isolate the procedure that produces the model. By induction from observed facts, the critic progressively elaborates the properties of the model which he must continually review and correct. These properties define particular texts and by defining them display a coherence among them. The model, in this sense, is what permits the pleasurable discovery of the Other.

Medieval civilization, inasmuch as it draws many characteristics from what Henri Berque (with respect to Islam) has called the "paradigmatic" cultures, lends itself in all its aspects, better than other cultures, to modelization. Rather removed from us in time, but not too much, relatively well documented, neither too brief nor too long, complex but almost void of irreducible contradictions, this civilization can without difficulty be viewed, paradoxically, as a kind of historical monad. The factors which constitute it, while being very redundant, convey a considerable quantity of information when one considers them in their narrow reciprocal relationships. T o be sure, the model tends to close in on itself, and we know that in the real world nothing is closed. But the fiction of closure is without a doubt, in the order of comprehension, the very condition that permits us to think about alterity. As for pleasure, Jauss joins to it the qualification aesthetic. In so doing, he refers it to a specific experience which produces the pleasure. It seems to me that the word gains in force and in correctness if it is not entirely stripped of its corporal connotations. Jauss's most recent book, Aesthtische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (Munich, 1977), does not expressly allude to this aspect of Aisthesis, but his argument does not deny its existence. Some critics affirm that all relationships that we maintain with a text (or with a work of art) involve a latent eroticism. I n a less metaphorical manner, I would say that the foundation of all true reading resides in the feeling of being personally affected by the text. The critic, if he meets this condition, places himself in what was the situation of a medieval reader or listener whose very body (I will return to this point) was involved in the reception of the text in a much more complete way than by the visual or auditory functions alone. Now, this implication of the body in the experience that we make of the text is derived in part from the alterity of the text. Thus we arrive at what is the essential. On this point, far from weakening what I wrote in the Essai (which Jauss recalls), my recent studies in the fifteenth century lead me to strengthen my argument. T h e necessity of immediately positing the alterity of the Middle Ages appears to me to be proved by the history of medieval studies down to recent times. Developing from Romanticism, for more than a century, these studies have reduced the historical character of the Middle Ages to the mythic category Jauss speaks of: "our origins," "the origins of." This means that the reference point was the present in which the medievalist was writing. In and of itself (and although it removes us from the object of study), such an approach can pass as

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legitimate (indeed, it is still that of Curtius). But, in fact, the ossification of the structures of imagination and of thought in the academic milieu at the end of the nineteenth century often had as its effect that in 1930, in 1940, or even 1950, the real point of reference was situated in the bourgeois and positivist society of 1880. It is pointless to insist on the damage caused by this inertia. T h e term alterity nonetheless carries some degree of ambiguity. Even without recourse to psychoanalytic considerations, let us admit that there is a radical alterity produced by any confrontation between a subject and an object. This alterity is ontological and does not matter here as such. But when this ontological alterity is dramatized by the intervention of varied circumstance^,^ it becomes relative alterity, and this is what concerns us here. Relative alterity results from an insurmountable distance between the subject and the object, distance which diminishes (to the point of doing away with it in extreme cases) the sentiment of participation in a common universe. The alterity of the Middle Ages, in this sense, is less indisputable than that of the primitive world, or, for the West, that of Ancient China. The Middle Ages belongs to our history, and biologically we come from it. However, we are not concerned here with degrees of distance; what matters is a methodological principle. I would willingly formulate this principle in a paradoxical fashion: every text emanating from a distant epoch must, first of all, be received as a product of a universe in which we have no way of participating. Any analogy between this universe and ours must (until explicit proof to the contrary) be held as illusory (which does not mean that there are not pertinent analogies; I will return to this point). T h e only uncertainty with regard to this is: what is "ancient"? Across what temporal distance does antiquity engender alterity? Endless discussions could be initiated on this issue. It has been known since Fernand Braudel that the rhythms of history d o not all maintain the same amplitude. However, the case of our Middle Ages is, on the whole, less disputable than would be that of seventeenth-century France. In spite of some marginal survivals in our customs, I think that the consensus among us is to declare the antiquity of the Middle Ages. Thus the medievalist's awareness of his subject requires that he acknowledge the marks of distance that separate him from it. In other words, the relative alterity will be assumed, for argument's sake, to be total. Now, the medievalist can be led by two different paths to deny in fact this alterity, even if he affirms it in theory: by naive historicism o r by blind modernism. I call "naive historicism" that which rests on the presupposition (general and not explicit) of the continuity of history, considered as a

regular evolving process. This attitude, undoubtedly inspired by the natural sciences and shared by most medievalists u p until the Second World War, misunderstands the nature of the intercultural relationship which opposes us to our object: a relationship which forces us to set up an epistemological problem (as Jauss does) before any discussion concerning methods. The fathers of medieval studies, on the whole, hid this fact. It is why they did not attempt at any time to develop a theory out of their practice. The greatest of them possessed an immense amount of knowledge on which we still draw today. But they never questioned the ideological and philosophical implications of their manner of working, of collecting information, and of transmitting it to their students and readers. Hence the unreflecting tenacity with which they held to contigent criteria that they put forth as absolute: organicism, authenticity, and others. These criteria led to an analogical type of argumentation that was never declared as such: thus the risk of misinterpretation. By "blind modernism," I mean a more subtle phenomenon, resulting from conceptual tools and methods at our disposal in 1978, following the extensive use of analytical perspectives in the last twenty o r thirty years. On the one hand, it would be impossible to renounce recourse to these tools and methods, since they are, for us, as academics dedicated to texts, the essential of our culture. It is only with their aid that we succeed in knowing the Other. "To read" a medieval text can in effect only signify for us the following: to render it comprehensible for the mind and sensibility of the twentieth century, conditioned by its own culture. But, on the other hand, these critical tools have generally been perfected in the course of reflecting upon modern texts (most often contemporary), answering to our own universe; such texts do not pose the problem of an intercultural relationship. In fact, most often, their study concerns history only according to the first of the two aspects: insofar as it constitutes the depth and breadth of the present and not insofar as it gives rise to the presence of the Other. Almost all research (more o r less heterogeneous), which today forms what is called the "theory of the literary text," is thus historically marked. Generated by Western culture of the mid-twentieth century, it is tied in every way to the specificity of the latter, and nothing appears more dubious than the universality of its possible applications. On the surface, we are running up against an aporia. T h e only way out, if there is one, will be found in the application. Can the critical tools in question transcend cultural difference? And, if yes, how, by what methodological conditions, at the price of what deconstructions and reconstructions? The possibility of answering these questions de-

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pends to a great extent on a preliminary comparison, of a philological nature, of the circumstances (in the sense defined above) surrounding the production of the objects: the modern object, upon which literary theory operates, and the medieval object yet to be theorized. These circumstances are of all types, and their description demands a certain interdisciplinary attitude: socioeconomic circumstances, technological, ideological, fantastic, aesthetic. Differences and resemblances appear on all these levels, but any one of them can be either apparent o r functional. (Strictly speaking, modern gestures of courtesy stem in part from ancient rites of chivalry, but the function is entirely different, etc.) T h e same applies on the textual level. Hence, at each moment in reading the medieval text, there is a double necessity: to determine its "historicity" (I mean the formal aspects of the manner in which this text entered into the culture of its own time) and, simultaneously, to redefine, adapt, and sometimes reject modern critical concepts, so as to render them appropriate in seizing this historicity. Let us take for example the notion of text, indispensable today (as much from a linguistic point of view as from a poetical or ideological). From a material standpoint, we have at hand a medieval text. But several factors combine to make up a definition of it that is different from that of the modern text: (a) complication in the act of writing itself (cumbersome tools, high expenses, etc.); (b) specificity of the possible motivations for this act (patronage, commemoration, propaganda, etc.) and the censors that were opposed to it; (c) low frequency of this act; relative rarity of books, object of the workmanship of craftsmen, doubtlessly lacking economic benefit; (d) restricted distribution (printing methods will not noticeably alter this state of affairs until the sixteenth century); (e) inability to read, for the majority of the public: either for lack of books, or because of illiteracy; and (f) auditory consumption of the majority of texts: by intervention of a public reader, by recitation from memory, or by oral improvisation. This list could easily by lengthened and extended by the factors that, from another point of view, I subsumed in my Essai under the designation of "mouvance" of the text--even if this "mouvance" affected only a part of medieval poetry. At least, the characteristics pointed out here reveal, among other things, that the medieval text is much nearer the body of him who performs it (author, narrator, singer) and of him who consumes it (listener or reader) than is the modern text. The medieval text, much more than the modern text, is gesture, action, charged with sensory elements. Its relationship with the transmitter and the receiver is necessarily different, and more concrete. A notion like that of tradition, useful, but secondary in a modern

perspective, becomes fundamental with respect to the medieval text, for which tradition constitutes the mode of existence (even if, on this point, I am led to modify certain propositions of my Essai). It would be interesting, and not unattainable, to thus draw up a corrective lexicon of the most frequently used terms in modern textual analysis. But such a lexicon would have only a relative value, for our "Middle Ages" represent a long period of history, and (even taking into account the stability of many of its structures) the "circumstances" of a text of the twelfth century are not identical to those of a fifteenthcentury text. Medieval culture, although more homogeneous than ours, was not monolithic. It is on the level of each text or each class of texts that a redefinition must be made. It is in this light and with these expressed reservations that I turn, at the risk of certain confusions, to the notion of writing [kcriture]. Jauss on two occasions criticizes the use I make of this term and casts doubt on its critical value with respect to the Middle Ages. There is without a doubt a misunderstanding on this point. Certainly, in the last ten years, writing, especially in French criticism, has been elevated to a sort of autonomous entity and has lost its primary denotation as a scriptural act. All that has been written on the act of writing and on the effect that its diffusion has had on the nature of communicative action represents, nevertheless, a conceptual acquisition which cannot be denied without harm. It nonetheless remains that while referring to these characteristics, the word writing refers also to an ensemble of historically conditioned phenomena, affecting in a determined yet variable manner the intensity of its own effects: (a) Writing is the operation of the hand consisting of tracing characters, with the aid of some kind of instrument, in a manner disposed toward this objective; this operation supposes an intention of deferred communication across a determined space and time. (b) Writing is thus the whole of the conditions and circumstances (biological, psychological, philosophical, etc.) of this operation. (c) Finally, writing designates on a global scale the result of the operation so conditioned and situated. Every one of these elements demands redefinition at each moment in history. Thus the French chansons de geste, written down in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, had previously (without any serious doubt) been communicated by oral transmission, and maybe such transmissions were continued even afterward. Various analogies borrowed from other "paradigmatic" cultures lead one to suppose that several, at least, of these chansons were produced orally. Therefore, with respect to these, we cannot speak of the original "writing down." Nevertheless (as I believe I demonstrated in 1963 in

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L a n p et techniqws poktiqws), the effect of "deferred communication" was produced, in the performance itself, by the use of quasi-ritualistic language. Certainly the orality linked the text to a hi6 et nunc, establishing it into a presence. But this presence found itself falsely drawn away from its concrete conditions in time and space, for it suggested a mythic image of the society which the singer and his listeners shared in common. One o r two centuries later, at the creation of our manuscripts, the operation of writing down was able to provoke a second effect of distantiation and of communicative dispersal. Based on the first, this second effect challenges, corrects, o r replaces that on which it is superimposed. Such is the way in which I interpret the work of Madame M. Tyssens on the Chanson de Guillaume. It is in this sense that I again take up the expression (in itself ambiguous, I realize) of models of writing [ d hd'kccriture]. In 1972 I used it as a free variant of types of discourse. Such was a cause of error. I would now designate in 1978, in an approximative but, I think, useful way, the historical classification of the corpus, the elements of a typology of writing effects. It is a typology with an inevitably vacillating synchrony and a relatively unstable diachrony, but at least it furnishes a small number of determined factors which permit us to situate particular texts and to carry out various regroupings indispensable to any "scientific" undertaking. Vacillations, instability, such are the marks of history within the system. (Far be it from me to oppose here writing to speech. Writing in its own way is speech. Speech, in the case of oral poetry, implies virtual writing. If there is no ~rality,there is no speech, properly speaking). T o speak truthfully, the distinctions of structuralist origin between language and speech, system and process, are not applicable at the level of poetry, unless it be in a metaphoric way as Jakobson and Bogatyrev understood it to be in a well-known essay on "Literature and Folklore." T h e poetical belongs to the order of the particular. It adheres to the universal only on the level of deep impulses, both individual and collective, that we can hardly surmise when our object is a poetry of the past. The necessity from our standpoint, to impose order onto a multiplicity of particular texts, leads us to regroup, by induction, certain characteristics of these texts, and in so doing to define types and classes (genres if one insists on this word). But these types, these classes, are scarcely anything but sets of paradigms, poorly organized and always incomplete. It is precisely this that I designate by the name tradition. In the course of the centuries, tradition represents a (rather relative) permanence, a more o r less continuous and quasi-abstract thread, which takes on a concrete existence only by being used at a given moment in history-in other words, by the act of writing.

I d o not doubt that in the Essai I stressed, with some exaggeration, certain affirmations in the hope of accentuating what appeared to me as a remarkable cultural alterity. Today I would be inclined (and my friend Jauss convinces me of it) to temper it a little, to make explicit that which remained understood in my research six o r seven years ago. In Le masque et la lumiire I believe that I have reintroduced, in the definition of writing, the terms of the communicative process, understood by this the social demands to which it responds, and the consideration of a "horizon of expectation." What I placed in the margins in the 1972 book (Jauss reproaches me with reason) is now put again into center perspective: the constant possibility of a "discourse explosion," of a shifting, if not a requestioning, of the effects of writing, to the extent that real men and circumstances are involved in it. In any case, an effect is produced. Even when the text refers to traditional paradigms, this effect is never foreseeable. It is to be understood, after these explanations which are perhaps too long, that I am (more than I was previously) in agreement with the classification of "simple forms" with which Jauss ends his article: communicative situation, relationship to tradition, life situation. These are the very elements, called by other names, that I subsume under writing. They can be considered as critical categories of general value. They can be fruitfully applied (as well as the terms which clarify them) to the whole of the medieval corpus. On the other hand, I confess a hesitation with respect to the validity of the distinction of the nine "simple forms," a hesitation which has not diminished since 1958 when I first read about them in Jolles's book. T h e level on which this distinction operates does not seem to be clearly enough established. It is either a matter of a proposition of anthropological nature, universal in its scope, or a matter of historical verification, or, finally, a matter of classification of the corpus of exempla. All that together, most probably. But in the first hypothesis, one would have the right to question the homogeneity of the criteria: is alligorie of the same order as proverbe; can one really speak of the nouvelle as a simple form? In the second hypothesis, its application to the Middle Ages causes a difficulty, because of the complexity of the majority of remaining texts-and with respect to which the "simple forms" would function, at best, as generative structures on a very deep level. There remains the third hypothesis-apparently held by Jauss, when he generalizes in speaking of the little "genres of the exemplary." T h e expression in itself is fortunate. The exemplary without a doubt defines a part of the medieval corpus. But the question can be asked: does it not define virtually the totality of this

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corpus? Does not every poetic text of the Middle Ages, fictional or historical, involve some "proverbial" intention, "allegorical" o r "legendary" intention? In order to cut short this discussion without end, I adopted in the Essai a purely formal division: long versus short. I agree that the application that I made of it is marred by some errors in judgment. However, the material size (and therefore the duration) of a text also defines its writing, and it is a troubling fact to note that in the corpus of groupings, such distinctions are ignored. Here some tens; there, hundreds; elsewhere, thousands of lines o r verses. Roger Dubuis did not hesitate to adopt, in 1973, this point of departure in his fine book on the Nouvelle Fran~aise.I regret not being convinced by this last part of Jauss's essay. Scarcely even stirred! UNIVERSITY OF MONTREAL

(Translated by Betty R. H. Sapir) NOTES 1 I understand here by "circumstances" all concrete factors of a situation. One can, for use in analysis, divide them into two kinds: spatial-temporal and sociohistorical.

A Coda: Modern Medievalism and the

Understanding of Understanding

Eugene Vance

T

HE APPEARANCE in a single issue of New Literary History of five essays devoted to medieval literature-two of which are English translations of major pieces by two of the most distinguished medievalists of our time-is an event of considerable interest to medieval studies as a "modern" discipline. What is more, since Hans Robert Jauss and Paul Zumthor have both attempted to make cogent statements concerning the ternary relationship between poets, the world in and about which they wrote, and the modern reader of such poets, this issue of New Literary History raises questions that are pertinent to the state of literary criticism as a whole. It is noteworthy that the initiative behind this publishing venture comes from a journal which is not, itself, "medievalizing": this is one more index of the growing concern among nonmedievalists over the tendency for medieval culture to remain artificially cloistered in a discipline whose epistemological models are rarely defined, much less challenged, by those who practice it. The blame for such inertia lies as much with editors as with writers: never was a field so badly in need of editorial initiative as medieval studies is now. In the brief remarks that follow, I shall reflect upon the options (as I see them) that are put before us by these two remarkable essays. Quite secondarily, I shall attempt to define my own aspirations with regard to these options, though I should make it clear from the outset that my own essay can scarcely pretend to surpass the limits that I detect in the efforts of my fellow contributors in this issue. Upon reading Jauss and Zumthor, I am struck both by the contrast in their manners of expression and by the common ground of their presuppositions. That they refer to each other's writings in these essays (as in others) is a concrete reflection of the spirit of dialogue that prevails between Jauss and Zumthor. Since Jauss's essay is the more explicit about situating its reading of medieval culture in a general paradigm of human understandingthe paradigm broadly known today under the label hermeneuticsI shall speak of this essay first. Jauss's essay is powerful because its message is articulated on several levels at once: not only is the her-

Copyrighta 1979 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia

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meneutic model given as a universal in the process of human understanding, but it is tested historically through the example of the "reception" of medieval culture by cultures other than it; finally, its doctrines are further validated by Jauss's personal experience as a reader of medieval culture who made the initial aesthetic leap, who then entertained lovers' quarrels with its "alterity," and who finally attained a mature understanding, whose maturity is expressed in the very doctrine of hermeneutics as a science of understanding (Verstehen) itself. T h e epigraph before Jauss's text is carefully chosen to emphasize a long-standing analogy between the poetic word and the divine logos. It signals the theological matrix from which modern "literary" hermeneutics has devolved. Indeed, two of the leading voices in hermeneutics today, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, remain important in theological circles as well. T h e affinities with C. S. Lewis that Jauss expresses only strengthen our sense that hermeneutics is a secular manifestation of occulted religious belief. Jauss belongs to a critical tradition whose roots in German idealism are unbroken, which is to say that its epistemological core has been intact for a century and a half. Although Jauss himself speaks of a "paradigm change" that challenges us to rediscover the alterity of medieval poetry as a constitutive element of modernity, I am struck, to the contrary, by the solidarity of Jauss's dialectical paradigm with that of his hermeneutical forebears. One has only to read Wilhelm Dilthey's remarkable essay about Schleiermacher, "The Rise of Hermeneutics" (translated by Fredric Jameson, New Literary History, 3 [Winter 19721, 229-44), to appreciate to what extent hermeneutics and philology reinforced each other in the early days of modern medievalism. Philology was understood as a science of interpreting textual monuments, and "An effective hermeneutics could only develop in a mind where a virtuoso practice of philological interpretation was united with a genuine capacity for philosophical thought" (p. 240). In Germany, moreover, the speculative dimension of philology and of romance studies has never been entirely lost, and Jauss's aesthetic experience has something of that adventuresomeness (Abenteuerlichkeit) which the Romantics celebrated both in themselves and in the medieval spirit. Jauss is perfectly at ease with a long-standing paradox of hermeneutic theory which makes of "understanding" at once a process of communication with voices of the past and a process of self-awareness. As Dilthey writes (p. 242): All exegesis of written works is only the systematic working out of that general process of Understanding which stretches throughout our lives and is exercised upon every type of speech or writing. The analysis of Understanding is

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therefore the groundwork for the codification of exegesis. The latter can be realized, however, only by analyzing the production of literary works. Only upon this relationship between Understanding and literary productivity can that ensemble of rules be founded which will determine the means and limits of exegesis. . . . In Understanding, the individuality of the exegete and that of the author are not opposed to each other like two incomparable facts. Rather, both have been formed upon the substratum of a general human nature, and it is this which makes possible the communion of people with each other in speech.

What I find remarkable about Jauss's essay is not, then, the novelty of its deep paradigm, but rather the tenacity of its application to a vast corpus of medieval texts. Indeed, it should be recalled to the English readers of this essay that it is a tour de force that opens a huge collection of articles written by Jauss in the field of medieval studies over the past twenty years and gathered into a book whose title is the same as that of his German essay. The strength of Jauss's hermeneutics lies in its flexibility, a fact made quickly evident if we glance at the generous index of names of authors of secondary literature that appears at the end of his book: hardly a pebble of modern criticism lies unturned (even though Derrida's name, quite unsurprisingly, is not there). Moreover, an interview of Jauss published in Diacritics (Spring, 1975, pp. 53-61) shows how agile Jauss can be in grasping the affinities between hermeneutics and contemporary movements seemingly opposed to it. It is difficult to outflank a hermeneutician such as Jauss: even if one hopes to quarrel with the doctrines of hermeneutics, it is impossible to mount much of a campaign against them without taking recourse to the methods and strategies of the very movement that one is proposing to denounce. One can always try to poke fun at its congenital seriousness, but it takes two to make a joke. Once, late one evening at Cerisy I dared ask Jauss over a Scotch what he intended to work on when he was "finished with hermeneutics." There was an odd silence; but, not being sure my question had been heard, I let it die in a peace which passeth all understanding. Among the medievalists who have most stimulated and complemented Jauss's own critical writings on the Middle Ages is, of course, Paul Zumthor. In the present essay Jauss describes Zumthor's critical methods (especially as exemplified in the latter's Essai de poitique midiivale) as being fundamentally hermeneutical, but only implicitly so. Jauss believes that a more incisive articulation of Zumthor's critical model would have led Zumthor to make better use of the "hermeneutic difference" to illuminate his position as a modern: "New insight into the alterity of the Middle Ages and new selfknowledge of our modernity condition themselves reciprocally in the

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hermeneutic circle." Jauss takes further issue with Zumthor for accentuating the purely poetic function of language (that is, its selfreferentiality) to a point where "all other functions of language are almost eliminated. Components of textual communication and of social function are missing in Zumthor." However, Zumthor, like Jauss, recognizes that the difference between them is merely one of individual priorities, and not of opposition, and Zumthor has in the past frequently endorsed Jauss's project of recognizing the alterity of medieval literature as the expression of a "horizon of expectations" peculiar to the age in which such literature was produced. Indeed, the present essay by Zumthor is interesting precisely because it does attempt to situate the poetry of the Grands RhCtoriqueurs (where the poetic function remains unambiguously maximal) in a social and historical context. This context must be understood, we are told, if we are to transcend the initial response (or, in Jauss's terms, the naive aesthetic experience) which awaits the modern reader of such poetry and which is always initially hostile. Zumthor's essay begins with a general statement about the ways in which a poetic text may be considered to be "historical." Outside of and prior to language are the events of history, and the burden of their reality constitutes the instance of discourse as the hinc et nunc of enunciation. 'Then there is the articulation of history as it has been manifested to the intelligence of the person who produces the text; finally, there is the matrix of tradition within which the poet must function as poet. If the poetic performance integrates all of these strata into itself, it is only by virtue of an "ungrateful task" that the critic may recover those features of its context which are necessary for his understanding but obscured by the great expanse of time that separates him from it. Jauss is no less candid about the labors of understanding: he speaks of his tribulations as a reader of "all" allegory written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a possible "atonement for some sin." Zumthor's essay passes to a vividly brushed study of the historical world in which the poetry of the Grands Rhetoriqueurs was produced, and the dominant traits of that world are its fragmentation, its contradictions, the emptiness of its appearances, and its indices of cleavage and of alienation of man from the cosmos. One will recognize here strong affinities between Daniel Poirion (Le pobte et le prince [Paris, 19651) and Zumthor. Upon this background Zumthor now attempts to describe what Jauss would call "modalities of esthetic experience," though Zumthor concentrates more on the production than on the reception of the poetry of the rhetoriqueurs. He denies that this poetry has a representational or documentary function, but

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claims that it extracts from the events of the world a "meaning" (sens) which belongs to another, distinct order constituted by the traditions and generative models proper to the poetic text itself. However, this poetic sens is not simple: if, on the one hand, the poetry of the rhetoriqueurs constantly reflects its curial affiliations, its occasionality, and its proximity to the voices of authority and of law, on the other hand, it ironizes the world upon which it is contingent by means of a series of transgressive and even subversive poetic strategies which Zumthor proceeds to describe. He refines upon the Bakhtinian notion of the carnival as the encounter of a plurality of voices without any transcendental point of convergence: this poetry expresses such contradictions, yet their manifestation is also their containment. As a praxis of irony, the poetic text of the rhetoriqueurs is also a "repersonalization" of language. It is a projection into an imagznaire governed by its own laws in which statements of contradiction ensure the "coextensitivity" of the poetic realm with the order of being (I'dtre). Though Zumthor seems to be approaching Romantic theories of the imagination, he denies, as does Jauss, a subjective dimension to the poetry that he is describing. However, there are moments when Zumthor's definition of the relationship of the poem to reality resembles Paul Ricoeur's. The text does not directly mirror reality, Zumthor proposes, though it is articulated within the systems of signification that constitute that reality. T h e text remains centered in his own system, so that referential or literal meaning destroys itself at the same time as another meaning is produced which is "a metaphor, always unfinished," of the first one. The social world of the text is littirarisi. The text does not "reproduce" it, but "re-produces it, actively." The text "communicates" with the "real." Zumthor is making powerful and profound statements about the function of poetic art in a decisive period of Western culture, and one may wonder whether the statements that he is making are to be extended into a general statement about other kinds of poetry as well, as does Paul Ricoeur, whose arguments in La metaphore vive (Paris, 1975) so closely resemble Zumthor's. T o what extent, one may ask, is the historical world that Zumthor depicts a projection from an unexplored aesthetic a priori? As is the case with Jauss's essay, the strength of Zumthor's essay is not the originality of its (latent) hermeneutical paradigm, but rather, in the intelligence of the perceptions that it makes possible about a body of poetry that has been reviled for centuries. In Zumthor's writings, neither methods of analysis (for instance, those that have come from structural linguistics) nor aesthetic models are ever elevated to the status of dogma, as they are in Jauss's writings, but are always used merely heuristically. This explains why Zumthor can use hermeneuti-

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cal models when it suits him, then quite simply let them drop: he is more of a poetician than a theoretician by vocation. This is not to suggest that the results are unsystematic o r unrigorous, but merely that Zumthor uses ideas in his own way: they allow him to describe a body of poems and to do so better than has been done before. As my own essay will clearly testify, 1 have in no way gone beyond the limitations that I detect in the essays of my companions in print. I am hardly capable of claiming, for instance, that the process implied by the term hermeneutic circle is not always at work in the critical act, if not in the poduction of literary art as well. Indeed, I believe that the discourse of literary criticism itself is merely an institutionalization of hermeneutical propositions and that these are only more determining when they are allowed to function implicitly rather than explicitly. Nor am I sure what other discourses in our culture might exist that are free of the presuppositions made explicit by the science of hermeneutics. Even silence may be interpreted by any decent hermeneutician; and as for death, it is the very condition of meaning and signification. However, hermeneutics (as hermeneuticians themselves constantly remind us) is not the invention of German idealism. One may suggest, to the contrary, that modern hermeneutics-that is, hermeneutics as it has been articulated during the past hundred yearshas brought certain restrictions to our understanding of "understanding" at the same time as it has contributed to it. It is precisely because of a narrowing of attitudes and practices among hermeneuticians that the term hermeneutics has acquired a pejorative sense in certain circles, which is to say the notion of hermeneutics must not be tied too absolutely either to the priorities of Romantic and post-Romantic epistemology or to the discourses in which that epistemology is embedded. During the last few years, my efforts as a reader of medieval literature (if such a literature may be said to exist) have been devoted to the study of texts less as objects of interpretation than as pragmatic demonstrations of problems of interpretation. Indeed, the vernacular literature of the Middle Ages arose during a time when two distinct hermeneutical traditions collided (the Augustinian and the neoAristotelian), and its poetry often reflects a competition between contradictory understandings of "understanding" that affected other spheres of culture as well (e.g., the judicial, the theological, the scientific). A hermeneutical consciousness was already important, if not determining, in the "horizon of expectations" of the Middle Ages. Hence, the proposal that hermeneutics is a science which is to be put to the service of a critical intelligence must also be reversible when it comes to the case of medieval texts: a critical intelligence must be

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employed to discover a hermeneutics which is deployed as pragmatic poetic strategies. Medieval poetry interprets problems of interpretation dramatically, rather than logically, just as a musician interprets problems of musical comprehension in a sonata by playing rather than by analyzing them. That problems of understanding are always given high priority by Chaucer in almost all of his poetic art, from the Book of the Duchess onward, can hardly be a matter of dispute. But it can be disputed whether our grasp of these problems in Chaucer's art as modern hermeneuticians is as complete as Chaucer's, or as complete as that of nonpoetic minds whose whole culture was centered on problems of hermeneutics. If, as Dilthey writes (p. 244), "the ultimate goal of the hermeneutic process is to understand an author better than he understood himself," I would argue that the "modern" hermeneutician has yet to gainsay hermeneutically minded authors of the Middle Ages such as Dante or Chaucer. Indeed, if we study the terms henneneuein and intep-etare in their fullest semantic range in classical and medieval thought (cf. Jean Pepin, "L'hermCneutique ancienne," Poitique, No. 23 [1975] pp. 291 -300), it becomes quickly evident that modern hermeneuticians have allowed the name of their science to preclude the recognition of vast areas of human behavior, verbal and otherwise, as modes of interpretation and understanding that merit being studied together. T o do so implies a willingness to lay aside the notion of "literature," at least as that notion has been commonly accepted since the early Romantics, and to study texts that have been called "literary" in close proximity with other systems or media of exchange (e.g., money, marriage, travel) within the same culture. Like modern semiotics, modern hermeneutics must now return to its own history, and to medieval poetry as a privileged moment in that history. T h e attitudes of those who do so must remain open, and their methods flexible and eclectic, though not unrigorous. Such, within the limits of my knowledge and abilities, are the goals of my own essay on Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.

The Alterity of Medieval Literature J. A. Burrow

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here gives an excellent account of the three "hermeneutic steps" involved in reading old texts: first, the immediate, prereflexive aesthetic experience; then awareness of the "surprising otherness" of the world of the text; then the discovery of "meaning for us." I want to concentrate on the second of these steps and make a few observations on how the contributors to this issue treat what Jauss calls the "alterity" of the Middle Ages. My first observation is a general one. In the very first sentence of his seminal book, Essai de poktique mkdikuale (1972), Zumthor stressed "l'eloignement du moyen ige, la distance irrecuperable qui nous en separe"; and a similar emphasis on the sheer remoteness and otherness of the period marks the essays here. Thus, Warning, in his discussion of certain (admittedly outrageous) medieval plays, speaks of their "absolutely archaic otherness" and their "insuperable hermeneutic strangeness." All the contributors, in fact, seem to feel considerably further away from their Middle Ages than I feel from mine. I ask myself why this should be. One reason is that the contributors are mostly concerned with continental, and especially French, literature. When Jauss speaks of the repression of medieval literature by the aesthetic canons of the Renaissance, for instance, his observation applies to medieval French literature-to which, by a familiar and pardonable synecdoche, the expression "medieval literature" commonly refers. But in some other countries, including England, this suppressing and distancing of medieval literature during the Renaissance period was a much more partial affair than it was in France. Writers such as Spenser and Herbert (and some would add Shakespeare) in England display a cultural continuity with their medieval predecessors; and this continuity makes a surprising difference, for students of English literature like myself, to our sense of the "eloignement du moyen ige." The other reason why the contributors' emphasis on the strangeness of the Middle Ages itself strikes me as strange lies, not in the history of sixteenth-century literature, but in the history of twentieth-century universities. Jauss observes that "the study of the literature of the European Middle Ages . . . has lost its place in the ANS ROBERT JAUSS

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educational canon, and therefore it hardly shows up in courses of study or curricula." Faced with this statement, I am forced to recognize my own anomalous position; for I have spent most of my academic life in English universities where medieval literature still plays quite a significant part in the ordinary curriculum of undergraduates reading English (markedly less if they are reading Modern Languages). T h e regular, everyday teaching of medieval literature to first-degree students may develop, at best, the joyful and relaxed intimacy of a C . S. Lewis, or, at worst, tired overfamiliarity; but in either case it certainly diminishes the sense of that "distance irrecuperable" felt by Zumthor. Let me make it clear that I do not regard the absence of sharp, catastrophic change in most Renaissance English literature and in some modern English universities as conferring any balance of advantage on insular medievalists, as against their continental o r transatlantic colleagues. What advantages we do enjoy are sufficiently displayed, with a great deal more brilliance than most of us can manage, in the works of C. S. Lewis. But even that remarkable man also displayed the disadvantages of having a relatively accessible Middle Ages. He was certainly not free from that chief vice of English medievalists-a churchy conservatism which is, in fact, no more medieval than it is modern. So for a reader like me it is bracing and salutary to see the Middle Ages from the really modern side of a real divide, as a remote subject of anthropological telescopy. Thus, Corti's semiotic approach allows her to sustain a greater detachment from the "official" cultural model of the period than Lewis achieved in his Discarded Image. This detachment appears in her account of how medieval intellectuals administered the exclusion from the official model of things which did not fit into it. Again, her discussion of the "reversal of positive and negative signs" in the rival antimodel shows a radical sympathy with the unofficial counterculture represented by the churl in Solomon and ,2-larcolph. Such sympathy is certainly lacking in Lewis and in most of my present-day English colleagues, who have probably not even heard of Bakhtin (an author I myself had to hurry away to read). Similarly, Warning's account of vernacular religious drama is admirably free from the religiosity, displaced or otherwise, which still mutes so many discussions of these extraordinary texts. Warning treats the "official self-conception" of the plays with not a trace of lingering loyalty. If Lewis could claim to be an Old Western Man, Warning is certainly a New one. But the authors represented in this issue would, of course, lay claim to more than mere detachment. Perhaps the boldest and most con-

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troversial of their claims may be found in the essays of Zumthor and Vance. Jauss asserts that "the highly touted modern methods of structural linguistics, semiotics, and phenomenological o r sociological literary theory have not yet gelled into the development of paradigms" for research into medieval literature. I take it that Zumthor and Vance would not agree with this. Their challenging essays imply, not only that such "modern methods" can usefully be applied to medieval literature, but also that they are peculiarly appropriate to it. That claim rests partly, as I understand it, on the fact that these methods, as practiced in France and elsewhere, reject the notion of literature as a set of "works" by individual authors. T o claim a text for its author because it expresses his subjectivity is romantic sentimentality; to claim it for him because he produced it is bourgeois philistinism. But who did produce the text? And what does it express? The answers to these questions, as all readers of structuralist criticism will know, lie not in the "pragmatic" world of people, events, and feelings, but in the realm of language and its analogues-a realm of codes and conventions in which the text "speaks itself." The purpose of this grossly generalized and no doubt amateurish account of the "modern methods" to which Jauss refers is simply to suggest the attractions of applying them, as Zumthor and Vance, as well as Corti and Warning, do here, to medieval texts. Romantic and bourgeois individualism has always found many of these texts frustrating, because of their highly codified character. Whether or not they are formally anonymous, they present an impersonal, conventional face to the reader-more like the face of a building than of a person. The typical medieval love lyric, for instance, seems much more like a product of the tradition, or the code, of love poetry than the work of an individual writer, let alone an expression of his feelings for an individual woman. Such texts, as Zumthor observes not without approval, "lack all facility for grasping the extratextual in the act." They therefore offer themselves (how the reflexive verbs flourish here!) as congenial material for our modern methods. It is surprising only that Zumthor's Essai was the first full-scale attempt, as late as 1972, to apply those methods to medieval literature. It is early days to assess the results of work such as Zumthor's. There can be no doubt, however, that some aspects of medieval thought and writing become easier to understand and appreciate from these new points of view. Vance's account of medieval sign theory, for example, gives due credit to a branch of medieval thought still somewhat neglected. Nothing attracted the contempt of Renaissance humanists more than scholastic theories of modi signijicandi and the like; and they managed, by their ridicule, to persuade the learned

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world to forget these theories so completely that even today people sometimes still credit Saussure with discovering "l'arbitraire d u signe'-a doctrine, as Vance rightly says, commonplace in the Middle Ages. Again, the concept of "intertextuality," invoked here by Jauss, surely deserves to be widely adopted by students of medieval literature. In another part of Jauss's essay, one sees how the concept of genre can be revived by the "challenge of the new linguistics" and how it can become again something more than a mere device for classifying histories and bibliographies. In ways such as these, "modern methods" will surely contribute much to the understanding of the awkward, neglected characteristics of medieval culture. Yet, reading these essays, I was aware more of promise than of performance. As a characterization of fifteenthcentury Burgundian culture, Zumthor's essay represents no very obvious advance on Huizinga. In his discussion of the rhktoriqueurs, Zumthor makes the striking, but also characteristic, claim that they were afflicted by epistemological doubts: "In the midst of this disintegrating world appear the rhktoriqueurs, each in his own way tormented by a conscious inability to know the world or express it in suitable terms." The notorious extravagance of their poetry, he argues, serves to express this sense of absurdity and alienation. His demonstration of this, however, gets no further, in the present essay, than highly general and metaphorical talk about "ruptures . . . beneath the surface continuity," "a crack . . . zigzagging beneath the surface of the syntax," and even a "chasm." I wanted to beshown some of those ruptures and cracks. In the essay by Warning, the discussion of the scene where Mary Magdalen mistakes Christ for a gardener is brilliant and illuminating; but his psychoanalytic and anthropological observations about the vernacular drama seemed to me tantalizingly undeveloped. But other readers will be more competent than I to judge the essays of Zumthor and Warning. Let me turn to Vance's essay on Chaucer's Troilus, and to an issue which it raises. One danger of the "modern methods" lies, I think, precisely in that banishment of the author which is so characteristic of them. I ought to confess here that I am a convinced believer in what Hirsch calls "validity in interpretation." Like Hirsch, too, I regard some duly refined notion of authorial intention as indispensable if interpretations are to claim validity. Not surprisingly, therefore, I am unhappy about a conception of alterity which excludes the otherness of the person who wrote the text. Of course, the otherness of authors is by no means the only check on the solipsism of readers; but it is a check which most readers need. Texts without authors are often no more reliable guides to their own meaning than authors without texts. T o judge by the

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frequency with which texts read by modern methods turn out to be about literature itself, o r language, texts seem to share with human beings a regrettable tendency to talk too much about themselves. What Corti calls "metacommunicative" texts, in other words, turn up with suspicious frequency on the reading lists of semiological critics. I think that Vance's essay on Troilus illustrates this danger. Its first part admirably summarizes medieval ideas about "the relationship between the order of verbal signs and social order," and establishes that there is no question of historical impropriety in attributing sociolinguistic thoughts to a medieval writer. So far, so good. But Vance's ensuing attempt to demonstrate that Chaucer did in fact, in Troilus, "incorporate this metalinguistic consciousness into his strategies of composition" fails to convince me, for reasons which may bear summary here. At an early stage, Vance pronounces sentence of banishment upon the author: "In this text I shall not attribute any special meaning to Chaucer as an intentional, sentient center whose nature I might hope to grasp, but shall concentrate on the poetics of the Troilus itself with regard to fundamental ideas about language that were available, in one form or another, to any literate mind in the later Middle Ages." Notice that Vance here associates (though somewhat obscurely) "special meaning" with the individual author, and that he seems to discard it in favor of "fundamental ideas available to any literate mind." His discussion of those ideas, as I have said, is sound and valuable; but does he demonstrate that they play a significant part in the meaning, or even the "poetics," of Troilus? I think not. It is certainly true of this story, as of many others, that the characters use language to persuade, manipulate, and deceive each other; but surely it does not prove Chaucer's "metalinguistic priorities" to observe, for instance, that "Criseyde's first overt act of infidelity . . . [is] an act of speech, rather than one of a more carnal sort." Wordless acts of carnality (one thinks of Aleyn and Malyne in the Reeve's Tale) are simply out of the question in the world of Troilus, for reasons which have (I think) nothing whatever to do with metalinguistic consciousness. Vance's quite deliberate neglect of "intentional, sentient centers" goes beyond a disregard for what Chaucer may reasonably be thought to have intended. He also neglects the i.s.c.'s in the poem itself-what I cannot resist calling thc "characters." It is surely hard to entertain an interpretation of this text which draws no real distinction between Troilus and Diomede. Both these characters, according to Vance, illustrate the same "decadence in the use of language" which is destroying the fabric of society. Now Diomede is an unscrupulous womanizer who says whatever suits him at the time, and it is perfectly

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fair to call him, as Vance does, a "pragmatic semiologist." But Vance himself draws the distinction between this ready-tongued opportunism and the "shamefast inarticulateness" of Troilus confronted with Criseyde. That inarticulateness is a symptom of everything Vance misses in Troilus when he portrays him as representative of a self-indulgent physical passion which subverts both language and society. It would be unfair to make too much of Vance's gross misreading of part of Troilus's beautiful aubade (his references to Venus and her boar of lust are quite out of place, since Troilus is addressing the Day, not Venus, and the word bore denotes the chinks through which Day peeps). However, the misreading is representative-not of Vance's scholarship, but of his persistently tendentious combination of moralism and metalinguistics. In his valuable essay, Jauss speaks of a "new attempt to discover the modernity of medieval literature in its alterity." He goes on to observe: "It hardly needs to be noted that 'modernity' here is to be distinguished from the uncritical modes of an actualizing tendency which would find a contemporary interest exactly confirmed in the literature of the past. As opposed to such modernism, modernity means the recognition of a significance in medieval literature which is only to be obtained by a reflective passage through its alterity." This "passage through alterity" is always a perilous one; and the authors of these essays do not always escape the dangers of what Jauss calls "modernism." But I do not think that any serious medievalist can afford to ignore the new possibilities opened up by the methods represented in these essays.

Antiqui or Moderni?

Brian Stock

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raised by these papers can perhaps best be summed u p by comparing the opening remarks of Eugene Vance and Hans Robert Jauss. Vance points to the resurgence of theories of language and communication in the past two decades, which has affected the study of medieval culture in at least two ways. Research has been undertaken into the medieval roots of semiology, and the notion of the sign has slowly but surely found its way back into discussions of medieval literature. Jauss looks at the new tendencies in a broader perspective. Although, he notes, interest in "positivistic" o r "idealistic" criticism has gradually waned, the methodologies of linguistics, semiotics, and phenomenology have as yet provided no satisfactory general models for interpreting major developments in medieval culture. In part I agree with both positions. The contemporary interpreter of the Middle Ages finds himself in an uncomfortable no-man's-land, so to speak, between the ancients and the moderns. The situation is not without its ironies. After all, the Middle Ages is the richest of all periods in symbolism, structuralism, and semiotic approaches to cultural meaning. The existence of such patterns of thought and expression led the Romantics to revive the study of the period for its own sake and to create the first widespread, popular audience for medieval art, literature, and theology. Indirectly, they also inspired some of the finest synthetic studies of medieval life and art of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the works of such writers as Huizinga, Gilson, Haskins, Bloch, and C. S. Lewis. Today the tables are turned. The professional caste of medievalists is less concerned with large interpretive issues than with editing, establishing facts, and preventing the study of the field from once again sinking into oblivion. As a consequence, new strategies for understanding medieval cultural life are often coming from students whose center of gravity is outside the field. Medievalists themselves in ever increasing numbers have taken to studying anthropology, archaeology, and even the more arcane branches of hermeneutics. The interdisciplinarity is of course to be welcomed, but it also raises new dangers. On the one hand, the theories must be tested for internal consistency, a task beyond the HE CENTRAL ISSUE


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capacities of most medievalists, whose training in philosophy and the social sciences is notoriously weak. On the other, practical considerations cannot be shelved indefinitely. Sooner or later one must ask whether the new ideas shed any genuine light on the Middle Ages or whether exempla from an earlier culture are not merely being used to defend current theoretical positions. Insights, in my view, must arise from both the antiqui and the moderni. On many matters the professionals will have the last word. But the study of the Middle Ages is too important for modern culture to be left to medievalists alone.' The problems of applying theory to practice can most vividly be observed in Maria Corti's analysis of models and antimodels in medieval culture. First, a word on methodology. Corti's point of departure is the semiotics of Lotman and Uspensky, which cannot be evaluated here.= Yet, as she presents their views, they seem to me to be open to three general criticisms: they are markedly evolutionary in character; they make an identification between epochs of history and their respective social psychologies as expressed in literary form; and they make heavy demands on a rather limited sort of evidence. Criticism of evolutionism and the older sociology of knowledge is now so well known that it needs no repetition here. But, for the nonmedievalist, the last point perhaps deserves a further word of explanation. Models which, in Lotman's terms, exhibit "self-adjustment" and "systematic unity" are rarely found in the Middle Ages except in a highly schematic form. Social historians have all but abandoned such formalistic pictures in favor of more flexible models for interpreting thought and a ~ t i o nThe . ~ triadic division of society has the status of a social myth: it is the linguistic skeleton of an organism that once lived and breathed, fulfilling a multitude of social, intellectual, and ideological purposes. It can most effectively provide a lens for viewing the dynamic elements in medieval culture not in comparison with other literary versions of the same myth but through comparison between successive literary variations and the other relevant components of the concurrent sociological fabric. An excavation of the function of signs can contribute to an overall reconstruction. But semiotics is perhaps most skillfully deployed in concert with more traditional historical tools, not in isolation. I am reminded of Jauss's remark: "How inappropriate and even misleading it is to judge the literature and art of this period exclusively according to the modern, i.e., categories of affirmation or negation of the existing order." Similarly, Warning notes that institutions can only partially be reconstructed via texts. The same observation may be made about the affirmations and negations of medieval writers themselves: they too have their alteritas o r modernitas.

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There is nothing inherently implausible in the suggestion that medieval culture evolved through a process of "modeling." As Corti suggests, antimodels were often latent in the models themselves and frequently grew into antitheses of the official o r dominant culture, opposing low to high, open to closed, mobile to immobile, and disordered to ordered. My quarrel is with the specific examples and the explanation of how they functioned. Only St. Francis seems to me to fall into the desired category. Francis tried rather hard to pose as a member of the counterculture, rejecting his bourgeois background and severely criticizing the lack of an effective lay ministry in the church. Model and antimodel are preserved in the differing accounts of his life: official vitae from Thomas of Celano to Bonaventure stress his leadership and organizational capacities as founder of the Franciscan order; unofficial commentators such as his own "three friends," Angelo Clareno, and Peter John Olivi draw attention to his asceticism, voluntary poverty, and literal imitation of the life of Christ. But none of Corti's other examples fit her requirements nearly as precisely. Nor are the cases always interrelated with each other in the manner she suggests. Courtly love poetry was not a response to the exclusion of women from a meaningful role in Christian life but a cultural model in its own right. Nor did the female answer to a male-dominated church await the synthetic talents of thirteenth-century scholastics like Humbert of Romans. In the late eleventh century Robert of Arbrissel founded a convent for prostitutes and undowered women at Fontevrault; Hildegard of Bingen was prominent among twelfth-century reformers, occasionally haranguing St. Bernard himself. Female offshoots sprang up within almost all the "new" orders, and women were prominent in all the major heretical group^.^ Objections can also be raised against Corti's use of Solomon and Marcolph and Hugh of St. Victor. The Dialogus summarizes a number of cliches of learned and popular culture. But it is too late and too obviously a composite text to permit generalizations about the previous three centuries (unless, of course, one first sorted out the Latin and vernacular sources). Hugh, it is true, enumerated the mechanical arts in the traditional manner under the sacred number seven. But his inclusion of mecanica as one of the four principal divisions of knowledge was a radical departure from the views of Augustine and Boethius. While it is difficult to generalize about an encyclopedic treatise, the Didascalicon appears to me to be rather more symptomatic of a reevaluation of manual labor and the active scholarly life than a clear-cut example of the official culture. Corti's "antimodels," then, d o not, in my view, fit together coherently. But what about the dominant "model" of the tripartite society? Here, two issues are involved. One concerns the ordines

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(the estates o r orders as categories of social reality), the other, the threefold classification of oratores, bellatores, and laboratores, which appeared as early as 995 in Abbo of Fleury and was popularized in Adalbero of Laon's laudatory poem in honor of Robert the Pious, probably written between 1025 and 1027. Turning to the latter first: triadic divisions of society were relatively commonplace throughout the Middle Ages. As Dumezil and Benveniste suggest (on admittedly thin evidence), a predisposition towards a separation of three orders o r castes may be the common property of all members of the IndoEuropean linguistic community. The Middle Ages knew many complex and often overlapping versions of the triad: nobiles, ingenuiles, and semi (nobles, free men, and slaves); clerici, monachi, and laici (clerics, monks, and laymen); and so forth. Such classifications made good sense to a society whose intellectual tools often amounted to nothing more than reasoning by a n a l ~ g yThe . ~ threefold division of society not only reflected the three persons of the Trinity, as Corti points out, but also the tripartite faculties of the mind or soul as outlined by Plato, Calcidius, and twelfth-century Platonists. In his lecture notes on Plato, William of Conches noted that there were three qualities which endowed the individual with perfect wisdom: the power of grasping matters quickly, the intellectual capacity to make distinctions, and the faculty of retaining them in the memory. Following the Liber de Oculis of Constantinus Africanus he assigned these powers to the fore, mid, and aft parts of the brain. T o complete the picture he cited Plato's division of society into three orders, those who ruled, fought, and s e r ~ e d . ~ This brings me to the more fundamental problem of the ordines themselves. Originally they were the Roman divisions of the body politic (e.g., ordo equester, ordo senatorius). Adapted to Christian usage along with other terms of Roman law during the Middle Ages, ordo gradually acquired a range of meaning within the individual community, referring on occasion to the entire clergy, that is, clerici and monachi, or to some branch within it, often distinguished, as Augustine put it, by its officia or gradus. In imitation of ecclesiastical usage, ordines were often adapted to the needs of lay social classification. But it was clear to a variety of authors between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries that the tripartite schemas were not sufficiently flexible for describing the rapidly changing social patterns of the countryside and town. While retaining the triads as a normative framework, writers began slowly but surely to adapt them to the times. As early as 1057, Ariald of Milan, the leader of the Patarene reformers, twisted the customary division of the Christian community into "preachers, continents, and laymen" in order to more strictly

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separate the clergy and the laity and to draw attention to the need for priests to communicate directly with parishioner^.^ Even more radical challenges to the older models came from within lay society. Occupations related to manual labor and to commerce acquired a new status, as did formerly illicit categories like actors and innkeepers. Beneath the umbrella of the older ordines a whole new social fabric sprang into existence. The coalitions of interest groups gradually worked their way u p the ladder of social respectability. The antimodel was not an alternative finite structure but the gradual erosion of formerly unquestioned categories by new social groupings that had no place within them. T o turn from Maria Corti to Eugene Vance is to move from semiotics as a tool of macrosociological investigation to the more manageable question of medieval and modern linguistic poetics. Vance shares with Corti a concern for "the order of language" as an important constituent of "the living order of society." But his essay deals largely with the theory and practice of poetic expression in one masterpiece. Vance's overture is to be welcomed for several reasons. Despite the rising interest in medieval rhetoric in recent years, the study of Middle English literature has remained somewhat isolated from the mainstream of continental criticism. Vance attempts to bridge the gap between the linguistics of Jakobson and the philosophy of language of Austin and Searle. His reflections on the problem of language and reality are not derived from modern critical theory alone but from a serious reading of fundamental texts in Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. His essay raises new issues in the study of Troilus and Criseyde. But Vance also encounters a number of problems which appear to me to be typical of this sort of endeavor. In his outline of medieval sign theory he moves a little too quickly from Augustine to figures like John of Garland, Humbert of Romans, and Aquinas, passing over in silence such important thinkers as Eriugena, Berengar of Tours, Anselm, and Abelard. He deals with rather a lot of different philosophical issues under the general rubric of sign theory including, for instance, ratio and semo, the substantiveness of names for God, and the problem of universals. Linguistic and philosophical allegory are somewhat too facilely subsumed under semantics. Also, one wonders whether earlier theory was quite as influential as he assumes. The fourteenth century was a period of intense interest in l a n g ~ a g e . ~ The artificial discourse of scholasticism was beginning to collapse under its own weight; poetic language was just beginning to rehabilitate itself, largely through the efforts of Dante. Is there no relation between the two phenomena? Finally, as Douglas Kelly has pointed out, the application of Latin rhetorical theory to vernacular texts is

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fraught with difficulties. Thefigurae are often too schematic for an accurate stylistic description of the French, Italian, or English poetry. Vance's paper occasionally lapses into formalizations, as, for instance, when he discusses encoding and decoding between Pandarus and Troilus. From time to time one also has the impression that he is explaining linguistics in terms of Chaucer instead of elucidating the text. But these, I think, are very minor criticisms in view of the innovative aspects of the paper. Paul Zumthor is also concerned with mentaliti and literary expression. But few greater contrasts can be imagined than between the vitality of fourteenth-century England and fifteenth-century Burgundy, where the forms of an aging culture were seeking to perpetuate themselves through artifice. Huizinga drew attention to Molinet's qualities as a writer: his pessimism and longing for the sublime; his glorification of knightly virtue as ideology; his political symbolism and even deification of monarchs like Frederick 111; his overuse of proverbs, dicta, Latinisms, and rhetoric; and his occasional vulgarity, which the great Dutch historian, like Zumthor, perceived as the "extreme degeneration of literary form nearing the end" of its existence. Zumthor has gone further than Huizinga and his predecessors in demonstrating how the literary and historical sensibilities of a fifteenth-century rhetoriqueur manifest themselves in phonetic, syntactic, and semantic relationships. He has also integrated more closely the human and linguistic sides of the "play element in culture" as revealed in festivals, liturgical drama, and other symbolic gestures. He has thus fitted the grotesqueness of this verbally inflated world into an appropriate context. While the general lines of interpretation seem to me to be remarkably sound, I believe that in two areas improvements could be made. One concerns the historicity of the material under discussion. The other relates to discourse as a linguistic as opposed to anthropological phenomenon. Zumthor distinguishes between the chronicle as a narrative sequence, the context of the events it narrates, and what he calls the "historicity," that is, the totality of its linguistic and cultural manifestations. I am troubled by the last category. Like Huizinga, he seems to me to overdramatize the sense of imminent decline. The notion that cultural standards were descending from previous heights was a pattern of thinking generated by the medieval experience of the past. Many of its features appeared earlier. The sentiment that the world was growing old-mundus senescit-recurred regularly after the mill e n n i ~ mThe . ~ embourgeokement of cultural values of which Zumthor speaks began in Italy and southern France in the early thirteenth century and was in full swing in England, the Low Countries, and

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northern France by the fourteenth. Other crises of sensibility also made an early appearance: mapmaking and exploration revealed new peoples from the time of the First Crusade; scientific endeavor was reborn in translations from the Arabic and the Greek. The commercial and industrial classes were the source of new mentalitis that openly conflicted with ecclesiastical and aristocratic cultural values. Nor was the fifteenth century unique in its inability to find appropriate vehicles for interpreting contemporary experience. An equally acute convulsion was felt in the eleventh, when the ancient models that survived the Carolingian renaissance were questioned. A second, if less perceptive, ennui came about in the thirteenth, when the optimism of the twelfth century had waned, the economic revival slowed down, and such long-standing receptacles of appropriate lifestyles as the pilgrimage, the crusade, and the monastic life were undermined by mundane political concerns. T h e medieval memory was short, especially among court rhetoricians. A talented writer in his own right, Zumthor has recreated Molinet's taedium vitae with great skill. But the "historicity" of his work must be viewed in a broader context. So should the ritualistic aspects of fifteenth-century society, which Zumthor brilliantly throws into relief against the narrow, selfconsciously mannered world of the court and its "official" poets. True, the festival became a domesticated version of Bakhtin's "carnival," promoting the rebirth of territorial units, forms of association like the confririe, and social hierarchies threatened by a more mobile world. But these urban rituals of an increasingly mundane society, like the more primitive ritual experiences which it had for several centuries tried to expurgate, had their own internal logic and rhetoric, often imitating the structural patterns of official culture (and vice versa). Are the two worlds of rhetoric and experience as isolated from each other as Zumthor suggests? Do they not, like the actor's confrhie, act as halfway houses between the rising lay spirituality and declining sacramentalism? Do they inevitably point to decline? I find the picture a little one-sided. As Natalie Davis has suggested, perhaps the widespread use of ritual is not so intimately connected with desymbolization and the decline of older values as creative elements in the fifteenth century itself.1° It is a short step from Zumthor's analysis of Burgundy, implicitly contrasting the antigui and the moderni, to Jauss's discussion of the "alterity" and "modernity" of medieval literature, which is, of course, in part, a commentary on Zumthor's Essai de poitique midikvale. As Rainer Warning points out in his outstanding analysis of medieval German drama, this foreignness, far from being overcome by interpretation as Dilthey supposed, imposes permanent barriers between the modern reader and the medieval text. Jauss is not discour-

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aged by the fact that all but a few classics of medieval literature are neither found in the school curriculum nor have a wide popular audience, as opposed, let us say, to the situation in Islam, where the literary heritage weighs heavily-perhaps, at times, too heavily--on the present. Like Curtius and Auerbach, he looks at the Middle Ages from two perspectives at once: a sincere interest in the period for its own sake and a desire to reinterpret its otherness for contemporary readers. He wishes to build a "hermeneutic bridge" from the past to the present and looks for a "paradigm change" which indicates the birth of modernitas. As he sees it, there are three stages in the process of interpretation: aesthetic pleasure, the reconstruction of alterity, and the disclosure of concretizable significance. His position has the advantage of being easily understandable both to professionals and nonmedievalists. Like C. S. Lewis and Eugene Vinaver, whom he admires, he benefits from common sense informed by intensive reading and a wide general culture. I can quarrel with little in this program. However, as I read through Jauss's essay, I feel I would occasionally place my emphasis elsewhere. For instance, he makes no mention of recent studies in folklore, which have done so much to rehabilitate "popular" literature and to narrow the gap between oral and written traditions." His theory of genres also raises as many problems as it solves. The eight genres he mentions do not all flourish at the same time nor do they appeal to the same audiences. Romance and courtly lyric were directed towards those acquainted with literacy; cultic participation receded to popular levels during the thirteenth century; and, as Warning suggests, liturgical drama later incorporated the need for new forms of religious association and participation. Similarly, I am not sure that the older cliche about the medieval reader as a lecteur de symboles can any longer stand as a blanket response to twelfth-century allegory. Peter Dronke has pointed to the degree of individuality and self-consciousness among Latin poets of the period;'* others have drawn attention to the middle ground between realism and nominalism among the cosmological poets.13 The age was more diversified and the issues more complex than formerly assumed. Jauss also argues that what is foreign to us was familiar to the medievals. True, but a large part of the attractiveness of romances, crusading histories, works of science fiction, and the occult was precisely their remoteness from everyday experience. Yet, in general: Jauss is correct to stress that the Middle Ages is further away from us than classical antiquity. Homer places less of a strain on our imaginative capacities than Beowulf. Nor can this otherness be overcome through the continuity of rhetoric as Curtius assumed. The major divide was the introduction of the printed book, which rescued many medieval works from oblivion but, as Vinaver

399

Ah'TIQUI OR MODERNI?

has pointed out, deliberately buried their orallaural character under the veneer of classical stemmata. Among writers whom Jauss thinks have contributed to an intelligent reassessment of the Middle Ages, I am happy to see C. S. Lewis somewhat rehabilitated, although I do not think the lectures he gathered together shortly before his death in 1963 and published under the title The Discarded Image give us the best example of his wide-ranging mind. There are other minor flaws in Jauss's essay. Medieval Lebensfomen were not as fixed as he assumes; nor did they always follow the directions suggested by models from learned tradition. The family did not evolve from complex to simple organization. Finally, his review of recent work in allegory appears to me to be seriously deficient.14 I conclude by returning to the issues I raised at the outset. Students of the Middle Ages today are faced with a twofold problem: how, on the one hand, to sustain interest in a period whose discontinuity with the present cannot easily be overcome and, at the same time, to avoid the distortions which, while making the Middle Ages more accessible, prevent any genuine understanding of its inner artistic or spiritual life. The problem is more acute for the historian than for the literary critic because history still labors under positivistic illusions which the study of literature has by and large abandoned. As a general position I do not think that anyone who writes about the Middle Ages can avoid interpreting it. Whether o r not its foreignness can be overcome, the interpreter is involved in framing his picture of the Middle Ages just as the period, conceived as an autonomous entity possessing its own cultural assumptions, is involved in shaping his responses to contemporary concerns. Nor do I see why this reciprocal relationship should necessarily be regarded as a bad thing. Like ethnomethologists, medievalists must learn to live with their own interpretive structures and, in a less embarrassed manner than in the past, to use them to advantage. The authors of the essays under review-as well, I suspect, as their reviewer-are a new kind of moderni. They all recognize and exploit the essential alteritas of the Middle Ages. But, paradoxically, by acknowledging its distance, they have brought us nearer to it.

NOTES 1 For a further discussion of these issues, see my essay, "The Middle Ages as Subject

and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism," N e u Literary History, 5

(Spring 1974). 527-47.

2 See New Literary History, 9 (Winter 1978).

400


3 See, in general, Jacques Le Goff, Pour u n autre Moyen Age. Temps, travail et culture en Occident: 18 essais (Paris, 1977). 4 See, in general, Herbert Grundmann, Religiiise Bewegungen im Mittelalter, 2nd. ed. (Darmstadt, 1961). chs. 4-6. 5 See Yves Congar, "Les la~cset I'ecclesiologie des 'ordines' chez les theologiens des XIe et XIIe si6cles," in I laici nella 'societac christiana' dei secoli XI e XZI (Milan, 1968), pp. 83-117. 6 Glosae super Platonem, ed. Edouard Jeauneau (Paris, 1965), pp. 74-75. 7 Giovanni Miccoli, "Per la storia della Pataria milanese," in Chiesa gregoriuna (Florence, 1966). pp. 124-37. 8 See Martin Grabmann, "Die Entwicklung der mittelalterlichen Sprachlogik," in Mittelalterliches Geistesleben, I (Munich, 1926), 104-46. 9 See Miccoli, Chiesa gregoriuna, Excursus: Mundus Senescens. 10 See Society and Culture in Early M o h m France (Stanford, 1975), chs. 4-6. 1 1 E.g., Carlo Ginzburg, I1 f o r m u g p e i vermi (Turin, 1976). 12 Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1970). 13 See my Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century (Princeton, 1972),chs. 2-3. 14 See Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poehy in the Twelfth Century: The Literaly Infuence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, 1972),and Peter Dronke, Fabula: Explorations Into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism (Leiden, 1974),as well as the remarkable essays of Edouard Jeauneau gathered in Lectio Philosophorum (Amsterdam, 1973).

Literary Meaning in the Middle Ages: From a

Sociology of Genres to an Anthropology of

Works

Daniel Poirion

I

to find that, in order to analyze literary theories applied to the Middle Ages, we turn to researchers in countries outside France. The contents of this issue of New Literary History confirm the sibylline remark made by Maria Corti at the beginning of her article: "If France, whose orientation is different, is left to one side." What orientation could justify such an exclusion? Of course, we must take into account the overall effect of university teaching and research in France, particularly regarding medieval literature. So centralized is the French system that one or two dogmatic minds could control appointments, competitive examinations, and publishing, thereby stifling research, or at least restricting it to a level of respectable mediocrity. Undoubtedly, a large proportion of writings published in France perpetuate a positivistic and bookish approach, merely shifting information from one point to another, ensuring an appearance of knowledge which disarms criticism. This molelike activity is not without merit, for it prepares the ground for use. But others, seekers unimpressed by an institution's respectability or by the venerable antiquity of the buildings housing it, must come to sow and reap. The astonishing fertility of the French nouvelle critique has not extended to the Middle Ages. However, this discouraging impression might be dispelled if we considered the work of French scholars less enslaved by the system, working in the direction defined by Maria Corti (Italy) and Eugene Vance (Canada)-Jean Batany's sociological semantics,' Michel Zink's investigation of Romance sermon^,^ and Jean-Charles Payen's ideologvirtuosity is indeed less apparent in these ical c r i t i ~ i s mTheoretical .~ studies than methodical demonstration. But the writers are well aware that their literary history is based upon new structures, defined primarily on the basis of the lessons of French historians, particularly Georges Duby and Jacques le Goff. There is no need to restate here the importance of these great medievalists or the richness of their interpretation of cultures and attitudes. Normally, students of literature turn to such T IS STRIKING


402


historians for definitions of civilization models, social structures, and even intellectual categories. The price paid for the resulting scientific prestige is an increased dependence of literary history on history. This dependence is veiled in the approach of Maria Corti and Eugene Vance, who begin their studies with sociology, linguistics, or philosophy. But the ultimate point of reference remains the historian's discourse on medieval civilization, the firm starting point for a renewal of literary history linked to the progress of historical studies. Here one can react against the tendency to confuse this historical discourse with the meaning of individual works. The usurping of meaning is all the more insidious as one moves away from the history of events to the interpretation of mores, institutions, and ideas, all structures which, in leaving their mark on the written work, tempt one to take these cultural models for literary meanings. The intersection of a semiotic with a sociological point of view in no way changes this trend, since such a semiotics eventually refers us back to sociological structures. The hegemony of the social is most noticeable in Maria Corti's work, influenced by Soviet studies which only call upon linguistics as a logic of historical discourse. True, this critical intellectualism seems particularly suitable for explaining medieval literature, because certain writings echo a philosophy or an intellectualist theology. Medieval dogmatism invites a criticism which explains everything by the dialectics of power. Scholastic classifications, inventories, and the "estates of men" are obviously provocative to modern structuralism. We have still to verify that the analogy between the two conceptions of the world has not made us lose sight of the essential differences between them. And we must above all resist the totalitarian reduction of literary meaning to ideological preaching and disputation. By paying greater attention to linguistic structures, Eugene Vance is able to provide a reply to these objections. If he succeeds in showing us that, in its very language, the literary text is determined by the culture of the age, we can then explain all medieval writing by the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Vance's investigation of the theoretical writings of the Latin Middle Ages is both fundamental and decisive. The application of his findings to a distinctly literary example, such as Chaucer's Troilus, confirms the fruitfulness of his method. He has demonstrated the relationship that forms between the poetic theme and the historical context, between, for example, love and war. But we risk falling into the error mentioned earlier if we interpret this relationship as a mirror one, the literary text a mere reflection of political reality. The history of the fourteenth century does not give literature its meaning: or, rather, the meaning history gives literature

LITERARY MEANING I N THE MIDDLE AGES

403

has already been conferred upon history by literature. At the beginning of the signifying procedure was the word, not the action. We are faced with an antinomy from which there is no escape unless we bring in the real bearer of meaning, man. If Hans Robert Jauss's works, particularly those on alterity and modernity, dominate this entire attempt at critical renewal, it is because his theory of reception is anchored in human psychology. No longer dealing with an abstract intersection of various applications of sociology and linguistics, we are at the crossroads of everyday life and literary activity. Freeing us of a dependence on ideological presuppositions, the concepts of function and communication permit us to situate texts with regard to real life. The modern trend towards dogmatism, intellectualism, and political schematization disappears. Critical perspective is situated in relationship to reading pleasure; judgment is not presented as absolute; the meaning of the text is not brought down to the rationality of themes and motifs, and the condition of literary life is not reduced to the service of social conflicts. By using theoretical "possibilities" such as those Jolles tried to describe, one can step back from historical discourse to formulate a new typology of genres. In the elaboration of this structural history of literature two critical endeavors stand out as landmarks-Curtius's classicist criticism and Paul Zumthor's formalist criticism. Curtius's ideas4 are in fact linked to an aesthetics which appeared in the Renaissance, breaking with medieval tradition, cutting through the complexity of literature to retain the writing only of the learned. Such a procedure immediately removed the alterity of the Middle Ages. Paul Zumthor's poetic^,"^ nurtured by linguistic concepts, does not make this mistake, but errs instead on the side of modernity, tending to treat the text as a source of itself, whereas its function as communication poses questions about its meaning for the audience. I n other words, Jauss, unlike Zumthor, does not go so far as to attempt a description of literature almost entirely divorced from the historical context. But he takes for granted a flexible and variable relationship which could account for the original characteristics of this literature-its normative function, its mixture of Latin culture and folklore; its growing independence of the movement of philosophical ideas; its elaboration of a mode of expression whose singularity is brought out in the allegory. At the very moment when the two critical directions given by Jauss and Zumthor seem to be diverging, Zumthor makes a significant return to history. Indeed, his work on the rhCtoriqueurs6 begins with a consideration of their social and historical situation, their function at the princes' courts, and moves towards a study of literary forms. The

404


very nature of rhktoriqueur poetry, usually linked to circumstances, may have dictated this historical method. The conversion even brings Zumthor back to an approach which seems like the one I took in my book on the poets of the previous century, a study influenced by Eric Zumthor brings a greater linguistic subtlety to the K ~ h l e rAlthough .~ strictly formal analyses, we are once again grappling with historicity, its concentric circles circumscribing the problematics of literary production. Around the texts will be paraded all the structures which could characterize the age: the notion of transition is charged with explaining the transformations of civilization, while Huizinga's grandiose but summary ideas are also corrected. The image of a "disintegrating world" still haunts the historian. The invention of printing, the aesthetics of the festival, the spectacles accompanying the festival, court pomp, carnival disguise, all become so many facts used to shed light on the forms of literary discourse. Only later on does Zumthor study the processes of laughter and of verbal play in order to define the poem. His procedure is very satisfying as a means of circumscribing and defining a given moment of literary history, for it traverses all the concentric structures which, first in the context, then in the text itself, surround the essence of the poetic parole. Of course, the problem of the particular work and its message is not addressed, since the aim is only to define parameters in which to situate the work. Still unknown is how the new historical criticism can formulate the passage from one period to another, recapture the evolution of literary history, for initially this approach involves cutting up the corpus to be studied as if it were autonomous, independent of literary tradition and context. In this way one admittedly avoids basing literature on history, although the latter provides explanatory elements, but one risks losing the thread and dynamism of the transformation. Must we then reintroduce a stricter dialectic, as Rainer Warning seems to do in interpreting religious drama? In Warning's study, the genre is interpreted on the basis of cultural antagonisms, while the archaeology of literary practice becomes clear, a seeking to reconstitute the entire activity of which the texts preserve but the trace. The logic of the explication leads to questions concerning the underlying meaning of the drama, and soon makes apparent the problem of remythologization, a notion also found by Jauss when studying allegory.8 Naturally, one seeks to explain the phenomenon by way of history, invoking the medieval duality between Christian and pagan culture. But here we confront an area that can only be explained using the tools of Sozialgeschichte if the cultures correspond exactly to social categories. For if one ponders the unity of the widely differing investigations


405

claiming to belong to a new literary history, one is led to confuse such a history with the use of sociological donnees to describe and interpret the evolution of genres, classify and situate ideological systems and cultural references, explain a given view of the world, and construe the messages of literature. Doubtless, the theoretical reflection sustaining these efforts will enrich the more positive tradition of literary history as practiced in France. There is no opposition on that level, except that there is a tendency to philosophical synthesis, while in France analysis is still preferred. As fine examples of analysis I would suggest PierreYves Badel's Le Roman de la Rose au XZVe sitcle; itude de la riception de I'oeuvre (Paris, 1977), and Francois Suard, Le Roman en pose de Guillaume &Orange au XVe sitcle, Etude littkraire (Paris, 1976). If we realize that French criticism remains more attached to the work than to the genre, we shall understand that in France literary theory is not an end in itself. However, what characterizes and, in my opinion, mutilates new literary history is the exclusion or surreptitious removal of the structures of the imaginary. Not that such structures are not invoked; but by applying to them the same sociolinguistic analysis used for ideological structures they are reduced to a semantic system. Now here lies the illusion, even the deception, of what is nowadays called literary semiotics: instead of establishing an analogical relationship between the different formal codes of a culture-from the image to the word, passing through all forms of expression-literary semiotics tends to reduce the image to the idea and the word. Thus, differences come down to the opposition between oral and written, an opposition which itself intertwines with two functions, two types of culture, ultimately with two social types. The antithesis between learned and popular culture weighs heavily on all modern interpretations of the Middle Ages, from the problems of the supernatural in twelfth-century narrative literature to those of laughter and madness in fifteenth-century literature. It goes without saying that Bakhtin's stimulating but confused ideas on the carnival encourage speculation about the fifteenth century and favor a return to a concept of social opposition as an explanatory principle. But the imaginary world is not the prerogative of one social class, one form of civilization, one culture: dream, madness, phantasm, and myth belong to all human beings. A study of the structures of the imaginary, essential, I feel, to every attempt at interpreting art and literature, is dependent not on historical but on psychological, psychoanalytical, and anthropological methods,!'for which neither space nor time are fundamental donnkes. The imaginary creates its own shape, place, and duration. The axis of research is thus atem-

406


poral, its manner of proceeding comparative. Of course, it is not impossible to discover a certain connection between social and imaginary structures: how such a connection can be made is immediately clear in the works of Georges DumCzil, particularly in his theory of the three functions.'O But structures of the imaginary cannot be reduced to the social structures as if the latter will constitute the explanation, the meaning of the former. The individual literary work is therefore situated at the point of connection between the imaginary and the ideological: in order to restore the full meaning of a work, we must interpret its function as communication. In other words, we must consider not only the receiver [destinataire], the code or the mode of communication, but also the message, together with all its conscious and unconscious implications, as emanating from a man or group of men and addressed to other men. Here we touch upon a sensitive and crucial point of commentary on medieval literature-the elimination of problems concerning the author. The fact that it has in most cases proved impossible to make use of biographical information is now presented as a law of medieval literature: the problem then becomes a false problem. All the arguments adduced are undercut by this mistaken assumption. Numerous substitutes for the author are imposed: the text itself speaks (obviously one of the childish ploys of la nouvelle critique),or the genre determines the work, or the cultural milieu accounts for its creation, or, at best, "any literate mind" invents it-and the thought processes of this literate mind are duly reconstructed. The seriousness of the theoretical negation of the author lies in the resulting inability to situate those imaginary and affective elements which form the basis for a literary text's meaning. By treating all works as political or theological texts, one risks bypassing the specificity of the literary sign, charged with expressing that which intelligence cannot formulate, desire, grief, love, and hate. These vectors of literary language cannot be left behind by linguistics or sociology, for their point of origin is the author, the human-author (whether an individual or a group). The intellectualism of medieval literature is exaggerated because we do not know how to analyze its affective and imaginary components. Naturally, the theoreticians of new literary history are eventually confronted by this problem. Jauss is undoubtedly the most eager to form a bridge between the two domains (let us call them the sociological and the psychological), in particular when he defines the nuances of literary pleasure [plaisir litth-aire], but also when his interpretation of allegory leads to the rediscovery of myth. But the problem of alterity and modernity, which Jauss poses in the context of literary


407

curiosity and enjoyment, must also be considered from a more scientific point of view. T h e question which then arises is to know how to apply our modern instruments, in this instance all the structures of the social sciences and their nomenclature, to the medieval field. Take, for example, the concept of the imaginary; what does such an idea correspond to in an age ignorant of modern psychology? Reference to medieval concepts of imagznatio,to ideas on dreams and hallucinations, to the figures of rhetoric, its grid taking the place of a psychological inventory, allows us to select with some accuracy the point where our modern notions can be applied-and substituted. And if ideas on the self, on personality, and on the inner world were not the same? But there were medieval equivalents, particularly in the personifications of allegory, for example in the dialogues featuring "the Heart" as a speaker. In both psychology and sociology, then, we can take into account a system of equivalencies or correspondences, on the basis of which we can locate and measure differences. Critical modernity can thus be practiced quite legitimately on the alterity of the Middle Ages. The very notion of literary creation is to some extent an anachronism. Nonetheless, one must still rediscover, in medieval ideas on nature in general and on sexuality in particular, the interpretive framework defining the role of the author, mime, storyteller, or writer. Hence, the notion of procreation or of re-creation is applied to the man of letters, as to the artist, according to a concept of work and of the production of works which the Renaissance will replace with the proud notion of creation. T o sum up, the theoretical writings of new literary history have developed in Germany, Italy, and the New World under the influence primarily of sociology, aided or merely dressed up by linguistics. In their present state, the writings constitute a relevant and illuminating commentary on the current state of research in medieval literature, not only in the countries just mentioned but also, most recently, in France. They confirm a certain fascination with historical studies, and with the social sciences underlying such studies. Aimed first of all at young French scholars closer to the tradition of psychology (together with recent developments in the field) and aesthetics (along with its concessions to various philosophies), a corrective for these theories might call upon the model of anthropology. In its reference to human nature, anthropology enables us more easily to situate the work at the crossroads of the imaginary and the ideological, of personal desire and historical situation, mythos and logos.We could thereby avoid the risk of taking modern historians' discourse for the reality of other times, their current ideology for the truth of the past. This danger is all the greater in France, where political prejudices are endemic and,

408


where, even in literary criticism, the allegorical debate is still eternally fought between "the left" and "the right," the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians.

(Translated by Annette Tomarken)

NOTES 1 Jean Batany, "Un prkdicateur semiologue: I'apostrophe au roi du Roman de Car&!,"

in Milanges de langue et de littkrature m'diivales offer& a Pierre Le Gentil (Paris, 1973), pp.

105-15.

2 Michel Zink, La pidication en langue mmane avant I300 (Paris, 1976).

3 Jean-Charles Payen, "Les elements ideologiques dans leJeudeSaintNicolas,"Romania,

94 (1973), 484-504.

4 Ernst R. Curtius, Europaische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern, 1948).

5 Paul Zumthor, Essai de poitique midihale (Paris, 1972).

6 Zumthor, Le marque et la lumik-e. La poitique des grand rhitoriqueurs (Paris, 1978).

7 Daniel Poirion, Le Po& et le Prince, 2nd ed. (1965; rpt., Geneva, 1978).

8 Hans Robert Jauss, "Allegorese, Rernythisierung und neuer Mythus," in Alteritat und

Modernitat der mittelalterlichen Literatur (Munich, 1977), pp. 285 -307.

9 Gilbert Durand, Les structures anthropologzques de l'imaginaire. Introduction a l'ar-

chitypologie gindrale (Paris, 1963).

10 Joel Grisward is currently completing a thesis on "L'Heritage indo-europeen dans

la litterature epique et romanesque du Moyen Age" (Paris: Sorbonne).

Continuities and Discontinuities Morton W. Bloomfield HE NOTIONS of progress and evolution have made natural in modern scholarship a n emphasis on continuities a n d similarities, even long after these basic notions of the intellectuals of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries had begun to fade as dominating ideas or perhaps paradigms of modern thought. It is not surprising then that the essays in this issue of NLH devoted to new paths in medieval scholarship should emphasize discontinuities and differences within medieval life, culture, ideas, and art as well as with our modern period, Looking at the medieval period from a point of view of differences rather than similarities with our own time satisfies both our desire to see the Middle Ages as different in a good sense from our own time and equally in a deeper sense to imply that the Middle Ages from this point of view is really similar to our time with its clashing ideologies, anomie, and restless seeking for what is at its heart religion or perhaps belief of some sort. Both these desires enable us to idealize the Middle Ages and to believe that it has something to tell us. In a period of intellectual disorder, it is only natural that similar disjunctions in the past be stressed. When paradigms, to use Thomas Kuhn's term, a r e changing-and in the humanities unlike the sciences, we have many at one time-we instinctively and consciously reanalyze the past, in this case the medieval past, to see how it too was a period of changing paradigms-from oral to written culture, from paganism to Christianity, from feudalism to mercantile capitalism, from Platonism to Aristotelianism, and so forth-and above all how it established new ones without removing the paradoxes and antitypes which characterize all cultural manifestations. We seem, then, in our time in scholarship to be leaving the emphasis on genesis, background, and historical continuities for structure, contradictions, and breaks. This movement is by no means confined to our attitudes toward the Middle Ages but embraces such phenomena and subjects as how we distinguish ourselves from our background and fathers both literal and spiritual, with Harold Bloom, rather than how much we are indebted to them; as the revival of interest in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and other poets of our time o r immediately preceding it as poets of disjuncture; as in

T

Copyright" 1979 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia

410


child development; as in modern anthropology with its rebellion against evolution and influence; and as even in our prose style which emphasizes parataxis with its discontinuities as opposed to hypotaxis' which our fathers and grandfathers favored for their novels and serious writing. Even evolution theory now emphasizes mutations and discontinuities. Although this present issue of NLH is not the first example of a serious attempt to look differently at and to ask different questions of the Middle Ages than has been the habit in the past 125 years of medieval s c h o l a r ~ h i p ,it~ is certainly a major attempt to see the period with different eyes and to look again at old "truths" and "established verities" about the period. The similarities to our present life and our present hopes encourage a deep interest in the medieval past and yet do not encourage the study of origins or philology in its strictest sense. Above all, we are deep in an age of theory and do not in medievalist studies wish to spend too much time on the history of Germanic sound changes. The age of positivist scholarship seems to be past. In this issue of NLH we find a serious attempt both to define and to illustrate some new approaches to the medieval period. One of the major figures in this reevaluation and restructuring of medieval studies in the past ten years o r so has been Hans Robert Jauss. The present article presents succinctly his major ideas. Most of them demand a long analysis and discussion for which we have no space here. Making use of hermeneutics of the Gadamer type and some of the ideas of Zumthor, Haug, and C. S. Lewis, Jauss argues for the "otherness" o r alterity as he calls it of the medieval period but at the same time, as I have suggested above in my general comments, emphasizes the modernity in the alterity of the Middle Ages. Convinced that both the positivistic scholarship of the past 150 years and the idealistic interpretation of the Middle Ages, so dear to the heart of the nineteenth century, have exhausted themselves, Jauss presents approaches which emphasize (1) aesthetic pleasure, (2) the alterity of the period to us, and (3) the model character of medieval texts. While none of these approaches are new, they are presented with a vigor and exemplification that heightens our sense of what they mean. Jauss seems to have little faith in any form of linguistics, sociology, and phenomenology. With some modifications, however, he does seem to favor, among the new intellectual goodies arrayed for humanists these days, hermeneutics and perhaps the new emphasis on the oral basis of literature. Jauss also seems to be unhappy with too much emphasis on the self-referentiality of poetic language which Jakobson and others find characteristic of poetry.

CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES

41 1

When Jauss gets down to particulars, he is exciting on animal poetry and genres and to my taste less exciting on allegory, which he defines as the poetry of the invisible. On beast poetry, he is especially interested in finding the beginnings of that emphasis on the individual that is supposed to be characteristic of the Middle Ages from the twelfth century on. On genres, he thinks we should emphasize generic components rather than genres as such and reemphasizes Jolles's famous classification of primitive or root genres. In all these matters, Jauss as always is intelligent and provocative. Whether we can accept his interpretation as theory is another question. Without at least a sound knowledge of philology, all these attractive notions can lead nowhere. He like most older medievalists was properly trained as a philologist before he went on to his penetrating analyses. I still think this subject must occupy a basic role in medieval study even if we don't have to memorize sound changes from IndoEuropean down to Old English or Old High German. The early "New Critics" had their historical training before they went off to their "organic" analyses of literary texts. Now the young "new critics," if there are any left, don't know any history and their criticism suffers for it. So, too, I think we must still insist on philology as a basic discipline in medieval studies. Philology must be defined in broader terms, and it should be looked upon as a propaedeutic subject. One cannot be a literary medievalist unless he knows how to understand and deal with his basic materials: medieval manuscripts. Some students will also want to specialize in these matters. Not everyone is capable of indulging o r even desires to indulge in generalizations about the period he is studying. Yet many will go on to do so, but philology cannot be dismissed as useless o r unnecessary. It is true, however, that the most exciting work of the future may well be done along some of the lines Jauss lays down. He is himself a scholar who delights in accuracy and knowledge, but he knows that more is needed. Here Jauss is exciting. The Middle Ages is the matrix of the present and is thus easily understandable, but it is also a different world and is thus strange to us. Perhaps it is now time to differentiate it from us (especially as we are now strange to ourselves). Maria Corti, picking u p the Lotman and Uspensky notion of antimodels within societal organization, and the speech of Zolkiewski at the 1973 Milan Conference on Semiotics wherein the notion is developed, applies the notion of model to the period around 1000 when a Trinitarian model created ternary divisions throughout medieval society. Then she moves to Humbert of Romans OP's De eruditione fmzedicatoriurn written in the early thirteenth century with its notion of

412


social states (a kind of semiotic cultural structure) with sermons for various classes. Until the twelfth century, Corti points out, women as a special category in these divisions and oppositions are left out. Then they suddenly appear. Various oppositions flourish in medieval thinking. Corti concludes with the Bakhtin notion of popular tradition as seen in the various dialogues of Marcolf against Solomon which are widely preserved in our period. Here we have lower-class culture strongly supported by Marcolf who cuts down to size Solomon's upper-class culture. An opposition culture puts the dominant culture in its place in an upside-down view of the world. What we have in Corti's essays is really an invitation to think dialectically, to be aware of oppositions-good advice often made but usually ignored. It is difficult to emphasize antitheses and oppositions, but we really only understand a culture when we are aware of its internal oppositions and contradictions, even if we do not choose the Marxian model to think them in. Corti's article is fresh and perceptive, but like most attempts to deal satisfactorily with opposites tends to ignore exceptions. Corti's strong semiological sense enables her to point again and again to the contradictions between res and signa. One does not have to be a semiotician to realize this fundamental disparity, but it does help one to be precise about the contradictions. Needless to say, the actual analysis of the various documents is sensitively done. On a personal or cultural level we have the spirit of contradiction or of negativity which is hidden in the affirmations of individuals or cultures. These must be brought to light if the avowed notions of the past are to be understood. Corti's essay is a notable contribution to the understanding of some of these negations of the Middle Ages. Much more needs to be done here. What can we learn from her? Do we need to be semioticians to do cultural and social analyses? On such levels, unlike literary analyses, I would say that it helps,3though is not necessary. Zumthor, Warning, and Vance give us perceptive studies of particular schools, genres, and a literary work of the Middle Ages-in these cases, the Grands Rhetoriqueurs of fifteenth-century France, religious drama especially of the German-speaking lands and France, and Chaucer's Troilm and Criseyde. Zumthor, father of the revolt against positivism and continuities in medieval studies, is especially fascinated by language. Although he seems to accept the classic Huizinga picture of the fifteenth century as a decline and does not make use of anthropological information about "court poets," he has nevertheless written a brilliant study of the fifteenth-century French-speaking rhetoriqueurs, by seeing their

CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES

4 13

movement as a "deconstruction" of language and by emphasizing the notion of carnival and public poetry in their work. His sensitivity and intelligence give the whole paper, although many of the notions are not original with him, a sensitivity and intelligence which delight. I put the word deconstruction above in quotation marks because this is not deconstruction in the Derrida sense but of the signifying element in the linguistic processes. The poets discussed, Zumthor emphasizes, are not rejecting an order but rather questioning the univocal nature of the values of the world. Although not all medieval critics and scholars will possess Zumthor's acuteness, nonetheless his essay provides a real example of how by emphasizing neglected aspects of society like carnival and by an awareness of the complex nature of language in its referential and self-referential roles, one can open new paths. In his comments on the use of irony in the broad sense as in the macaronic poetry and in the narrower sense of puns, the author raises new kinds of questions. The discontinuities and breaks of the past become new ways of overcoming alienation. Warning has also written a provocative and stimulating essay. He emphasizes in his discussion of religious drama both the quality of foreignness as a hermeneutical hurdle to overcome and the importance of mutations, breaks, o r leaps in the evolution of medieval plays. The remythologization and repaganization of the episodes of Heilsgeschichte are the ways he sums up the extraordinary development of medieval drama and castigates, as modern American scholars have been doing recently, a simplistic evolutionary story. He, however, goes further and tries to show, often successfully, how this theory has blinded historians to the newlold mythic elements both in the Visit to the Sepulchre theme (a most important element in the rise of drama) and in the Passion story. Whether all will agree with his argument that the medieval dramatic tradition developed in opposition to religious cults or not (and I suspect not), Warning's arguments and argumentation will certainly have to be taken account of by future historians of medieval drama. Vance's article on Troilus and Criseyde is full of insights and brilliancies, but I see both imprecision and clarity in his use of semiotics and speech-act theory. Vance is learned and knows a good deal about both notions, but he confuses levels of discourse in the one and defines speech act so broadly as to be, I think, of little use. The graphic level can be central to the social order without paying attention to the signzjiint. Only the s i g n f k is relevant. Throughout, the level of meaning and the arbitrary level of the sign are confused. That the Middle Ages was especially sign conscious, no one can deny, but

414


this hardly excuses claiming that misuse of language is a confusion between signifier and signified instead of a confusion between meanings. If Criseyde says "By Mars" instead of "By Venus," "Mars" still means Mars and "Venus" still means Venus, even if she is wrong. What the section on speech acts contributes to the central argumentation of the poem, I do not understand. I do not see how it can be established that, as Vance claims, Chaucer had more of a performative linguistic consciousness than any other author or even person, unless Vance is using "performative" in a very special sense. Vance also seems to confuse sentences dealing with or describing action and dialogue with the action or dialogue themselves. I have my prejudices like everyone else, but I find it difficult to accept Vance's basic assumption about the poem: that it is completely in the contemptus mundi tradition. Troilus, Criseyde, Pandarus, and the Chaucer figure are all vicious, ugly, and wicked human beings whom Chaucer the author hates. Vance finds evil everywhere in the most imaginative ways. "Die" refers to sexual orgasms and when Chaucer speaks of Diomedes as "of tonge large," what he finds in that remark is Diomedes's predilection for "cunnilingus," to take two examples. Troilur and Cnieyde is a drama of "adultery," he tells us. Are widows even in Christianity (I think of the setting of the action as pagan; otherwise the whole ending is meaningless) not allowed to remarry? Perhaps Vance means "fornication," a much less serious sin. Reality to Vance is for the Trojans to prosecute the war to the bitter end. T o Chaucer, who believed that if Troy had won, there would have been no Britain or England, this may not have been a desirable act. Vance even holds the etymology of "chere," a word which Criseyde uses (from Latin caro), against her. We have quite a learned Criseyde in Vance's eyes. Furthermore, Vance finds nominalism a completely skeptical philosophy, an interpretation highly disputed today. There are many other detailed criticisms I could make, but this essay is hardly the place to do so. Although I am dubious of how much speech-act theory and semiotics can contribute to the elucidation of most art (although they can certainly do so to life, philosophy, and culture) and although it is the popular thing to find a "gloomy C h a ~ c e r , "Vance's ~ article is an acute and brilliant reading of Chaucer's great poem. His linking of the paradigmatic with the lyric o r exclamatory mode and the syntagmatic with narrative, his general comments on the centrality of language to an understanding of the poem, on the significance of Troy to the medieval period, on the frequency of certain rhymes (e.g., joy and Troy), on the parallel he sees between Troilus and Criseyde to Troy and Greece and to Being and Fortune, on his awareness of contradictions and oppositions in

CONTINUITIES A N D DISCONTINUITIES

4 15

the poem, all indicate that this is a major article. But I doubt that we can learn much as to new approaches to medieval literature from his article; rather I fear we shall be misled. The new approaches to medieval literature in these five articles should stimulate new excitement and a new understanding in the field. Philology and a knowledge of manuscripts must, however, always be the only basis of good scholarship and perception in medieval studies, but there is no need to be concerned only with these subjects. Positivism insofar as it stresses respect for fact and text, for accuracy and care, must always have its place in our studies. But we can move beyond such an attitude if we so desire. These articles (and some others which have appeared elsewhere in the past few years) will give us a lead in looking at our materials in a new way: see the rich significance of the movement from oral to written, notice the discontinuities and differences in the Middle Ages and between them and our time, make use of what linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy can provide us with. Above all, we must keep a sense of polarities and oppositions. We do not necessarily want to find syntheses although at times they may be necessary.' We can often best approach the past by being aware of its dualities and polarities. The Christian religion itself provides us with a model of profoundly moving oppositions which to all of us seem to give us a special insight on life. On a lower level we can do the same for the study of the Middle Ages or of any recognizable period. In some ways, however, the Middle Ages is an ideal period for us in the West to approach dialectically. It provides us a basic matrix for our culture. While we do not want all humanistic scholars to be medievalists (where for one thing could they find jobs?), a little dose of it would give an important and deeper perspective on all later literature, history, and culture-as much for its alterity as for its sameness, for its differences as for its similarities. Medieval men are in some important ways ourselves and in other important ways very different from us. A sense of their dilemmas, their solutions, their art, their institutions, their life will help us over our own deep chasms and yet reinforce our sense of the marvelous and the strange.

NOTES

1 On some of the cultural and psychological and symbolic distinctions between "paratactic and hypotactic style," see Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, 1964). pp. 162-74.

416


2 I am thinking of Zumthor and Jauss's own earlier works in the late sixties and seventies, and even earlier of such speeches as F. L. Utley's given some years ago at a meeting of the Mediaeval Academy of America, which made a similar point and which urged that we study the Middle Ages not to find its similarities to and the roots of our own age (e.g., the university, the cathedrals, scientific rationality, etc.) but rather its differences from our own period. We should approach the Western Middle Ages as we might approach a different culture in Africa or Australia so that we can see and learn how a society can operate differently from ours and yet have obvious links to modern times. It should be a kind of poor man's anthropology, so to speak. We read of and study the Middle Ages instead of going to spend a year among the Luo or Torres Straits people.

3 See below in my discussion of Vance's article.

4 See M. W. Bloomfield, "The Gloomy Chaucer," in Veins of Humor, ed. Harry Levin,

Harvard English Studies, 3 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 57-68.

5 Cf.: "For example, the appearance of dualities, pairs, polarities or opposites does not

of itself entail that a mediation is being sought," G. S. Kirk, in a review of Marcel

Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis, in TLS, I8 Aug. 1978, p. 922. Cf. also: "in xrlatters of art

. . . it is wrong to want to decide, to want to resolve a difficulty," Fredric Jameson,

"Metacommentary," PMLA, 86 (1971), 9 el passim; and Peter Elbow, OpPositions in

Chaucer (Middletown, Conn., 1975).

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Soviet Revolutionary Culture: A Special Issue October 8 Spring 1979

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Boretz, Hans Magnus Enzensberger,

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V E R S E S IN S E R M O N S FASCICULUS MORUM AND ITS

MIDDLE ENGLISH POEMS

Siegfried Wenzel

Fasciculus morum, a Latin handbook for preachers from the late

thirteenth century, is an important document for scholars interested in

popular preaching and the Middle English religious lyric. This new

book offers a study of Fasciculus morum and its verses, along with the

first complete edition of all the English poems contained in the various

manuscripts. Mr. Wenzel examines the date, authorship, purpose, and

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vernacular poems in Latin sermons.

Cambridge, Mass., 1978. Pp. x , 234.

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Cambridge, MA 02 13 8

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an interdisciplinary journal of literary and philosophical studies Editor: Denis Dutton Corresponding Editors: Jesse Kalin, Martha Nussbaum Since its first appearance in 1976, Philosophyand Literature has established itself as a lively forum for the best new work in a challenging and exciting interdisciplinary field. The journal features philosophical interpretations of literature. literary investigations of classic workiof philosophy,articles on the aesthetics of literature,theory of criticism, and relations between ohilosoohv . and the dramatic media of theatre and film.

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Subscriptions are available to individuals for $7, $10, and $12 (2, 3, and 4 years).The journal is published twice each year. A sample copy may be had postpaid from the publisher for $1. Philosophy and Literature is published by The University of Michigan-Dearborn Dearborn, Michigan 48128

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JACQUES DERRIDA The Retrait of Metaphor MARIE CLAIRE ROPARS The Overture of October I STEVEN UNGAR Doing and Not Doing Things With Barthes WILLIAM WEST Staying Alive: Poe's "William Wilson" PATRICIA FEDKIW A Letter-al Re-covery

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MAURICE BLANCHOT From The ~nfiniteconversation MARIE CLAIRE ROPARS The Overture of October II HUBERT DAMISCH Eight Theses For (or Against?) a Semiology of Painting CHRISTINE RICHARDSON A l l the Memory o f a World: A Retrospective ROBERT BURGOYNE Oneiric Fantasy in Open City LEE HUMPHRIES Tonality, Mortality MEG MORLEY Vision and Desire in Spies

Subscriptions: 5.001yr; single issues 2.50 outside U.S. and Canada add 1.OO Institutions: 11.001outside U.S. and Canada 13.00 200 Folwell Hall, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN. 55455

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CONTRIBUTORS MORTON\Y. BLOOMFIELD is a Kingsley Porter Professor of English, Harvard University, a n d t h e a u t h o r o f "Piers Plowman" a.r a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse, Seven Deadly Sins, and Essays and Exp1oration.r. J O H N A. BURROWis Winterstoke Professor o f English at the Urliversity of Bristol. His most recent book is an anthology, Engli,rh Poetry 17'00-1500.

ARIA CORTI,Professor of the History of Italian Language a n d Director of the Irlstitute of t h e History of the Italian Language at Pavia Urliversity, is Presiderlt of t h e Italian Association f o r Semiotic Studies a n d a u t h o r of An Introduction to Literary Semiotic.r. HANSROBERTJAUSS,Professor of Romance Literature and Literary Science at the University of Consta~lce,is founder a n d coeditor of Poetik und Hermeneutik. His latest publications a r e Literaturgeschichte a h Provokation, Alteritat und Modernitat der mittehlterlichen Literatur, and ~.rthetircheErfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik. DANIEL. POIRION,P rofessor at the Paris Sorbonne, has devoted his principal works to the literary history of the fourteenth a n d fifteenth centuries a n d to a study of the Roman de la rose. H e directs research o n literary problems of meaning and comn~unication. BRIANS10ch is a Senior Fellow of t h e Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto. H e is currently completirlg a series o f studies in t h e c u l t u r e o f t h e eleventh a n d twelfth centuries.

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