Roland, Charlemagne, and the Poetics of Illumination

Abstract

A VARIANT TITLE OF THIS PAPER might have been, "The Chanson de Roland: From the Poetics of Illumination to the Opacity of the Sign." For my intention here is to draw upon medieval theories of illumination in order to suggest that there is a deep epistemological tension in the Chanson de Roland which involves a crisis in fundamental modes of seeing, of knowing, and communicating reality.1 For the moment, let me speak simplistically and say first, that this tension implicates what may be called (with Eric A. Havelock2 and F. Edward Crantz) a changing relationship between the knower and the known, and secondly, that the crisis signaled by this change coincides with a certain dualism in the cultural status of the Roland, an epic which is quite obviously both a preeminent vestige of an oral tradition that reaches back at least to the year of Rencesvals that we are celebrating in 1978, and a precious written monument inaugurating nothing less than a new order of vernacular literacy in France. The Chanson de Roland may be considered, therefore, as a threshold to a culture of the text which in some deep way is very much our own today. Moreover, the textualization of vernacular culture is but one index of a much larger transformation of social relationships which occurred but which I cannot attempt to describe here. Suffice it to say, then, that I am speaking of a crisis whose true violence is hardly that of bright red blood spilt on green grass (indeed, for chivalric heroes such outpourings are fulfillments of their being rather than its denial), but is located in the very order of speech in which heroic hemorrhages are declared.