Critical Paradoxes Author(s): Paul Zumthor Source: MLN, Vol. 102, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 1987), pp.

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Paradoxes Critical
Paul Zumthor

Among organizers of medieval conventions,colloquia, seminars and other such learned gatherings,it has already become a tradition to include on the menu of special events some exhibitionof manuscriptsor related objects, a musical concertbased on copies of original instruments, presentation of Gregorian chant, the a staging of a drama such as the Old French Play of Adam,or the projection of an appropriate film: from Cassenti's version of the fromEric Rohmer'sPercevalto Song ofRoland to Bresson's Lancelot, Excalibur Borman. The matter of the hieraticand almost ritualistic of the organizer's choice, insofar as it involves simplya selection from among a comparable list of possibilities, presents few problems; problems do arise, however,when we consider the implicitintention,sometimesleftmuch in the dark, that dictatesthe inclusion of such entertainment.Indeed, it is remarkable that, over the last few years, these presentationshave moved from a position at the margins of our professionalmeetings to the very center.As timegoes on, theyare less and less intended as a simple diversion from supposedly "serious" preoccupations and have been increasinglysituated withinthe very context created by the placed on scholarlydiscussions. The concert or filmis thus tacitly an equal footing(a footingthatcertainly needs to be defined ) with erudite exchanges. The sweeping importancethat has been granted to the typesof reflections and discussion fostered by these exhibitions is surprising to the over-scrupulous among us, not to mention those dour academic types who have little regard for what seems, to What themat any rate,an incongruousand trifling entertainment.

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is importanthere is not the question of whether the medievalist establishment is subject to a lack or an excess of audacity, nor would it be pertinentto measure the extentto whichwe are altersignifWhat is truly natelymoved or bored by such manifestations. icant has to do withthe nature of a kind of knowledge,the specific I informationwe are attemptingto acquire concerningour object. do not want to be seen as the proponent of a culturalagnosticism, but am instead concerned about definingour positionin regard to what we wish to know. And I do at the veryleast assume and hope that this is our desire: to acquire knowledge. But: what is knowledge? The discourse that we, as professionalsor as amateurs, are developing in dealing withthe "Middle Ages" tends to sketchout in is itsown termsthe basic design of our object. Its intention to dissito pate the fog surrounding it and, ultimately, see thingsface to face. In sayingthis,I am of course purposelymakinguse of a metovertones.For thisdesire of aphor withreligiousand even mystical which I have been speaking is in manyways,ashamed as we might mythical!).Our choice (andjust as certainly be to admit it,mystical of methodologyonly changes the appearance of things.Nonetheless, it seems that differentpaths are available depending upon of me whetherI am seekingcontactwiththe object within or outside me. The search takes place outside of me if I set out witha lantern in myhand in what seems to me to be the rightdirectionand hope, not without some reasonable expectation, to reach some goal withina portion of temporal duration engulfed in an irretrievable dimension preceding my existence. The search is inside of me if, like Narcissus looking for himselfin the fountain,I preferto gaze and fleeting image sparklingin the recesses of my at the far-off inner grottos. For the sake of simplification, let us call the first of these methods scienceand the second art: we have here two different two ways of ways of gaining access to knowledge and, ultimately, opposed. Science no less than learning thatseemto be diametrically art (we could have said art no less than science) seeks to proclaim, if not to impose, a meaning. The will to impose a meaning upon sense, be deemed the definingtrait the world could, in the strictest of culture. We all know that culture acts upon nature, making certain thingsmeaningful.What is "nature" forthe medievalist?It is a sortof overgrownand, at first glance, chaotic assemblage of philological, textual, moral, social, aesthetic,legal, and even biograph-

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ical givens. Lagrange's Tristanor Rohmer's Percevaldo not (from this viewpoint) fulfila functionwithin our own experience differentfromthat of a research project concerningBeroul's textor the use of proverbs in Chretien de Troyes. The differencebetween a film and a research project is of another order and has facultiesthan our more to do withthe operation of our intellectual emotional ones, whether we wish to admit it or not. Scientific method venturesforthso as to encounter meaning along its path: it aspires for it in a spiritof hope, makes it the object of its research, and, sometimes quite laboriously, constructsit. Artistic conmethod, on the other hand, starts out from an intuitively ceived or even imagined meaning, but in any event a provisional one that is always incomplete. This "artistic"method goes on to put this meaning to the test,gauging it, extrapolatingit and quite literally exhausting it. In Now, what if we were to say poeticinstead of artistic? the it comes down to the same thing.The adjective present instance, qualifies somethingthat is the opposite of science on the level of . . . Of what? Of the verifiable?This is at best a contingentcriterion. Just try and "verify" the meaning of the scene between Tristan and Isolde under the pine tree as told by Beroul, or thatof the inscriptionon the hazel twigin Marie de France's shortstory! But what order of Shall we speak of the level of verisimilitude? are verisimilitude we gettingat? What about the level of the true or the false? What indeed is the truth?People have been asking this question forwell over two thousand years now, and mostlyend up washing theirhands of the whole business. We can qualifyas "scientific"that which refuses in principle to be considered "poetic"; is but the converse of thisstatement not at all true,for poets don't reallycare. has As a matterof fact,once an attemptat interpretation been manifested, tending either toward the simple suggestion of meaning or its fullscale elaboration, science and art inevitably begin to interminglein our discourse, even though we may consider it a failure on intellectual grounds. They penetrate each other. Some thirty years ago, Levi-Straussremarked that the only true sciences are those we call exact or natural.This amounted to a denunciation of the equivocal nature of the "human" sciences,our own included. It does happen that certain among us evoke the "pure sciences" with the ecstatic look of anchorite monks tormented by the world's turpitudes.And such colleagues will occa-

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sionallycite some truismunder the guise of a supposedly algebraic formula, in the same way that they would attemptto disguise its poimperfections witha fake nose. This is of course an eminently to etic operation in its essence (if not in itseffect), unbeknownst its perpetrators. Let me be perfectly clear. The word poetic, referring a mode to of knowledge, does not necessarilyimplyin this contexta particular styleof expression, nor does it indicate an avowed aesthetic intention.This symbiosisthat,withrare exceptions,associates the in poetic with the "scientific" our disciplineaccounts for a unique of feature of that discipline: namely, the multiplicity possible interpretationsapplicable to one same fact. Certainly,most other sciences are aware of this phenomenon, but theycan only categorize it as a sortof residue, and progressin researchtends to reduce This (or ratherI should say, consistsin reducing) the multiplicity. to phenomenon appears on the contrary be an integralpart of our forebearsconown humanisticresearch. Our nineteenth-century ceived the future of their intellectualcontributionin terms of a reduction to oneness, a total agreement of perspectives.The very idea of plural interpretation would have appeared to theireyes a whence typeof aporia. They couldn't get past thisway of thinking, the scathing tone and undue harshness of learned polemics on a scale that is not to be found any more. For them,it was a question of Truth (with a capital T). For us, in our occasional learned vanities. brawls, it is scarcelymore than a question of conflicting Willinglyor not, each of us has come to be waryof the misdeeds of perpetrated by reductionists many cloths. The new ideal of interdisciplinarity notjust a pretextfor obtainingmore substantial is research subsidies. It ultimately opens us up to an extremediversificationin the points of view expressed by scholars, in the questions that theybring to light,and in the possible answers to these questions. Nonetheless,some sortof coherence has to be maintained.A lot of the concerted efforts interdisciplinary at research,as we are all aware, have merelycrumbledaway. Such a "poetic" undertakingis more easily adapted to the imperativeof coherence, because it is more globalizing,less a captive of deductive reasoning,and richer in its abilityto exploit the resources of analogical conceptualization. With our several years experience, I do not thinkI am taking anyone by surprise in suggesting that the so-called scientificapthe proach to interdisciplinarity an art.And thisstatement, pertiis

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nence of which is most evident when we are dealing with disciplines as divergent as paleography and mathematics,is no less valid in a more narrow circle, which for us might include grammar, thematic study, social history,and folklore. I would submitas proof the diffusionin the last few years withinthe isowoven) realm occupied by medieval scholars of lated (yet tightly and notions that originated in other areas (such as textuality), the new inflexion given to older termswhichhad long before become such as "tradition,""myth,"or almost emptied of signification, leading, if it is not, "legend." Where is this cultural interference to ratherpredictably, the eventual dilutionof the last tracesof that dear to our fathers?Which is to say, the abbenign scientificity sorptionof theiralready quite weakened impactupon our intellectual behavior? By virtue of a secondary, but perhaps even more deeply felt, effect,it is no longer simplythe contour of our medieval object, but its verynature, that is called into question. The termliterature betraysits own incapacityto define thatobject,even in the crudest von Strassburg'stales as way. To deal withThomas's or Gottfried texts,according to the conventionaland scarcelycritical "literary" attached to the adjective,is reallyto be aiming at the signification wrong target.Littleby little,and withoutmost of us even noticing what was going on, one of the cardinal presuppositionsmade by medievalistsfor the last centuryhas been slowlydissolving.The commonplace assimilation of medieval texts to what our eighpredecessors have led us to understand as "literateenth-century ture" is in the process of becoming,quite simply,obsolete. I am insisting thispoint at the riskof belaboringthe obvious. on witha precise I especiallydo not wish to endow the term"literary" definitionthat itjust doesn't have. One of the methodologicalimperativesthat no medievalistcould attemptto sidestep withoutseconsistsin sethis falsifying undertaking, riouslyand irremediably ting aside the notion of "literature"as somethingtotallyunsuited reexamine to his object . .. even if he must then,albeit prudently, the consequences of thisexclusion. This is a point thatHugo Kuhn German made back in 1967, when speaking of thirteenth-century of texts.In fact,in order to maintainthe validity our discourse on the Middle Ages, it is importantthat we transcend the prejudice which, since the era of Romanticism,has induced us to refer to literature though it were an essence freed from any temporal as conditioning.I don't simplywish to say thatthe modalitiesof liter-

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ature are transformedwith the passage of time, but rather that there does not exist in and of itselfa categorycalled "literature." The preliminary remarks of Tzvetan Todorov in his book Les are Genres discours not limitedby theirtheoreticalapplication to du to the ensemble of modern texts; theyapply historically any succession of discourses. "Literature"never existed except as one part of a chronologicallyunique whole, recognizable fromvarious peripheral indicators (for example, the existence of parasitic disciand yetdif"history") or "criticism" literary plines such as literary literaturepartakes in the culficultto specifyin theory.In effect, tural environmentwithin which it is possible for us to name it. Thus, to question its validityis, for us, to take a distance from ourselves. Having maintained its position in our midstas the predominant model of discourse for at least three or four centuries, what we call "literature"has never ceased being challenged from the inside withrespectto itsvariantforms.But up untilnow, it has never been challenged in what can be called its constituentelements. Language is unquestionably a universal phenomenon, a definingfactorof humanity.It is probable thatany primarygiven of the our existenceconstitutes potentialfoundationforsome kind of art (just as language forms the foundation for some kind of poetry).But literatureas such does not belong to thisorder of values. Even more than the idea of Nature, it belongs to the arsenal of mythsthat an expanding bourgeois societydeveloped for itselfat the dawn of modern times. This bourgeois society preserved it over and against all other setbacksand reversals,as long as it was empowered by a genuine project; the mythof "literature" was nurtured as long as it continued to manifestthe society'sdynamism and to provide resources for its justification. Literature should onlyhave lasted as long as thisproject.And ifitslegitimacy, its very existence, is called into question nowadays, it is because that project has slowlyfizzled out while no other one has taken its place. Thus, literatureconstitutesa complex historicalfact, but one which,over long periods of time,has proven to be transitory. In a global, long-termfashion,we could consider it to be a punctual phenomenon, limited in duration and narrowlyconditioned by a culturalsituation.Until around 1150-1200, the medieval period was moving toward thisculturalsituationstep by step, slowly, and withoutclearly realizing exactlywhat sort of web was being woven.

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did The word literature not enter common usage in any of the European languages until the eighteenth century. Although it in seems to have occurred at first England, sometimearound 1730, it took more than a half centuryto become generallyaccepted. By 1800 it had finallybecome suitable as the designation for a set of representationsand mental tendencies that had up to then only been stored randomly in the collective consciousness of the lettered class: the idea of an autonomous "subject,"and, along with that,the concept of a reified"object"; the prestigeaccorded to lanfunctionand, simultaneously (though not coinguage's referential to cidentally), fiction.This latterinvolvesthe presuppositionthata be sort of extratemporality granted to a certaintype of discourse, as though it could transcend social and cultural barriers and be suspended in a void, itselfmaking up its own Order. This new of visionled to the determination a canon of model textsproposed to the reader as a source of admiration and a target for study; hence the delimitationof what mightbe called the horizon of the imaginary,which can be contrastedwith the unceasing openness formulaictendencies. of more primitive had conceived of some noIt is possible that Classical Antiquity tion close to thisone. At the veryleast,we can be certainthatit was and thatin thisparticularcase therewas no connever transmitted tinuity from Classical to medieval culture. The contrarythesis,as formulatedby Ernst Robert Curtius in a well-knownbut by now outdated book, simplifies this history in a somewhat abusive manner. The classical tradition,renewed veryearly in the Middle Ages by writerssuch as Fortunatus,and revitalizedin the Carolingian period thanks to its application in the political sphere, was once again stifled in the very same period in which writerswere becoming conscious of the autonomous existence of a vernacular tongue. Since in the civilizationof the High Middle Ages thisculsolely through Latin, it remained tural traditionwas transmitted too language-specificto affectin any lastingway that civilization's large-scale mental patternsand typesof behavior. Its field of apnarrow. plicationwas, in due time,destined to become increasingly Furthermore,startingat a time which,depending upon the locacention,stretchesfromaround 1150 to the end of the thirteenth down in the vernacularof various tury, begin to see the writing we texts,stories,songs and liturgicalworks. Many of these textshad through this even been composed quill in hand. It was indirectly scriptorialtechnologythatwhat L. Costa-Lima has termed a "con-

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of introduced;but the efficacy trolof the imaginary"was discretely thiscontroldoes not reallyappear untilafter 1500, in the wake of manifesa period of growingtensionsthat,in spite of its different tations,was common to all the Occidental nations: in particular, tensionsbetween traditionalpoetic energies and forcesseeking to thatwould be proper to it-a impose upon language a rationality rationalitythat would be, ultimately,detrimental to the living word. In this way, Western culture,as it became more and more secularized from the twelfthcenturyon, transferredonto those who held the power of writingthe old theological conception of the divine Speaker. Such culturallybound factorsas the modern concept of the author and the sorts of writingpractices that this concept imposes on us, as well as the resultingrelationshipbetween man and histext,all begin to take shape, somewhatsporadithismovement century.In the French tradition cally,in the twelfth ancestorsas Chretiende Troyes becomes apparent in such far-off and Gace Brule. These modifications are set into motion in a world where a social order dominated by economic factorsis already trying establishitself.What willhappen is thata zone desto ignated by the word "culture" begins to set itself apart, surwill come to be rounding itselfwithprotectivebarriers.An outside contrasted with an inside.A text will break from all that can be considered exterior to it and then, at a time that will only come much later, literaturewill be contrastedwith all the rest. By the end of the twelfthcentury,we can detect, in certain prefatory statementsand in occasional blusteringtirades voiced by vernacThus we ular "authors,"a diffuseperceptionof these implications. (their rivals, find romance writersprotestingagainst storytellers whose production is implanted in the oral tradition), the wellwho countenanced rebellionagainst the discipline knownjongleurs of writing.Is this simplya cliche? Maybe it is, but at the veryleast we must consider it a revealing one. Somewhat later, in the fifteenthcentury,most of the courts in the Westernworld will have theirown fixed minstrels, complete withofficialtitlesand regular salaries. These are the precursorsof our own letteredclass. Society that would henceforthbe had thus become aware of a distinction indelible. which remained diffusely scatteredfor All these various factors, a lengthyperiod of time,began to coalesce sometimein the fourteenthor fifteenth century.From then on, the signs begin to multiply.To givejust one example, it is only afterthe second half of

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centurythat people begin to assemble poetic antholthe thirteenth that the earliest exogies, and it is largely thanks to this activity amples of courtlylyricwere saved fromoblivion: French and ProItalian canzovencal anthologies,otherwiseknown as chansonniers, These were occasionally recopied, nieri,and Spanish cancioneros. enthusiastsand this rewritten and reordered by sixteenth-century a activity continued sporadicallyinto the seventeenthcentury, fact that demonstrates in no uncertain way the conscious desire to build an authoritativecanon in the various vernacular tongues. Such an intentioncan already be read between the lines of Dante's De VulgariEloquentia(II, ii, 8), when the Italian masterevokes the example of his illustriouspoetic forebears,Bertran de Born, Artext naut Daniel, Giraut de Bornelh, and Cino da Pistoia. The first in a romance vernacular to be translated(and here I am referring to the modern meaning given to thisterm,as opposed to the medieval acception, which is somewhatcloser to our idea of adaptation or reworking)into other romance languages was Boccaccio's DecaThis is a furtherindication of the move toward canonizameron. tion. Another sign of change is the progressivedissociationof pocenetic text and music that had already begun in the thirteenth century.What turyin Italy and was generalized by the fourteenth this separation amounts to is the exclusion of music fromthe domain of poetryand poetics,even though it mightbe expected that some professionalcould come along later and set the poetic verse attendingto the operation of to music. In other words,everything the voice is reduced to the registerof spoken language. Another example I could give is the personalization of poetic discourse, which had occurred here and there as of about 1200, became especiallywidespread after 1300, and triumpheda shorttimelater in the work of Petrarch. In the fifteenth century,the well-established personal voice of the poet resounds more or less clearlyin the poetryof Charles d'Orleans, Francois Villon, and that of sevde eral authors from the Cancionero Baena. A fictionof verisimilitude associates theI of the poetic message withthe "author,"and it the of transforms circumstances whichthisI is said in the textto be of the subject into a concreteindividual experience. Such a fiction cenrepresentationwould have been unimaginable in the twelfth writtenby Eustache Deschamps in 1392, tury. The Art de dictier and the "Arts of Second Rhetoric"which were to followfor more than a hundred yearsafterit in France and in Burgundy,the Const van Rhetoriken the Flemish scholar MathysCastelein-all sketch by

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out a sequence of reflectionsabout writing,historicalas well as technical. They all multiplyreferencesto stronglyindividualized model authors who we-resupposed to guarantee the "new poetic confer upon this form its form" and at the same time ultimately equated Afterall, thisformwas increasingly own claim to nobility. with the exercise of a distinctskill or art that, it was expected, would functionto replenish the nation's cultural repositorywith new masterpieces. The widespread diffusionof printinghad the effectof dismantlingthe last remainingobstacles blockingthe foundationof what would come to be called-once these so-called "Middle Ages" were At gotten past-a literature. the very same time, throughout a Europe that was just recoveringfromone of the worstcrisesin its history,a dominant class that was on its way to becoming an endangered species began to exercise diverse tacticsof repressionin the name of an order thatfew people continued to believe in. As a result,poetic discourse marks a retreat,becoming isolated within itsown pleasure; whateverthematicpretextitwas using to disguise itself,this poetic discourse was in realityseeking itsjustification, indeed itsveryfreedom,withinitself.This move towardsinteriorization, due to the special circumstances of a changing, and factorin the changed, world,was withouta doubt the determining of establishment what we call our national "literatures." European poetryhad never known anythingof the sort before the end of the twelfth centuryand, in some cases, the thirteenth century.We can with some confidence consider that the appearance of the firstcourtly romances in France and in Germany, century, which occurred as earlyas the thirdquarter of the twelfth heralds the advent of what will later be called "literature."But integratedinto the largely even the romances were stillperfectly oral culture of the twelfth centuryas far as theirimmediateorganizing intention,indeed their very roots, are concerned. To be of sure, it can be argued thatthe transformation a workinto literadown. But thisis ture is already under way the minuteit is written only in appearance. In the "romance" (and even more profoundly in the other poetic genres) the maintenanceof a vocal presence at the heart of the text slows down, and even totallyblocks, this transformationinto "literature." Out of its originary vocal elements, a gestating"literature"can only realize itselfvery slowly, and even then not without repeated hesitationsand steps backaffordeda nearlytotalcontrast ward. This newlyformedliterature

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to traditional poetic practices, at least as much by virtue of its formal structuresand its way of functioningas by the values it promoted and eventuallysucceeded in imposing upon European society.What I call traditionalpoetic practicesin the vernaculars harbingers were already three or four centuriesold when the first of the literaryage appeared on the scene. They continued to put up some resistance to this onslaught for two or three centuries more and only gave in completely when their epistemological, ideological and socio-politicalfoundationshad succumbed-those foundations which, of course, constituted the very universe to which these traditionalpoetic practiceslent theirvoice. The sequence of factsI have just presented to you should come as neither new nor surprising.But at least until the 1970's, the medievalistestablishment has almost unanimouslyformed a block or aimed at ignoringthese facts, at least at coveringup the epistemological consequences of these facts. For, after all, what we are that talkingabout is an episteme, is, the natureof a type of knowlfew medievalistshave up to edge ratherthan a method. Relatively now acknowledged even the existence of a problem. What is at stake is a multiplicationof points of view, a necessary interminglingof disciplines,and an untidyextensionof the otherwiseidealized information network.There is a lot of resistanceto this,and it is perhaps not surprising.Things used to be so simple! These socalled "masterpiecesfromthe distantpast" took theirplace next to those of our own more recentera, in a general grouping together of what was considered a homogeneous culture.But, to put it succinctly, this vision is past. "Medieval literature" is simply not Chapter One of what we call modern literature."Medieval literature" should not be considered the beginning of anythingexcept itself,as it moves from sentence to sentence. It is not the Origin (witha capital 0) dreamed of by the Romantics.It is not literature. literature.It is not a part of the Rather, it is what existed before institution call by this name. we This is why there can be no "historyof medieval literature," which is itselfan absurd phrase unitingfundamentally incompatible elements. "What do I care?" will be the reply of the honest to academic laborer hurrying turn out his next article.And yet,is it not preferable to be certain of the ground we are standingon, which the nature of the clouds passing overhead, or the labyrinth is ready to engulfus? Nobody willdeny thatour medieval textsare historicalobjects. But theycan only be objects withina global his-

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tory.This last expression may seem today to be pretentiousif not archaic, and many have abandoned it. In using it I mean nothing more than a historythat attemptsto describe its object in a virtuallyglobalizingfashion. Our task is to determine the parametersof an existentialspace and, if possible,to appreciate itsdimensions.This undertakinghas littlechance of succeeding ifwe do not conceptualizeand even feel in this space of the medieval text as an other, comparison to the space of our own existence. . . in the same way thatLagrange feels and makes us experience in his filmthe space occupied by Tristan, or Rohmer, the space of Chretien de Troyes's Perceval romance. These films chart their course along an interval that cannot be fathomed other than through the brief flashes or discontinuous rushes of an emotion. They pass beyond an emptiness within which the trained and attentiveear can detect weak echoes emanating fromvoices of the past. This situationrequires fromus an of ethnologist'sscrutinycombined with the sensitivity a stage diagile rector. It involves a criticalimagination that is sufficiently continuallyto re-situatethe object in the perspectiveof some primordial function that, depending upon its varying modalities, never ceases to manifestitselfthrough that object. Whatever can be said about this object will have only limitedvalue if it does not the also address in some fashion,even indirectly, followingquestion: "What does it mean to be a human being?" In this"anthropoforms logical" vision,all oppositions are neutralized and arbitrary of exclusion lose all theirmeaning.