Mimesis (23 page)

(When the day was passed and night had come, thus spake his father: “Son, now go to bed, with your spouse, as the God of Heaven commands.” The son did not want to anger his father; he goes into the chamber with his gentle wife.

When he saw the bed, he looked at the maiden, then he remembers
his Heavenly Lord whom he holds more dear than any earthly thing; “Ah, God!” said he, “how strongly sin presses upon me! If I flee not now, much I fear that I shall thereby lose Thee.” When they were left all alone in the chamber, Master Alexis began to speak to her: mortal life he began to chide to her, of heavenly life he showed her the truth; but much he wished that he were gone from there.

“Hear me, maiden, take Him for spouse who redeemed us with his precious blood. In this world there is no perfect love: life is frail, there is no lasting honor in it; this joy becomes great sorrow.”

When he had set forth all his mind to her, he gives her the thong of his sword and a ring with which he had married her. Then he went out of the chamber in his father’s house; in the middle of the night he fled from the country.)

However different the tenor of the two poems may be, the stylistic resemblance to the
Chanson de Roland
is very striking. In both, the paratactic principle goes far beyond mere technique of sentence structure. In both we have the same repeated returning to fresh starts, the same spasmodic progression and retrogression, the same independence of the individual occurrences and their constituent parts. Stanza 13 recapitulates the situation at the beginning of stanza 12, but carries the action further and in a different direction. Stanza 14 repeats, concretely and in direct discourse, the statement made in stanza 13 (of which, however, the last line had already gone further). Instead of the construction, “When they were alone in the room, he remembered …, and said ‘Listen …’ ”, we have the following arrangement: 1. “When he was in the room, he remembered …” 2. “When they were in the room, he said that ….” (indirect discourse) 3. “Listen, (he said) …” Each of the stanzas presents a complete and autonomous scene. The impression of a unified, progressive event whose advance binds together the various elements is much weaker than the impression of a juxtaposition of three very similar but separate scenes. One may generalize on the basis of this impression: the
Chanson d’Alexis is
a string of autonomous, loosely interrelated events, a series of mutually quite independent scenes from the life of a saint, each of which contains an expressive yet simple gesture. The father ordering Alexis to join his bride in the chamber; Alexis at the bedside, speaking to his bride; Alexis at Edessa distributing his worldly goods to the poor; Alexis the beggar; the servants sent out after him but failing to recognize
him and giving him an alms; the mother’s lament; the conversation between mother and bride; and so forth. It is a cycle of scenes. Each one of these occurrences contains one decisive gesture with only a loose temporal or causal connection with those that follow or precede. Many of them (the mother’s lament, for example) are subdivided into several similar and individually independent pictures. Every picture has as it were a frame of its own. Each stands by itself in the sense that nothing new or unexpected happens in it and that it contains no propulsive force which demands the next. And the intervals are empty. But it is with no dark and profound emptiness, in which much befalls and much is prepared, in which we hold our breath in trembling expectation, the emptiness sometimes conjured up in the style of the Bible, with its intervals which make us ponder. Instead, it is a colorless duration without relief or substance, sometimes only a moment, sometimes seventeen years, sometimes wholly indefinable.

The course of events is thus resolved into a series of pictures; it is, as it were, parceled out. The
Chanson de Roland
taken as a whole is more compressed; the coherence is clearer; the individual picture sometimes displays more movement. But the representational technique (and this means more than mere technical procedure, it includes the idea of structure which poet and audience apply to the narrated event) is still exactly the same: it strings independent pictures together like beads. The intervals in the
Chanson de Roland
are not always so very empty and flat; landscape sometimes intrudes; we see or hear armies riding through valleys and mountain passes—yet the occurrences are still strung together in such a fashion that, time and again, completely independent and self-contained scenes result. The number of the characters who maintain the action is very small in the
Chanson de Roland
too; all the others—although they are far more varied than in the Alexis—seem mere types. Those participating in the action of the individual scenes are fixed to the spot; it is but rarely that a newcomer joins their number; and when that occurs (Naimes or Turpin acting as mediators), there is a sharp break. The variously altering relationship between a large number of persons, with the consequent involvements and element of adventure so characteristic of epic elsewhere, is here completely lacking. So much the stronger is the element of impressive gestures, both in the Alexis and the Roland. The urge to establish connections and pursue developments is feeble. Even within an individual scene, the development, if any, is halting and laborious.
But the gestures of the scenic moment are simply and plastically impressive in the highest degree.

This impressiveness of gestures and attitudes is obviously the purpose of the technique under consideration when it divides the course of events into a mosaic of parceled pictures. The scenic moment with its gestures is given such power that it assumes the stature of a moral model. The various phases of the story of the hero or the traitor or the saint are concretized in gestures to such an extent that the pictured scenes, in the impression they produce, closely approach the character of symbols or figures, even in cases where it is not possible to trace any symbolic or figural signification. But very often such a signification can be traced: in the
Chanson de Roland
it is present in the person of Charlemagne, in the description of many characteristics of the pagan knights, and of course in the prayers. As for the
Chanson d’Alexis
, E. R. Curtius’ excellent interpretation (
Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie
, 56, 113ff., especially pp. 122 and 124) conclusively supports the idea of a figural fulfillment in the beyond. This figural tradition played no small part in discrediting the horizontal, historical connections between events and in encouraging rigidification of all categories. Thus the prayers cited above exhibit the figures of redemption completely rigidified. The parceling of the events of the Old Testament, which are interpreted figurally in isolation from their historic context, has become a formula. The figures—as on the sarcophagi of late antiquity—are placed side by side paratactically. They no longer have any reality, they have only signification. With respect to the events of this world, a similar tendency prevails: to remove them from their horizontal context, to isolate the individual fragments, to force them into a fixed frame, and, within it, to make them impressive gesturally, so that they appear as exemplary, as models, as significant, and to leave all “the rest” in abeyance. It is easy to see that such a procedure permits but a small, extremely narrow portion of reality to assume visual plasticity, that portion which the crystallized idioms of the established categories are able to convey. But small as it may be, it does assume visual plasticity, and this shows that the high point of the process of rigidification has been passed. It is precisely in the isolated pictures that the germs of a revival are to be found.

The Latin text which may be assumed to have been the source for the French
Chanson d’Alexis
(it will be found in the
Acta Sanctorum
of July 17; it is here cited after Förster-Koschwitz,
Altfranzösisches Übungsbuch
, sixth edition, 1921, pp. 299ff.) is perhaps not much
older than the French version, for the legend, which originated in Syria, can be traced in the West only at a comparatively late date. But it exhibits the form of the saint’s legend of late antiquity much more purely. Its treatment of the bridal night deviates from the Old French version in a highly characteristic fashion:

Vespere autem facto dixit Euphemianus filio suo; “Intra, fili, in cubiculum et visita sponsam tuam.” Ut autem intravit, coepit nobilissimus juvenis et in Christo sapientissimus instruere sponsam suam et plura ei sacramenta disserere, deinde tradidit ei annulum suum aureum et rendam, id est caput baltei, quo cingebatur, involuta in prandeo et purpureo sudario, dixitque ei: “Suscipe haec et conserva, usque dum Domino placuerit, et Dominus sit inter nos.” Post haec accepit de substantia sua et discessit ad mare. …

(When it was evening, Euphemianus said to his son: “Go into the bedroom, son, and visit your wife.” But when he entered, the noble youth began most sagely to teach his wife of Christ and to explain to her many holy things, then he gave her his golden ring and the thong of his sword wrapped in a purple cloth of silk and spoke to her: “Take these and keep them as long as it pleases the Lord, and the Lord be between us.” After that he took some of his wealth and went down to the sea.)

It will have been noticed that the Latin text is likewise almost wholly paratactic. But it does not exploit the possibilities of parataxis; it has not come to know them. It has leveled and flattened the whole scene to complete uniformity. The narration proceeds without any ups and downs, without change of tone, “monotonously”: so that not only the frame but even the picture within it remains motionless, is rigid and without dynamism. The inner struggle which the temptation brings about in Alexis’ soul and for which the Old French version has the simplest and most beautiful expression, is not even mentioned. There seems to be no temptation at all. And the great movement of Alexis’ words in direct discourse to his bride (
Oz mei, pulcele
…)—one of the strongest movements of the entire Old French poem, in which Alexis rises to his full stature and which is the first outbreaking of his real nature—is evidently something the French poet created out of the pale Latin words of his source. The flight too first becomes dramatic in the French text. The Latin version is much smoother and more uniformly progressive; but the human movement is weak, is
barely alluded to, as if the story had to do with a ghost and not a living being. The same impression continues as one reads on. A really human formulation can be found only in the vernacular version. New in it (and we mention only the most important points) are the mother’s lament in the deserted room and, later, the saint’s inner struggle when the storm drives him back to Rome. Here Alexius hesitates before taking upon himself the most difficult trial of all, which is to live as an unknown beggar in his father’s house, where day after day he sees his nearest relatives mourning for him. He wishes that the cup might pass from him; yet he accepts it. The Latin text knows no hesitation and no inner struggle, here as in the scene of the bridal night. Alexis goes to his father’s house because he does not want the burden to fall on anyone else.

It was vernacular poetry—our comparison of these two texts seems to show—which first imparted relief to the individual pictures, so that their characters took on life and human fullness. This life, to be sure, is restricted by the rigidity and narrowness of the categories, which persist unalterably, and it fails all too easily for lack of progressive movement; but it is precisely through the resistance offered by the frame of rigid categories that it acquires impressiveness and force. It was the vernacular poets who first saw man as a living being and found the form in which parataxis possesses poetic power. Instead of a thin, monotonous trickle of juxtapositions, we now have the laisse form, with its abrupt advances and regressions and its abundance of energetic new beginnings, which is a new elevated style. If the life which this stylistic procedure can seize upon is narrowly restricted and without diversity, it is nevertheless a full life, a life of human emotion, a powerful life, a great relief after the pale, intangible style of the late antique legend. The vernacular poets also knew how to exploit direct discourse in terms of tone and gesture. We have already referred to Alexis’ address to his bride and to his mother’s lament. In addition we may mention the words in which, after his return to Rome, the saint asks his father for food and shelter. In the French version they have a concrete and direct appeal to which the Latin text could not possibly attain. The French passage reads:

Eufemiiens, bels sire, riches om,
quer me herberge por Deu en ta maison;
soz ton degret me fai un grabaton
empor ton fil dont tu as tel dolour;
toz sui enfers, sim pais por soue amour. …

(Euphemianus, noble lord, wealthy man, may it please thee to give me shelter in thy house for the sake of God. Under thy stairs arrange a sickbed for me, for thy son’s sake through whom thou hast such great sorrow. I am very ill; so feed me for the sake of thy love to him. …)