SOURCE: Vance, Eugene. “Roland and the Poetics of Memory.” In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, edited by Josué V. Harari, pp. 374-403. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

[In the following essay, Vance analyzes the narrative patterns of The Song of Roland and explains its emphasis on commemoration.]

La différence, c'est ce qui fait que le mouvement de la signification n'est possible que si chaque élément dit “présent,” apparaissant sur la scène de la présence, se rapporte à autre chose que lui-même, gardant en lui la marque de l'élément passé et se laissant déjà creuser par la marque de son rapport à l'élément futur, la trace ne se rapportant pas moins à ce qu'on appelle le futur qu'à ce qu'on appelle le passé, et constituant ce qu'on appelle le présent par rapport même à ce qui n'est pas lui: absolument pas lui, c'est-à-dire pas même un passé ou un futur comme présents modifiés. Il faut qu'un intervalle le sépare de ce qui n'est pas lui pour qu'il soit lui-même mais cet intervalle qui le constitue en présent doit aussi du même coup diviser le présent en lui-même, partageant, avec le présent tout ce qu'on peut penser à partir de lui, c'est-à-dire tout étant, dans notre langue métaphysique, singulièrement la substance ou le sujet.

—Jacques Derrida

During a long period of its history, medieval culture granted special importance to the faculty of memory, and my intention in this essay is to describe as simply as possible what I believe to be certain obvious features of this culture that I shall call commemorative, and then to show to what extent a commemorative model is operative in the Chanson de Roland, at the level of both deep narrative configurations and a system of values expressed at the ethical surface of that poem. I shall also show how, especially in the second half of the Roland, this model is violently disrupted, and I shall suggest some of the cultural forces that may have contributed to this disruption.

By “commemoration” I mean any gesture, ritualized or not, whose end is to recover, in the name of a collectivity, some being or event either anterior in time or outside of time in order to fecundate, animate, or make meaningful a moment in the present. Commemoration is the conquest of whatever in society or in the self is perceived as habitual, factual, static, mechanical, corporeal, inert, worldly, vacant, and so forth.

Even if no theories of memory had been written during the Middle Ages, the strictly pragmatic functions attributed to it in medieval culture would be very much in evidence. It is well known, for example, to what extent the ideal of the imitatio Christi impregnated every sphere of the medieval consciousness, and in broader terms one can hardly fail to glimpse the centrality of a commemorative model in the cult of ancestors, in the tradition of precedence in common law, in the ritual of pilgrimages, in the typology of monarchical theory, and in notions as diverse as those of archetype, universal, exemplum, authority, figura, and miracle, not to mention that of historia itself, as a representation of the past: in short, in any pattern of thought that ontologically privileges some moment or principle of origin.

It is easy to show that Christianity—especially that Platonizing strain of Christianity which dominated pre-Scholastic thought for more than seven centuries—is founded upon a commemorative épistémè of the purest sort, for its eucharist is centered upon the gestures of a Lord who gathered together with his apostles on the eve of his death to celebrate a final repast (itself a commemoration of the Jewish Passover feast), and who exhorted them thus: “This is my body, which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me”—in meam commemorationem.¹

A commemorative culture will inevitably rationalize its ideologies in the perspective of a metaphysics of signs. If Reality or Truth is conceived of as being anterior to the present—or, more radically, as being anterior to existence itself—this original Truth that is always absent will signify or present itself partially to man in time and space by means of the words and things that constitute his palpable world—visibilia, to use a term of St. Paul. At best, these signs can reflect only poorly an ineffable Truth that transcends them; however, one day man will enjoy perfect knowledge, that is, a presence without mediation, without signs: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate; tunc autem facie ad faciem.²

Like the doctrine of signs, the commemorative impulse is inseparable from a cult of the voice, or what one may call the phonocentrism that defines the creative force of the Logos as it was understood in the Middle Ages. According to St. Augustine, God “spoke” the universe through the matter of the abyss during the creation. The syntax of God's discourse is the history of the world.³ Even though God gave of his substance in an act of material expression that was authentic yet susceptible to corruption, the original cogito did not allow itself to be contaminated along with the firmament that is its state-ment:

It is as when we speak. In order that what we are thinking may reach the mind of the listener through the fleshly ears, that which we have in mind is expressed in words and is called speech. But our thought is not transformed into sounds; it remains entire in itself and assumes the form of words by means of which it may reach the ears without suffering any deterioration in itself. In the same way the Word of God was made flesh without change that He might dwell among us.⁴

In such a cosmogony, any notion of mimesis will ultimately involve regression, and it is the memory that bridges the hiatus between the empirical presence of signifiers and a transcendent signified at the origin of all. This incorporeal otherness can be partially remembered through the traces (vestigia) it has left in our souls. One has only to read Book 10 of Augustine's Confessions, his De trinitate, or his De magistro to grasp the radical interchangeability of metaphysics, sign theory, and memory theory in medieval thought.⁵ The importance of memory in the epistemic system of classical culture has been indicated by numerous studies during the last decade and more: the names of Finley, Havelock, Russo, Yates, Vernant, Détienne, and Peabody come immediately to mind.⁶ Moreover, in classical antiquity, the commemorative process tends to be allied with operations of the organs of speech. We cannot be surprised, then, that in a predominantly oral culture a privileged agent in the ritual of recall should be the speaking poet, in whose performance historical discourse is replenished and vivified with a new inspiration of truth. As Vernant has written:

Mnemosyne presides, as is well known, over the poetic process. It was obvious for the Greeks that such a process demanded a supernatural intervention. Poetry is one of the typical forms of divine possession and rapture: it is the state of “enthusiasm,” in the etymological sense of that word. Possessed by the Muses, the poet is the interpreter of Mnemosyne, just as the god-inspired prophet is the interpreter of Apollo. … The bard and the diviner have in common a single gift of “vision,” a privilege that they have paid for with their eyes. Blind to light, they see the invisible. The god who inspires reveals to them those realities that escape the sight of ordinary men. It is a twin vision that bears in particular upon those parts of time inaccessible to mortals: what once was, what has yet to come … in contrast to the diviner who must usually answer for the future, the activity of the poet is oriented almost exclusively toward the past. Not his individual past, nor a past generalized as if it were an empty framework independent of the events that have occurred there, but “ancient times” with its own contents and qualities: a heroic age or, still further, a primordial age, the origin of time.⁷

The proposal that the apotheosis of memory was a determining force in medieval history will no doubt seem an exaggeration to some, yet the vastly suggestive study by Frances Yates has already allowed us to glimpse, however fleetingly, the scope of the problem.⁸ The notion of memory, however—like the notion of time, to which it is related—is one of those numerous categories of our daily vocabulary that become massively complex with a moment of scrutiny.

Consider, for instance, the implications of the psychic model one invokes in order to deal with the basic functions of memory. Already in classical antiquity it was clearly understood that acts of recollection or of reminiscence involved a problematic of mediation: how, it was asked, does some absent object of memory relate to the object stimulating its recall in the present? Aristotle claimed that retrieval occurred by three types of mental association: similarity, contiguity, and opposition. Hence, the prelinguistic operations of memory are already essentially rhetorical.⁹ Modern theories of memory have regarded such acts of substitution as a kind of primordial violence. Freud held that the passage of an image from the preverbal system of the unconscious into the conscious system of language (or vice versa) involves both radical substitutions and changes of valence: such is the transforming power of repression in our mental activity, hence the potentially pathological ambivalence of the remembering subject to the substance of his own recollections. To recognize that such transformations might indeed occur even in our most familiar rituals of commemoration is to recognize that our daily cultural life is constituted as a balance of the dialectical forces of repression and recollection. In Freud's explanation of Christ's sacrifice, the medieval notion of imitatio Christi involves a struggle simultaneously to remember and to repress, a struggle rooted in primal yet unresolved acts of violence:

If the Son of God was obliged to sacrifice his life to redeem mankind from original sin, then by the law of the talion, the requital of like for like, that sin must have been a killing, a murder. Nothing else could call for the sacrifice of life in expiation. And if the original sin was an offense against God the Father, the primal crime of mankind must have been a parricide, the killing of the primal father of the primitive horde, whose image in memory was later transfigured into a deity.¹⁰

One need not accept the topical content of the categories that Freud brings to the theater of the mind; however, the complexity that he attributes to their operations of memory is plausible enough to suggest that a definition of memory, or a fortiori, a history of its functions, is impossible. If one will grant, however, as Freud himself willingly did, that what we call poetic discourse is a notation that, alongside those of philosophy and psychology, has its own special ways of apprehending a problematic of memory, one will not lack interesting material, especially in the Middle Ages.¹¹

With these priorities in mind, I should like to consider certain narrative patterns observable in the Chanson de Roland, especially with regard to the mode—rather, the modes—of performance that brought this poem into existence. For if there is any truth in the notion that the basic function of any act of communication is to make experience intelligible, we must be willing to consider that among the things that must be made intelligible is the model that subtends communication itself. In other words, I am suggesting that what we call myth and legend (poetic or not) always tend to be structured no less by their mode of dissemination in culture than by the “events” in the past that such myths are purported to convey, no matter how much these events are accepted as being truly historical. Thus, if memory is the principal means of preserving sacred history, history must serve, reciprocally, to sacralize the faculty of memory. The special interest of the Chanson de Roland is that ever since the Romantic age, the Roland has always been considered one of the most “historical” of all poems. This reverence notwithstanding, it is not difficult to show that at every level the drama of the Chanson de Roland is not only a product but also a drama, and even a tragedy, of memory.

Like so many other poems of the Middle Ages, the Chanson de Roland bears all the marks of a long oral prehistory, during which time the primary creative—or rather, conservative—process was that of an oral performance that was also a feat of memory. (I shall explore later the serious consequences of a glaring and important paradox, which is that the Roland is accessible to us only as a written text, and that a system of writing has already intervened in the process of transmission.)

To claim that the Chanson de Roland is a drama of memory is also to presume that if such a drama originates in a specific legendary corpus, its substance must be compatible enough with modes of oral poetic production to be both conservable and renewable through the ages. We know nothing definite about what we commonly call the historical origins of the poem, but we may be fairly certain that the Roland as we possess it is a coagulation of disparate narrative materials that once perpetuated themselves in oral performances during which the poet and his heroes would be simultaneously reborn together, thanks to the memory and voice of the poet. Thus the heroes of the Roland, like those of the Iliad and the Odyssey, speak in the same metrical formulas as the poet; they employ the same epithets, the same lists, and they even share the same foreknowledge of events. The fact that these heroes live only by the memory and the voice of the poet ensures, in other words, a strong cognitive identification between them, and this is evident in the motivation imputed by the poet to the heroes themselves. For if it is the antique glory of the hero that animates the voice of the poet, inversely, it is the commemorative posterity of the singer that inspires the epic blows of the hero. Roland, in short, constitutes himself as the true “author” of his songs, and he is aware that his immortality is to be consummated in the living poetic word:

“Now let each man take care to deal great blows,
Lest a bad song be sung of us!…
A bad example shall never be made of me.”

[1013-1016]¹²

It is not surprising that in such a monologism (Bakhtin) no noun denoting the distinct figure of the poet is available: the twelfth-century poet is known not as an entity, but only through his action, which is that of singing (chanter).¹³ Moreover, in such action his identity as a poet is not expressed so much as it is possessed by the legendary gestes of his heroes. One can imagine, moreover, that the fame of epic singers, like that of certain film and television actors today, is derived more from their interpretations of certain roles than from their “real” personalities.

The “song,” as Roland himself says, is an “example” (essample) that revitalizes a moment in time and space—the instance of performance—with a therapeutic truth, a meaning, a signifié that re-presents itself each time anew through the phonic substance of speech. Such is the role, Jean Bodel says clearly in the opening lines of another epic, the Chanson des Saisnes, of the matière of Charlemagne: it must be voir chacun jour apparent. Truth is in uttering, not in the utterance. The truth that manifests itself anew “each day” in the oral performance, however, is not something that one grasps objectively, or even, for that matter, subjectively: on the contrary, the commemoration of “truth” abrogates altogether the matrix of self and other. It provokes instead a movement of undifferentiation where the commemorating self is given over to a field of forces that is infinitely (hence fatally) regressive. Its sweep includes the identity of the listener as well, tacitly engaged by the poetic word only to find himself no less dissolved in it. The psychology of the poetic performance is not determined by events of history, but rather by circumstances of language, and the Greeks were eager to analyze it with some precision. As Socrates says to a rhapsode, a man who performs the Homeric poems:

This gift you have of speaking well on Homer is not an art; it is a power divine, impelling you like the power in the stone … which most call “stone of Heraclea.” This stone does not simply attract the iron rings, just by themselves: it also imparts to the rings a force enabling them to do the same thing as the stone itself, that is, to attract another ring, so that sometimes a chain is formed, quite a long one, of iron rings, suspended from one another. For all of them, however, their power depends on that lodestone. Just so the Muse. She first makes men inspired, and then through these inspired ones others share in the enthusiasm, and a chain is formed … a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him. So long as he has this reason in his possession, no man is able to make poetry or to chant in prophecy … Herein lies the reason why the deity has bereft them [poets] of their senses … in order that we listeners may know that it is not they who utter these precious revelations while their mind is not within them, but that it is the god himself who speaks, and through them becomes articulate to us.¹⁴

In the oral performance, then, poet, hero, and audience recreate each other in a common, discursive space; yet their presence to each other is consummated only in a regressive series of “magnetic” alignments, through speech, with some originary presence. As in the Iliad, this movement is reinforced by the genealogical consciousness of its audience, if we may believe modern scholars who say that the twelve peers and the Christian warriors in the chronicle of the Baligant episode could be identified as distant ancestors by twelfth-century listeners. We have relatively few documents from the Middle Ages which capture the épistémè of oral epic discourse, yet the following statement by Jean de Grouchy insists precisely upon the regenerative effect of oral narrative on a crowd of laborers and humble people who have been beaten down by their daily tasks and routines, yet who are revived in a collective regression into the heroic past:

We call a chanson de geste that in which the deeds of heroes and of our ancient fathers are recited, such as the lives and martyrdoms of saints and the adversities that beset men of old for the Faith and for Truth. … Moreover, this song must be ministered to the old people, to the laboring folk and to those of humble condition, so that by hearing miseries and calamities of others they may bear more easily their own and so that their own travails may become lighter. And thus this song brings about the conservation [conservatio] of the whole community.¹⁵

Commemoration, however, involves not just an act of retrieval by the mind of the poet but simultaneously the perception of what lies before him in the present as being deficient, as a vice, a lack that the memory will fill; the present may even be seen as an obstacle to the possession of some reality or meaning belonging to the past. Such a dialectic is already implicit, as I have said, in the duality of the sign as a material signans of an immaterial signatum. In pragmatic terms, however, such a dialectic could be welcomed and intensified by poets and orators who had mastered the art of memory. For, as Frances Yates has shown, it was customary for orators from classical antiquity to the Renaissance to practice what was called compositio loci, that is, to memorize a speech either by linking, however arbitrarily, the elements to be retrieved during performance with physical objects in the orator's immediate presence, or by imagining some spatial scene whose details (imagines), often made vivid through effects of violence and the grotesque, would swiftly summon up the memory of those elements to be recalled.¹⁶ Thus violence may be understood as being not only the “subject” of oral epic narrative but also as an aide-mémoire or as a “generative” force in the production of its discourse. By extension, it is interesting to ask if the semiological prominence given to violence in classical and post-classical culture—the sacrifices, the circumcisions, the tortures, the beheadings, the crucifixions, the quarterings, the burnings—was not primarily mnemonic in function. If the Odyssey ends in joyous recollections that reconcile husband to wife and fathers to sons, it also ends with a violent exemplary massacre from which only a bard and a herald are spared, for it is they who will remember and speak. In a commemorative culture, then, history “stages” itself around events of violence by which the collective judicial memory reinforms itself—as narrative.

However one wishes to describe it, the dialectic of presence and absence that arises in the very circumstances of oral performance tends, as we shall now see, to double itself within the Roland as basic configurations of narrative that command the relationships of characters both to each other and to the physical world in which they move. Indeed, such a configuration informs the Chanson de Roland from the start: the Franks have fought in Spain for seven years, an expanse of time easily understood, in the Middle Ages, as a metaphor—rather, as a synecdoche—for all the travails of earthly existence. Despite the victories of the moment, the Franks are now weary of the war and nostalgic for “sweet France,” the terrestrial seat of God's presence among men (Charlemagne, one will recall, figured as a vicarius Christi in medieval iconography). The pagans, who have been his adversaries, imagine how tired Charlemagne must be. As Marsile, their king, puts it:

                                                                                                              “I greatly marvel
at Charlemagne, who is white-haired and old.
I would say he's two hundred years old or more.
Many are the lands where he has wearied his body
And taken so many blows of lance and spear …
Never will he give up fighting.”

[537-543]

The geographical opposition between Spain and France provides to the heroes within the poem and above all to its audience an epistemological framework in which a dialectic between presence and absence is historically significant in both ideological and affective terms. Blancandrin, a Saracen who is Marsile's ambassador to the council of the Franks, concludes the treasonous proposals of the Saracens by eliciting nostalgia in the Franks:

“You have been in this country long enough.
You must now return to Aix, in France.
There my master says that he will follow you.”

[134-136]

The topographical location of Roncevaux only makes these feelings more dramatic. Situated in the mountains between Spain and France, Roncevaux serves as a threshold of intense recollections for the war-weary Franks, who now contemplate their tranquil homeland: a place of abundance, security, and appeased desires. The tantalizing proximity of France is all the more poignant in that an imminent and foreknown tragedy separates the Franks from it:

When they came to the Tere Majur
They saw Gascoigne, the land of their lords.
Then they remembered their fiefs and their possessions,
And their maidens, and their noble wives;
There's not a one who does not weep for pity.

[818-822]

The passage through Roncevaux stirs up a particularly violent anguish in Charlemagne, who is already grieving for a Roland destined never to return. The future already belongs, as it were, to the past, and such foreknowledge is a condition of that fatalistic cognitive homology of hero, poet, and audience, bound to each other in a single commemorative language. Never does it occur to Charlemagne that he might act to reverse the course of events.

Above all others, Charles is anguished:
At the gates of Spain he has left his nephew.
Pity seizes him, he cannot hold back from weeping.

[823-825]

Moreover, Charlemagne is fated to lose in Roland his “right hand,” a privileged agent of his own potency. The experience of Charlemagne is an instance of what seems to be a general tendency of the process of commemoration to be closely associated with—if not to demand—some act of mutilation or immolation. Did not time itself begin with the castration of Kronos—and once again with a crucifixion? Though some in our time might see such acts as manifestations of a castration complex disguised as instances of what Freud calls “organ speech,” I suggest that such violence, especially when it occurs in medieval narrative, is a manifestation less of some trauma in the authorial unconscious than of the conflicting nature of words (or things) as signs. For, as medieval thinkers knew so well, any signifier is a corporeal trace that must at once subsist and yet efface itself in order to convey a signified that is absent and different from it: that difference may be called “time.”

As an epic hero, Roland no doubt appealed to medieval audiences on more than one political or ideological score, but it is easy to show that Roland is also a hero of memory. The force of his memorial “logic” is evident from the very moment he appears in the poem. Blancandrin, one will recall, has just delivered Marsile's treacherous proposals to Charlemagne, who submits the question, as a good feudal lord must, to the counsel of his barons. Roland is the first to speak out; and he initiates his speech not with a rational opinion but with an aggressive outcry and a formulaic recital of his previous conquests. Roland's aggressions in the past, in other words, entirely determine the weight of his argument in the present. Then Roland reinforces his opinion with the exempla, likewise remembered from the past, of Basan and Basile, two Christian knights who had been sent as emissaries to the Saracens—at the price of their heads. Thus, counsels Roland, “Pursue the war as you began it.” Whether Roland is motivated by an excess of zeal or by outright pride, we the audience know by our privileged perspective that Roland, the champion of the idée reçue, is right.

Ganelon's memory, however, is less acute. Eloquent, a good rhetorician, this future traitor persuades the Frankish barons that the present appearance of things suffices as proof that it would be a “sin,” as he says, to continue the war. Seduced by Ganelon's speech, the Duke of Naimes, who is ordinarily a paragon of good sense among the Franks, corroborates Ganelon's counsel. “Ben ad parlet li dux,” cry the barons; but the irony of this judgment is obvious; the rhetoric of appeasement is subversive not only in ethical terms but in artistic terms as well. Without war, there could be no hero, no history, no song, no jongleur, and no audience.¹⁷

Once Roland and the twelve peers have been named to command the rear guard, a new dilemma arises: faced with the vast numbers of the pagan forces, should the Franks summon the aid of Charles? Perhaps because Oliver seems to have entered the Roland legend late in time and is, accordingly, somehow detached from the heroic (and commemorative) ethic that commands its principal figure, he accepts the empirical evidence of the pagan masses as justification for sounding the alarm. It would seem that Oliver is a champion not primarily of memory but of knowledge that derives from what is present, knowledge that has objective truth and can be treated rationally and even communicated. Even so, Oliver is not to be dismissed as a relativist, as his future conduct in the poem will clearly show. For Roland, by contrast, knowledge is always a priori, and language is never an instrument of true dialogue or exchange but rather of invocation or commemoration or of aggression, and it expresses his bond to a truth that is always both universal and anterior to the present and immutable. We are faced here with an epistemological difference that is finally smothered by events in the Roland, yet one that will have great ramifications in the intellectual environment of the century to follow.¹⁸ Roland invokes against Oliver's empiricism the formulaic obligation to respect at any cost the earlier orders of his lord, Charlemagne. Not only does Roland live by the oath of fidelity between vassal and lord (his contractual link to the past); he also evokes, as I mentioned earlier, the importance of his present performance on the battlefield as an exemplum for audiences of the future—thanks to the good offices of the jongleurs.

But Roland, as we know, is not beyond reproach. And if his idealism is founded upon a rectitude of memory, his pride, like Ganelon's, consists of a willful forgetting; Roland will simply not tolerate Oliver's recalling the earlier threats and the prominent gesture—the dropped glove—that had portended Ganelon's treason:

“Quiet, Oliver!” Count Roland replies.
“He is my stepfather: I want no further word about him.”

[1026-1027]

The battle now begins, and at several points the poet makes it clear that a victory on the battlefield is also a victory of memory over oblivion. Moreover, no less for the soldier than for the poet, a triumph of memory culminates in an outcry of the human voice. As the poet says of Oliver,

Whoever could see him dismember the Saracens
And throw one dead man upon another
Could remember a good vassal.
He does not want to forget Charles' ensign:
He cries “Munjoy” loud and clear.

[1970-1974]

Even the characters themselves give tongue to the commemorative impulse that motivates any true hero, demonstrating, once again, virtues that are perhaps only arbitrarily related to superlative martial conduct but which are necessarily related to the continuation of oral epic. Oliver's exhortations to fight and remember are echoed by the praise of the poet:

“Lords, Barons, hold your ground!
In God's name I pray you, be careful
To strike good blows, to take and to give them!
We must not forget Charlemagne's ensign.”
Upon this word the French cried out.
Whoever could hear them cry “Munjoy,”
Such a man would remember the deeds of a good vassal.

[1176-1182]

The nearer Roland approaches the moment of his death, the more the action of the poem tends toward that of pure commemoration. Almost surreptitiously a strange substitution of priorities takes place as a heroics of memory displaces a heroics of the sword. In other words, the commemorative performance must ultimately rise to the dramatic surface of its own narrative vehicle. We may observe here the manifestation of a desire that outweighs all others in an oral culture, the need to commemorate. In short, during the final moments of Roland's life we witness a kind of reversal in the process of mimesis: if the oral poet first imitates the voice and gestures of his heroes, in the end it is the hero who imitates the poet.

Once all of the twelve peers but Roland have been killed, he interrupts his heroic struggles and begins to gather up the dead bodies of his companions in order to have them blessed by Archbishop Turpin and to commemorate their heroism with his own voice. Planctus and prayer, poet and priest, answer to the single burden of past and future. The spectacle of the bodies arranged before him, like a dead audience, provokes from Roland a planctus and a series of mimetic gestures that are also those of the poet: indeed, the hero at this point is merely imitating the poet, though with this difference, slight in the eyes of a good Christian: the audience within the poem is dead and will not revive, except, one hopes, in heaven.

Roland's final moments provide insight into what we might call the psychology of commemoration, at least to the degree that an isolated hero appears to be addressing only himself. But it is hardly an individualized psychology, because Roland's formulas of conquests belong to a repertory of deeds that are not his alone, and his voice becomes more and more that of history itself speaking to us. After his attempt to break his sword, Durendal, on a stone, Roland discovers in its imperishability a reminder of the numerous conquests that he himself has made in the past as Charlemagne's vassal. The intrinsic virtue of Roland's sword, which has now become his silent interlocutor, encourages, moreover, a sequence of psychic reflexes that are regressive, both chronologically and in an ontological sense. The sword Durendal, we are told, had been given to Charlemagne by God (through the mediation of an obedient angel) with the instructions that Charlemagne should in turn bestow it on one of his best captains. Thus Roland's sword shines with the light of good works that originate, ultimately, with the Father in heaven. Furthermore, the list of conquests that Roland recalls undoubtedly corresponds to the boundaries of Charlemagne's empire as they would have been imagined by an epic poet at the beginning of the twelfth century. Each name in Roland's list of conquests must have coincided with a whole epic cycle, and in its entirety, this list is a capsule expressing the totality of a history that for the eleventh and twelfth centuries was sacred. Though Roland would hardly pass for an intellectual giant in ages to come, at the time he had only to recite the list of his conquests to show that he knew (and had performed) “everything.”

If it is true that in a commemorative culture the power to recall is a conquest, then Roland's reminiscences—and the violence that instigates them—mark a victory not only over the world but also over himself. Likewise, with regard to the poetic performance, if the poet succeeds, through memory, in making his voice resonate with a certain heroic timbre that is also his own, we may state that the reminiscences of the victorious Roland are consubstantial with a victory of poetic discourse over obstacles in the mind of the temporal speaker: by the blows of one and the phonemes of the other a culture endures.

To the degree that Roland's personal glory opens, through speech, into a less and less differentiated field of forces that includes first the presence of a Charlemagne absent and last the Great Magnet hidden behind everything, Roland's commemorations are infinitely regressive. But such regression cannot occur without a certain destruction of the self: the more the self languishes for communion with the infinite, the more it must confront the corruption of its own finitude. If the self is to liberate its own spirit, then the body (whose ontological status is equal to that of a mere signifier) must give way. The self, in other words, must come home from its exile among those multiple and disparate traces that constitute the palpable world yet point beyond themselves to an original, redeeming presence whose eternal, uncreated, indivisible substance is different—absolutely different—from them. Such is the dilemma facing the Christian hero who carries the logic of commemoration to its limits—that is, to the limits of his mortality.

But this is a dilemma for which the Christian religion has remedies, and those remedies also stem from the faculty of memory. Thus, having commemorated the glory of Charlemagne and finally that of God, Roland engages in another type of reminiscence (whose discourse is no less formulaic), in which he becomes momentarily present to himself. The transition (which I have italicized) is clearly signaled in the text:

He began to remember many different things,
So many lands that he conquered as a good baron.
And sweet France, and the men of his clan,
And Charlemagne, his lord, who nourished him;
He could not restrain himself from weeping and sighing for them
But he does not want to forget himself.
He confesses his sins and prays to God for mercy.

[2377-2383]

By means of his memory, Roland now confesses and succeeds in purging himself of the evil that has held him captive of the world: here, the ritual of commemoration gives rise to an act not or recovery but of expulsion. The self willingly discovers within its own substance a pharmakos whose expulsion cures the difference between body and spirit, or, more generally (but not more abstractly), between signifier and signified, in a universe of speech. Purifying himself, then, of evil through a labor of memory, Roland recalls the beneficial exempla of Lazarus and Daniel, of two mortals in the past who were revived by their faith in God. Thanks again to his memory, Roland is now prepared to quit the vassalage of Charlemagne, his spiritual father and his terrestrial lord, in order to rejoice in an unmediated relationship, facie ad faciem, with God the True Father (Veire Patene), “who never lies.” The first half of the Chanson de Roland is nothing other than an exalted Christian “comedy” of memory—and of signs.

Roland dies in the middle of the poem, however, and it is Charlemagne who inherits the bitter consequences of Roland's heroic splendor and brings to them sharp tragic relief. The Chanson de Roland is populated by characters who are perhaps static, yet our perspective is not so: on the contrary, with the change from a young hero to an old—Charlemagne is a Roland grown old—many of the values and triumphs that seemed so absolute in the first half are thrown radically into question.¹⁹ If it is true that the legend of Roland himself is the most archaic “nucleus” of the epic and that with succeeding eras other characters and episodes (Oliver, Baligant) were added in order to restore symmetries and to revive interest, then we may consider the Roland as a poem in which problems of history are not represented by language, but rather inscribed into language in all of its materiality. Similarly, it seems obvious to me that displacement of Roland by Charlemagne as the central protagonist of this epic also carries with it a disruption of the fundamental epistemic models immanent in the Roland legend, and it is with this shift in mind that I shall now focus on the story of Charlemagne.

From his initial appearance in the Roland, Charlemagne is strangely remote from the events that develop around him. Even though Christians and Saracens agree that Charles is the most powerful man in the world, Charlemagne broods in painful silence over the fatal cleavage in his heroic world. Charlemagne's detachment from that world is expressed most obviously in his two centuries of age, a distance from the glory of youth which no doubt coincided with a twelfth-century audience's sense of its own remoteness from a “heroic” age—the age when oral epic discourse was constituting itself, two or more centuries before. Charlemagne is also strangely undetermined—indecisive, even—with regard to Ganelon's dispute with Roland, even though he knows that Ganelon is a “living devil” and that the division of his army into vanguard and rear guard will result in the destruction of its best heroes. Charlemagne is also uncertain about the sinister prognostications in his dreams: videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate. Charlemagne seems especially remote from the discursive arena around him, in which younger heroes are so quick to argue, threaten, and boast:

He bows his head and begins to ponder.
The emperor holds down his head.
In his words he was never hasty;
His custom is to speak with deliberation [a leisir].

[138-141]

Charlemagne's silence inspires mostly awe in the first half of the poem, yet this same detachment from the motivations of the heroic world will ultimately give rise to a perspective so tragic as to call into question the adequacy of epic language, if not of all language itself. By contrast, Roland is a warrior whose motives and gestures remain profoundly compatible with the ethical values that underlie the traditional formulaic language of his poem, and both the hero and the poet of the first half of the Roland seem to feel that “meaning” is not something that we need to discover, but rather something that we assume and perform as our own: we declare it, we give it off; this is the original but long-forgotten sense of the word hermeneuein, so badly served by its translation as interpretatio.²⁰ In Roland's actions, then, both the language and the values of a commemorative culture find adequate realization, and Roland has every assurance that he will live again, after his death, in the performance of poetic song. The more violent and bloody are his deeds, the more easily they may be remembered and uttered: his victory over the pagans will also be a victory of memory over oblivion. Inversely, he who is most brilliant in battle is also, in the end, he who is the most commemorative: the planctus that generally follows episodes of violence is nothing other than a formulaic type of verbal action which doubles, within the universe of the poem, the commemorative function attributed to the poem by the community of audience and poet attempting to recover, through song, their own heroic origins: oral epic usually tends toward the elegiac, and the elegiac presupposes the epic.

As he becomes the protagonist, Charlemagne initiates profound disruptions in the coherence of the epic imagination. Not only is Charlemagne unable to grasp, except dimly, the prophecies of the future revealed to him in his dreams (much less to alter that future by producing alternative “interpretations” by his actions); he is equally incapable of reuniting himself with Roland—his nephew, his “son” and link with his own heroic past—and of triumphing in the future: “Against me will rebel the Saxons, / the Hungarians, the Bulgarians” (2921-2922). During the entire second half of the poem, the memory of an absent Roland eclipses (even literally, at one point) all apprehension of the present. Not even the vengeance of Charlemagne on the Saracens (“an eye for an eye” is an especially futile type of “commemoration” because it is also a new beginning)²¹ can recover a splendor of young blood irrecoverably lost: at best, the joy of new victories can be only a forgetting of the pain of Roland's loss, rather than a remembrance. Revenge no longer works; hence for Charlemagne there can be no triumph in revenge. To the degree that the heroes of this poem are emanations of a poet's voice, apart from which they have no separate existence, it should not surprise us that, along with its new hero, the very language of the Chanson de Roland should inscribe into itself—into its very formulas—a kind of subtle nostalgia, during which a present moment in speech is experienced as a falling off, as a decomposition of a more splendid heroic discourse that was once possible in the universe of the poem. Such is the case, I propose, in the narration of Charlemagne's exhaustion in his grief for Roland; for, if we look closely at the passages evoking the emperor's grief, we see that they are comprised of a sequence of formulas—or of antiformulas—which systematically reverse the content of those earlier formulaic passages where heroes joyfully took up arms in brilliant sunlight in preparation for the fatal glee of combat. Consider, first, this passage, in which the pagan and Frankish forces poise themselves for the attack:

The pagans arm themselves with Saracen hauberks,
Most of which have three layers of chain.
They lace their helmets, the best of Saragossa.
They gird up their swords of Viennese steel.
They bear nobel shields, and spears from Valence,
And flags that are white, blue, and crimson.
They leave their mules and palfreys;
They mount their steeds and ride in closed ranks.
Clear was the day and beautiful the sun.
There was no armor that did not flame in the light.
A thousand trumpets sound, to make it more beautiful.
The noise is great, and the Franks hear it.
Oliver says, “My comrade, I believe
That we shall do battle with the Saracens.”
Roland answers, “Ah, may God grant it to us!”

[994-1008]

Consider next how, along with the now exhausted hero Charlemagne, heroic language itself is generated as antiformulas that acquire special poignancy because of their counterpoint with a more glorious heroic discourse, now part of an irretrievable narrative past. A world of warriors once teeming with potency, movement, and exuberance, buoyant with sunlight, color, and fine weapons, has given way to a wasteland (terre déserte) of darkness and the dim pallor of moonlight; here men and horses are too fatigued even to stand up under the weight of armor or saddle, much less to rejoice in their recent revenge. This dark night of the heroic soul threatens to become a dark night of poetic language. Even the name “Joyous” given to Charlemagne's sword is invested with a torturesome paradox of a joy born in suffering and death, since Charlemagne's imperial sword contains the tip of the very spear that killed Christ, the man-god nailed to a cross:

The French dismount on the barren land.
They have taken the saddles from their horses.
They remove from their heads the reins of gold.
They put them afield, where there is much fresh grass.
They can give them no further care.
Whoever is that tired sleeps on the ground.
On that night they do not set up guard.
The emperor has lain down in a field.
His great spear is by the baron's head.
That night he does not wish to disarm himself.
He wears his great saffron-colored hauberk,
His helmet laced, which is of gemmed gold.
His sword Joyous is girded at his side,
A sword without peer, which gleams thirty times a day.
We know all about the lance
With which our Lord was killed on the cross.
Charles has the point, thanks be to God,
And has had it encased in the golden handle.
Because of that honor and its great goodness
The name Joyous is given to the sword.
The Frankish barons must never forget it.
And for that they cry out “Munjoy”
So that nothing can resist them.
Clear is the night and the moon is shining.
Charles lies down, but he grieves for Roland,
And for Oliver he is greatly weighed down
And for the twelve peers and the Frankish people.
He left them bloodied in death at Ronceval.
He cannot hold back from weeping and lamenting.
And he prays that God protect their souls.
The king is tired, for his pain is very great.
He falls asleep, for he can endure no more.
Now the French are sleeping all about the fields.
Not a horse can stand.
If he wants grass, he grazes lying down.
He who has suffered much has learned much.

[2489-2524]

In short, a tragic flourish of counterpoint between joy and grief operates in this passage, not just thematically, but also at the more material level of poetic language as a medium. Though it is true that other formulaic descriptions of the heroic taking up of arms occur in the second half of the Roland, their promise is never fulfilled by unequivocally glorious deeds. Epic language is becoming differentiated and alienated from itself—or, to use the terms of Bakhtin, is passing from the monologic (which is the precondition of “truth” in language) to the dialogic, where “truth” is at best equivocal and relative. This dissipation is the inscription of a hero's death into the poetic Word.

The amazing and poignant gestures of Charlemagne that follow in the Roland dramatize, among other things, a very real anxiety of the medieval world before the dilemma of signs: the spirit, it would seem, does not always vivify. Unable for the moment to regenerate either the world or the word by a brassy new sequence of heroic deeds of his own, Charlemagne withdraws and devotes himself to the task of commemorating as meticulously as possible the final gestures of his nephew. No longer a theater of blind, unreflective action, the “present” world reduces itself to the status of a mere trace, a text inscribed with the past glory of Roland; thus, as Charlemagne walks reverently about the spot where Roland died, he becomes less an epic soldier than an epic déchiffreur who interprets Roland's sublime hieroglyphs of blood on grass, his calligraphy of sword blows incised in stone:

When the emperor goes seeking his nephew
He finds the flowers of so many plants in the field
That are crimson with the blood of our barons!
Pity takes him; he cannot hold back from weeping.
He came beneath two trees,
He recognized the blows of Roland on three stones;
It is no wonder if Charles feels grief.
He goes now by foot, and goes forth at a full run.
Between both his hands …
He faints over him, so great is his anguish.

[2870-2880]

Charlemagne vainly attempts to restore the “presence” of Roland by embracing his nephew's dead body—that is to say, a thing whose pure thingness is both an irreducible presence and a conspicuous absence. Despite his efforts to commemorate, regression beyond the inertness of the signifier is impossible for Charlemagne. Imprisoned in a totally corporeal presence that is a total absence, Charlemagne and the Franks now faint, as if life could symptomatically possess death, its opposite; or, as if by miming the dead, life could somehow “represent” what has been denied to it. But Charlemagne's struggles are as vain as they are extravagant, and he is condemned to survive in a world that will neither signify nor vanish altogether: a “desert,” as Charlemagne calls it, a barrenness of futile redundancies. Indeed, the poem's “end” will be merely another unhappy beginning. Thus the devastation of the Frankish empire has left Charlemagne empty of all desire, except the desire to conclude his “exile” in history in order to rejoin the fellowship of his barons, spiritually present to each other in the timeless kingdom of the dead:

“My nephew is dead, who conquered so much for me. …
Who will lead my army with such force
When he is dead, who each day led us forth?
Ah, France, how deserted now you are.
So great is my grief that I no longer want to live!…
May God grant it, St. Mary's son,
That before I come to the great gates of Size
My soul may be severed from my body,
And be placed among theirs,
And my flesh be buried beside theirs.”

[2920-2942]

Broadly speaking, the vision of death imparted to Roland's passion at Roncevaux is ultimately one of compensation, reintegration, and even fruition as martyrs blossom into the “holy flowers” of the saved. Roland and his companions had been absolved and blessed well in advance of their dying, and after their death Roland's last gesture as a good feudal lord was to gather together the bodies of his peers and to commemorate their glory in song; shortly Roland would incant his own salvation as well and be borne aloft to heaven by Gabriel and Michael, God's most chivalrous angels. Thus all Christian warriors could be certain, it seemed, of being reunited in heaven's sublime peerage and of being remembered on earth in song.

But the experience of death that prevails in the wasteland that Charles inherits is quite opposite. Here death is not a reward but a punishment that degrades even the punishers. We witness first the tenuous triumph of a skinny Thierry over a magnificent Pinabel; then we are told that thirty of Ganelon's relatives are hanged for having pledged their loyalty to his person and his cause; finally we witness the drawing and quartering of Ganelon himself, a knight who quite properly defended his honor under the old dispensation only to find himself defined as a traitor under the new. In contrast with the ultimately integrative vision of death that was manifested earlier in the martyrdom of Charlemagne's troops, death becomes a centrifugal force, a violent dispersion of things both material and spiritual as Ganelon's limbs are torn from his body in “splendid torment” by four wild, thirsty horses.²² One last time chivalric blood spews formulaically onto the green grass, but now it is the unredeemable blood of a traitor. Not only the heroic world but heroic language itself has lost its center:

Each of his nerves is tightly stretched
And all his body's members split apart:
The bright blood spills onto the green grass.
Ganelon has died like a hateful traitor.

[3970-3973]

Such as it is, the conclusion of the Song of Roland points more to unending violence than to forgiveness or consolation. True, there is the baptism of Bramimonde, a pagan woman who abandons the pagan law for that of the true God, yet this is hardly material for a new epic; if anything, it marks the obsolescence of the old. The past hangs over the present only as memories that are painfully in conflict. The hardships of Charlemagne, who must set forth once more, this time for the city of Imphe in the perhaps infinitely distant land of Bire, are the hardships of a man who has come to hate the heroic role with which history has burdened him; and it is no less clear that this desolate, two-hundred-year-old man is radically at odds with a poetic language that will neither serve him nor let him die:

The emperor does not want to set forth.
“O God,” says the king, “how painful is my life.”
He weeps from his eyes and pulls on his white beard.

[3999-4001]

It seems to me that the tragedy of the Roland is not primarily that of a poet who has “used” language to express the purgative anguish of nobel souls: the Roland is less a tragedy in language than a tragedy of language itself, the loss of force in the heroes of this poem being a way of dramatizing a more pervasive loss of signification in the world. It is a poem that transcribes into its very substance a loss of transparency—of apparence, to borrow Jean Bodel's term—and a fatal discovery of the opacity of signifiers and, by extension, of all things. A cleavage is produced in the Roland between thought and action, between the knower and the known, and between the world and language. The seemingly permanent semantic universe of formulaic discourse is disrupted by discontinuities that are those of time itself, which an ethics of memory cannot finally remedy. If true temporal perspective is lacking in the verb system of the Roland, its semantic and cognitive shifts express this perspective in a perhaps more profound and tragic way. Meaninglessness in language is the soul's death. As John of Salisbury wrote, near the time when the Roland was written down, “A word's force [vis] consists in its meaning [sensus]. Without the latter, it is useless, and (so to speak) dead. Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word.”²³

The ending of the Roland may be admired and explained in many ways, and ever since the poem's discovery a century and a half ago, each generation of readers has discovered in it their own provocations and rewards. By way of conclusion, I should like to return briefly to a problem that I deferred earlier, one that stems, frankly, from concerns of our own time: that the Roland, for all the marks of its oral tradition, is available to us not as an oral performance, but only as a written text. If it is true, as scholars claim (correctly, I believe), that the most archaic legends of the Roland endured three centuries and more as oral narrative, what new cultural constraints, we may ask, were brought to these legends by the intervention of the technè of writing? If it is true that any narrative is shaped at least in part by the process of its dissemination, is it not possible that the dyptich structure of the Roland documents, in some painful way, a historical transition from an oral épistémè to one of writing—a passage necessarily seen, however, from the experience of a culture of scriptors contemplating its pre-history as some kind of paradise of the oral word?

Admittedly, we know very little about the way a culture of scriptors selects the legends (or their variants) it will preserve from the infinitely variable repertory available in an oral tradition, but I would say that it is safe to assume that as a rule writers tend to choose material—and to organize it—in accordance with their own mode of experiencing the world. Hence it is perhaps not unreasonable to speculate that at least part of the fascination that the legends of Roland and Charlemagne held (and still hold) for a culture of scriptors was precisely that they delineated, in the successes and failures of their principal heroes, a problematic of memory that had special poignancy for the mind of the scriptor laboring in the language of interpersonal communication (as opposed to Latin) to create, with his text, a material object that would “forget” him and his “truth” as it became closed upon itself and assumed the alien existence of an economically negotiable commodity. I would suggest that the story of Charlemagne, which is one of progressive alienation and isolation from a world of people, things, and language, is also a story in which the scriptor found a reflection of his own potential destiny. Given the importance in the Middle Ages of the notion of the world-as-text, Charlemagne's tragedy in the world is one in which the scriptor could no doubt easily find analogies with his own potential fate in the labor of letters, which were seen as arbitrary signs of arbitrary signs, hence doubly remote from the reality they would represent.

Of course, such conjectures can hardly be “scientifically” proved—but neither can it ever be proved that “our” Roland died historically in Roncevaux or, on the contrary, that the Roland sprang during some “sacred minute” into the mind of an inspired “Franc de France.” Though it would be silly to suggest that the Song of Roland is first and foremost a song of writing, we have every reason to examine its implicit models of communication for indications of disruption and change that might correspond to an epistemological crisis rooted in the competing cultural functions of speech and writing.

Though I believe that there are many such indications, I shall mention only one. It involves a fundamental shift in the conceptions that Roland and Charlemagne express, respectively, about the mode in which the memory of Roncevaux will be conserved and communicated to the future. Roland, one will recall, hurls himself into the fray with the conviction that his legend will live on in song: his epic blows will animate the performance of both bard and hero in generations to come, and his blood will flow forever in words. Charlemagne, by contrast, though he quite properly deciphers Roland's last moments and delivers the most moving and elaborate planctus in the whole poem, immediately thereafter undertakes to monumentalize the glory of Roland and Oliver not in song but in the more viable medium of stone:

The emperor had Roland's body prepared,
And Oliver's and the Archbishop Turpin's.
He had all three opened right before him,
And had all of their hearts wrapped in silk,
And placed inside a coffin of white marble. …
He brought his nephew back to Blaye,
And Oliver, his noble companion,
And the Archbishop, who was wise and bold.
He places the lords in white coffins:
The barons are buried at St. Roman.

[2962-2966, 3689-3693]

If we assume (as did John of Salisbury) that there is a close affinity between stone monuments and texts—each conserves the memory of something important that is absent—and that the epitaph is an instance of textuality in one of its most awesome and enduring forms, then we may see in Charlemagne's instincts a fundamental change in the notion of monumentality. This change coincides, moreover, with a general tendency of twelfth-century vernacular culture, as its languages assumed the status of writing, or of grammatica, to confer upon these languages a function of “monumentality” (Paul Zumthor) previously reserved for Latin. (Such concepts would of course be elaborated more specifically later by Dante.) Since we discover suspiciously late in the Roland (v. 2955) that Charlemagne's army is fairly swarming with “bishops, abbots, monks, canons, and tonsured priests,” we may safely deduce that at the end of the eleventh century these clerical custodians of the letter became suddenly quite eager to identify themselves as proper heirs to Roland's legend. Moreover, with later written versions of the story of Roncevaux, the story of the burial of the twelve peers tended to become more elaborate (and contradictory), reflecting, once again, the desire of literate clerical poets to appropriate the prestige of Roland's legend by attaching it to their parish or monastery.²⁴ Such details may, of course, be interpreted in ways that have no necessary bearing on the historical function of texts, but there is no question but that even in the twelfth century such leading churchmen as John of Salisbury and Thomas Aquinas argued very clearly for the text as the privileged device by which society conserved its memories of the past and by which men distant in time and space remained “present” to each other.²⁵

Such claims for the text as society's best aide-mémoire are disturbingly complacent, however, and one may easily imagine that for poets and their audiences the transition from an oral or preliterate culture to that of inscriptions and texts involved some kind of violence. Yet if a radical anxiety about the difference between uttering and writing was felt at such a time, it was surely not easily expressed (in writing). Perhaps in this light we should look more carefully at Charlemagne's personal tragedy to see what analogies it might have with the scriptor's experience of detachment from the world about which he writes. To formulate an admittedly mannered question: If Roland is Charlemagne's “right hand” cut off, is this not also the writer's right hand writing itself off?

No culture could have been more obsessed with the problems and dangers of textuality than the Christian Middle Ages; and lest writing become, as Socrates had earlier called it, “the language of the dead,” Christian culture maintained potent weapons. Not the least of them may be found in the Bible, the archtext par excellence, which perpetrated its hermeneutic dream (one of an ultimate presence, a voice spoken and heard in the duration of all time)²⁶ precisely by anathematizing those who lived by the law of the opaque letter, those who took the text of the Bible “literally”: in particular, the scriptor as mere scribe, to be associated with the despised Pharisees. For the scribe is one who lives by externals: he favors the signifier at the expense of the signified; he neglects what is “inside” the otherwise killing letter. Here we may recall Christ's magnificent curse of the scribes who have defiled the temple and who have dared to sit blindly on the throne of Moses, the inspired author of the Pentateuch. Surely the curse helped prevail upon the early witnesses of this living Word to mind their alphas and omegas. It is an expansive, vocal curse, of which I need cite only this passage in which Christ compares the subversive text of the scribe to the empty cup and the tomb:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but within they are full of robbery and uncleanness. Thou blind Pharisee! clean first the inside of the cup and the dish, that the outside too may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you are like whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear to men beautiful, but within are full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness. So you outwardly appear just to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.²⁷

Notes

1. Luke 22:19.

2. I Corinthians 13:12.

3. Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum XCIX: Confessions, 12.13.16 and 13.15.16-18.

4. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.13.12, trans. D. W. Robertson (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 14.

5. See Confessions, 1.13.20, and On Christian Doctrine, 1.4.4 (Robertson, p. 10). See also E. Vance, “Le Moi comme langage: Saint Augustin et l'autobiographie,” Poétique, 14 (1973), 164-177; and “Augustine's Confessions and the Grammar of Selfhood,” Genre, 6 (1973), 1-28.

6. M. I. Finley, “Myth, Memory and History, History and Theory,” Studies in the Philosophy of History, 4 (1965), 281-302; E. A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); J. Russo and B. Simon, “Homeric Psychology and Oral Epic Tradition,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968), 483-498; F. A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); J.-P. Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les grecs (Paris: Maspéro, 1965); Marcel Détienne, Les Maitres de vérité dans la Grèce archaique (Paris: Maspéro, 1967); and Berkeley Peabody, The Winged Word (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975). I would like to acknowledge a personal debt to Professors Russo, Vernant, and Détienne, who as colleagues have generously shared their knowledge with me in the past.

7. Vernant, p. 53; all translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.

8. See Yates, pp. 63-114.

9. Aristotle, De memoria, 451b18.

10. Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957), XIV, 292-293.

11. Freud, “The Uncanny,” Standard Edition, XVII, 219-252.

12. La Chanson de Roland, ed. and trans. G. Moignet (Paris: Bordas, 1969). All subsequent references are to this edition; English translations are mine.

13. I am grateful to Paul Zumthor for sharing this insight with me.

14. Plato, Ion, 533d-534d, trans. L. Cooper (1938), reprinted in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1961), pp. 219-220.

15. J. de Grouchy, De musica, in “Die Musiklehre des Johannes de Grocheo,” ed. J. Wolf, Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft (1899), I. 90.

16. See Yates, chap. 1.

17. Apart from his courage, Ganelon represents an interesting coincidence of ethical principles, both good and bad: he is courageous but also a rhetorician; he is also a liar, a traitor, and a negotiator of peace and monetary exchange. As a creature of evil, Ganelon, like his coconspirators, always turns the signifier against its proper signified.

18. For an interesting study of this epistemological change, see Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

19. In the discussion that follows, I draw freely on points made previously in my book Reading the Song of Roland (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970).

20. Jean Pépin, “L'Herméneutique ancienne,” Poétique, 23 (1975), 291-300. It is interesting to note that in v. 2454 of the Roland, an angel promises Charlemagne clartet, by which he will achieve vengeance. This use of the word clartet shows the semantic overlapping of the notions of “light,” “force,” and “understanding” (as illumination). Darkness, by contrast, seems to be associated with impotence and confusion.

21. “Venge your sons, your brothers and your heirs
    Who died the other evening at Roncevaux!”

    [3411-3412]

22. I owe this insight in part to a sentence in a seminar research paper by Lucie Brind'Amour, University of Montreal, 1975.

23. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, II.4, trans. Daniel McGarry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), p. 8.

24. Ramon Menendez Pidal, La Chanson de Roland et la tradition épique des Francs, rev. ed., ed. René Louis, trans. I. Cluzel (Paris: Picard, 1960), pp. 112-126.

25. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, II.12-13; Aristotle, On Interpretation, Commentary by St. Thomas and Cajetan, trans. J. Oesterle (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1962), II.2., p. 24.

26. Psalms 18:2: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day pours out the word to day, and night to night imparts knowledge; not a word nor a discourse whose voice is not heard; through all the earth their voice resounds, and to the ends of the world their message.”

27. Matthew 23:25-28.