Читать книгу Medieval Nonsense - Jordan Kirk - Страница 12

Consider first the case of St. Anselm of Canterbury, sometimes called—and not without reason—the “first scholastic.”⁴⁸ Anselm, writing in the second half of the eleventh century, did much to determine the course that would be taken by philosophy, theology, theory of language, and devotion in the centuries to follow; it is in no small part to his sensibility that both the characteristic rationality (“scholasticism”) and the characteristic emotionalism (“affective piety”) of the later Middle Ages can be traced. In the present day his fame rests chiefly, though not exclusively, on the basis of a treatise that he wrote toward the end of the 1070s and that came to be known as the Proslogion.

This treatise is remembered for two reasons. The first is the motto that provided the work with its original title: fides quarens intellectum, faith in search of understanding.⁴⁹ As Anselm writes, “I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand.”⁵⁰ This precept might seem, to modern ears, to signal a subordination of reason to blind belief. But what will strike anyone who does not skip over the preface and first chapter of the Proslogion—that is, the sections in which the motto is introduced and explicated—is that fides refers not to unshakeable belief in the existence of God but to something altogether different. It names a willingness to be submitted to a certain ordeal: the ordeal that afflicts the mind when it withdraws into itself and discovers that it is entirely without ground.⁵¹ Fides, as Anselm uses the term, is the name of a certain kind of imbecility that makes itself available, despite every instinct of self-preservation, for an experience of desolation, or atheism. For this questing faith arrives at the “understanding” that it has gone in search of only on one condition: that it declare, in its very heart, that there is no God. So much is clearly indicated in the treatise’s first chapter, where mind is summoned to withdraw into itself, there to find nothing at all and be forced to conclude that there is no God. And it has been indicated already in its preface, where Anselm recounts that, tormented unceasingly by the absence of a proof for the existence of God, he came finally to grab hold of nothing else than that absence itself as the proof he had been seeking.⁵² The discovery transmitted in the Proslogion is simply that to be deprived of the thought of God is already the proof of the nothing that that thought is.

But the true object of fides can be seen still more clearly in the formula of the unum argumentum that Anselm discovers in this fashion, which is of course the second thing still remembered about the Proslogion: the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God. The operation of Anselm’s argumentum depends entirely on the fact that “the fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no God.’”⁵³ Recall the stages of Anselm’s reasoning. To say “there is no God” is necessarily to have the idea of God in one’s mind. But the idea of God is that of quo nihil maius cogitari potest ([something] than which nothing greater can be thought). And since it is greater to exist both in the mind and in reality than to exist merely in the mind, if the idea of than which nothing greater can be thought exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality—otherwise it would not be than which nothing greater can be thought. And thus, it seems, just to utter the word god—or, more to the point, to say, “there is no God”—is in itself sufficient to prove that God exists in reality.⁵⁴

To put it mildly, this argument did not meet with universal assent. Indeed, as soon as it had begun to circulate it elicited a rebuttal from a certain Gaunilo of Marmoutiers. For Gaunilo, as for more than a few subsequent readers, the argument seemed absurd. A person can be familiar with the sound of the word god, he objected, without knowing what it means. Such a person would know that the utterance is not just a sound (litterarum sonus vel syllabarum) but a sound possessed of a certain meaning; but not having any idea of what that particular meaning might be, he could do no more than imagine (effingere) it to himself on the basis of the effect that the sound has upon his mind. As Gaunilo concludes: “it would be astonishing if he could ever attain to the truth of the thing” on such a basis—astonishing if by mere utterance of a word of unknown meaning a person could arrive at an understanding of the existence of God.⁵⁵

In his reply to Gaunilo, Anselm strangely—even conspicuously—neglects to counter Gaunilo’s central objection. But the reason for this neglect is not far to seek: as he explains, Anselm is not responding to a “fool” like himself, that is, to someone with fides, but to a Christian.⁵⁶ Because he has not attained to the state of foolishness, in Anselm’s sense, Gaunilo does not realize that this “astonishment” of his—at the idea that the truth of the divine being would be made known in a word of no conceivable meaning—is the very experience of the proof itself. Gaunilo is exactly correct, in other words, only he has not gone far enough. As Daniel Heller-Roazen has shown, Anselm’s formulation of the proof already anticipates Gaunilo’s cogitatio secundum vocem solam: “one could define the entire philosophical probatio of the Proslogion as a single attempt to construct a metaphysics on the basis of a specific type of speaking without meaning; and the absolute novelty of the Anselmian ‘demonstration’ could be said to lie in the fundamental position it assigns to the limit point of language at which the mechanisms of reference and signification, faltering, give way to a speech that quite literally expresses nothing.”⁵⁷ For it is precisely the fact that the word deus signifies nothing whatsoever that makes the proof operate. The God whose existence it proves is no more and no less than quo nihil maius cogitari potest, that is, not a subsistent entity but the mere trace of a relation: a than which. Moreover, what that quo is in relation to is itself not a something but rather nihil maius, a “nothing greater.” The God in question here is neither a something nor a nothing, but a than which nothing—a relation to nothing. And the undergoing of such a relation, as Gaunilo saw without realizing what he was catching sight of, is just the mind’s encounter with the litterarum sonus vel syllabarum of the word deus: the experience of getting caught in the mere sound-shape of a word of unknown meaning. The so-called ontological proof is the staging of an ordeal or probatio of incomprehension in the face of the “expressionless word,” the excruciation of a fides or imbecility that does not know what it means when it says non est deus. In short, the key experience and doctrine of the “first scholastic” is, essentially, a thinking of nonsignification.

So, too, with literature. Consider the case of William the Ninth, Duke of Aquitaine, who wrote his songs within a few decades of the composition of the Proslogion. William, for his part, has long been known as the “first troubadour”—a designation to which we will return. His songs, the inauguration of the new practice of singing that would soon spread across Europe, are the seed of the late medieval literary tradition and indeed of all subsequent literature in the European vernaculars to the present day. With William the preoccupation with nonsignification could hardly be more evident. He famously begins a song with the declaration that he will “make a verse about absolutely nothing” (farai un vers de dreit nien). The poem that follows answers very neatly to this description:

Farai un vers de dreit nien:

non er de mi ni d’autra gen,

non er d’amor ni de joven,

ni de ren au,

qu’enans fo trobatz en durmen

sus un chivau.⁵⁸

[I’ll make a verse about absolutely nothing:

it won’t be about me or about other people,

it won’t be about love or about youth,

nor about anything else,

because it was found while asleep

on a horse.]

As Agamben has emphasized, William is alluding here to an “ancient exegetical tradition of the Gospel of St. John,” in which logos is said to ride on the horse of phone, that is, thought is expressed by vocal utterance.⁵⁹ In this case, though, in which the poet is asleep on his horse, speech goes on while thought is suspended. The poem announces the arrival of a kind of vocalization that does not signify.

And just such a vocalization is spelled out at the heart of another of William’s inventions. In the song that begins “Farai un vers, pos mi sonelh” (I will make a verse, because I am asleep), the poet declares that, meeting two women on the road, he responds to their greeting in the following manner:

anc no li diz ni “bat”

ni “but,” ni fer ni fust no ai mentagut

mas sol aitan:

“Babariol, babariol

babarian.”

I said neither “baf” nor “buf,”

I named neither metal nor wood,

but only:

“Babariol, babariol,

babarian.”⁶⁰

The utterance of “babariol, babariol, babarian”—articulate, versifiable, and meaningless—makes up the crucial moment in the events narrated in the poem: the two women, thinking him incapable of telling tales, take the poet with them and have their way with him.⁶¹ They also make up the crucial moment of its reflection on the being of language. What William provides here are materials for a taxonomy of ways of saying nothing at all: for it is not simply a matter of either signifying or not signifying. In the phrase “neither ‘baf’ nor ‘buf’” what is established is that the utterance “baf” is irreducible to the utterance “buf”; in the following lines both of these are made distinguishable from utterances that would refer to things in the world (metal, wood); and finally all of these possible utterances are distinguished from what the poet says that he did, in fact, say aloud: namely, the sequence “babariol babariol / babarian.” In this cobla various modes of saying dreit nien are distinguished and, at the same time, coordinated together. “Verse” is, for the first troubadour, a place in which speaking can be about nothing at all and yet be subject to linguistic differentiation, form the materia of literature, and bring about certain effects in the realm of love.

Nor did the poets who wrote in William’s wake abandon his practice of versifying in what Paul Zumthor calls jargon absolu.⁶² In the Inferno, written a decade into the fourteenth century, Dante describes an encounter with the giant Nimrod. The giant, suffering the punishment of Babel, says only “Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi.”⁶³ This famous line, alongside that of Pluto (“Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe”), has defied the efforts of interpreters to identify it as an instance of Arabic or Hebrew, Basque or Greek.⁶⁴ It is composed in no particular language, serving rather as an instance of barbarolexis, a form of speech that cannot be assimilated to any known idiom.⁶⁵ As Virgil explains to the pilgrim, the giant’s speech is unintelligible to all who hear it, just as the giant himself can understand no one else’s speech.⁶⁶ “Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi” thus announces a condition of absolute linguistic incomprehension, in which the experience of unintelligibility cannot be overcome by means of translation, explanation, or learning.

As Peter Dronke and others have indicated, Nimrod’s “convincing line of spoken Babelese” participates in a wider medieval tradition of invented languages.⁶⁷ Nor is the hellish location of the giant’s utterance incidental to its incomprehensibility: the demonic, necromantic, and heathen realms have been associated, immemorially, with meaningless incantations and illegible inscriptions.⁶⁸ The phenomenon is evident not least on the stage. A century before the composition of the Inferno, Jean Bodel included in his Jeu de Saint Nicolas a golden statue that comes to life long enough to say

Palas aron ozinomas

Baske bano tudan donas

Geheamel cla orlaÿ

Berec .he. pantaras taÿ⁶⁹

—which means nothing at all. The other play invariably cited in this connection is Rutebeuf’s Miracle de Theophile, from about 1261, in which Salatin conjures the devil with the following invocation:

bagahi laca bachahé

lamac cahi achabahé

karrelyos

lamac lamec bachalyos

cabahagi sabalyos

baryolas

lagozatha cabyolas

samahac et famyolas

harrahya⁷⁰

Incomprehensible incantations of this sort exist also in Latin liturgical drama and appear widely in late medieval English plays.⁷¹ In the Towneley Judicium, for example, the demon Tutivillus announces himself in a macaronic speech that combines English, Latin, and sheer nonsense:

Mi name is tutiuillus,

my horne is blawen;

ffragmina verborum,

tutiuillus colligit horum

Belzabub algorum

belial belium doliorum.⁷²

Likewise, in Mankind, the character Mischief reads aloud a writ copied out in an untidy hand:

Here ys blottybus in blottis,

Blottorum blottibus istis.⁷³

And in the N-Town Adoration of the Shepherds, a shepherd, having heard the phrase Gloria in excelsis Deo, explains that he has understood it perfectly and memorized it exactly:

I have that songe ful wele inum.

In my wyt weyl it is wrought,

It was “Gle, glo, glas, glum.”⁷⁴

These lines of dog Latin constitute a kind of phonesthetic parody or grammelot, as Dario Fo will call his “method of producing the semblance of a given language without adopting real or identifiable words from that language.”⁷⁵ They are made up of words that sound like they would belong to a certain language, without for that being lexically recognizable; words uttered in one language as though they belong to another; words represented as in a game of telephone.

Such a survey, preliminary as it is, makes plain that any history of medieval literary culture that does not include jargon absolu and other forms of nonsense will be incomplete and any account of modernist nonsense that assumes it to be a novelty misconceived.⁷⁶ For linguistic nonsignification was evidently a matter of basic importance both in the first philosophy and in the literature of the Middle Ages—and indeed in other fields as well.⁷⁷ If a medieval writer such as Chaucer devotes his attention not to the kernel of meaning but to the mere shell of the empty word, and to the poetic possibilities of nonsignification that might be found there, there is thus nothing anachronistic about his doing so. But simply to recognize that a poet comes by his materia honestly is still to know very little about that materia itself.