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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
All specialists who question the diverse components of the medieval universe stress that the ecclesiastical institution occupied a choice place within the sociocultural structure of that world. This is true because of the solidity of its implantation in the century and particularly because of the efficacity of its doctrinal function. In the cultural domain, the production and transmission of knowledge (in addition to the practice of indoctrination that it supposes), the Church was completely sovereign. The ecclesiastical institutions (from simple parish churches to cathedrals and episcopal sees, as well as convents and monasteries) were responsible for the foundation and rise of medieval schools, universities, the centers where books were produced—or more precisely, manuscripts—and the organization of libraries.
1 Mikhail Bakhtin, Estétique de la création verbale, translated by Alfred Aucoturier, Paris, Gallimard, 1948, p. 189.
2 Aaron J. Gourevitch, Les Catégories de la culture médiévale, translated by Nina Godneff and Hélène Courtin, Paris, Gallimard, 1983, p. 8.
3 Horst Ruthrof, The Reader's Construction of Narrative, London-Boston-Henley, Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 126.
4 Aaron J. Gourevitch, ibid., p. 15.
5 Armand Strubel, "La littérature allégorique", in Daniel Poirion, ed., Précis de littérature française du Moyen Age, Paris, P.U.F., 1983, chap. VIII, p. 239 (our italics).
6 La vision de Tundal (or Tondale or Tnudgal, transcribed in Portuguese as Tundalo or Tungallo), a Latin text of 1148 or 1149 by Marcus, a southern Irish monk, probably after a sojourn he made with the nuns of St. Paul at Ratisbon. This monk was the companion of Malachie and knew St. Bernard. The Portuguese quotations are taken from a critical edition by Patricia Villaverde Gonçalves, (Revista Lusitana, Lisbon, 1982-1983). The French equivalents are taken from La Vision de Tondale, French, Anglo-Norman and Irish texts, translated from the Latin and published by V.-H. Friedel and Kuno Meyer, Paris, Champion 1907.
7 Lubomir Doležel, "Narrative Semantics," PTL, 1, 1967a, pp. 129-151; id. "Narrative Modalities," Journal of Literary Semantics, V. 1, 1976b, pp. 5-13; Id. "Truth and Authenticity in Narrative," Poetics Today, 1-3, 1980, pp. 7-25.
8 Lubomir Doležel, 1976a, p. 142.
9 Idem, 1976b, p. 5.
10 Teun A. van Dijk, "Text Grammar and Text Logic," in S. Petöfi-H. Rieser, ed., Studies in Text Grammar, Dordrecht, D. Reidel 1973, (apud Lubomir Doležel, 1976b, p. 5).
11 Dolezel, 1976b, p. 6.
12 Id., ibid.
13 Id., ibid.
14 Id., ibid.
15 Id., ibid p. 7.
16 Id., ibid.
17 Doležel, 1976a, pp. 142-145. On the importance of modal constraints with regard to the facts of history in narrative texts, see also Vitor Manuel de Aguiar e Silva, Teoria da Literatura, Coimbra, Almedina, 1982, Vol. I, pp. 567-568.
18 Id. 1976b, p. 7.
19 Id. 1976a, pp. 148-149/1976b, pp. 8-9.
20 "Peregrination" as the only way for the salvation of the soul is an essential idea of the medieval view of the world.
21 Exemplarity, capable of leading to imitation, is a fundamental element of the emic plan of the hagiographic text. That is, it is presented as a distinctive trait of the "narrative armature" (Greimas) of this type of text (see in this regard André Jolles, Formes simples, French version by Antoine-Marie Buget, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1972, p. 36).
22 Horst Ruthrof, op.cit., p. 126.
23 Doležel, 1976a, pp. 142-143; id. 1976b, p. 8. See also A.J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, Paris, Hachette, 1979, under the word "Déontiques" (modalités).
24 Doležel, 1976b, p. 8.
25 Id., ibid., p. 9. See also A.J. Greimas and J. Courtès, op.cit., under the word "Epistémiques" (modalités).
26 We treat these two types of "modal constraints" in the same paragraph so that, in the case we are dealing with, they are found in a rapport of mutual dependence, a fact that would make their approach artificial and of small consequence in individualized terms.
27 Ruthrof, op.cit., p. 126.
28 Doležel, 1976a, pp. 147-148.
29 "Among the possible personages of a novel (a genre that, within this context, is considered as the paradigmatic realization of literary accounts) there is one that is distinguished by its status and functions in the narrative process and in the structure of the text: it is the narrator…Any narrative text implies the mediation of a narrator: the voice of the narrator is always heard in the account in presenting the traits that distinguish it in conformity with its status of the person responsible for the narrative statement, and it is the one that produces in the literary text the other voices found there—the voices of possible hypo-diegetic narrators and those of personages" (V.M. de Aguiar e Silva, op.cit., pp. 663 and 727).
30 "The zero degree of individuation—what I will call here impersonal narration—is attained when the discourse of the narrator presupposes one property, and only one: the ability to tell a story" (Marie-Laure Ryan, "The Pragmatics of Personal and Impersonal Fiction," Poetics, 10, 1981, pp. 517-539; quotation taken from page 518); "The words of the anonymous narrator Er-form (our case) has a guarantee of authenticity which is lacking in the words of narrative agents" (Doležel, 1980, p. 11).
31 Apropos of the "effacement of the emitter" in medieval literary texts, we may refer to the following studies: V.M. de Aguiar e Silva, op.cit. pp. 223-224; M. Bakhtin, op.cit., p. 189; E.R Curtius, La Littérature européenne et le Moyen Age latin, translated from the German by Jean Bréjoux, Paris, P.U.F., 1956.
32 "By definition, the narrator of a primary account is a narrator in the first degree, whose narrative act is external with regard to the related facts" (V.M. de Aguiar e Silva, op.cit., p. 730), the reason for which it is called extra-diegetic (as opposed to the intra-diegetic narrator, a category in which the two other narrative voices of our text are integrated). The inclusion of a narrator in one of these categories depends on the possibility it has to "be characterized"… through its relationship as a productive instance of the discourse with the diegetic level constructed by its discourse, seeing that, according to Gérard Genette, "any recounted event in a story is at a diegetic level immediately above the one in which the producing narrative act of this story is situated" (id., ibid.). See also in this regard Shlomith Rimpon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London, New York, Methuen, 1985, pp. 91-95.
33 "During a primary account, secondary accounts, more or less long, may nevertheless be produced by second-degree narrators existing in the diegetic universe, whose narration is in that way intra-diegetic" (V.M. de Aguiar e Silva, op.cit., pp. 730-731).
34 As to the treatment of personages, we return to the doubt, expressed by quotes, that we feel by designating the "soul" as a protagonist in Tundal's story.
35 The fact that the account of the "soul's" course devolves on the "body" from which it was entirely detached during the peregrination should be pointed out for two essential reasons: a) because it obeys the principle of the "global coherence of the story" told, acting, as we said above, at the level of profound structure and imposing on it the presence of two nuclear factors: a maximum of credibility and conviction, from which comes a maximum of aptitude to convince its potential readers (This hetero-diegetic could of course also choose the homo-diegetic way to become an observer more closely connected to the world represented in its story—the "subjectivated Er-form" of Doležel) 1980, pp. 16—17)—; another choice was to make the "soul" an auto-diegetic narrator, the Doležian "Ich-form" (ibid., pp. 17-18). But as Doležel observes, there is lacking in both options the "function of authentification" of the narrative universe that characterizes the genre of the chosen narrator and they thus cannot be adapted to the nature and function of the hagiographic text); b) because, conforming entirely to the medieval view of the world, it marks the incompatibility existing between terrestrial things and those of the divine sphere, thus not permitting that the body becomes a traveling companion of the soul and taking away from it any possibility of being a homo-diegetic narrator.
36 On the use of the terms "hypo-diegetic story/hypo-diegetic narrator" and on their functions, see V.M. de Aguiar e Silva, (op.cit., p. 731) and Shomith Rimon-Kenan (op.cit., pp. 91-95).
37 Doležel (1980, pp. 16-17) considers that this type of narrator is weakened, although relatively less so than the Er-form narrator, in its faculties of the "authentification" of the narrative discourse of which it is a producing instance.
38 Id., idem. pp. 20-23.
39 See the pages on this subject by Youri M. Lotman (in La Structure du texte artistique, translated from the Russian by Anne Fournier et al., under the direction of H. Meschonnic, Paris, Gallimard, 1973) on medieval texts, particularly on one of the fundamental elements of structure in literary texts: "the point of view of the text" (p. 366).
40 The joint treatment of these components is due not only to the close relationship of mutual dependence that characterizes them but also to the specifically allegorical function that each one fills in our text (and, we dare say, in any hagiographic text).
41 Allegory, because of the way it adapts itself to the didactic and doctrinary ends of a large part of the production of medieval texts, is one of the favorite rhetorical figures of the thought and creation of medieval man. The semantic base of its functioning—"the basic procedure consists of imagining through thought what one wants to express (a lesson in behavior, religious or courtly) an equivalent in imagery susceptible to a rich exploitation…and separable into elements….Allegory offers a "concrete" representation, speaking to the imagination, an imaged approximation of analogy…" (Armand Strudel, op.cit., pp. 245-246)—in fact, a privileged instrument for the transmission of the ideological apparatus of the social, laic and ecclesiastical institutions of the epoch. On allegory, see also the following studies: Howard R. Patch, op. cit., ch. IV; Chandler R. Post, Medieval Spanish Allegory, Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press, 1974.
42 See Youri M. Lotman, op.cit. and Philippe Hamon, "Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage," in A.A.V.V., Poétique du récit, Editions du Seuil, 1977, pp. 115-180 (particularly as concerns syntagme and the concept of referential personages, p. 122).
43 See the observations of V.M. de Aguiar e Silva, (op.cit. p. 669).
44 Youri Lotman (op.cit.) theoretically bases this capacity that space has to penetrate the models of the world issued from artistic texts.
45 See V.M. de Aguiar e Silva, op.cit., p. 709.
46 "Hyperbole is putting into relief the verba singula with the obvious aim of provoking astonishment even more than credibility. The trope, which belongs to the audacior ornatus, has poetic effects of evocation and serves in rhetoric to arouse pathetic and partisan feelings and in poetry the affective creation of images that go beyond reality" (Heinrich Lausberg, Elementos de Retórica Literária, Portuguese translation by R.M. Rosado Fernandes, Lisbon, Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 1962, p. 158).
47 "Monsters symbolize cosmic forces in the stage preceding chaos, non-formal potentialities… They are par excellence the antithesis—or adversary—of the ‘hero' and ‘arms'… The struggle with the monster represents the combat undertaken to liberate the conscious from the ascendancy of the unconscious. The deliverance of the hero corresponds to the breaking of day, to the triumph of light over the darkness of the conscience or the spirit on the irrational levels of the unconscious." (J.C. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, English version by Jack Sage, New York, Philosophical Library 1981, under the entry "Monsters". p. 213.) As far as concerns the symbolism of the various monsters in the universe of the bestiaries, Cirlot specifies that hell was represented in the Middle Ages by the head of a monster (a dragon, for example) with one or two human heads in its jaw.
48 Cirlot also tells us that "in most of the symbolic traditions, jewels represent spiritual truths, as well as superior knowledge…—not knowledge as science in the meaning of impersonal erudition but as the sum of experiences and inextricably linked to the living being and its evolution." (op.cit., in the article "Jewels and Gems." p. 167.)
49 On the concept of "narratology" see V.M. de Aguiar e Silva, (op.cit. pp. 666-667, which gives the essential bibliographical elements) and Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative, Berlin-New York-Amsterdam, Mouton, 1982, pp. 16-26 (see also in the Grand Robert, for the word under consideration, formed on the model of "Destinataire").
50 On the theoretical concept of the facet of reader in the literary communication system, see V.M. de Aguiar e Silva (op.cit. pp. 292-321).
51 Requiring the "identification" of the reader for the models proposed by the texts, the hagiographic account is integrated into a category of texts which, according to Youri Lotman in the work quoted above, have as a distinctive trait to be constituted by artistic phenomena which are given in advance, and the expectation of the listener is justified by all the construction of the work. Lotman considers that this type of text is constructed on the basis of a principle he calls "aesthetics of identity," that is, in substance, on a complete identification of the phenomena represented of life and stereotyped models, already known by the listener and which are part of a system of "rules".
52 Op.cit., p. 126.
53 André Jolles (op.cit. pp. 29-30) meticulously analyzes the steps proper to this procedure of canonization, an indispensable element for the condition of exemplarity that characterizes the true heroes of hagiographic texts.
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