Mimesis (22 page)

Ce dist li reis: “Jo oi le corn Rollant.
Unc nel sunast se ne fust cumbatant”

(This said the King: “I hear Roland’s horn. Never would he sound it if he were not fighting.”)

have often been compared with the corresponding lines in Vigny’s poem “Le Cor,”

Malheur! C’est mon neveu! malheur! car si Roland
Appelle à son secours, ce doit être en mourant,

which is extremely informative in the present connection. But it is not necessary to adduce a romantic parallel; the same purpose can be served by classical and later European texts from periods preceding Romanticism. Consider Roland’s death prayer (ll. 2384ff.) or the formally quite similar prayer uttered by the Emperor before the battle against Baligant (ll. 3100ff.). These follow liturgical models and consequently display a comparatively prolonged sweep in their syntax. Roland’s prayer reads:

2384
Veire Paterne, ki unkes ne mentis,

Seint Lazaron de mort resurrexis

E Daniel des leons guaresis,

Guaris de mei l’anme de tuz perilz

Pur les pecchez que en ma vie fis!

(True Father, who never lied, who resurrected Saint Lazarus from the dead, and saved Daniel from the lions, save my soul from all dangers on account of the sins which I committed in my life!)

and the Emperor’s:

3100
Veire Paterne, hoi cest jor me defend,

Ki guaresis Jonas tut veirement

De la baleine ki en sun cors l’aveit,

E esparignas le rei de Niniven

E Daniel del merveillus turment

3105
Enz en la fosse des leons o fut enz,

Les. III. enfanz tut en un fou ardant!

La tue amurs me seit hoi en present!

Par ta mercit, se te plaist, me cunsent

Que mun nevold poisse venger Rollant!

(True Father, help me now on this day, Thou who didst Jonas truly save from the whale which had him in its belly, and spared the King of Nineveh, and Daniel from the terrible torture in the lions’ den wherein he was, and the three men from the burning oven: let Thy love be with me today. Through Thy mercy, if it please Thee, grant me that I may avenge my nephew Roland.)

In this rigidly stereotyped use of the figures of redemption (figures which, as the literature of mysticism shows, can be employed in a very differently dynamic fashion), as well as in the almost static and reiterative manner of the apostrophizing supplication, there is, to be sure, a strong element of emotion, but there is also the narrow definitiveness of a spatially limited and perfectly unambiguous view of God, the universe, and fate. If we confront this with any prayer from the
Iliad
—I choose at random 305ff.,

πότνι᾽
Ἀ
θηναίη ἐρνσίπτολι, δῖα θεάων,
ἆξον δὴ ἔγχος
Δ
ιομήδεος ἠδὲ καὶ αὐτὸν
πρηνέα δὸς πεσέειν
Σ
καιῶν προπάροιθε πνλάων

(Mighty Athena, protectress of the city, sublime goddess, turn Diomedes’ lance and make him fall headlong before the Skaean gates!)

with a violent upsurge in the movement of imploration (
ἠδὲ καὶ αὐτὸν πρηνέα δὸς πεσέειν
)—we discover how much greater possibilities for freely flowing, urgent, and imploring movements are to be found in Homer, and that his world, though certainly limited, yet has a much less rigid structure. The significant feature here is obviously not the run-on lines (which are frequent in antique versification) but the broad sweep of the richly nuanced sentence movement. This can equally well be displayed in rhymed verse without enjambment, whether the lines are short or long. And it appears quite early in Old French, as early as the twelfth century, in the octosyllabic rhymes of courtly romance or in shorter rhymed tales. If one compares the octosyllabic line of an old heroic epic, the fragment of
Gormund et Isembard
, which sounds like a series of detached and sharply marked bugle
calls (
criant l’enseigne al rei baron,/ la Loovis, le fiz Charlun
), with the fluent, sometimes verbose, sometimes lyrical octosyllabic line of the courtly romance, one will quickly grasp the difference between rigid and fluent-connective syntax. And very soon indeed widely sweeping rhetorical movement appears in the courtly style. The following lines are from the
Folie Tristan
(after Bartsch,
Chrestomathie de l’ancien Français
, 12
^e
éd., pièce 24):

31
en ki me purreie fier,

quant Ysolt ne me deingne amer,

quant Ysolt a si vil me tient

k’ore de mei ne li suvient?

(In whom can I have confidence, if Ysolt deigns not to love me, if Ysolt considers me so despicable that she does not now remember me?)

This is an urgent movement of grief in the form of a rhetorical question with two similarly constructed subordinate clauses of which the second is broader in scope, while the whole passage displays ascending rhythm. In pattern, it is reminiscent of, though much simpler than, the famous lines in Racine’s
Bérénice
(4, 5):

Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons-nous,
Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous:
Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse,
Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice,
Sans que, de tout le jour, je puisse voir Titus?

Let us briefly complete the analysis of our text. At the end of laisse 61 the Emperor still hesitates to hand the bow to Roland, who stands before him, and thus definitely to give him the order. He bows his head, he strokes his beard, he weeps. The intervention of Naimes, which concludes the scene, is again entirely paratactic in structure. The modal connections implied in his remarks are not grammatically expressed. Otherwise the passage would have to read: “You have heard how angry Roland is because his name has been suggested for the rearguard. But since there is no baron who could (or: would?) fill his place, give him the bow, but at least make certain that his support is strong enough.” The beautiful concluding line is also paratactic.

In the classical languages paratactic constructions belong to the low style; they are oral rather than written, comic and realistic rather
than elevated. But here parataxis belongs to the elevated style. This is a new form of the elevated style, not dependent on periodic structure and rhetorical figures but on the power of juxtaposed and independent verbal blocks. An elevated style operating with paratactic elements is not, in itself, something new in Europe. The style of the Bible has this characteristic (cf. our first chapter). Here we may recall the discussion concerning the sublime character of the sentence
dixitque Deus: fiat lux, et facta est lux
(Genesis 1: 3) which Boileau and Huet carried on in the seventeenth century in connection with the essay
On the Sublime
attributed to Longinus. The sublime in this sentence from Genesis is not contained in a magnificent display of rolling periods nor in the splendor of abundant figures of speech but in the impressive brevity which is in such contrast to the immense content and which for that very reason has a note of obscurity which fills the listener with a shuddering awe. It is precisely the absence of causal connectives, the naked statement of what happens—the statement which replaces deduction and comprehension by an amazed beholding that does not even seek to comprehend—which gives the sentence its grandeur. But the case of the
chanson de geste
is completely different. The subject here is not the awesome riddle of creation and the Creator, not the creature man’s relationship to one and the other. The subject of the
Chanson de Roland
is narrow, and for the men who figure in it nothing of fundamental significance is problematic. All the categories of this life and the next are unambiguous, immutable, fixed in rigid formulations. To be sure, rational comprehension has no direct access to them, but that is an observation which we ourselves make; the poem and its contemporary audience felt no such concern. They live safely and confidently in the rigid and narrow established order within which the duties of life, their distribution according to estates (cf. the division of labor between knights and monks, ll. 1877ff.), the character of supernatural forces, and mankind’s relationship thereto are regulated in the simplest way. Within this frame there are abundant and delicate emotions; there is also a certain motley variegation in external phenomena; but the frame is so restricted and rigid that properly problematic situations, let alone tragedy, can hardly arise. There are no conflicts which deserve to be called tragic.

The early Germanic epic texts which have come down to us also exhibit paratactic construction; here too the warrior ethics of a nobility dominates, with its strict definitions of honor, justice, and ordeal by battle. And yet the final impression is quite different. The verbal blocks
are more loosely juxtaposed, the space about the occurrences and the heaven above them are incomparably wider, destiny is more enigmatic, and the structure of society is not so rigidly established. The mere fact that the most famous Germanic epics, from the
Hildebrandslied
to the
Nibelungenlied
, derive their historical setting from the wild and spacious epoch of the tribal migrations rather than from the solidly established structure of the age of feudalism, gives them greater breadth and freedom. The Germanic themes of the age of the migrations did not reach Gallo-Roman territory, or at least they could not strike root there. And Christianity has almost no significance at all for the Germanic heroic epic. Free and immediate forces, still unsubdued by settled forms, are stronger in it, and the human roots—so at least it seems to me—go deeper. We cannot say of the Germanic poems of the heroic epic cycle, as we said of the
Chanson de Roland
, that the problematic and tragic element is lacking in them. Hildebrand is more directly human and tragic than Roland, and how much more deeply motivated are the conflicts in the
Nibelungenlied
than the hatred between Roland and Ganelon!

Yet we do encounter the same restricted and definitely established cosmos when we take up an early Romance religious text. We have several of these which precede the
Chanson de Roland
chronologically. The most important is the
Chanson d’Alexis
, a saint’s legend, which crystallized in the eleventh century in an Old French form still extant in several manuscripts. According to the legend, Alexius was the late-born only son of a noble Roman family. He was carefully educated, entered the emperor’s service, and in accordance with his father’s wishes was to marry a virgin of equal rank. He obeyed, but on the bridal night he left his wife without having touched her and lived for seventeen years as a poor beggar in a strange land (Edessa in northeastern Syria, the modern Turkish Urfa), that he might serve only God. Leaving his refuge to escape being revered as a saint, he was driven back to Rome by a storm. There he passed another seventeen years, still unrecognized and living as a despised beggar under the steps of his father’s house, unmoved by the sorrow of his parents and his wife, whose laments he often heard without revealing his identity. Not until after his death was he finally and miraculously recognized and thenceforth revered as a saint. The attitudes reflected in this text are different entirely from those of the
Chanson de Roland
. But it exhibits the same paratactic and rigid style, the same narrowness, indisputability, and fixity of all categories. Everything is settled, white or
black, good or bad, and never requires further search or justification. Temptation is there, to be sure, but there is no realm of problem. On the one hand there is serving God, forsaking the world and seeking eternal bliss—on the other, natural life in the world, which leads to “great sorrow.” There are no other levels of consciousness, and external reality—the many additional phenomena which have their place in the universe and which ought somehow to constitute the frame for the occurrences of the narrative—is submitted to such reduction that nothing survives but an insubstantial background for the life of the saint. About him are grouped, accompanying his activities with appropriate pantomime, his father, mother, and bride. A few other characters required by the action appear, but they are even more shadowy. Everything else is completely schematized, both sociologically and geographically speaking. This is the more surprising since the scene seems to embrace the extent and variety of the entire Roman Empire. Nothing remains of West and East but churches, voices from on high, praying multitudes—nothing but the ever identical environment of the life of a saint; even as in the
Chanson de Roland
, the same social structure—that of feudalism—and the same ethos is dominant throughout, among both pagans and Christians. But here this is much more pronounced. The world has become very small and narrow; and in it everything revolves rigidly and immutably about a single question, which has been answered in advance and which it is man’s duty to answer rightly. He knows what road he must follow, or better, there is but one road open to him, there is no other. He knows too that he will reach a fork in the road, and that then he must turn right although the tempter will try to entice him to turn left. Everything else has vanished, the whole sweeping infinity of the outer and inner worlds, with its innumerable possibilities, configurations, and strata.

This, without doubt, is not Germanic; nor is it, I believe, Christian; at least it is not the necessary and original version of Christianity. For Christianity, the product of a variety of premises, and coming to grips with a variety of realities, has proved itself—before and after this period—incomparably more elastic, more rich, and more complexly stratified. This narrowness can hardly be original at all; it contains too many and too various inherited elements for that; it is not narrowness, it is a narrowing process. It is the process of rigidification and reduction which late antiquity underwent and which has figured in our earlier chapters. To be sure, a significant part is played in it by the simplified
reduced form which Christianity assumed in its clash with exhausted or barbaric peoples.

In the Old French
Chanson d’Alexis
the scene of the bridal night, which is one of the high points of the poem, reads as follows (stanzas 11 to 15, text after Bartsch,
Chrestomathie
, 12
^e
éd.):