HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

LEGENDARY HISTORY: HISTORIA AND FABULA 391for the group, for the fissure which has seemingly opened up betweenlife as experienced and the world of the imagination. It converts memoryand recollection into prophecy. It takes on the diffuse ideology ofa collectivity, upon which it confers the reassuring dignity of thatwhich contrives to escape the decadence of this world. By the selfsamewords that it uses to declare history to be true, it transmutes it intoa timeless fiction. Thus history remains, but only by abolishing itselfas historicity. 15This “triumphant timelessness”, Zumthor argues, is guaranteed bythe dramatic and, as it were, liturgical aspects of the epic chant, “inthe here and now, in the present, warm, virtual dialogue between theperformer-singer and those who listen to him.” Composition of thepoem in assonanced laisses only reinforces this impression:A progression establishes itself by dint of the deep narrative structuresemployed; but it does not predominate: repetitions, parallelisms, breaks,contradictions, each moment of the narrative discourse is fundamentallya present, forever the same. 16The performers of these often very lengthy songs (comprising severalthousands of lines) recounted to their listeners the gesta principumor acts of prowess wrought by the great men of a relatively distantpast. The chansons de geste were ostensibly inspired by the deeds ofheroes from the great noble families who had lived in the Carolingianera. The narrative of their history/story was conceived as a seriesof events now legendary in nature, now based upon more or lessauthenticated fact. The chansons de geste soon developed into cyclesrelating to particular families (the geste of the king or of Charlemagne;the geste of Garin de Montglane; the William of Orange cycle). Ifthese tales of distant conflicts (most frequently between Christiansand Muslims) found such an enthusiastic audience around 1100 andwell beyond, in the royal and feudal France of the first crusades,this was doubtless because they re-awakened in contemporary mindsthe memory of an earlier struggle that once again was becominghighly relevant, thus helping them to make sense of the challengesfaced by their own generation. They presented their aristocratic audiencewith a profusion of heroic acts, which were sometimes tragicbut invariably glorious, acts carried out for the most part in the15Zumthor (1975), 238–39; my translation.16Zumthor (1975); my translation.