Mimesis (21 page)

The poem itself in any case gives no analyses or explanations whatever of the mysterious aspects of this and other events. We have to contribute them ourselves, and they rather detract from our aesthetic appreciation. The poet explains nothing; and yet the things which happen are stated with a paratactic bluntness which says that everything must happen as it does happen, it could not be otherwise, and there is no need for explanatory connectives. This, as the reader knows, refers not only to the events but also to the views and principles which form the basis of the actions of the persons concerned. The knightly will to fight, the concept of honor, the mutual loyalty of brothers in arms, the community of the clan, the Christian dogma, the allocation of right and wrong to Christians and infidels, are probably the most important of these views. They are few in number. They give a narrow picture in which only one stratum of society appears, and even that stratum in a greatly simplified form. They are posited without argument as pure theses: these are the facts. No argument, no explanatory discussion whatever is called for when, for example, the statement is made:
paien unt tort et chrestiens unt dreit
(l. 1015: heathens are wrong and Christians are right), although the life of the infidel knights—except
for the names of their gods—seems hardly different from that of the Christians. Often, it is true, they are referred to as depraved and horrible, at times in fantastic and symbolic ways, but they are knights too, and the structure of their society seems to be exactly the same as that of Christian society. The parallel extends to minor details and thus serves to render the narrowness of the representation of life still more striking. The Christianity of the Christians is simply a stipulation. It exhausts itself in the creed and the liturgic formulas that go with it. Furthermore it is, in a very extreme sense, made to serve the knightly will to fight and political expansion. The penance laid upon the Franks when they pray and receive absolution before going into battle is to fight hard; whoever falls in the fight is a martyr and can surely expect a place in Paradise. Conversions by force which involve the killing of those who offer resistance are works with which God is well pleased. This attitude, astonishing as a Christian attitude and non-existent as such in earlier times, is not based, here in the
Chanson de Roland
, on a given historical situation, as it was in Spain, whence it would seem to have stemmed. Nor is any other explanation of it given. That is the way it is—a paratactic situation made up of theses which, extremely narrow as they are, are yet full of contradictions.

Let us go on to the second part of the scene—Roland’s reaction. It is the theme of three laisses. In the first two Roland addresses Ganelon, in the third the Emperor. His speeches contain three motifs of various strength and variously crossed: (1) a tremendously assertive and ferocious pride, (2) hatred for Ganelon, and (3), much weaker, devotion to the Emperor and the desire to serve him. (1) and (2) are crossed in such a way that (1) appears first, with great force, but even here is already imbued with (2) and (3). Roland loves danger and seeks it; he cannot be frightened. Furthermore he sets great value upon his prestige. He refuses to grant Ganelon the briefest moment of triumph. And so his first consideration is to point out emphatically, for all to hear, that he, unlike Ganelon in a comparable situation, has not lost his composure. Hence his expression of gratitude to Ganelon, which in view of the enmity between them—well known to all present—can have only an effect of irony and scorn. Hence too the enumeration of the various mounts and beasts of burden not one of which will he abandon without fight—a powerful, demonstrative, and very successful assertion of his pride and courage which even Ganelon is obliged to recognize, although in doing so he may well have his own thoughts
in the back of his mind, for it is precisely Roland’s intrepid self-confidence on which he relies in his plan to destroy him. But in any case, Ganelon’s momentary triumph is spoiled. For, once Roland has made his attitude sufficiently known, he can give the reins to his hatred and contempt, which now assume the form of a scornful triumph on his part: you see, you scoundrel, I do not conduct myself as you did that time; and even when he stands before Charles to receive the bow, his expression of ready obedience, formulated so as to reveal impatience, is once again interspersed with his scornful and triumphant comparison between his behavior and Ganelon’s.

The whole scene—Roland’s display of self-confidence, followed by his sustained, repetitive, and triumphant outburst of hatred and scorn—is spread out over three laisses, and since the first two are addressed to Ganelon, with very similar opening phrases, distinguished only by the adverbial modifiers—the first time
a lei de chevaler
, the second time
ireement
—since furthermore a superficial and purely rational examination seems to show their contents to be incongruous—the first appearing friendly and the second angry—numerous editors and critics have doubted the authenticity of the text and have cut out one of the two laisses, usually the second. That this cannot be right was pointed out by Bédier in his commentary (Paris, Piazza, 1927, p. 151), and this—as the foregoing analysis may serve to indicate—is my view too. The second laisse presupposes the first. The attitude revealed in the first laisse, which stands in sharp contrast to Ganelon’s attitude in that earlier scene, supplies the justification for the triumphant hatred of the second. I should like to corroborate this result by another, a stylistic, consideration. This kind of repeated resumption of the same situation in consecutive laisses, in a manner which at first leaves the reader in doubt as to whether he is confronted with a new scene or a complementary treatment of the first, is very frequent in the
Chanson de Roland
(as well as elsewhere in the
chansons de geste
). There are other instances where such resumptions occasion surprising shifts, as is the case in the passage here under discussion. In laisses 40, 41, and 42, the question which King Marsilius repeats three times in almost identical terms—i.e., when will Charles, who after all is getting on in years, tire of war—is answered by Ganelon in three different ways, of which the first gives not the least inkling of what the others will be. In his first answer Ganelon speaks exclusively in praise of Charles, and it is only in the second and third that he names Roland and his companions as warmongers, thus taking his first step toward treason;
in the following laisse, 43, he at last speaks plainly, and Charles is no longer referred to in friendly terms. Even before this, Ganelon’s attitude in Marsilius’ presence is not to be understood in purely rational terms. He displays such hostility and haughtiness that his purpose seems to be to irritate the king at all costs, and negotiation and treason appear to be out of the question. In other instances (laisses 5 and 6, 79 to 81, 83 to 86, 129 and 130, 133 to 135, 137 to 139, 146 and 147, etc.) there is no real contradiction between the content of one laisse and that of another, but here too one and the same point of departure is frequently used to push ahead in different directions or over different distances. When in laisse 80 Oliver climbs to the top of a hill and from there sees the approaching Saracen army, he summons Roland and talks to him of Ganelon’s treason. In laisse 81, which also begins with Oliver’s climbing the hill, no mention is made of Roland, but Oliver comes down as quickly as possible to report back to the Franks. In laisses 83 to 85, where Oliver thrice asks Roland to blow his horn and thrice receives the same negative reply, the function of the repetition is to make the scene more intense; as, in the
Chanson de Roland
generally, both the urgent-intense and the manifold-simultaneous are represented by the repetition and addition of many, and frequently of artfully varied, individual occurrences. The series of knights who assume a place in the action, as well as the series of battle scenes, are instances of this procedure. Laisses 129 to 131, where Roland himself proposes to blow his horn (prepared in laisse 128 and extremely artful in the expression of Roland’s self-conscious regret), correspond to the earlier scene although the actors have exchanged roles. This time it is Oliver who thrice replies in the negative. His three answers are constructed with considerable psychological finesse. The first, with concealed irony, repeats Roland’s own counterarguments but suddenly changes to a spontaneous outburst of sympathy (or admiration) at the sight of Roland’s blood-stained arms. The second again begins ironically, and concludes in an outburst of anger. It is not until we reach the third that we have Oliver’s reproaches and his grief formulated in an orderly manner. In the three laisses of the horn signal—133 to 135, presumably involving a threefold blowing of the horn—the effect which the horn produces upon the Franks is developed differently each time. Taken together, to be sure, the three effects represent a development too, that is, from surprise and confusion to a complete realization of the state of affairs (which Ganelon endeavors to prevent), but this
development is not evenly progressive but spastic, now gaining, now losing ground, like generation or birth.

Varied repetition of the same theme is a technique stemming from medieval Latin poetics, which in turn draws it from antique rhetoric. This fact has recently been pointed out once again by Faral and E. R. Curtius. But neither the form nor the stylistic effect of the “regressions” in the
Chanson de Roland
can thus be explained or even described. It would seem that the series of similar events and the resumption of previous statements are phenomena related in character to the parataxis of sentence structure. Whether one comprehensive representation is replaced by a reiterative enumeration of individual scenes similar in form and progress; whether one intense action is replaced by a repetition of the same action, beginning at the same starting point time and again; or whether finally, instead of a process of complex and periodic development, we have repeated returns to the starting point, each one proceeding to elaborate a different element or motif: in all cases rationally organized condensations are avoided in favor of a halting, spasmodic, juxtapositive, and pro- and retrogressive method in which causal, modal, and even temporal relations are obscured. (In the very first laisse of the poem, the last line,
nes poet guarder que mals ne l’i ateignet
, looks very far into the future.) Time and again there is a new start; every resumption is complete in itself and independent; the next is simply juxtaposed to it, and the relation between the two is often left hanging. This too is a type of epic retardation in Goethe’s and Schiller’s sense (cf. above, pp. 4f.), but it is not managed through interpolations and episodes but through progression and retrogression within the principal action itself. This procedure is very markedly epic; it is even recitationally epic, for a listener arriving in the course of the recitation receives a coherent impression. At the same time it is a technique of subdividing the course of events into numerous rigid little divisions, mutually delimited by the use of stereotyped phrases.

Roland’s three speeches are not as brief as the Emperor’s and Ganelon’s in the first laisse, but they too have no periodic flow. The long sentence of laisse 59 is merely an enumeration with repeated breaks. In all three laisses the subordinate clauses are of the simplest type; they are independent to a very high degree. Anything like flow of discourse does not arise. The rhythm of the
Chanson de Roland
is never flowing, as is that of the antique epic. Every line marks a new start, every stanza represents a new approach. This impression, already produced
by the prevailing parataxis, is increased by the generally clumsy and ungrammatical handling of connections whenever a rare attempt is made to use somewhat more complex hypotaxes. Another factor is the assonant strophic pattern, which gives every line the appearance of an independent unit while the entire strophe appears to be a bundle of independent parts, as though sticks or spears of equal length and with similar points were bundled together. Consider for example Ganelon’s speech in support of accepting Marsilius’ offer of peace (ll. 220ff.), which contains a long sentence:

222
Quant ço vos mandet li reis Marsiliun

Qu’il devendrat jointes ses mains tis hum

E tute Espaigne tendrat par vostre dun,

225
Puis recevrat la lei que nus tenum,

Ki ço vos lodet que cest plait degetuns,

Ne li chalt, sire, de quel mort nus muriuns.

(If this is the message King Marsilius sends, that he will become—his hands folded—your vassal, and will hold all of Spain in fief to you, then will take the faith which we hold, he who recommends to you that we reject this proposal, to him it does not matter, Sire, what kind of death we die.)

The principal clause (
ne li chalt
…) comes at the end. But the beginning of the period does not consider what the pattern of the main clause is going to be and consequently—after the content of Marsilius’ message has been stated—a shift in construction proves necessary. The
quant
-clause with its subordinate statements of the content (
que … e … puis …
)—which itself loses sight of its structure before it is half finished (
puis recevrat …
already begins breaking away from the anchorage in
que
)—remains an anacoluthon, and the emphatically anticipated
ki
-clause starts a new pattern. But in addition to this type of sentence structure, which is hypotactic in external appearance but in reality quite paratactic, there is also the subdivision in meaning according to the individual lines, the sharp incisions marked by the assonance in
u
, and the somewhat less emphatic but clearly noticeable caesuras in the middle of the line, which in all cases indicate units of meaning as well. No indeed—periodicity and flow of discourse are not among the characteristics of this style. It is admirably homogeneous, for the attitudes of the personages are so strongly molded and limited by the narrow range of the established order in which they
move, that their thoughts, feelings, and passions can find room in such lines. The copious and connected argumentation of which Homer’s heroes are so fond is wholly outside of their ken; and by the same token they are without any free-flowing, dynamic, and impulsive movement in expression. The words which the Emperor Charles utters when he hears the call of the horn (ll. 1768-9),