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Medievalism: Testing Ground for Historicism(s)?
Round table discussion with Peter Haidu, Alexandre
Leupin and Eugene Vance
Recorded at the University of California - Los Angeles, on February 23rd, 1991
and edited by E. Charvier-Berman, S. Cordova, P. Merrill, A. Sol, ]. Woodbury.
In 1989, a New History of French Literature was published in English,
under the banner of Harvard University. Striking in its nontraditional
presentation of the canon, it seeks to emphasize historical and cultural aspects
of French literature from contemporary critical perspectives. Unconventionally
organized, the commentaries still spring from chronologically arranged dates.
Yet the issue of historicisms as modes for the examination of texts is side-stepped.
Theïntroductory statement addresses the fluidity of national, political,
linguistic and textual frontiers for literature and critics today. Peter Haidu
(University of California, Los Angeles), Alexandre Leupin (Louisiana State University,
Baton Rouge), and Eugene Vance (Universisty of Washington, Seattle), medievalists of French, Swiss and American
birth respectively underlined this fluidity, as they sat around hi-fidelity
recording devices in the French Department lectorium, in UCLA's Royce Hall,
a 1929 exact, if overscaled, replica of the Milanese Romanesque church of Sant'Ambrogio
(c. 1100), and addressed the theoretical issue elided, in particular as it illuminates
- or confuses medievalism.
Word processing techniques have progressed over the last eight centuries, nevertheless
the editors still faced the aIl too medieval problematic of transcribing the
discourses. How does one not bury the voice?
Peter Haidu
The challenge is not
a one-way street: a post-structural medievalism and historicism challenge each
other reciprocally. "Historicism" designates a variety of methodological
vices.1 Though much criticized, it still exists, and can
disguise itself as the dernier cri in the pages of Speculum.2
As that historiography which collocates continuity, teleology, and the operation
of a free-standing, independent, self-conscious subjectivity, historicism is
not a reliable model for medievalism. Discontinuities repeatedly cut across
medieval temporality: barbarian invasions, Christianity, the beginning of vemacular
writing, the Black Plague are so many major gashes obviating medieval continuity.
Beyond these evenemential discontinuities, there is the crucial epistemological
discontinuity imposed by the Renaissance, which rips the hermeneutic connection
between the 20th century reader and pre-Renaissance textuality, making a mediated
form of analysis such as semiotics the requisite acknowledgment of medieval
alterity.3 Teleology is the great gift of the Middle Ages,
which gave us the first grand narrative: its teleology of salvation and redemption,
transformed into various secular mythologies, is one of the banes of the contemporary
intellectual struggle. A contemporary historiography which would restore medievalism
to its historical importance will prefer a form of genealogy which acknowledges
the interdependence of subject and object. And a free-standing subject, prior
to the texts, operating as their source and origin and efficient cause, is a
mere will-o'the-wisp for the medievalist: many of our texts are anonymous, and
where a name exists (Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Renaut de Beaujeu),
it is an insubstantiallable which tells us nothing about the individual, his
or her "background," his or her subjectivity, other than what can
be gathered from the texts which are to be explained. Even at the end of the
Middle Ages, "Christine de Pizan" is little more than her own textual
creation; and who believes that a dossier judiciaire such as accompanies
the name "François Villon" gives us privileged entry into a
realm of subjectivity prior to his texts? The kind of secondary documentation
that feeds traditional literary history by allowing the scholar to elaborate
the figure of the poet or writer apart from his or her properly literary texts-joumals,
diaries, reviews, manifestoes are absent from the documentary record. So
flimsy is the historical documentation that a case has been made that the authors
as weIl as their creations are fictive constructs. The instance of the individual
writer mediating between concrete texts and social structure or historical process,
remains an empty slot in the medieval case, incapable of being fumished with
the "historically situated authorial consciousness" sought by historicism.4
Individual subjectivity in medieval France is a product of the text, not
its precondition.
It is not any theoretical objections therefore devolving
from contemporary theory that cancels historicism, it is the character of historical
documentation itself. It is the epistemological conditions of the discipline
which make the medieval case a perfect set-up for post-structuralism, quite
aside from the inherent value of the theory. It is post-structuralism, at least
in certain of its forms, which most adequately recognizes the historiographical
problematics of "reading medieval." And that is true particularly
for those forms of poststructuralism whose ambition is a historical reading
of medieval textuality, an intellectual effort disregarded by those who inveigh
and complain about a supposedly "massive dehistoricization" of literary
reading.5 All the wailing and complaining emanating from
traditionalist positions, whether of literary history or social history, about
the limitations of post-structural approaches, cannot change either the gross
characteristics of the period, our relation to it, or the character of its historical
documentation.
One mode of historicist self-legitimation is particularly misleading. It attempts
to counter the modem critiques of empirical knowledge coming from phenomenology,
from the scientific theory of indeterminacy, and the centrality of language
argued by (post-) structuralism - with a particular cognitive strategy that
claims historical objectivity. It attempts to view the past through a perspective
attested in the period in question, thinking thus to avoid the imposition of
presentism upon past historical experience. The strategy is deceptive. Past
historical societies are not flat, uniform, and cohesive: they are variegated
and conflictual, otherwise they would not be historical. All the perspectives
attested in a given period of the past are discourses situated within the conflicts
of that period. Thus, Robertsonianism imposed a narrowly defined interpretation
of the clerical perspective upon the interpretation of secular texts. In doing
so, it selected, in the medieval scenes of conflict, the antagonist of the laity
which had produced the texts, an antagonist which defined itself in hostility
to the values of that secular world, and specifically its texts. To claim objectivity
for this procedure is ridiculous. An overt presentism is preferable to the covert
politics of such historicist strategies.
The complaints of traditional historicism regarding the unsettling news of the
(post-)structuralist revolution become tiresome: complaints are no substitute
for intellectual argument countering the views one dislikes. The appeal to the
authority of tradition perse can have no intellectual weight, when that is precisely
what is in question: such appeals merely run with reactionary times. Nor can
the slash and bum rhetoric which reduces the forms of post-structuralism to
the clichés of the Sunday supplements, ignoring among other subtleties
specifically those efforts made to historicize semiotics and deconstruction.
These are the techniques of TV spots in political campaigns, not the dialectics
of theoretical discourse. lt is regrettable to see members of the left deploy
Willie Horton tactics, and to have them sponsored by the Medieval Academy of
America.
In spite of these deformations of intellectual discourse,
the fundamental tenets of historicism cannot simply be written off. The criticisms
of these tenets, entirely justified, do not resolve the issues to which the
tenets were a response. The tenets of historicism continuity, teleology,
and subjectivity - mark the sites of problems that are still with us. Discontinuity
appears only across the face of continuities, genealogy (which continues to
acknowledge the need for history) is partly teleology reversed, and the question
of the subject retums to haunt us ineluctably. lnstead of the complaints that
are the standard fare historicists indulge in, what is required is a renewed
exploration of how we can construe the relations of the textual structures to
a diegesis which is the near face of representation and how we can imagine and
theorize the relations of that representation to the represented - recognizing
their ineluctable differences as weIl as their identities. Historical discourse
points in two directions simultaneously: the events it purports to describe,
and the "generic story form" with which it construes those events
as structure or process.6 lt is the interface between those
two faces of history - and of language - that is in question. Is it possible
for language, discourse, and text to be self-referential, self-reflexive, and
hence modemist, on the one hand, and on the other, a critical representation
of values at work in society, and to function, furthermore, as an agent of historical
change, rather than simply as an index to change occuring elsewhere7 Careful semiotic and deconstructive readings of medieval texts show that both
are possible, and simultaneously so. Textuality operates, not as an ideological
exemplum or as a mimetic reflector of "social reality", but as a critical
actor in the différends of its social formation.
Textuality is an institution, and medieval conventionalism institutionalizes
textuality with immediate proleptic retroactivity. Medieval text gives itself
as repetition, as "retext," even and especially when it is at its
most revolutionary. All invention is immediately "covered" by its
own, self-reflexive conventionalization, and offered in the guise of omamental
redundancy and amusement. Meaning cannot simply be "read off" textual
surface; decoding the dissimulative text implies a major effort.
This self-reflexivity does not imply the exclusion of the social and the historical.
On the contrary, the extraordinary self-reflexivity of medieval textuality is
a mode of its social ontology. Chrétien does not settle for inserting
the image of the romance in the romance of the Knight of the lion,
he goes farther, and implicates the romancewriter, at the service of the
dominant class, within the representation of its culture, right after having
narrated its harsh exploitation of the poor and the defenseless in proto-Marxist
terms of surplus value. Self-reflexivity incorporates social, economic, and
political dimensions in its complex mirrorings.
The attitudes of the traditional historicist historian would limit textuality
to the mimetic function - Auerbach is still its critical hero. In that respect,
it shares the same principles as what, a short while ago, was still referred
to as "vulgar Marxism". Contemporary theory takes a more complex view.
The diegesis of the text may well incorporate elements of social and political
structures (where would those elements corne from if not from social reality,
but the text's role is more active than mere reflection. It transforms those
elements in profound ways. The figure of Charles, in the Chanson de Roland,
can hardly be construed as the mimetic image of the kingship to which it is
contemporary, especially in the earlier phase of the poem's development. During
the reign of Philip I, around 1100, the traditional dating of the Oxford Roland,
the French Capetians are at the nadir of their power. lt is only under his son
Louis VIth, that the king will begin to exercise effective suzerainty over his
vassals in the Ile-deFrance. This "meaning" is not stated
in the text, but it is inscribed in the text, which labels Charles both king
and emperor. The figure of Charles represents a transformation of kingship,
thanks to its junction with the ideologeme of Carolingian mythology and the
seme of "empire." In mimetic terms, as a representation of a supposed
"reality," the text lies outrageously, and is as factitious as it
is fictitious. But is the figure of Charles to be accounted as having no effectivity
in the realm of politics, which will see effective kingship develop to the point
where the bases of the nation-state can be laid a hundred years or so after
1100, under Philip Augustus? Or should we leave open the possibility that the
text, already characterized as transformative of the elements given by itsencoding,
may also be performative in its socio-historical insertion?
As distinguished from the superficial skirmishes to which the opposition of
history and post-structuralism has given rise, the careful study of the medieval
text as simultaneously structural and historical, may serve to dispell some
of the false dichotomies which beset knowledge. One does not examine the forms
and structures of the text first, and then look for its relations to a context.
All codes, and all decodings, are historical. The text, medieval and other,
is social ab initio et origo: textuality is a social fact. The medieval
text is social, hence historical, therefore political. It is so in complex and
unpredictable ways, and must be read as such, from the opening of the very first
page. Its linguistic meanings, its formaI organizations, its constitutive structures,
are always already social, and historical, and political.
Alexandre Leupin
J'aimerais commencer par un plaidoyer pro domo. Ce qui m'a toujours étonné dans les rapports et comptes rendus de lecteurs sur mes
livres, c'est le reproche d'essentialisme, d'an-historicisme ou d'ahistoricité
de ce que j'essaye de faire avec la littérature médiévale.
Cette critique m'étonne parce que je crois faire un travail qui est historique
dans le sens où j'essaye toujours très précisement de déterminer
les conditions d'énonciation d'un texte. Ces conditions ne sont pas évidemment
dans les faits, dans l'histoire et peut-être dans l'histoire sociale mais
elles sont dans un symbolique rhétorique, théologique etc., à
partir duquel j'essaye de définir ce qui fait le texte littéraire.
Ceci dit, j'aimerais commencer par développer le problème de l'historicisme
chez les historiens eux-mêmes, à partir d'un point extrêmement
précis qui est celui de la falsification des documents du Moyen Age.
Ils se plaignent très souvent que les documents sont falsifiés,
que les moines trafiquent des reliques etc.: mais cette plainte n'est recevable
pour ce qui concerne le Moyen Age qu'à la lumière d'une mentalité
positiviste moderne. Pourquoi n'est-elle pas recevable? Parce qu'elle ne tient
pas compte de la mentalité symbolique du Moyen Age, pour laquelle il
importe de plier les faits à une explication vraie. A cet égard
le faux médiéval est symptôme de la vérité
et il se rapproche de façon évidente de l'écriture littéraire
dans le sens où Jean de Salisbury dit que "les poètes mentent
pour dire le vrai." Prenons exemple des Serments de Strasbourg qui sont recueillis dans un unique manuscript 150 ans après l'événement.
Sont-ils authentiques? En fait, la question importe peu parce que leur opération
peut se faire comme fiction ou comme document authentique en tant qu'ils promeuvent
une nouvelle équation dans la culture: l'équivalence langue/nation.
C'est là leur vérité. Sont-ils une sténographie
fidèle, positive de l'oralité? Non, ils fondent dans l'écriture,
dans une langue dont on a montré le caractère synthétique,
une idée de nation tout à fait neuve qui recouvre ce qu'on appelle
la Francia occidentalis. L'institution du français, comme l'a
dit Renée Balibar, se fait par une langue fictive. C'est cela qui importe,
plus que la correction pseudo-positive des graphies. Là, je suis très
proche de toi, Peter.
Dans ce sens, il faut opérer sur le texte une lecture qui repositionne
l'historicisme de 180 degrés. Il ne s'agit pas de constater passivement
que les choses ont changé mais de constituer une poétique active
des énonciations. L'histoire elle-même relève aussi d'une
poétique, comme le dit Edouard Glissant. A un moment l'histoire doit
se dire, et se dire obéira aux contraintes, aux injonctions, aux utopies,
aux procédures rhétoriques de son temps. C'est-à-dire que
d'un côté, il faut mesurer les effets calculables qu'un dire, une
profération, une inscription ont dans l'histoire à un moment donné.
Inversement cette poétique du dit historique doit aussi être attentive
aux efforts de désinscription qui font la littérature.
Ça m'amène à l'historicisme dans la lecture de la littérature.
J'aimerais avancer une proposition: la lecture des textes littéraires
a une vocation profonde et toujours recommencée à ancrer ce qui
est proprement "littérature" dans un texte, à le ramener
à une cause "externe". Je donne ici un exemple qui vous paraîtra
peut-être un peu ancien pour montrer combien ce désir d'ancrage
est fort. Bédier rabat la Chanson de Roland sur les routes de
pèlerinage, aussitôt qu'il en découvre l'autonomie poétique.
Même s'il décrit cette profération en termes romantiques
(le génie d'un grand poète etc.), sa découverte reste pertinente.
Le fait est que cette découverte lui fait horreur et qu'il n'a de cesse
de la réduire. Cet exemple, qu'on pourrait multiplier, fait symptôme
d'une peur: celle de voir le texte littéraire se désinscrire du
lieu de son énonciation, se désancrer de l'arrimage du sens. Or,
cette peur est précisement ce qui fait rater à l'historicisme
la dimension littéraire d'un texte: il y a un reste en littérature,
qui est de la nature du déchet, de l'inconscient, de l'irreprésentable,
alors que l'historicisme doit toujours travailler avec l'hypothèse d'une
totalité représentable. Ce reste fait que tout texte se déplace
sans cesse à travers l'histoire et revient nous parler dans notre présent.
On peut ramener ce reste à la métaphore lacanienne de la letter/litter (déchet) qui est à la fois repérable et non-inscrite, c'est-à-dire,
commme il l'écrit, interdite. D'après moi, c'est ce je-nesais-quoi
qui donne la seule explication possible au fait que huit siècles après
qu'un texte ait été écrit nous le fassions revenir dans
notre interprétation et nous nous disputions à propos de son sens.
A cet égard, une opération uniquement archéologique me
semble être faite pour réduire au silence la part de la littérature.
Il faut aussi bien voir que tous ces discours de gestion et d'interprétation,
les nôtres y compris, sont aussi (et tu y as fait allusion, Peter, quand
tu as parlé de la problématisation objet-sujet), sont en partie
littéraires dans le sens où la part du reste et de l'inconscient
joue un rôle crucial chez nous, tout comme chez eux et de façon
réitérée: par exemple, dans un discours comme celui des Pères de l'Eglise, il y a de la littérature, et de la
meilleure, qui déjoue le calcul de la gestion idéologique ou interprétative.
Pour repérer où la littérature médiévale
se sépare de son lieu d'énonciation, il faut revenir à
la conception chrétienne que le Moyen Age se fait de l'histoire, en évitant
le double piège de la religiosité mystique qui fait de Dieu la
cause première, et du scientisme positiviste qui entend faire du Nouveau
Testament encore une version d'un mythe. Ce n'est qu'à ce prix qu'on
peut identifier la soustraction qu'opère la littérature par rapport
aux déterminations juridiques, économiques, rhétoriques,
théologiques qui entendent la gérer. C'est le concept de l'incarnation
qui joue là un rôle central en ce sens que l'idée de Dieu
cesse d'être une idée éternelle, comme chez les Grecs, pour
être liée sans retour au devenir humain et précisément
par là à l'histoire. Même si elle ne le sait pas ou ne veut
pas le savoir, notre conception moderne de l'histoire dépend de cette
fracture fondamentale dans l'histoire de la pensée. A cet égard,
le Moyen Age ne peut être que moderne.
J'ai été très intéressé par un mot dans le
sujet qui nous a été proposé, c'est le terme de testing
qui suppose que nous fassions un experimentum mentis au sens galiléen.
Nulle théorie ne saurait se passer d'une pratique des textes, et là
encore le X, la lettre de l'incarnation, qui est aussi un déchet, doit
servir de guide au sens où, au Moyen Age, la littérature, inspirée
par le modèle christique, fait poétiquement sa théorie
dans sa pratique d'écriture. C'est-à-dire que toute théorie
s'incarne, de façon parfois perverse.
J'aimerais proposer comme champ d'expérience les premiers textes en vernaculaire.
Ils relèvent de toutes sortes de discours: pièces de résistance
pour l'histoire, la critique littéraire, la phonétique historique,
la rhétorique etc. Si ces approches restent isolées, elles n'ont
aucune chance de saisir le dire de ces textes. La phonétique historique
manquera, dans son idéologie sténographique, la nouveauté
de la promotion à l'écriture que sont ces vénérables
monuments. L'histoire s'aveuglera sur leur dimension d'invention profératoire,
en les prenant pour des documents: c'est-à-dire la constatation d'un
fait, jamais une profération relevant d'une poétique. La critique
littéraire les éternisera dans le Ciel des idées.
Partons de l'événement évangélique: celui-ci suppose
que le message s'énonce dans la Babel des langues sans que ses sens en
soient altérés. "Ils furent tous emplis par le Saint Esprit
et commencèrent à parler en d'autres langues suivant les directives
de l'Esprit" écrit Saint Paul. Il y a là une langue sans
langue, celle du Saint Esprit chez Saint Paul, celle de l'extase d'Ostie chez
Saint Augustin, qui dit, sans la dire, la vérité évangélique.
Puis il y a les incarnations de la Babel historique des langues: l'une et l'autre
sont indispensables à l'énonciation et à l'écoute
du message. Il faut l'histoire pour communiquer, mais il faut aussi l'Autre
de l'histoire qui est ici théologiquement l'Esprit.
Les premiers monuments en vernaculaire se placent tous dans l'orbite du texte
paulinien. Pour ce qui est des Serments de Strasbourg, la profération
poétique et historique de l'équivalence entre langue et nation
est une coupure révolutionnaire qui se substitue à toutes les
formes de transmission du pouvoir féodal et qui ne prendra son sens qu'après
des siècles d'élaboration. En ce qui concerne la Séquence
de Sainte Eulalie, nous nous trouvons en face d'un effort conscient, poétique
et artificiel de donner une écriture à quelque chose qui ne fut
pas parlé: une langue latinisante ou même provençalisante
selon l'hypothèse fugace de Poirion, qui essaie de recouvrir le maximum
de territoire de la Francia occidentalis. L'alternance des alemuets,
de la graphie Krist/Christus sont à interpréter non comme des
maladresses mais comme le rappel volontaire de la langue liturgique dans l'écriture
du vernaculaire. Il y a là une profération d'écriture qui
obéit à une poétique d'autant plus raffinée qu'elle
se dissimule sous la couverture rhétorique d'une simplicitas à la Quintilien. Elle fait semblant d'écrire peuple Eulalien:
bien écrire dès le départ selon des règles plus
esthétiques que phonétiques. A ce propos, je trouve que le titre Paroles Gelées est fabuleux parce qu'il s'agit bien de geler
la parole mais aussi de la dégeler dans la vie de la lettre sur le papier.
Ce bien écrire dépend aussi d'une coupure et d'une différenciation
par rapport au latin. Ce latin est métaphoriquement mâle parce
qu'il est la langue du pouvoir et de l'Eglise. On peut ici généraliser:
toute inscription nouvelle suppose en fait une désinscription inaugurale,
qui est sa condition même d'énonciation. Eulalie est à la
fois une inscription neuve du texte liturgico-littéraire en vernaculaire
et une désinscription par rapport au texte liturgique latin.
Je propose comme deuxième experimentum mentis la désinscription
dans l'oeuvre de Guillaume IX, premier texte en provençal. Ici la phonétique
historique fonctionne dans une double fiction: la première étant
le bas-latin, langue inventée par les philologues, ce que Lacan aurait
appelé une élucubration du savoir. Je n'en conteste nullement
la nécessité, mais elle doit être toujours présentée
comme une hypothèse au sens vraiment scientifique du terme: elle est
opératoire. Mais la tentation du philologue est de la réifier
empiriquement et c'est là que se place la véritable fiction ou
l'imaginaire du philologue. La deuxième fiction est que la phonétique
historique déduit toujours l'existence de parlers dialectaux réels
à partir d'un monument littéraire anachronique. Les manuscrits
datent du 13e et 14e siècles, cependant elle ne pose jamais la question
si ces dialectes ne pourraient pas relever d'un effet rhétorique. En
reprenant l'exemple de Guillaume IX, seul, ou à peu près, le comte
de Poitiers atteste du "limousin," du "poitevin" etc. Charles
Camproux l'a souligné: "la raison de l'emploi de formes empruntées
à d'autres parlers que le parler de Poitiers, parler maternel de Guilhem,
ne serait-elle pas simplement une raison de métier poétique? Autrement
dit, ne serions-nous pas en présence d'un problème de poétique
et de rhétorique?"
Il faut cependant aller plus loin. La notion "d'emprunt" me gêne
parce qu'elle repose presque uniquement sur les effets fictionnels calculés
par l'écriture des manuscrits. Il faut la remplacer en bonne méthode
par celle de fiction dialectisante, qui permet de saisir que les poèmes
visent, comme Eulalie ou les Serments de Strasbourg avant
eux, une aire linguistique de diffusion maximale.
D'autre part, il faut se rappeler qu'aujourd'hui encore, l'assimilation faite
par les vidas entre Guillaume IX, prince d'Aquitaine parlant poitevin, et le "cuens de Peitieu" n'est qu'une hypothèse invérifiable.
C'est ici qu'il faut faire coupure méthodologique par rapport à
un certain historicisme. Car même si l'assimilation était historiquement
certaine, rien ne nous assurerait que la langue ou le discours d'un poète
soient identiques à ceux d'un grand seigneur féodal.
Sans entrer dans le détail, les poèmes mentionnent nombre de villes
et de provinces, s'étendant de Montpellier à Niort, du Poitou
à l'Anjou, pour exclure la Normandie et la France. Or, ces noms sont
à la base des différentes identifications dialectales; le comte
de Poitiers écrira en poitevin, en limousin etc. C'est un cercle vicieux
méthodologique dans le sens où le monument littéraire est
amené à faire preuve documentaire d'une réalité
extérieure qui existe à peine, hormis la trace que, prétendument,
il en conserve. Il faut ici inverser le problème: l'écrit profère,
par ces noms, l'essence de son projet, son adresse poétique, distribuée
de la Gascogne à l'Anjou, dans une langue qui est somme artificielle
de parlers dialecticaux qui jouent poétiquement entre eux. De plus, "aller
à Niort", c'est ne rien dire, "parler poitevin" ou "normand",
c'est parler de façon ambiguë, l'Anjou, c'est la terre de la jouissance
(du joy) et de sa perte, etc.: toutes figures qui s'accordent parfaitement à
la poétique même du "comte de Peitieu."
Et encore: cette langue artificielle est déterminée par une autre
langue. Cette langue, c'est celle du désir, barbarolexie proférée
par le pèlerin pour parvenir à la jouissance d'Agnès et
d'Ermessen dans le cinquième poème: l'indéchiffrable "barbariol,
barbariol, barbarian," sinon à comprendre qu'il est le chiffre
même de la jouissance. Cette langue échappe à la fonction
de désignation et de représentation: considérée
comme "muette" par les deux dames, elle se soustrait donc à
tout imaginaire historique. Son interdiction (dite et indicible) est à
rapprocher de l'amie invisible et sans être du quatrième poème:
Amigu'ai ieu, no sai qui s'es
Qu'anc non la vi, si m'ajut fes.
Du désir nous avons des traces mais elles ne peuvent qu'être inadéquates à leur objet absent.
Que conclure de cet exemple, dont je vois bien le caractère limité?
Je dirais que nul historicisme ne saurait rendre compte de cette autre langue,
ni même et surtout la phonétique soit-disant "historique".
Malgré leur légitimité, ces disciplines ne peuvent que
s'aveugler sur le caractère déterminant de l'autre langue, par
rapport à la manifestation historique, à la trace écrite
que sont les poèmes. L'autre langue, déchet de la représentation,
reste rétive à toute identification historique, même si
cette dernière peut nous permettre de déterminer le lieu où
elle vient à manquer.
Il faut remarquer aussi que le "barbariol" échappe
à toute tentative de l'arrimer que pourrait produire le discours de l'Incarnation.
Non pas parce qu'il est la marque libératrice d'un désir sexuel
(ceci cadrerait parfaitement bien avec la relance du désir que produisent
les Pères en l'interdisant) mais parce qu'au contraire de l'Incarnation,
il ne peut se manifester empiriquement. Ici, le poème du "dreyt
nien" prend tout son sens. Ce néant absolu, il faut l'interpréter
à la lettre, et non pas comme fiction, jeu, riddle purement
verbal. La dimension a-chrétienne du poème apparaît alors
pleinement. Je dis a-chrétienne pour ne pas le confondre avec l'hérésie.
"Et le Verbe fut fait Verbe," tel pourrait être le leitmotiv
du "dreyt nien". Rien n'est: ni l'être même qui est cause
première de la création ex nihilo, ni l'Incarnation.
Seuls les mots sont, hors toute incarnation, hormis celle qu'ils trouvent sur
la page du manuscrit, et, dans nos lectures non en tant qu'objet mais comme
projet (le texte littéraire est plus qu'un objet - c'est un projet puisqu'il
implique toujours un lecteur futur).
C'est pour cela, sans doute, que le comte de Poitiers est contraint d'invoquer,
pour l'autorité de son dire, la seule littérature. Rappelezvous
le poème des dés:
Et en traig le vers a auctor.
Je suis le meilleur poète du monde mais la seule chose qui puisse le prouver c'est le vers lui-même.
Eugene Vance
I feel llike I've been sitting not at a roundtable, but in front of a high-calibre
artiIlery of written texts. I'm going to proceed differently, and speak about
my experiences as a medievalist over the past thirty years as a way of trying
to glimpse where I stand now on the problem of historicism, and of asking where
we might go, say, in the next ten years.
My initiation as a medievalist began in 1959 at Poitiers, at the wonderfully
interdisciplinary Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale.
I was there for a stage, and I had not studied the Middle Ages. I had been working,
rather, in the English Renaissance, so this was a real baptism. It happened
to coincide with the first meeting of the Société Rencesvals,
a learned society devoted to Gold French Epic. This meeting gathered many of
the great living Romance medievalists in one room at one time. Just to mention
a few: Ramon Menendez-Pidal was there, but he refused to speak French; Martin
de Riquer, Erec K6hler, Pierre Le Gentil, Jean Frappier, René Louis,
Italo Siciliano, Aurelio Roncaglia, Maurice Delbouille, Paul Zumthor - all these
were there, and I could go on for five minutes. It was incredible for me as
an American greenhorn to be in a world which was devoted to one question: the
origins of the Song of Roland.
The debate was passionate in ways that I rarely see nowadays in contemporary
discussions of medieval culture. It was clear that these people were involved
in a way that, to me, was mysterious. Now it's a little bit clearer. This was
probably the last spectacular event where there was a consensus that the questions
and the agenda of philology were still the only important way of making important
critical and literary judgments. All agreed that the issue they were going to
fight over was the national origins of the Song of Roland. At one point,
René Louis even chanted something in order to win an argument. I also
realized that I had no place in this debate. These were people who had aIl corne
through the thirties and forties, who had been trained as philologists searching
for an origin as a basis for a national ethos. Although these scholars were
being rigorously historical, they were in fact playing out a historiographical
episteme whose underpinnings had been blown away by the experiences of the Second
World War. By now, the teleology implicit to philology as a historical science
had corne to be seen by many as a destructive force. Indeed, it was just at
this time that general linguistics was proposing itself as a new master science
promising just about everything to aIl other disciplines. The search in general
linguistics was not for historical origins but for universals. It was a movement
whose premises included a reaction against many aspects of the philological
episteme which had been so ideologically important (not just in Germany, but
in aIl the countries of Europe, and even in America) in generating the Second
World War.
In France, after this time, philology quickly lost its momentum. Such was not
the case in Germany, and especially Italy. In fact, philology in Italy has kept
pace intellectually even until now, because the Italians have been more eclectic
and assimilative; nor was there in Italy the same radical cleavage that occurred
in France with the events of May '68. The mid-sixties saw the proliferation
of linguistically based disciplines: not only structural linguistics itself,
but structural anthropology, structural semantics, semiotic theory and also
psychoanalytical theory, to the extent that Lacan was reading the linguists,
Roman Jakobson in particular, in the early sixties. Thus, linguistics was making
inroads into psychotheory as well.
This was a short-lived moment, I think. The structuralist project quickly led
into other concerns which were really aIl centered on problems of discourse.
People also began to realize that even these revitalized models of their disciplines
were themselves historicaIly determined in some crucial way that was important
to understand. For instance, the American semiotician Peirce was best known
by the public of his own time as a theologian, and not as a semiotician. He
himself understood the theological and scholastic origins of his semiotics,
as well as the context in which he was writing and publishing his semiotic theory.
But the semioticians who first edited the Peircean corpus did so in
a way to neutralize the theological context of Peircean semiotics. This perception
led me to a serious question as a medievalist concerned with problems of discourse:
should modern semioticians be cutting semiotics off from its rich history? Can
semiotics pretend to be a mature science without recognizing and dealing with
its own history? This question was especiaIly pertinent to the reception of
Greimas as well. Why is his actantial model so powerful? Greimas is a rigorous,
scientific man, but one who does not accept the importance of the early history
of semiotics underlying his own semiotic models. Nor is he concerned with discussing
his own epistemological development. I have discovered this in two debates with
him on this question, in 1972 and 1984.
By contrast, I have been gratified, as a medievalist, to observe how the discourse
of Freud is being subjected to extraordinary analysis to see how his models
came into place. In fact, the best psychoanalytical criticism in our time, in
my opinion, is embodied in the search for its own foundations, for an understanding
of the processes by which this discourse constituted itself in the beginning
of this century. The best Freudians are now meta-Freudians, who work in ways
that are extremely creative. They are wiIling, moreover, to problematize the
psychoanalytical apparatus in its complicated historical relationship to medieval
texts. This kind of concern has been fueled by the Lacanians, because they had
in Lacan a master for whom Augustinian psychology, semiotics, and models of
mind were never indifferent. It's clear, at the same time, that Lacan was only
a superficial reader of Augustine. I don't believe he ever read the De trinitate
seriously. Had he done so, I think his models would have been chaIlenged and
transformed at a very early stage.
After the structuralist period, it seemed to me as a medievalist that it was
important not to see how Freudian the West might be, but how Western Freud might
be; not to see how Lacan had transcended theology, but rather how his own discourse
is a laundered theology. 50, during the post-structural period, major critical
approaches which had considered themselves to be somehow outside of the historical
process seemed to me more and more historicaIly and institutionaIly determined.
This was especiaIly the case with deconstruction. There was nothing easier and
more natural to me than to see how the claims of modern deconstruction were
in fact designating an ongoing cultural crisis which may even to be said to
have constituted medieval vernacular literature. And it was very easy for medievalists
to see - because medieval texts are ineluctibly burdened with a metaphysics
of presence - that medieval writers do not fail to grasp, and even to accentuate,
the troubled metaphysical dimension of their textuality, in other words, what
the deconstructionists were so anxious to ferret out of modern texts. For me,
the problem in the seventies was to ask how medieval theories of semiotics,
of discourse and of understanding propeIled the processes of creation, of propagation
and of revision in medievalliterary discourse. For this, Augustine has always
provided an important matrix in which to work. (I'm getting away from this now,
and some people will be glad to know it.) In Augustine, one found not only a
provocative theory of the sign and of textuality, but also a useful theory of
discourse in his recasting of Ciceronian doctrines of rhetoric. 50 too, one
found in Augustine a rich psycho-theory based on the theory of the Trinity.
Augustine also left us the legacy of a teleological historiography which has
shaped aIl narrative representations of culture, including our notion of "nation:
right up to the present war [in Iraq]. It would be a drastic mistake not to
see the continuity between the teleology of Augustinian models of culture and
the very idea of the European Economic Community, not to mention the recent
American crusade in the Middle-East.
Leupin:
"Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit."8
Vance:
Oui. At the same time,
my own historical concerns were changing. I should mention that my first diploma
was in History. It was at Strasbourg and I worked under the great French medieval
historian, Bernard Guenée. My second real medievalist teacher was Robert
Benson, now at UCLA, but whom I met at Cornell. So historians were my real entry
into medieval study, and not the philologists. From the start, I was intrigued
by the very complex relationship between literary texts and their contexts,
both discursive and social. But this was a difficult time for someone with such
interests: there were no methods, no models for dealing with these relationships.
(Nor were there automatic professional rewards.) I began to take seriously the
medieval rhetorical notion that human society is constituted of multiple speech
groups competing with each other to define, and hence, to control, reality.
I began to be aware to what extent medieval events not only respond to material
circumstances, but engender them: there could have been no crusade without sermons.
On this score, I totally agree with Alexandre and Peter on talking about the
notion of a poétique active: a poetics which is a determinant
of a social reality as much as it is a reflection of it. The idea of a mimetic
realism in the Middle Ages is simply untenable.
So for me, the literary text - and when I say literary: I mean it as in the
sense of grammatica, the cultural space of writing - as soon as it became vernacularized,
it began to represent and objectif I thought and speech, not as a stable order,
but as a zone of interference between discourses constituting the dynamism of
the social group. As the rhetoricians knew so well, each discourse has its own
lexicon, its own conceptual bundle, and its own repertory of illocutionary acts;
and these discourses are constantly disrupting and transforming each other within
the zone of the literary text.
Put otherwise, I used to consider the text as a totemizing operation. A text
can assert a configuration of social power by assigning strict boundaries and
functions to the discourses constituting the social group. For instance, in
the lyric by Guillaume IX that Alexandre mentioned, Guillaume clearly desired
to assign specific spaces to certain political and geographical entities and
to exclude others. This poetics is perfectly within the agenda of medieval rhetoric.
The Dominican preacher Humbert of Romans decided that there were exactly one
hundred different speech groups constituting the totality of the human race.
This was the Christian people: non-Christians did not figure into the scheme
of the totality of human speech. So, to include or exclude a speech group is
already to order a world according to one's beliefs, needs and wishes.
By the same token, discourses undergo mutations when structures or modalities
of power change. It's interesting that the nobility of Champagne began to write
and that the discourse of the Champenois school of poets emerged at a time when
feudal relationships were being archivalized. I mean this very specifically:
in the mid 1160's, Count Henri le Libéral decided that he would compile
written inventories of the feudal relationships that had been in force for generations
and to centralize these into roles. As aIl the names and properties of his vassals
were identified and written into an archive, writing itself became a force that
altered feudal relationships in a crucial way. It was also a time when the bourgeoisie
- I use this in a strict judicial sense: a group constituted by a legal contractual
relationshipin 12th century society-mastered writing very quickly, because they
were also the new practitioners of commerce, for which writing was indispensable.
The nobility, therefore, had to acquire its own model of writing, a discursive
model of its own, which could not be those of the bourgeoisie or those of the
clergy. Such notions about discourse as emblem extended even to language: there
was no a priori legitimacy to French as a mother language now constituting itself
as a literary language in the place of latinity, indeed, as a demonumentalization
of grammatica. Suddenly, you see a vernacular literature embracing the world
of material desires and needs, and as it did so, rethinking the individual,
the psychic, the social and even the metaphysical dimensions of human experience,
meticulously de-spiritualizing and unpacking the repressive reflexes that had
been dictated by the ecclesiastical community.
So, I have been aware of how important it is to see medieval literature as actively
engaged in re-articulating social realities within changing modes of power that
occurred in the 12th century. To study this process means learning to think
in ways which go against the grain of orthodox intellectual history and of course
philology. Sometimes we have to leam to reverse chronology in the way we understand
events so as to break the illusions of cause and effect, of source and influence.
By this, I mean that the unsaid of a literary text and the generative powers
of literary texts often become apparent only after the fact.
Therefore, it is important for us to use all the fine instruments of recent
critical movements, including deconstruction, in order to practice a new
and historically dense kind of discourse analysis. I find it amusing to see
the Shakespearian establishment discovering only now what French medieval scholars
influenced by the Annales school, by Althusser, and by Foucault, have been doing
for ten or fifteen years. The Shakespearians are trying to stake out for themselves
a new territory which, in fact, is an old territory for many of us. Though their
level of theoretical reflection about history is a bit superficial, the scholarly
outcome is in fact interesting and rich.
A historical approach to discourse analysis can also help us to deal with a
question that no ne of the major critical movements, from philologyup to our
time, has been willing to address - with the possible exception of the Marxists.
It involves addressing the ethical burden of literary texts, medieval or otherwise.
We aIl know that along with physics and logic, ethics was one of the three branches
of medieval philosophy and that literary discourse too was often specifically
seen as an exercise in ethics. To make such a claim does not mean that we should
look to literature for recipes for proper or improper actions, but to see how
medieval literary texts both grasp and transform ethical complexities into properly
discursive events. By "discursive event", I mean new assertions of
social imperatives of a sort that cause old discourses to say new things, or
cause new discourses to say old things. The tension that arises with hybridized
discourses may be said to define the cultural moment. For instance, embedded
in the conventional discourse of 12th century courtly eroticism one may find
a relatively complex model of economic exchange. Such is the case, as weIl,
with Chrétiens Yvain. Surely this hybridizing amounts to an encoding
of new economic priorities of the nobility of Champagne, who vigorously
patronized commerce but did not themselves practice it. There can be no study
of ethics that is not historical, and the renewed quest for "historicism" among students of medieval literature might well include in its agenda the study
of ethical problems through techniques of discourse analysis that would include,
of course, consideration of the rhetorical assumptions of the medievals themselves.
Let me conclude by saying that the purpose of this retrospection is really to
ask what we're going to be doing in the next 10 years or more. I believe that
we, today, are on an epistemological threshold which is just as profound as
the one in the mid-sixties. Our own knowledge and models of understanding are
going to be severely tested by the new demands made upon us. Our world is changing
irreversibly. I am surprised at how much overlap there is in our positions.
We three started from very different bases and our discourses are certainly
quite different from each other. Yet, over and over again, our different discourses
lead us toward the same questions.
Leupin:
Il y a des échos
extraordinaires.
Haidu:
Echoes is, I think,
an excellent expression. It is hardly an identity, but there is an enormous
amount of recognition.
Discussion
Haidu: I think that you've led us to a very important remark,
which sets our own discourse in the historical context, for to characterize
thought itself as historical is the essential part of any form of modem historical
thought. You are talking about an epistemological threshold which sounds good,
hopeful, at least I hope that it will be positive. However I think that the
experience of the past thirty years that you've been talking about, gives us
a model of how complex this kind of shift is, and it's not a shift of before,
change, and after. It involves all sorts of continuations and invocations of
the later period with the earlier period. And the very locution, which is so
awkward and so unpleasant, of post-structuralism, gives the indication of complexity.
Post-structuralism has never gotten outside of structuralism, even in criticizing
it: I'm thinking of Derrida's first major book, the Grammatology. The
criticism of structuralism, of both Saussure and Levi-Strauss was done in terms
of their own work. It was not that Derrida attacked them with something that
came from outside, it was using Saussure against Saussure, Lévi-Strauss
against LéviStrauss.
Vance: Absolutely, and you can see how deconstruction has sought
to protect itself from within from the ethical charges brought against Heidegger
and De Man.
Leupin: Ce que dit Peter est juste. La pensée de Derrida
est une radicalisation très rigoureuse de Saussure pris à la lettre.
Haidu: I'm not sure what you were thinking of when you described
Peirce as being known primarily as a theologian.
Vance: in his time.
Haidu: Peirce described himself as a scientist and this did
not, and here I would agree with you, exclude a great deal of religious thought.
What is very clear is that the semiotic theory of Peirce, what has been presented
as a semiotic extraction of Peirce, is in fact a profoundly ambiguous project
which wants to claim scientificity in late 19th, early 20th century terms. At
the same time, it leaves itself open for a religious insertion. This was a dreadfully
difficult challenge for Peirce throughout his life, I think, to be scientific
insofar as he could both coopt and respond to evolutionary theory and at the
same time not set up intellectual structures that would exclude the religious.
The whole issue of the ultimate interpretant and the final interpretant is for
Peirce a possible theological resolution of interpretation. It's perfectly obvious,
that the sources, particularly the medieval sources of Peirce, are theological.
As far as Greimas' an-historicization or an-historical selfpresentation
is concerned, I dont think it is true. It is certainly true that he does not
situate his work in the long haul of semiotic theory . I dont know what work
he's done in medieval language theory, but in the Sémantique structurale,
his first book, he tries to specify his own historical insertion in the work
that directly leads up to him: Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Hjelmslev, Souriau
and Propp are very carefully acknowledged as the theoreticians from whom he
is taking off. There are also indications in his work of his thoughts about
history: a citation of Destutt de Tracy on ideology at the beginning of "Le
Jeu des contraintes sémiotiques". I dont think that's accidental.
I think he sees himself as picking up again the 18th century enlightenment project
of a science of ideas. He also talks directly about history in Sémiotique
et sciences sociales.
Vance : Well Peter, taking the case of
the semiotic square and its relationship to the carré logique,
he's been drawn out on this. He denies that he developed this carré
sémantique from the carré logique. There is a published
interview of Greimas' with Alain de Libéra,9 in
which he says that this came independently out of his own re-workings of Brondal,
and Lévi-Strauss. It's as if his carré sémantique
was not just a restatement of the fundamental model of reflection that had been
available in Western culture all through the Middle Ages: his carré
sémantique is functionally identical to the carré logique.
There is an historical redundancy here which Greimas plays down by stressing
only his recent sources. I would also ask whether the roots of his actantial
and actorial models do not lie very deeply in a Greek and Russian Orthodox theology
of archetypes.
Haidu: Greimas never presents it as having been dreamed up
out of nothing. On the contrary he's very careful, the whole book of the Sémantique
structurale is an explanation of each minute, little, incremental step
that he takes on the models of Souriau and Propp: he derives his model from
theirs. Now the notion that they have cultural roots, I think, is perfectly
valid; it's also fairly obvious that he does not present it as a radical invention.
So, no, he's not primarily an historical thinker.
Vance: Would you say that he is anti-historical?
Haidu: No, absolutely not. In '78, I explained to Greimas the
way I was thinking of using his model of the semiotic square for historical
purposes and he said that's what he had always thought. He recognizes here some
of the middle period work that he's done, that Il'm drawing on, which has not
been picked up by most of the people around him. So, no, I dont think he is
an historical thinker, I think he's developed stuff that can be used for historical
purposes, which is as you know what I've been doing for a number of years. The
question is: is it productive of knowledge? It seems to me that insofar as one
wants to deal with the specificities of texts as totalities of their own, the
semiotic models he's produced become extremely useful.
Vance: Lets be precise and take a concrete example that I'm
dealing with in my current work on the problem of icons and iconoclasm. This
is semiotics in the most extraordinarily rigorous and socially relevant way,
to the extent that the debate about images determines whether churches would
be destroyed, wars would break out, and whether people would be punished and
excommunicated because they either refused to, or insisted on, venerating icons.
Now the theology of semiotics at work in these debates has many common points
with modern semiotics. What does it mean if we take a modern semiotics to study
a medieval image or the veneration of that medieval image, unless our semiotics
allows an abundant place for the semiotics which first generated the pictures,
generated the veneration of these pictures, and generated the debate about them?
Haidu: It seems to me that there was probably a semiotic conception.
This is not Greimas, this is Eco. The decoding process is always different from
the encoding process. And this becomes all the more so when you're dealing with
encoding processes which are historically and culturally so far removed from
us. There is no way in which we can get back into the position of the encoding
process. I think that within certain limits one can hope to get some information.
To try to look at a historical process from the point of view of a participant
is not a value-free operation. It does not guarantee objectivity. On the contrary,
it guarantees that you will be a participant in a conflictual process, that
is to say, you will choose sides. Now, I have no problem with that. However
the criticism I do make of that procedure is that you cannot present that as
a mode of historicism which gets you away from present political values.
Vance: I'll agree with that.
Haidu: In choosing to view the political
process from the perspective of a participant, insofar as that's possible,
you are actually accepting the political implication of that position, and making
it your own...
Vance: Well I'm not sure about that.
Haidu:
...for the purposes of the analysis.
Vance: I think we're at an impasse right now. We' d have to
go into a lot of the theological disputes about images that corne out of acts
of the Second Council of Nicea in 787 before we could really get beyond this.
Haidu: Even before that. One cannot deal with the inheritance
of Augustinian sign theory, which you've explored so often and so fruitfully,
and ignore its theological implications. You cannot study the production of
signs, the interpretation of signs from an Augustinian point of view ...
Vance: This is true.
Haidu: ...without accepting a theological position.
Vacne:
That's not true.
Haidu: Well, I dont really see the difference,
but the alternative I propose is that the Greimassian codification of semiotic
models in the Dictionary 10 allows you to announce what
you are doing. You can play to the models that you are employing. Now you can
never announce all your investments, all the principles that lie behind your
moves because there are always more pre-suppositions.
Leupin: Gene, ta biographie intellectuelle m'a énormément
intéressé. Ce premier meeting de la Société Rencesvals m'a fasciné. Je me demande cependant si c'est la deuxième
ou la première guerre mondiale qui compte? Que la première guerre
mondiale soit le suicide de l'Europe des nations, c'est tout à fait clair.
C'est un problème dont l'origine est médiévale parce que
l'Europe des nations est née au Moyen Age avec les Serments de Strasbourg.
Il y a donc toutes sortes d'implications qu'il faudrait essayer de dégager.
Ce qui s'est passé dans les études médiévales ces
vingt dernières années, ce renouveau extraordinaire, c'est
un renouveau qui est parti de l'excentricité. Il na pas été
fait à Paris, mais sur les bords de l'empire intellectuel, c'està-dire
en Belgique avec Dragonetti, ensuite à Genève, avec Méla
et Cerquiglini qui ne sont pas à la Sorbonne, et en Amérique avec
tous nos amis que je ne mentionnerai pas, on les connait bien. Ça pose
un problème extrêmement important. Qu'est-ce qu'on va faire maintenant?
Est-ce qu'on va mettre l'accent sur une espèce de colonie intellectuelle
internationale construite sur le modèle des nationalités européennes
au Moyen Age, avec cette articulation du latin qui permettait naturellement
à une toute petite élite d'échanger des idées aux
quatre coins du monde? Ou est-ce qu'on va essayer de constituer le prochain
pas sur le modèle d'une poétique mondiale à la Glissant?
(Voir La Poétique de la relation où il essaie d'articuler
la relation de toutes les différences.) On assiste ici à une décentralisation
de la pensée et, paradoxalement, les USA en sont le laboratoire. Sur
un plan plus personnel, je crois pouvoir dire que la figure de l'exil par rapport
à la centralité européenne a été essentielle
à ma pensée et m'a permis de regarder le Moyen Age d'une façon
tout à fait différente. Pour la question de la théologie
lacanienne: je ne suis pas du tout d'accord. Si vous relisez La Science
et la vérité dans Les Ecrits il y a là un
refus radical de la magie et de la religion dans le sens où le religieux
se trompe toujours en mettant Dieu à la place de la cause. François
Regnault, dans son livre Dieu est inconscient, arrive à la conclusion
que la pensée de Lacan est le seul athéisme radical possible.
Cependant Lacan dirait de l'inconscient exactement la même chose que dit
Saint Augustin de Dieu dans l'ouverture des Confessions, qu'il est impossible
à dire, mais qu'il faut quand même le dire, l'étudier, y
penser.
Vance: When I talk about the hidden reinscribed theological
dimensions of psychoanalytical discourse, I go back to Freud's notion of the
unconscious and not to Lacan's. If you look at the Freudian topology, which
is a tripartite topology of the soul, and you look at the language in which
Freud describes the id, you will see that this language draws on a heavily theological
way of talking about God as eternal, timeless, non-negating. Freud inverts this
metaphysical language and locates its concepts in the biological, in a Darwinian
model which is evolutionary. Freud therefore gives us the illusion that his
discourse about the id has eliminated the theological, that is to say the Augustinian
discourse about God as Idipsum (the "it itself"). Its truth
value is enhanced by the very fact that it seems to be anti-theological. To
this extent, it is a revision of theology in the name of a new kind of science.
It's no doubt pertinent that this occurred at a specific moment in Freud's life,
when his father had died and the conditions of his psychic life had changed.
The relevance of a discourse which has inverted a theological model, is precisely
that it allows the theological model to persist under a new set of premises,
and still provides many of the functions that a failed religion offered to so
many people. So the topological models of Freud, Lacan and Augustine are in
dialogue with one another, even if this dialogue is implicit rather than explicit.
Haidu: That there is a dialogue, that there is a reincorporation
and transformation, the point is well made. Now does this mean that we strip
away the layer Lacan/Freud moving it back to a point of origin, like the Augustinian,
or do we keep the structure of dialogue present in our mind? Does Lacan dialogue
with Freud and Augustine? Or does Freud consciously or not, and I am perfectly
willing to accept that, partially incorporate Augustinian structures? What is
the next stage? Is there a resemblance, an inheritance?
Vance: No, I don't think so. I think we have to go farther
than that, Peter. It seems to me that many aspects of modern psychology originated
in a theological discourse that emerged in the 4th century. The real laboratory
for this is Augustine's De trinitate. It is not an accident that the
greatest psychological treatise of early Western culture developed as an investigation
of the Holy Trinity. The tripartiteness of the soul is an image of the Holy
Trinity. The three functions: memory, intellect and will overlap to a certain
extent with the tripartiteness of the id which is recovered through memory.
Alexandre insists quite correctly on the importance of the Incarnation. However
the dogma of the Incarnation was something which was not accepted for many centuries
by the different cults, and there are still Christian sects which have never
acknowledged the Incarnation. Thoughts about the Incarnation also summoned a
reflection about the Saint Esprit which deincarnalizes human knowledge of God,
universalizes and makes infinitely repeatable the event of the sacrifice of
Christ's body, through the operation of the Eucharist. Now it seems to me that
if you are going to talk about the coupure of the Incarnation, you have to see
this developing within a much larger problematic of the Holy Spirit. So yes,
Peter, the dialogue must go on, but it must include an awareness of how certain
major discursive permutations occurred in early Western culture and whether
we can accept, as a model in psychoanalytical exchange, a certain functioning
which will orient us towards ourselves, towards those that we love, hate and
so forth. Will this model remain static? Of course not. Will psychoanalysis
be around in fifty years? It is not at all clear. And psychoanalysts, if you
ask them this question, they blanch.
Leupin:
J'ai écarté de mon modèle le dogme trinitaire et la résurrection:
la résurrection est une tentative d'effacement de la révolution
promue par l'Incarnation. C'est très patent chez Saint Paul quand il
dit que Dieu s'est anéanti lui-même: il parle bien de la mort de
Dieu. Donc si je suis théologien, je suis un théologien de la
mort de Dieu. La résurrection ne fait pas partie de mon schéma
explicatif. Quant à la Trinité, je trouve ton analyse très
fine dans le sens où tu montres bien que c'est quelque chose qui n'est
pas spécifique au christianisme. En inversant ta lecture, je crois que
Freud peut reprendre le dogme trinitaire dans un tout autre contexte. Je ne
pense pas que ce dogme désigne d'une façon précise la spécificité
du christianisme et c'est pour cela aussi que je l'ai écarté du
modèle pour ne retenir que l'Incarnation.
Haidu: There is something that strikes me Gene. You pointed
to a change in your thinking during your autobiographical remarks. But it seems
to me that it is not a "repressed," that the old does return into
the new and I wonder about this return. You have had this discourse of the economic
and the historical, concerns that both you and I share, for quite some time.
At the same time,there is this return of a theological discourse, not only in
terms of your own intellectual evolution, but in terms of a cultural one as
well.
The dominant discourse about the Middle Ages has been theological? Not always.
I believe that during the period of Classicism and during the Enlightenment
it was not, but at some point during the 19th century the dominant historiographic
discourse about the Middle Ages turned religious and has remained the dominant
discourse.
Leupin:
Quand tu parles de la théologie au 19e siècle, j'irais même
plus loin. Je dirais que le scientisme positiviste du 19e siècle dans
lequel s'est constituée notre discipline, c'est l'autre face de la même
monnaie qu'est la foi. Cela suppose un acte de foi, ça, c'est sûr.
Haidu: And I see this theological discourse returning with
you, Gene, even after you have, at least at some point in your thinking, adopted
a completely different discourse qui ne cadre pas, with the theological. If
you are talking about the creation of banking systems, nation states, new kinds
of judicial arrangements within society, which are, I believe, what the 12th
century was primarily concerned with, it is a discourse which does not obviously
fit into the theological. The only way it can, as far as I can see, is by accepting
exactly the kind of identification of the semiotic with the theological that
I pointed to in Augustine, which is an identification that you accepted up to
a point.
Vance: I do not look on the return of theology as the return
of certain permanent, eternal conditions of Western culture and of our own thought.
It is very important to see the specific social conditions under which this
theology emerged in the first place, and also what was lost when this theology
was installed. There were many alternatives in the model of the Trinity, each
one carrying different ethical values. Early Christianity was the time when
the dominant family models were set in our culture; it was also the time when
gender models were established in Western discourse. These resulted from choices
that were historically open and subject to alternatives which have been excluded.
When they changed radically, the premises of theology changed in very radical
ways. For instance, most people agree that Jacques Le Goff has overstated the
novelty of the idea of Purgatory in the 12th century. But I think he is absolutely
right in suggesting that a major theological inflection occurred in the 12th
century. Why did it occur? It occurred because the new ethical values of commerce,
the quantification of service, the crimes people committed, the idea of a just
price were generating a new space, a new use of that theological concept of
Purgatory as an area of exchange. In every major intellectual and cultural revolution
theology has undergone inflections. So I dont look on theology as a kind of
permanent parameter of our thought, but as a dynamic process which also includes
the mutations that I would identify as those of psychoanalysis.
Haidu: I would go to the point of saying that insofar as any
discourse asserts itself to be grounded, and to rest upon ultimate values, it's
going to be theological in some profound sense.
But the Middle Ages are much more varied than is generally credited. There are
very strong and important counter - Augustinian currents which start in the
11th century, and which become major in the 12th, which have not been sufficiently
taken into account; this applies both to the variety of theologies and to applied
theologies. For instance, there is an applied theology to the issue of the just
price, to the issue of social relations among the men of the Church, as in John
Baldwins huge two-volume work on the circle of Peter the Cantor. Applied
theology becomes practical theology as it is adapted to the historical development
of a new economic class. There one has to ask: at the point of application,
doesn't the theological reading of history transform the theology itself? The
boundary between the theological and the non-theological is unclear. There are
many modern discourses - you've picked up on Freud, and I have no problem with
that - which are implicitly theological in a structural sense, not in a sense
of content, not in addressing God as a specific entity, but insofar as the structure
of the system of thought reproduces that which we traditionally think of as
theological.
Let me switch the discourse back to Alexandre. I have never reproached you with
a-historicism.
Vance: Neither have I.
Haidu: I have been conscious of your work's modernity. I was
very aware in the book on the Graal, of the way in which you were, in the most
delicate way imaginable, responding to historical issues even when they went
unacknowledged. So I don't think of it as ahistorical at all. But I do
see the recurrence of transcendent categories as if we were talking about eternities.
It came out this morning with the notion of l'esprit comme l'Autre
de l'histoire. Evidemment il faudrait pouvoir définir les rapports
d'altérité. Proposer l'Incarnation comme l'événement
qui serait la chose médiévale est historiquement une possibilité
théorique. Le choix semble ramener le discours théologique dans
des activités dont la convenance n'est pas évidente.
Leupin:
On a été, tous les trois, dans l'harmonie d'une écholalie
extraordinaire mais je crois bon de cerner ici une différence. Je peux
concevoir la Renaissance comme une coupure dans un sous-système de pensée,
voir même une régression. Quelle est cette régression? C'est
le retour humaniste, après la coupure chrétienne, aux textes que
j'appellerais païens. Il s'agit de rétablir la fiction d'une continuité
de la tradition occidentale. Ce n'est pas une fiction du tout innocente, la
fiction de la tradition occidentale: nous en connaissons tous les effets dévastateurs.
Elle repose évidemment sur l'idée d'une continuité entre
les Grecs et nous, qui saute le Moyen Age. C'est un des phantasmes les plus
ravageurs de l'histoire. Mais je ne peux souscrire à ta formulation de
la Renaissance comme lieu coupant le Moyen Age. J'affirmerais que le Moyen Age
est essentiellement moderne étant donné que la coupure se situe
non pas entre moderne et ancien, mais d'après Kojève, entre chrétien
et païen. Dans ce sens, je ne pense pas que le Moyen Age, historiquement
parlant, soit notre Autre.
Haidu: On n'a pas entièrement abandonné le Moyen
Age après la Renaissance. Pendant la Renaissance même, il y avait
certains textes qu'on continuait à lire, non pas La Chanson de Roland, non pas Chrétien de Troyes, mais Villon et Le Roman de la Rose.
Il y a deux thèses, de Nathan Edelman, de Lionel Gossman, qui tracent
les contacts - minimes, fréquemment de seconde main- qu'on a gardés,
aux 17e et 18e siècles, avec quelque chose de vaguement médiéval.
Il me semble qu'il y a donc tout de même eu une rupture de contact avec
les textes du Moyen Age, et ça ne peut reprendre qu'au 19e siècle
avec le romantisme, avec évidemment d'autres lentilles déformantes.
Leupin: Là, je suis tout à fait d'accord, mais
je crois qu'on parle à deux niveaux différents.
Haidu: D'accord, mais pour moi, c'est le niveau où doit
travailler la sémiotique à la place de l'herméneutique.
Cette question est entièrement liée au conflit entre sémiotique
et herméneutique. Il est impossible, me semble-t-il, de travailler à
l'intérieur de l'herméneutique sur les textes médiévaux
à cause de cette coupure. Ce n'est pas le cas, d'ailleurs, ni en Allemagne
ni en Angleterre, because the English and the Germans have kept a continuous
tradition of contact with medieval texts. They haven't had the kind of patricidal
warfare that the French have had, which has extended in fact over two or three
centuries, of cutting themselves off from the medieval paternity.
What is very peculiar is that there is no country in Europe where the political
system is such a direct heritage of the Middle Ages as in France, and the Marxist
viewpoint that the Middle Ages continue through feudalism and the monarchy of
the ancien régime up to the French Revolution is perfectly justified
politically. Yet there's an enormous discrepancy between the political heritage
and the intellectual tradition, where the coupure of the humanists and the Pléiade was extremely effective at the level of culture. For me, the problem is one
of running up against texts where we cannot be certain of our ability to decode
them. If I read a modern text, from Mallarmé on, which I dont understand,
I know that my non-understanding is an appropriate reaction. But that's not
necessarily the case for the Middle Ages.
Leupin: Là encore, on n'est pas d'accord, parce que
Proust est obscur, aussi bien que Marie de France, et sur le même plan:
on a chez Proust l'illusion d'une compréhension dont on découvre
après qu'elle est insuffisante. Par ailleurs, j'espère, Peter,
que tu ne me ranges pas parmi les herméneuticiens, parce que ma position
est complètement différente. L'herméneutique suppose toujours
qu'il y a du sens avant, et pour moi, évidemment le sens vient quand
il est construit par un signifiant.
Pour revenir à ta question, Peter, tu ne m'accuses pas d'antihistoricisme,
mais d'essentialisme. C'est tout à fait clair, et comment se tirer de
ce guépier-là, parce qu'il est évident que mon geste ne
vise pas du tout à faire, ou à refaire, une théologie de
la littérature? C'est là justement où tu m'ennuies. Je
suis pris dans une double impasse: je ne suis pas essentialiste, mais ma vision
de la littérature n'est pas non plus, primordialement historique. Je
reprends l'exemple de Guillaume IX et le poème du droit néant.
Faire un poème du droit néant, c'est affirmer le néant.
C'est un geste essentiellement satanique qui détermine son texte historiquement
dans le sens où il répondrait parfaitement aux paramètres
d'une hérésie datable.
Pour me tirer d'affaire, je propose de lire le néant, le je-ne-saisquoi,
c'est-à-dire aussi la figure de la réflexivité dans le
texte médiéval, non pas comme une réponse hérétique
ou déterminée par un moment historique de la théologie,
mais comme l'évocation réelle d'une autre langue qui n'est pas
prescriptible par des représentations, et qui donc, place l'altérité
de la littérature en dehors de l'histoire. Et si c'est un geste essentialiste,
au fond tant pis, parce que je pense que c'est un geste qui permet de lire mieux
ces textes. Tout ceci est un peu confus, parce que cette question me tourmente
depuis de longues années, et je n'ai pas réussi à la résoudre
entièrement.
Haidu: Pour moi le pire, c'est qu'avec tes suppositions essentialistes
- s'il faut les nommer telles - tu arrives à produire des lectures de
textes médiévaux qui me semblent extrêmement valables, importantes,
et parfaitement historiques parfois.
Leupin: L'épisode du Château de Pesme Aventure,
que vous avez travaillé tous les deux et dont il a été
question plus haut, m'intéresse. J'ai une hypothèse de travail
toute simple qui est l'équivalence du tissu/texte. Et la question se
pose si c'est la fabrique du texte toute entière ou s'il n'y a pas d'autres
moments où cette fabrique est contredite par le texte lui-même.
Ce qui me frappe, c'est qu'il y a un satanisme à l'oeuvre qui fonctionne
comme précondition de toute la fabrique textuelle.
Vance: If you'll permit me to argue historically,
this is a moment of extraordinary transformation of these social imperatives
into a quasitheological argument, and some of them have very important
implications. There were indeed factories weaving and exploiting labor, not
in Troyes, but in Flanders. The problem of the exploitation of workers in weaving
ateliers could be perceived outside of Flanders as a grave and potentially menacing
problem for the whole nobility which is patronizing commerce. But what is important
for us, is that Chrétien articulates these problems much more subtly
at other levels, as when he draws on the etymological trope textile/text. As
you remember, at the center of this space is the family sitting on silk rugs-silk
being not wool - and they are listening to their daughter reading about some
romance "ne sai de cui".11
Haidu: Which is obviously Chrétien's play, and it has
its own function of producing the romance. He is implicating both his romance
and himself as its producer by the phrase "ne sai de cui".
Vance: The sixteen-year-old maiden, Chrétien says, is
so beautiful that even if he were God, he would allow himself to be incarnated
to enjoy her. In other words, the appeal, the attraction of the girl is to force,
once again, the model of incarnation has some great transgression. Why would
a God ever want to assume a mortal condition? The whole erotic process is tied
up with the act of reading. Don't forget also that Yvain had first fallen in
love with Laudine while she was reading her psalter and about to bury her husband
Esclados. So the process of reading is seen as the quintessential mode of production
and exploitation that becomes theological, involving even the notion of incarnation.
Leupin: Théologiquement perverse.
Haidu: Reading as the quintessential moment of production/exploitation?
I think Alexandre was suggesting the equivalence between the first two parts
of the episode of the Aventure, with the tissu being both the text and the stuff
that's being produced for sale, which is the basis of the nobles' wealth and
power. Now, to make the suggestion of a kind of reflexivity between the notion
of the literary text, and the production of another kind of tissu, that makes
perfect sense to me. This is a part of the non-exclusive reflexive structure
that I see in Chrétien all the time. What does not make sense to me,
is to collapse the two, to say there is nothing but reading.
Vance: No, it is like an onion. We go through many, many formulations
of desire, need and reproduction, and at the center of this onion, if you want
to look at the castle of Pesme Aventure as an onion, there is this nucleus of
the reader reading a text that has destroyed its author.
Haidu: I don't know if it has destroyed the author. He has
certainly implicated himself, which is, I think, exactly what I was trying to
say at the beginning.
Notes
1. Useful introductory surveys are those of Hayden White,
On History and Historicisms in Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology,
Detroit, 1959; and Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination
in Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978) 101-20; and Maurice
Mandelbaum, Historicism in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
ed. Paul Edwards (New York & London: Macmillan, 1967/72) v IV, 22-5. Other
major texts in the discussion of historicism are: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Histoire et dialectique in La pensée sauvage (Paris:
Plon, 1962) 324-57; A.}. Greimas, Structure et histoire in Du sens
(Paris: Seuil, 1970) 103-16; Louis Althusser, Le marxisme n'est pas un historicisme
in Lire le Capital, 2 vols. (Paris: Maspero, 1975) vI, 150-84; Fredric
Jameson, Marxism and Historicism in The Ideologies of Theory,
2 vols. (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1988) v Il, 148-77; and Michel Foucault, Les
mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) especially 378-85, as weIl
as Nietzsche, Genealogy, History in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977) 139-64. The great example of
historicism in literary history, of course, is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature trans. William Trask (New
York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957). Important additions to Auerbach's historicist
dossier are two essays in Scenes {rom the Drama of European Literature
(New York: Meridian, 1959): Figura and Vico and Aesthetic Historicism.
Retour
au texte / back to the text
2. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, History, Historicism, and the
Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages in Speculum 65 (1990) 59-86.
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3. Peter Haidu, The Semiotics of Alterity: A Comparison with Hermeneutics in New Literary History 21 (1989-90) 671-91.
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/ Back to the text
6. Hayden White, Historicism, History, and the Imagination
in Tropics of Discourse, 106.
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7. Peter Haidu, The Hermit's Pottage: Deconstruction
and History in Yvain in Romanic Review 74 (1983) 1-15.
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8. La Chanson de Roland ed. Joseph Bédier
(Alfortville, 1974) v. 1015.
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9. Structures élémentaires de la signification,
ed. Frédéric Nef (Brussels, 1976).
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10. A. Greimas and J. Courtés, Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (Paris: Hachette, 1979).
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11. Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain ou Le Chevalier au lion, publié par M. Roques (Paris: Librairie Champion, 1971) v. 5360.
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