Mimesis (18 page)

I imagine that the first impression this passage makes on a reader is that here an occurrence sufficiently confused in itself is very obscurely narrated. Even if one is not put off by the irregular orthography and inflections, one will still have some difficulty in getting a really clear idea of the facts involved. “At that time grave civil disturbances broke out among the inhabitants of Tours. For …” The cause of the disturbances should now follow; but what follows—dependent on
nam
—is some account of earlier events; in a village where many people had gathered to celebrate Christmas, the village priest sent out a servant to invite some of them to come and drink with him. But that is certainly not the cause of the disturbances at Tours. We are reminded of the narrative method which is frequent in spoken conversation, especially among uneducated or hasty or careless speakers. Something like: “Last night I was late getting away from the office. Because Smith had come to see the boss, and they were inside talking about
the X business. And just before five, the boss comes and says: ‘Say, Jones, couldn’t you get these things itemized in a hurry, so we can give Mr. Smith all the material right now?’” And so on. Neither the priest’s invitation nor Smith’s presence in the boss’s office represents the immediate cause for the outbreak of disturbances or Jones’s being late leaving the office; they represent merely the first part of a complex of facts which the speaker is unable to organize syntactically. He intends now to state the cause of the result anticipated in the first independent sentence, but the amount of data requisite for the purpose confuses him. He has neither the energy to dispose all of it in a single construction through the aid of a system of dependent clauses, nor the foresight to recognize the difficulty and get around it by a synoptic introductory statement, as for instance, “It happened like this.” As it stands, the
nam
is neither exact nor justified—precisely as in the similarly conceived sentence which comes later:
nam Sicharius cum post interfectionem
, etc., for there again the value of
nam
is not that it introduces the cause of the renewed outbreak of disturbances, it only brings in the first part of a complex of facts. And in both cases the impression of disorder is considerably increased by a change in the grammatical subject. In both cases the sentence starts out with Sicharius as the subject (both times Gregory evidently thinks of him as the chief character), and in both cases he is later forced to insert the subject of that portion of the complex of facts which represents all that he is capable of getting into a single construction. As a result, the sentences turn out to be grammatical monsters. True enough, the commentators (Bonnet; and Löfsted in his commentary on the
Peregrinatio Aetheriae
) have informed us that
nam
in Vulgar Latin, like many of the once extremely clear and precise connectives of Latin, has lost its original value, that it is no longer causal but merely indicates a colorless continuation or transition. But this state of affairs has by no means been reached in our two passages from Gregory. On the contrary, Gregory still senses the causal value; he employs it, but in a confused and imprecise manner. It may be that such instances can show us how
nam
came to be weakened as a causal particle by being so often used laxly—here the weakening process is still going on, it is not yet complete. It is remarkable that such procedures, which would seem to occur at all times in the spoken language, here make their way into the literary language of a man like Gregory of Tours, the scion of a high-ranking family and a noteworthy character in his time and his country.

Let us proceed. The servant presenting the invitation is killed “by one of those who were invited.” Why? We are not told. That the killer must have been Austrighiselus or one of his group, we can only infer from what follows, for Sicharius wants to take revenge on him for the deed; but it is not stated. Further, the abrupt introduction of the various buildings—the church, the priest’s house—and the words
inter clericos ereptus
give only a very confused notion of the events. We miss the aid of clarifying connectives. In exchange, other things seem exaggeratedly detailed. Why does not Gregory say simply: one of the guests killed the servant? He says: …
extracto gladio, eum ferire non metuit. Qui statim cecidit et mortuos est
. What a detailed treatment of an incident which, after all, is important only through its consequences! To motivate it would seem to have been more important than to tell us that the servant fell before he died! In the very next sentence, he is afraid that the reader may already have lost the connection, for he considers it necessary to add,
quod scilicet puer eius fuerit interfectus
—which only a reader of very limited capacity can have so soon forgotten! On the other hand, with his
Austrighiselum opperiens
he expects the same reader to have a considerable power of combination, for he has failed to tell us that Austrighiselus is in any way related to the killing—or for that matter that the entire party is not assembled in one place, as one could hardly fail to suppose. So the text goes on. The sentence which deals with first legal proceedings has no principal verb at all (
Dehinc cum in iudicio
): the following sentence is made a monster by its superimposed participial constructions, which follow no grammatical system whatever:
inito placito, postposito placito, coniunctus Audino, mota sedicione, elisumque hospicium
. Both the translation and the historical and legal interpretation of the two sentences are extremely difficult (as a matter of fact, the entire juridical procedure was the occasion for a much-discussed controversy between Gabriel Monod and Fustel de Coulanges,
Revue historique
, 31, 1886, and
Revue des questions historiques
, 41, 1887); this is due not merely to the ambiguity of the word
placitum
but also to the general lack of orderly arrangement in the rhetorical structure. And this again reveals that Gregory is not capable of arranging the occurrences themselves in an orderly fashion.

Austrighiselus disappears without the reader’s being told what became of him; new characters are unexpectedly introduced, and it is only occasionally and incompletely that we learn how they are related to the events; the speech which Gregory makes to calm the excitement
is also incomprehensible without some power of combination in the reader, for who is
illi qui noxe subditur
, and who the
vir
whose soul must not perish? On the other hand, a story like that of Sicharius’ trip to Poitiers and of his being wounded by a servant—an incident whose bearing on the whole action is at best that it is the basis for the false rumor of his death—is presented in great detail. When we come to the second legal action or settlement procedure, we have once again to make a special effort to understand what party and what money are being referred to. And through the whole first part (which is from book 7), though there are numerous and often extremely clumsy subordinate constructions (the effort to write periodically is unmistakable), there is not a single clearly causal or concessive conjunction with the exception of
quoniam
in the Bible quotation, and
etsi
, the meaning of which is not quite clear to me, but it would seem to be rather conditional (=
si
) than causal or concessive. The second part (from book 9) does not make quite the same impression, because it very soon concentrates upon a single scene, so that the problem is less one of order than of visual directness. But here again the sentence
Nam Sicharius
which contains the exposition and which we discussed above, is a veritable monstrosity.

It goes without saying that a classical author would have arranged the material much more clearly—provided that he had treated it at all. For if we ask ourselves how Caesar or Livy or Tacitus or even Ammianus would have told this story, it immediately becomes obvious that they would never have told it. For them and their public, such a story would not have had the slightest interest. Who are Austrighiselus, Sicharius, and Chramnesindus? Not even tribal princes, and during the heyday of the Empire their bloody brawls would probably not even have elicited a special report to Rome from the provincial governor. This observation shows how narrow Gregory’s horizon really is, how little perspective he has with which to view a large, coherent whole, how little he is in a position to organize his subject matter in accordance with the points of view which had once obtained. The Empire is no longer in existence. Gregory is no longer situated in a place where all the news from the
orbis terrarum
is received, sorted, and arranged according to its significance for the state. He has neither the news sources which were once available nor the attitude which once determined the manner in which the news was reported. He hardly surveys all of Gaul. A large part of his work, doubtless the most valuable, consists of what he himself witnessed
in his own diocese or of what was reported to him from the neighboring territory. His material is essentially limited to what has been brought before his eyes. He has no political point of view in the old sense; if he may be said to have any at all, it is the interest of the Church; but there again his perspective is restricted; he does not conceive of the Church as a whole in such a way that his work forcibly conveys that whole; everything is locally restricted, both in substance and in thought. On the other hand, in contrast to his antique predecessors, whose work was often based on indirect and previously processed reports, most of the things Gregory relates in his
History of the Franks
he either saw himself or learned at first-hand from people involved in them. This is in keeping with his natural bent. For he is directly interested in what people are doing. They interest him as they move about him, irrespective of political considerations in a wider context. So far as it is present, he treats even politics anecdotally and humanly. Thus his work assumes a character much closer to personal memoirs than the work of any Roman historian. (We need hardly point out that Caesar’s case is completely different.)

An earlier antique author, then, would not have treated this story at all. If it had been indispensable for the understanding of a more general political complex, he would have disposed of it in three lines. In cases where a series of acts of violence assume political importance in themselves—Jugurtha and his cousins in Sallust might serve as an example—the whole system of political motives, rationalized to the last detail and heightened by rhetoric, is set forth beforehand. Dramatic incidents without political interest are at best briefly alluded to, as for example in the case of the words
occultans sese tugurio muliebris ancillae
in connection with the murder of Hiempsal (
Jugurtha
12). Gregory, on the other hand, tries hard, sometimes clumsily and prolixly but often with great success, to make the proceedings vividly visible. “… the priest of the village sent a servant to invite certain people to come to his house and drink. When the servant arrived, one of those who were invited drew his sword and had no qualms about wounding him. He fell to the ground and was dead.” That is visually vivid narration, even though of a very simple sort. There could be no other reason for mentioning that the servant arrived or that he fell to the ground. It is the same with the vengeful attack upon Austrighiselus. Topographically the report is not very clear, but we sense the author’s endeavor to give visual vividness to the successive phases of the occurrence. The same thing is true of Sicharius’ argument with his servant,
which has no bearing whatever upon the progress of the action. But in our text the most peculiar and striking illustration of Gregory’s concern for visual vividness is the murder of Sicharius. How the two, of whom one had killed the other’s next of kin not very long before, made friends and became so intimate and inseparable that they ate and slept together, how once again Chramnesindus invites Sicharius to feast with him, how Sicharius, talking wildly in his drunkenness, provokes the other to take vengeance for everything at once, and finally the murder itself—all this has such a visual vividness, and testifies to such an endeavor to imitate the occurrence directly, as Roman historiography never sought to achieve (even Ammianus’ showy pictorial style is not imitative) and as can hardly be found anywhere in all the serious literature of antiquity. Furthermore, it is magnificent psychologically, an extremely arresting scene between two individuals, and filled with the strange atmosphere of the Merovingian period: the sudden and undisguised brutality which blots out every memory of the past and every thought of the future, and, on the other hand, the slight effect of Christian morality which, even though presented in its most primitive form, cannot penetrate these brutish souls—all this comes out in sharp relief in the scene. The plausible hypothesis that Chramnesindus had consciously lured Sicharius into a trap—that on his side the friendship was sheer hypocrisy designed to lull his enemy into security—Gregory does not even take into consideration. And he is probably right, for he knew the people among whom he lived. Besides, we read of equally unthinking acts everywhere in his work. It seems indeed that the two had honestly become such close friends that, their consciousness being alive only to the passing moment, it never occurred to them how unnatural and dangerous such a friendship really was. A few tactless drunken words seem to have brought the memory back to the surface, to have rekindled the forgotten hatred, so that the murder was the decision of a moment. This is all the more probable since Chramnesindus—as we learn from the following passage—found himself in a difficult situation in consequence of his act, for Sicharius had a powerful protectress in Queen Fredegunde; if Chramnesindus had taken time to think matters through, he might have acted differently. Gregory relates the whole incident without personal commentary, purely dramatically, shifting the tense and writing in the present as soon as he nears the decisive moment. Then he gives us direct discourse, not only for the bullying of the drunken Sicharius but also for what goes on inside Chramnesindus.
Both these pieces of direct discourse are direct imitations of what was actually spoken and felt, free from all rhetorical editing. Sicharius’ words sound as though they had been translated into Gregory’s clumsy Latin from the vernacular in which they were spoken (“so they say,”
dixisse fertur
). One might reconstruct the speech in current vernacular roughly as follows: “Brother, you ought to be grateful to me for killing your people. You pocketed the indemnity, and now you’re a rich man. You wouldn’t have a shirt to your back if this little business hadn’t helped you out.” And Chramnesindus’ reaction is expressed in an unvoiced monologue which, for all its awkwardness, is sufficiently striking: “I ought to renounce the name of a man and be called a helpless woman, if I do not take revenge for the death of my people.” And immediately the lights go out, Sicharius is killed, his death rattle is not forgotten, and once again we read
cecidit et mortuus est
; Gregory refuses to do without the falling body.