The Scottish Legendary

Towards a poetics of hagiographic narration

Eva von Contzen

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526100276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

This is the first book-length study of the Scottish Legendary of the late fourteenth century. The only extant collection of saints' lives in the vernacular from medieval Scotland, the work scrutinises the dynamics of hagiographic narration, its implicit assumptions about literariness, and the functions of telling the lives of the saints. The fifty saints' legends are remarkable for their narrative art: the enjoyment of reading the legends is heightened, while didactic and edifying content is toned down. Focusing on the role of the narrator, the depiction of the saintly characters, their interiority, as well as temporal and spatial parameters, it is demonstrated that the Scottish poet has adapted the traditional material to the needs of an audience versed in reading romance and other secular genres. This study scrutinises the implications of the Scottish poet's narrative strategies with respect to the Scottishness of the Legendary and its overall place in the hagiographic landscape of late medieval Britain.

1

Towards a narrative poetics of medieval saints’ lives

Approaching the saints’ lives in the Scottish Legendary as narratives implicates a degree of formalism that requires a justification. Even though storytelling is an activity and always embedded in larger cultural contexts, the focus on the product of this activity – its form – suffers from the bias of being fixed, closed, inflexible, and ahistorical. Formalism, however, does not necessarily have to be these things; in fact, an acute awareness of form can lead to quite liberating results if one acknowledges that form is never an end in itself and cannot be dissociated from either the narrative product or process under scrutiny. Narration is always formal in that all narratives comply with some sort of form; even any conscious or unconscious deviation from or breaches of or plays with form are measured against a standard of formal orderliness and convention. There is no un-form: narratives operate on a scale of forms and formal devices that can be more or less ordered, systematic, obvious, comprehensible, chaotic, obscure, and so forth. Catherine Gallagher distinguishes between two main senses of ‘form’: form as arrangement, and form as style:

Form as arrangement or structure seems molar, an outline of the whole; form as style seems molecular, an enlargement of detail. Form as structure comes into view only from a distance; form as style requires unusually close proximity.¹

The two types are intimately connected with notions of temporality, more specifically, with the attempt of suspending time. Gallagher argues that they both ultimately ‘arrest narrative flow, one by generalizing an enduring pattern toward which the moments contribute and the other by freezing a moment for analysis’.² However, it is not form itself that ‘arrests narrative flow’ but the critic who in her analysis isolates formal structures. Of course literary criticism cannot imitate or maintain the experience of temporality that narratives create, but there is no reason why it should. On the contrary, paying attention to the intricate patterns of form can help understand how narratives function in their temporal dimension because form always implies motivation. Hence a formal analysis is central to gaining a deeper understanding of how a narrative ‘works’, that is, how it creates meaning, how it influences its audience, and how it unfolds its specific aesthetic. The aesthetic we find in the Scottish Legendary is of course in no way formalised. It emerges, rather, as an implicit ‘programme’ or poetics from the overall consistent and regular employment of formal elements in and through narrative.

Narrative theory and the Scottish Legendary: a pragmatic approach

A poetics that manifests itself in the practice of hagiographic narration in the Scottish Legendary can be usefully approached from the perspective of narrative theory, the central concern of which is the analysis of narrative as motivated structures. Although narratology has been firmly established as an influential field within literary studies at least since the 1960s, medieval studies have generally been reluctant, to say the least, to engage with the theories and methods developed by narratologists. There are good reasons why: in its early days, so-called classical narratology was an exclusively structuralist endeavour that focused on one genre in particular (the novel) from the eighteenth century to contemporary examples.³ This has led to the formation of an implicit ‘canon’ of texts and genres privileged for narratological analysis. Contrary to its claims of near-universality and flexibility, classical narratology has mainly concentrated on the novel and privileged this one genre as the paradigm for its theoretical overlay. To apply theories of classical narratology to medieval narrative consequently means to read these texts from the perspective of modern literature. The parameters offered by a classical narratological theory, such as Claude Bremond’s or Gérard Genette’s, are biased and hence draw our attention to features which are relevant to novels but not necessarily to medieval saints’ legends, and often neglect elements that are important in saints’ lives but do not occur in the novel at all.⁴ These early structuralist theories were interested mainly in structure, in Gallagher’s terms, form as arrangement, that is, in large, macro elements rather than the more detailed structures on a smaller scale (form as style).

In addition, the main problem inherent in the structuralist approaches has always been that the ‘structures’ of structuralism reveal ideas about the text that are not necessarily deduced from but rather read into it, not to mention the inevitable neglect and exclusion of any form of context, whether cultural, social, or historical. This is why in recent years narratology has continually moved towards broader, context-inclusive applications. In so-called post-classical narratology, emerging in the 1980s, narratology saw a shift away from the text to its processes of reception. Narrative came to be seen as a process or act rather than an object, which paved the way for ethical criticism, reader-response theory, and, based on the various possible identities of authors, readers, and characters within a narrative, post-colonial, gender and feminist narratologies.⁵ These approaches also turn from macro-structure to the small, detailed, specific elements in narrative texts that create meaning on a narrower plane. As part of the so-called ‘pragmatic shift’, structure is regarded as functional not only within the narrative text itself, but also as fulfilling certain aims or purposes outside the world of the text.⁶ A pragmatically oriented theory of narratology, then, investigates narrative structures ‘not as self-contained isolated units but as strategic elements in a pragmatic context’.⁷ All of the most recent narratological approaches are indebted to interdisciplinary work, oriented towards contextual and historical issues, and interested in individual narratives rather than generic structures, while focusing on the dynamic processes of narratives.⁸

Since classical narratology has not received much attention or practical application among medievalists, it is small wonder that most post-classical narrative theories have equally passed by medieval studies so far. There is little need in a field to challenge and revise something that, by and large, scholars have not engaged with in the first place. Thus, it is symptomatic that Tony Davenport in his recent introduction to medieval narrative provides an overview of medieval concepts of narratives and genres but nowhere links them to modern methodological frameworks of narrative analysis. Rather, Davenport criticises the difficulties medievalists face in terms of narrative theory as ‘the variety of medieval storytelling makes one realize the more limited range of styles and effects in modern written narrative which has almost entirely, in European and American languages at any rate, restricted itself to the novel and the short story in prose’.⁹ Similarly, the entry on ‘Medieval Narrative’ in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory concludes that:

modern theories may need to be modified for the purpose of analysing medieval narratives, which depend on period-specific concepts of fiction and the author, are based on distinctive causal and chronological structures, represent characters as types, and were performed aloud in a communal context.¹⁰

The careful wording ‘may need to be modified’ indicates the uncertainty about how to come to terms with medieval texts and their narrative design and structure. The fact that existing narrative theories pose problems is obviously recognised and acknowledged, but the problem itself remains unresolved.¹¹ Medievalists may justifiably be sceptical about the benefits of narrative theory, especially since a number of their own approaches overlap, at least in terms of their aims, with narratological ones. For instance, (medieval) rhetoric has been used as a means to analyse narrative texts, which relies on grammar and logic, in ways not at all dissimilar to classical narratology.¹² Yet, with their focus on narrative texts, medievalists would be prime users of narrative theory. In addition to my scrutiny of the Scottish Legendary, it is one of the purposes to demonstrate the extent to which a narratological approach can be beneficial for medieval studies.

Given the inadequacy of many existing narratological theories, one may well ask whether a narratological theory can still be of use at all. Inherent in all theories is of course the potential danger of imposing readings that pertain to the theory rather than the texts, and it goes without saying that there is no such thing as an ‘objective’ reading of a text. In that respect, whether a theory is used to access a text or not makes a difference only insofar as it is easier to trace possible biases in a systematic approach than in one that lacks a clear structure. If, however, a theoretical approach is self-conscious of its theoretical implications, and tested against the fallacy of imposing its premises on the object of study, it grants literary scholars the opportunity of accessing a text by means of a comprehensible, systematic, and (within certain limits) repeatable way that may be termed quasi-scientific. This is what narrative theory promises. Although the analysis of the Scottish Legendary, as of any piece of literature, can never be conclusive and unambiguous, a narratological theory provides us with an approximation of the narrative means and functions in the compilation, at least with respect to the variables we consider and the parameters we use. Narrative structures create meaning, and by accessing these structures within a text we can discover and uncover its meanings and the various meaningful elements that, taken together, form the whole.

The features of the Scottish Legendary that will be dealt with in the following chapters cover the core areas of narrative theory: the roles and functions of the narrator, character depiction and interaction, perspective and point of view as well as time and space. Such a comprehensive approach to the narrative design of medieval saints’ legends means that we will enter unknown territory. While the features just mentioned are obviously not only relevant for the stories in the Scottish Legendary, the specifics of hagiographic narration call for a careful handling of the parameters and theoretical terminology we apply. As Theodor Wolpers has remarked, late medieval hagiography cannot be adequately described by the terminology and means of conventional literary aesthetics but requires catering for its special religious functions.¹³ Most of the few existing studies that do address the narrativity of hagiographic tales or other medieval genres are, however, contained within the parameters of classical narratological approaches. Examples include Alain Boureau’s 1984 study of the Legenda aurea, J. D. W. Crowther’s analysis of point of view and narrative design in the legend of Mary of Egypt, and Karen Bjelland’s article on questions of voice and perspective in the South English Legendary.¹⁴ The structuralist emphasis of these studies invariably limits the impact of their findings.

The list of studies that belong to the post-classical tradition of narrative theory and that deal with saints’ legends is even shorter: these are Monika Fludernik’s theory of a ‘natural’ narratology and Rick Altman’s recent suggestion of A Theory of Narrative.¹⁵ In both cases, the overall focus is post-classical, diachronic, and inclusive in that the two scholars also account for medieval texts and explicitly seek to historicise narratology. Fludernik takes human everyday experiences and features of oral storytelling as the basis for her analysis, arguing that the spoken and the written mode of narrative are not separated but based on the same underlying premises. These can be described in terms of the two central processes of narrativisation and narrativity, which focus on the human a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Scottish Legendary and narrative art
• 1 Towards a narrative poetics of medieval saints’ lives
• 2 Teacher and poet: the narrator in the Scottish Legendary
• 3 Words and deeds: character depiction and direct discourse
• 4 Putting the saint in perspective: ideology and hagiographic narration
• 5 Saintly interiority: narrating conscience and consciousness
• 6 The past, a foreign country: time, space, and the Scottishness of the Scottish Legendary
• Conclusion: A poetics of hagiographic narration
• Appendix: The Scottish Legendary: authorship, dialect, and arrangement
• Bibliography
• Index