Читать книгу Medieval Nonsense - Jordan Kirk - Страница 13

The purpose of this book is to make discernible, in the shadow cast by the emblem of Chaucer’s windmill under a walnut shell, the possibilities of thinking linguistic nonsignification that obtained in the world of letters when and where the poet recorded his vision. It marks out a constellation of texts, all of them either written or widely known in what used to be called the Age of Chaucer, that seem to have been constructed in such a manner as to transmit axioms, techniques, and aspirations by means of which the being of reine Sprache as the extinguishing of all sense might come into awareness. It is not a book about Chaucer himself, whose name indeed henceforth scarcely appears in it, but about the very possibility of his vision’s having arisen in the first place. It consists of four commentaries on paradigmatic works or clusters of works. In chapter 1, I examine authoritative textbooks in the arts of language—by Priscian, Boethius, and Augustine—that the Middle Ages inherited from Mediterranean late antiquity; in chapter 2, an Aristotle commentary by Walter Burley; in chapter 3, the anonymous contemplative manual called the Cloud of Unknowing; and in chapter 4, the hagiographical poem St. Erkenwald.

It will be apparent to anyone familiar with these texts that they would not seem to fit comfortably under any single heading. The auctoritates studied in chapter 1 thoroughly determined the literary culture of fourteenth-century England, where all the other texts were written, but they were themselves composed a millennium before and in an altogether different part of the world. Moreover, chapters 1 and 2 focus on works written in Latin, whereas chapters 3 and 4 are readings of texts written in the Middle English vernacular. Chapter 4, on Erkenwald, is about an imaginative poem, whereas all the other chapters consider prose works that could be called works of literature only in a strained or outmoded sense of the word. However, the bringing together of these particular texts in this order is not by any means arbitrary. Their sequence recapitulates that of the fundamental linguistic model of the Middle Ages, the fourfold Aristotelian schema that Boethius calls orandi ordo. What occurs in an act of speech, according to this schema, is that four elements are brought together and coordinated in a sequence: the things outside the mind that are being referred to, the concepts that are formed of them in the mind of the speaker, the spoken words that communicate those concepts, and the written inscriptions that communicate in turn those spoken words. The four chapters of this book correspond, in order, to these fundamental linguistic elements: chapter 1, on the auctoritates, focuses on inherited definitions of vox sola (bare utterance) as a kind of “thing”; chapter 2, on Burley’s logic, is about what kind of concept in the mind could be adequate to such a thing; chapter 3, on the Cloud, proceeds to consider what sort of spoken word could correspond to such a concept; and chapter 4, on Erkenwald, broaches the problem of such a word’s being inscribed. Each reading, in other words, approaches the question of nonsignification from a different vantage point—that of its nature in itself, its relation to the mind, its relation to speech, and its relation to writing—and these four vantage points taken together constitute the basic medieval model of language. And if at times the chapters seem nonetheless to be joined only provisionally together, their doing so is also in keeping with that model; for, as will become plain in chapter 1, the orandi ordo was precisely understood as being constituted by its essential failure to cohere. This failure—the constitutive inoperativity of the structure by which meaningfulness is produced—is of course the very subject matter of my inquiry as a whole.

It will also be apparent to anyone familiar with medieval letters more generally that there exist many other texts that might have been studied in the present connection. There are other auctoritates, other works of Oxford logic, other contemplative treatises, other poems that concern themselves with non-signification than the ones that happen to appear here; moreover, those that do appear are in certain cases scarcely typical of the fields they are taken from. But what this book hopes to offer is neither the completeness of a historical survey nor the exemplificatory adequation of a representative sample but, instead, the generative possibility of a constellation of paradigms.⁷⁸ The texts examined here have been selected not as expressions, symptoms, exhibits, evidence, or artifacts of some posited phenomenon but, rather, insofar as they offer themselves as textual apparatuses that might still allow for thought, or indeed the suspension of thought, to arise in the moment of their being read.

To approach a text in this way is just to treat it—in good medieval fashion—as an auctoritas. For the authority of a text is simply its never ceasing to inspire contradictory interpretations: its retaining, in the face of sustained attention, the quality of not being able to be said to signify anything in particular. As the poet has it: “out of olde bokes, in good feyth, / Cometh al this newe science that men lere” (out of old books, in good faith / comes all this new knowledge that human beings learn).⁷⁹ The text as auctoritas is a transmission system for the preservation of incomprehensibility, an engyn constructed so as to shelter an obscure speech addressed to those still to come. Perhaps counterintuitively, the further removed the readers of a text find themselves from the circumstances of its composition, the better will they be able to receive the obscure speech that resounds in it. Or so teaches Marie de France, who has been the tutelary spirit of this inquiry, in what has rightly been called “as close to a vernacular art poétique as the High Middle Ages produced.”⁸⁰ This is because those who imagine that they have understood what a text means are liable, to the point of inevitability, to pass over the core of obscurity that it transmits. Only those who really and truly fail to grasp what a text is about have a chance of discerning what always remains to be encountered in it: the mere letter out of which it is fashioned. This inscrutable letter is the real object of commentary, in which a gloss is produced not in order to retrieve the meaning the letter might once have carried but in order that, by virtue of its irreducible emptiness, it might again be made to resound. The task of the commentator, on this model, is to expose the seemingly inassimilable details of the textual object to sustained attention so as to activate whatever possibilities of contemplation the text itself, because of its nature as a linguistic construction, might still afford. Not to discover what its author actually thought—a tasteless presumption, not to mention an impossibility—nor to identify how such a thought does or does not fit in with some statistically significant trend, but to follow the logic of the text to its point of undecidability and thereby arrive at the real, contentless, and undiminished awareness of its maker.

All of which is to say that the purpose of the sequence of commentaries that makes up this book is not, finally, to make a claim about an extratextual reality—be it even literary historical—nor to bring the texts it examines under the jurisdiction of a given field of critical concern but rather to activate by making use of them a set of mind-engines that, both individually and in their mutual resonances within the fourfold structure of the orandi ordo, allow for awareness to encounter itself in the mirror of the past. “Not system but commentary” as Scholem says, “is the legitimate form through which truth is approached.”⁸¹ Nonetheless, and by way of bringing these prolegomena to a close, it is also possible to abstract from the individual commentaries three general implications.

First, as will be evident throughout, I have proceeded in the light of Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter’s invaluable Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric; in the wake of the groundbreaking studies of medieval linguistic thought carried out by Irène Rosier-Catach; and following the lodestar of Giorgio Agamben’s “unwritten work” on the voice.⁸² More generally, there can be no doubt that in recent years the importance of theories and practices of sound, voice, and meaning to medieval culture (and to that of other periods) has been coming increasingly into view. The issue of Speculum devoted to the topic of “Sound Matters” and a recent edited volume on the topic of Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe, for example, take up a line of inquiry that runs from the work of Paul Zumthor and Eugene Vance on poetics and sign theory to more recent studies such as Elizabeth Eva Leach’s work on birdsong, Emma Dillon’s on cacophony, Valerie Allen’s on flatulence, and David Lawton’s on the voice.⁸³ These exemplary studies have had a salutary effect on the study of medieval literary culture, and the present book is itself thoroughly in their debt.

Within the context of this broader inquiry, what this book underscores is first of all that medieval linguistic thought was not, despite everything, grounded in a hierarchical arrangement by which the rational articulations of human, non-foreign, learned, male discourse would be privileged over their alterities.⁸⁴ To the contrary: it was grounded in a theory of meaninglessness; it never ceased to concern itself with nonsignification; and its most creative inheritors did not fail to elaborate the materials they received into new modes of thinking and practicing nonsense. Furthermore, the incomprehensibility of these elaborations makes them not less but more readable, and indeed not less but more literary. In other words, if medievalists continue to turn their attention to noise, sound, and the bare voice, they should not assume them to be the site of some extra-linguistic meaning but should rather recognize in them what the medieval thinkers themselves did: the site of language itself, in its most essential extinguishing of meaning. It would be judicious, to put the point more polemically, to hesitate before diagnosing in medieval texts that include jargon absolu or vaniloquium or barbarolexis, much less in their composers, an “anxiety” in the face of sociological or species difference.⁸⁵ The pseudo-foreign babble, feminized chatter, and animal vocalizations that abound in medieval texts need not be approached either as evidence of a sorry view taken toward the subaltern nor as the latter’s refusal to be silenced; they can, instead, be understood as participating in and developing a medieval theory of language far stranger and more capacious than has been understood. This is not, of course, to suggest that there were not hierarchies of various kinds that patterned the thought and behavior of the Middle Ages, nor that those hierarchies do not make themselves known in the texts they have left behind. It is to suggest, instead, that the very particular hierarchies that inhere in and are enforced by the “bourgeois conception of language” might not, in fact, organize the textual remains of a world that did not yet know the reign of the bourgeoisie; and that to proceed as if they do might be in effect to rule out, in advance, the possibility of experiencing the extent to which that conception, so crucial a foundation of contemporary ideology, might be merely adventitious.

Second, if I train my attention on the English fourteenth century it is because the latter has seemed to be the site of a particularly rich, but also peculiarly neglected, efflorescence of a millennial, transregional tradition of thinking and practicing linguistic nonsignification. Nor perhaps is it an accident if that time and place was also the site, with the emergence of what is now called Middle English as a written language, of crucial elements of the geopolitical and aesthetic orders that shape global affairs seven centuries on. It has been my working hypothesis that medieval linguistic thought will be better understood if these English contributions—both Latin and vernacular, scientific and imaginal—are taken into account; and that the political and aesthetic regimes that arose from this moment will be better understood if they are restored to their place within this medieval and ancient lineage of thinking signification and its outside.

To consider the objects of the following commentaries “English,” in any fundamental sense, however, or even European, would be a grave misunderstanding. Because this misunderstanding is widespread, in a more sinister but no more mistaken fashion among its celebrants as among their critics, it is necessary to dispel it wherever possible. This can be accomplished without difficulty. Take, for instance, the writers treated in the preceding pages. Chaucer is a poet who receives, as he signals at every turn, much of both the matter and the form of his works—not least of all the House of Fame—from Asian and African sources.⁸⁶ As for Anselm, the monastic practices of lectio divina and the like out of which his thought emerges are a desert phenomenon, transplanted from Egypt.⁸⁷ William IX, for his part, gives every indication of having been the “first troubadour” only in the sense that he learned his new art of song from the enslaved Andalusian Muslim and Jewish women singers who populated the courts of Provence in their thousands during his formative years; or from any of the countless men and women of various estates who were crossing and recrossing the Pyrenees during his lifetime, if he did not cross them himself; or indeed on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, where he went on crusade.⁸⁸ It bears recalling that the very epithet “troubadour” may itself derive from the Arabic word taraba, to sing.⁸⁹

The case is no different with the writers to whom the remainder of this book will be devoted. Priscian and Augustine were Africans, working in scholarly modes that are recognizably African; Boethius, the other late antique writer considered here, had as his task the transmission to the Latin-speaking world of “Greek” textual lineages, where Greek means Alexandrian, that is, Indian and Ethiopian as well as Athenian.⁹⁰ The scholastic institutions in which Walter Burley’s work took shape were part of a trans–Afro-Eurasian phenomenon that also comprises Buddhist shedras and Islamic madrassas; among Burley’s foundational dicta, as will be seen, is one derived from Averroes.⁹¹ The Cloud of Unknowing is an Englishing of meditative techniques and teachings on the nature of reality that come from Syria and Egypt, if not indeed from further East and South. Finally, St. Erkenwald is about nothing else than the survival in the foundations of an English church of Eastern Mediterranean, Islamic, Pagan relics; and the genre to which it more or less belongs, hagiography, also included exceedingly popular legenda derived from Buddhist Jataka tales: Christopher, Eustace, Hubert, and most prominently Barlaam and Josaphat.⁹² Each of the texts here studied stands as a confirmation of the fact that, as has been rightly said, “Afroeurasia has been linked, at least at the information and luxury goods exchange levels, for two and a half millennia or more. Thus, events and processes in Europe cannot be explained solely by examining European processes.”⁹³

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, in a postcolonial backwater of the Afro-Eurasian world system called England, as has happened at various times in many another of its corners, certain practitioners of the linguistic arts undertook to transform the multiplicative, unfixed, mutually uninterpretable dialects they had at hand into a language fit for instruction, memorialization, and translation.⁹⁴ They did so in order that ancestral teachings from all across the world system, as well as records of the states and contents of awareness newly arising in this particular quarter, might be made transmissible among those persons (not least women and the poor) who were unlearned in the grammatica of the Latins. The vernacular texts studied in this book are among the sites in which this “aureation of the mother tongue” was carried out. But the very useful abstractions by means of which scholars have characterized the first generations of texts to be written in this idiom—“vernacular theology” chief among them—should not be reified into the purported content of these texts, which is what occurs when the Cloud, for example, is taken to express a kind of homespun “English” anticlericalism, or when Erkenwald is pigeonholed as a “propagandistic” apologia for orthodoxy directed to the masses in their own tongue. For if there is a recurrent and explicit concern in these texts, it is not their having been written in the vernacular but, instead, the same thing that is at stake in the Latin works studied in this book’s first half: transmissibility itself, the possibility or impossibility of communication that both precedes and contains anticipatorily the distinction between particular languages. Here the problem of mutual incomprehensibility—in modern but not in medieval terms the site of the distinction among languages—gives way to the problem of the incomprehensibility that a language, any language, harbors within itself. In the minor literature of jargon absolu, a particular language is made foreign even to its own speakers, or again the foreignness of language itself is made familiar to those who find themselves speaking it.⁹⁵ For just as the bits of dog Latin cited above—“Here ys blottybus in blottis / Blottorum blottibus istis”—both preserve and abolish the distinction between comprehensibility and incomprehensibility, they also both preserve and abolish the distinction between grammatical and vernacular speech.

In other words, the aureation of the mother tongue does not occur because some speakers have a particular meaning in mind that they wish to communicate—a meaning that it would then fall to their scholarly readers to retrieve—but when, and only when, the mother tongue encounters, in writing, its own capacity to say nothing in particular, to say the bare potential of meaning anything. The alchemical process by which this aureation occurs—for it is in such terms that perhaps the most incisive account of the phenomenon, Chaucer’s “Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” describes it—is not the kind that creates gold out of lead, an ennobling of vulgar chatter into something weightier and more meaningful.⁹⁶ To the contrary, it is instead a wastrel science of absolute unproductive expenditure, an “elvysshe craft” in which by gimmickry all accumulated value is transmuted into irrecoverable loss.⁹⁷ This elvish craft is called literature.

Third, this book, which begins with a reading of the House of Fame and concludes with a reading of St. Erkenwald, is perhaps best understood as an archeology of the literary. And this notwithstanding the fact that the better part of its attention is turned to apparently nonliterary works. The overall itinerary is as follows: having now established that the materia of Chaucer’s poetics of tregetry is the empty word, and suggested by cursory survey both that this poetics is squarely medieval and that it has more in common than might be suspected with that of the modernist avant-garde, I consider a series of medieval linguistic, logical, and contemplative works in which the emptiness of the word is explicitly theorized, in order to turn finally to a poem by a contemporary of Chaucer’s in which such thinking is elaborated into what becomes recognizable as an account of literariness itself. Literariness, on this account, does not inhere in any particular kind of statement, representation, symptomatization, entertainment, or ornamentation, but in a text’s being engineered in such a manner as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the nonsignificative event of language itself.⁹⁸ If Erkenwald is a work of literature, it is so just insofar as it constitutes a trap for interpretation. Approaching such an instrument as though it were the record of the polemics or societal tendencies proper to the time and place of its composition—or, by contrast, as though it were an object of merely aesthetic interest—is (for better or worse) to ignore its fundamental purpose. No less than any other engyn—a windmill, an astrolabe, a bain-marie—the literary work discloses its affordances only in being put to use. And what the trap of literature affords, when it is sprung, is an undergoing, in the reader, of an experience of a very particular kind of unknowing, one that happens to have been an object of study in the medieval sciences.

The following commentaries are studies of some of the linguistic, philosophical, theological, and mystical ideas that contributed to the formation of the category of literature as it emerged at the end of the Middle Ages and remains perhaps in effect today. The argument implicit in their fourfold sequence is that this category came into being not only, as has been well and convincingly explained, as an elaboration by medieval writers of notions to be found in scripture and in the science of its explication, in ancient imaginative writing and the conventions of its schoolroom transmission, and in the unwritten rules of popular song and storytelling, but also in the light of the traditions of thinking the being of language itself, of inquiring into the properties of the utterance, that are preserved in works on grammar, logic, contemplation, and sacramental theology. Just as an appreciation of the precisely literary stakes of Gertrude Stein’s experiments, for example, requires familiarity not merely with the work of the poets and novelists who were her predecessors and contemporaries but also with that of her professor William James on the “varieties of religious experience”; just as an account of the experiments of Lewis Carroll that made no reference to his contributions to the field of mathematics would be needlessly impoverished; so, too, with the medieval poets: they did not carry out their experiments in a state of isolation from the other practitioners of the various scientiae vocis who were their contemporaries and whose aspirations, insights, statements of method, and technical vocabularies remain available for study in their works. What is gained by engaging in such study has perhaps never been better expressed than by Edgar Wind:

The process of recapturing the substance of past conversations is necessarily more complicated than the conversations themselves. A historian tracing the echo of our own debates might justly infer from the common use of such words as microbe or molecule that scientific discovery had molded our imagination; but he would be much mistaken if he assumed that a proper use of these words would always be attended by a complete technical mastery of the underlying theory. Yet, supposing the meaning of the words were lost, and a historian were trying to recover it, surely he would have to recognize that the key to the colloquial usage is in the scientific, and that his only chance of recapturing the first is to acquaint himself with the second.⁹⁹