Features of the poetics of the medieval collection of prose "Roman Deeds" (studying a new book by Svetlana Neretina "No word is better than another". Philosophy and Literature")

Rozin Vadim Markovich Doctor of Philosophy Chief Scientific Associate, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences  109240, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12 str.1, kab. 310 rozinvm@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Among other remarkable reconstructions of short stories, for example, "The Concept of Love: Peter and Heloise" or "The Mystery of Petrarch", the novella "Paradoxes of the Roman Acts" attracts attention. I set the task to characterize the poetics of the stories from the collection "Roman Acts", realizing that in fact this poetics has already been largely considered in this novella. In this regard, my analysis will complement Neretina's interesting and in-depth research. In order for the reader to understand what material in the novella was subject to analysis, I will give two stories from the collection.   

"The stories were like this: the title, an integral part of the composition. The title reveals the essence of the case. He was followed by the actual narration; the so-called addenda closed the story: note, butt (appllicatio), moralization (moralisatio), explanation of mystical and spiritual meanings…

"N 181. About adultery

It is reported that one king kept a lion, a lioness and a leopard, whom he loved very much. One day, when the lion was away, the lioness started a love game with a leopard. In order for the lion not to feel the stench of betrayal emanating from her, she usually bathed in a spring near the royal palace. The king has repeatedly observed this from behind the fence and once ordered the source to be closed. The lion returned and smelled the stench of betrayal. Then, in the presence of everyone, he condemned the lioness and killed her, although he was very worried.

Mystically, it means: King ? Heavenly Father, the lion is our Lord Jesus Christ, i.e. the Lion from the tribe of Judah, and the lioness is the human soul, often entering into a criminal relationship with the leopard, i.e. with the devil. A soul entering into such a relationship can be saved if it resorts to confession. If she falls without confession and sorrow, she will be condemned by Jesus according to a just verdict, for it is said about the evildoers “Go, you damned, into eternal fire" <...>

 The novella N1 “About Love” tells how a certain rich and powerful king Pompey had a beautiful daughter, whom he loved so much that he assigned five knights to guard her. But a certain duke saw her in the window, fell in love, achieved her reciprocity, and the lovers fled. As it often happens, the lovers were caught up, the kidnapper was killed, and the daughter was married off, showered with gifts. On the mottled tunic, a gift from his father, woven with a beautiful pattern, there was an inscription: “I have forgiven you, do not sin again!” On his own ringlet: “Your dignity is from me.” On another ringlet: “I have loved you, learn to love.” On the next one: “What did I do? How much did you do? Why did you do it?” <…>

From the addendum we learn that Pompey is a heavenly king, and the duke turned out not to be a passionate lover, but a devil, the daughter is a reasonable soul, five knights of the bodyguards are five senses... all the sayings written on her tunic and rings are taken from the holy books ? the Apocalypse, Zachariah, etc.".  ^{[4, pp. 128, 138, 156]}

Neretina rightly notes that the stories in the Roman Acts look strange and incomprehensible to the modern reader, and the medieval man seems to be "made of a different dough." ^{[4, p, 125]} Therefore, in order to disenchant these stories, so to speak, and to get acquainted with a person of the Middle Ages necessary for their understanding, she offers a very meaningful interpretation and analysis of the "Roman Deeds". Before proceeding to this analysis, I will briefly describe the research methodology that Neretina discusses in the "Preface" to the book.  Moreover, this methodology is interesting in itself and looks like an independent study.  

         Let's pay attention to the second part of the title of the book – "Philosophy and Literature". It correlates with two parts of the Roman Deeds stories – a narrative quite similar to a literary construction, and an addenda (moralization), which can be attributed to a philosophical statement. Neretina has one common position in relation to these two parts: she interprets the concept of "utterance" in such a way that it includes both narratives of art and philosophy. "This book," writes Svetlana Sergeevna, "appeared as a result of my long–standing interest in the problem of utterance: how and in what forms is it produced? And if it is a book, then what kind of work can it be attributed to: is it a philosophical treatise, dialogue, short story, prose. Poetry, what is usually called literature or literature" ^{[4, p. 5]}. Such an approach, in which not only philosophy and art do not differ, but rather they consciously relate Neretina to the same reality, forms the first thing I want to draw attention to.      

Second, what kind of reality is this? Neretina argues that this is the world of medieval culture and within it, indeed, the reality of the utterance, relating to what we could call medieval art (true, to the point of understanding that this art is completely different from ours, New European) and medieval philosophy (again, to the point of understanding that this philosophy was significantly different from the New European one). In this medieval world, God created the world (things) according to the word, and man, imitating the Creator, using words (speaking out), creates works of literature.

At the same time, according to Neretina, the mechanism (process) of such creation was groped and described by a number of thinkers, starting with St. Augustine, and then the names of Severin Boethius, Peter Abelard, and in our time Etienne Gilson and Martin Heidegger are indicated. This mechanism is quite complex: on the one hand, it is semiotic – a statement starting with a sound, opening the way to meaning and things, on the other – onto-epistemological ("disclosure of the hidden" as the creation of an independent reality – science, art, etc.), on the third hand, "tropical" as the use of tropes (metaphors, irony, metonymy, synecdoche, oxymoron, etc.) in the course of constructing a multi-valued medieval reality.      

"In the Middle Ages, this process of bringing from non-existence into being was called creation, which at the human level meant both the creative process itself and the already designed work <...>

...God said and did, where “said" means the same thing He did. The spoken Word, however, is not quite the Word that God had and was God himself: thrown out of silence, it became a path, a turn, it had a different substance than God, since the world, as it was supposed to be, was created by a trembling, wavering word. <...>

It is easy to compare it with the fact of the Christian creation of the world by the Word ... with the difference that here the word and deed do not belong to the only Creator, but – I repeat the words Vireno – to any speaker ... <...>

Since the world was considered the most important creation through the saying (“And God said”), the work of the world was a poetic work expressing the highest meaning of speech, divided into meanings: any human word seemed to resemble the originally divine meaning. The correlation of two forms of speech (divine and human) was part of the idea of thinking as such. <...>

The trope is connected with the desire to express what was before the utterance, and with the moment of the utterance when, as Augustine said in the treatise On Dialectics, it broke into the voice, vox, articulate sound. This means that the possibility of turning-transformation lies between the initial, not yet uttered thought, just yet assigned to the announcement, and its utterance, which can change and rethink in the process of utterance. This is res (thing. – V.R.) – constant recognition of a thing until it is almost completely grasped ("conceptualized". – V.R.) <...>

Tropes are the most important mental tool that reveals the ambiguity of a thing, the ambiguity of reality, which can be expressed in different ways, or even presenting more than one reality <...>

At that time, the trope played the role of a sense–forming factor, conducting a universal genre switching, turning – at the point of justification – history into philosophy, philosophy into mysticism, and the mystical into the artistic text of history. To which genre, for example, should “Roman Acts" be attributed? They are considered "their own" by philologists, historians, and theologians-mystics...". ^{[4, c. 14, 27, 50, 36, 37, 55, 157]}

    In my opinion, the exact picture of the medieval understanding of reality and what we refer to today as a statement (that's why I decided on a relatively voluminous citation), this picture explains art and artistic creativity less, although, as can be seen from the above statements by Neretina, we can only see both in retrospect; in the Middle Ages for centuries, reality and knowledge have been drawn and structured differently. .

The picture drawn by Svetlana Sergeevna well explains the ambiguity of reality, which is important for medieval thinking, primarily due to the action of two processes: the transition from what was "before the utterance" (Kant would probably say "a thing in itself" and a priori concepts, and the medieval thinker – what only God knew, saw), as well as the use of tropes that allow you to change and multiply meanings, meanings and realities. In the "Roman Acts", tropes are widely used, allowing not only to switch what we would attribute to different genres today, but also to generate ambiguity and diversity of reality.  

"Thus," Neretina notes, "the novella No. 1 about Pompeii becomes a pronounced overtone of all the images in the Roman Acts, it is its natural title, meaning holder and riddle -the solution to all the novels in their sum (which, by the way, testifies to the thoughtful abandonment of the collection). Without it, all other stories would be deprived of their “tropical” foundation… In this sense, the novel about Pompeii is a focus in which all the diversity of the world and the meanings of this world are concentrated ..." ^{[4, p. 157]}.   

But what does Neretina understand when talking about things and reality. The thing as an ancient and medieval concept for us will partly coincide with the New European concept of reality. But only partly, these concepts have more differences than similarities. Reading Svetlana Sergeevna's book, I can only guess where we are talking about the reality of the stories (short stories) of the "Roman Acts" (I call it "artistic reality", however, in relation to works of art ^{[6, pp. 350-397; 7, pp. 234-279]}), where reality is what was "before utterances" where these are things, not in the medieval sense, not in ours, as facts for literature.

Maybe I am mistaken or I do not have the necessary competence of the "art of interpretation", but I could not understand the features of the content of the stories of the "Roman acts" on the basis of the painted picture.  Neretina shows that several such features can be distinguished: the already noted widespread use of tropes; heterogeneity of the readership; two different attitudes embedded in these stories, on the correct, Christian understanding of stories (the role of notes and moralization), and, as we would say today, on rest, entertainment, play; poles of the content of stories – on like-mindedness ("univocation") and doubling reality ("equivocation", "ambiguity"); easily read in the novels "riddles-solutions", and first in the form of a title there is a solution, but not concrete, but so to speak generalized and in this sense one-sided; finally, reality, identifiable as a miracle.

 It cannot be said that these features are not explained. But they are not explained on the basis of the picture drawn in the "Preface", they are interpreted and interpreted from the point of view of the structure of medieval culture. To show this, I will resort to quoting again, especially since it allows us to better understand Neretina's approach.

"Therefore,"Deeds," writes Svetlana Sergeevna, "can only be conditionally called literary novels, especially if we take into account their features – an open–ended narrative about the vicissitudes of someone's fate without a tie, denouement and plot construction. They were intended for people of all classes with different types of (religious) consciousness: simpletons, profane, educated or mystically minded people ... assuming ambiguity, the possibility of referring to the past and future, the sharpness and variability of the present, which is emphasized by the constant appeal to readers-listeners: Carissimi! Most gracious! Dearest! <…>

... a purely medieval method: to show that there is not only equivocation (two-o-meaning, two–voice), but also univocation - a funny word meaning not only one-voice and unambiguity, but also unanimity. Why not? We have been pushed to it now and before. But still: the king had two bodies: divine and worldly, was both “by the grace of God” and “the first among equals.” This is discouraging: the creator of the novel writes about something clear and understandable to everyone in his time, but in ours it causes bewilderment, ignorance, inarticulacy. <...>

... we can venture to call these novels riddles, given together with the answers, but expressed not through a question-answer, but through two statements, and both statements are metaphors. These "mysterious" novels can be called the beginning of the detective genre. <...>

The fascination of any thing or phenomenon lies at the heart of medieval life. Passing into the hands of the “wise men”, things only acquired a particularly refined verbal form, becoming sophisticated material for training the mind. (Probably an indication of the picture expanded in the "Preface"? – V.R.) The riddle, like any allegory, opens up other meanings, allowing you to see things not as they seem at first, but unequal to yourself. Actually, such inequality is a characteristic of culture. The Middle Ages demonstrated this in the “Roman Acts” with amazing simplicity: after tasting the phenomena of a human skull, after spending the night alone with the hanged, the merchant went about his business <...>

In each novel, the reader is confronted with a miracle or human ingenuity, imitating a miracle presented in a certain conventional place and time. The focus is precisely in this “or”, because a miracle at a certain moment can become non–miraculous, problematic, accessible to analysis. <...>

Averintsev writes: "It was assumed that the essential advantage of the church as the holder of the "true faith" is that, in contrast to the "infidels", it is zn a e t r a z g a d k u..."

In a certain sense, the seemingly unassuming “Roman Acts” is a way to determine the measure of this ability to expand thought and word through the gap between the main text and novellas and addenda. This gap accommodates the hard-won understanding of the transformation of one into another, the readiness for revelation" ^{[4, c. 127, 133-134, 135, 144, 154, 162, 174]}.     

Here another, also interesting picture emerges, but the question is, how does it relate to the picture described in the "Preface"? I will now venture to add some of my own to Neretina's ideas, realizing that they are from a different system of thinking and explanation. In justification, I will only say that it seems to me that the author's provisions added below complement the ideas of Svetlana Sergeevna.

First of all, about reality. One thing is the reality of medieval everyday life, which was easily read in the "Roman Acts" by a medieval reader, another is the reality of ancient and medieval texts, the events of which belonged to the reality of the poetics of ancient art or the poetics of medieval semiotics (which already required some special competence in terms of understanding), another reality is the creation of the world by the word of God, finally, the hybrid reality of the "Roman Acts". And perhaps this is not all the realities involved in the study of Neretina. The reality of the "Roman Deeds", as Svetlana Sergeevna shows, is not only multi-layered, but also transforming (the role of tropes) under the influence of attempts to understand the story of the novel, including a miracle, solve a riddle, have fun, but also take another step towards salvation.   

To live through the events of such a reality, a medieval person of the XII-XIV centuries himself must be quite complex, ambiguous and dynamic in terms of the ability to change realities. Is the question more complex than the medieval one, or is the complexity of modern man different?

I was helped to better understand Neretina's research by the scheme that I outlined while analyzing art and his works. "It describes a system consisting of three interconnected plans. The first one points to the “social conditions of art”: this includes the “non-utilitarian” (non-productive) life of individuals struggling in art, which presupposes free pastime, the opportunity to observe, reflect, experience, not be judged, etc. For example, in response to the accusation of the famous Israeli writer Meir Shalev that he promotes archaic revenge and deviant forms of sexual behavior, Shalev replied precisely in the spirit of freedom of creativity and personal beliefs: “I am very interested in revenge as a literary idea. It turns me on. The desire for revenge, in my eyes, is much stronger than jealousy or some religious feelings. Its consequences are tragic. In the novel there are three murders... this angered some of my Israeli readers, they said: it is immoral to write that murder has a therapeutic effect, murder cannot cure! Well, you say, “impossible.” But the fact is that it is possible for certain people, as happened in my novel” ^[9].   <…> I would not call it eroticism, but sensuality... I appreciate sensations – taste, smell, touch, variety of colors – and share them with the reader. As for homosexuality, I do not find it a perversion or a disease, it is a variant of normal personal and sexual relations of consenting adults. As, by the way, what is called “adultery”, and the relationship of two men and one woman, two women and one man, two couples. It's their own business… As for the prohibition of “distribution” – no one can and should forbid a writer to describe life in all its manifestations. Following the logic of those who forbid novels about perversions, it is necessary to prohibit the printing of “Crime and Punishment” Dostoevsky as propaganda of murder and prostitution” ^[10].          Naturally, the reader is also free in the field of art and is protected from accusations that he misunderstood and experienced something there. He is also protected from direct contact with the characters of the artwork, because, for example, three murders in Shalev's novel “Two Bears Came Out of the Forest” they are committed not in front of the reader, but in the world of artistic reality. Another thing is that the reader is not protected from experiences that may be even stronger than in life, if he directly observed the events described in the novel.

         The second plan of the art scheme can be called “artistic communication". On the one hand, art presupposes a kind of division of labor: for example, writers create works of art, and readers read them, on the other hand, it is about broadcasting, because you still need to deliver the work to the reader (publish a book and distribute it) and teach him to read and experience the work adequately. At the same time, conditions are created for understanding the work, but often there is a misunderstanding.

So Shalev is well aware of the communication side of his work; despite the fact that readers do not always understand his novels. “To tell," Shalev explains in an interview, "an interesting story. It's good to write it. I'm a craftsman: that's how you want to write a good article, a photographer wants to take a good shot, that's how I wanted to write a good story. Strong. And I see that after people have read the book, they cannot forget it. I am very happy about this, so I have penetrated their soul after all and they have nowhere to run away from me. Readers say that the book, on the one hand, caused them suffering while reading, and on the other hand, they could not put it down. This is a great compliment for me. I felt it in the process of working on the novel. It was very difficult for me to write it, I left it, and then came back again, it became a special experience for me, more serious than other books” ^[9].             To help the reader in the field of art, specialists who can be called “intermediaries in art” work ? philosophers of art, critics, art historians, teachers. They create schemes, expressive means, samples of the analysis of works of art, concepts of art. So Neretina in this case acts not only as a philosopher of art, but also as an intermediary, helping the modern reader to better or for the first time understand the “Roman Deeds”.    

The third plan is the creativity, of course, mainly of the author, but also of the reader (viewer, listener), which Merab Mamardashvili drew attention to. “At any moment, an artist must obey and take into account only his instinct, why art is what is most real, there is the harshest school of life and the actual last Judgment” ^{[11, III, p. 880]}. We, Mamardashvili clarifies, “should consider art not as a field of occupation of people who are specially appointed for this (some are even appointed geniuses), but as a part of life, as what is necessary in our life is done by the work of thought, which is equivalent to the creation of a work of art <...> A novel, or a text, or a work is the machine of self-change” ^{[2, pp. 157, 354]}. “In the XX century, the old truth was clearly understood that a novel, a text, is something in the bosom of which the author of this text is born for the first time as a person and as a living person… what he wrote is the womb in which he became a real “I” for the first time, including he got rid of something and went some way through the text. My testimony is unknown to myself–before the book.” ^[3].          But what is the creativity of the writer? Is it not that he must create events of the reality of art from words and artistic language, events in which one can not only live, but solve problems that interest and excite the writer? There are two difficulties here: words and language are not events, not objectivity, besides, it is unclear how all this should be organized" ^{[8, pp. 46-48]}. In my opinion, Mikhail Bakhtin answered these questions well: "To enter into the visible, audible, pronounced by the creator and thereby overcome the material extra-creative-definite character of the form ... when reading and listening to a poetic work, I do not leave it outside of myself, as a statement of another ... but to a certain extent I make it my own statement about another, I assimilate rhythm, intonation, articulatory tension, internal gesticulation... as an adequate expression of my own value attitude to the content… I become active in the form and in the form I take a value position outside the content ? as a cognitive-poetic orientation" ^{[1, pp. 58-59]}.          Although this scheme helped me to better understand Neretina's book, I am aware that it was obtained during the study of modern art, and not medieval, especially works such as "Roman Acts". Now the question is about the concept of "two-o-meaning", widely used by Svetlana Sergeevna. In this novel, it is illustrated by an example of two meanings of the king: "the king had two bodies: divine and worldly, was both "by the grace of God" and "the first among equals." This is discouraging...". But the question is, who is discouraged: a modern person, who, by the way, is also different (one thing is a philosopher or a scientist, another is a simple parishioner in the Orthodox church), a medieval simpleton–layman, probably not thinking at all about these two meanings, a person educated or mystically minded (here he really could reflect on such plots)?

In short, I assume that ambiguity has been given and interpreted differently by different people, in different cultures. In modernity, for rationally thinking individuals, it really was a problem and therefore was either pushed out of discourse or thought out as a contradiction or a kind of schizophrenia. For an ordinary person, the ambiguity of the problem was not, for example, a Soviet person in the kitchen said one thing, and at a meeting the exact opposite. At the same time, he did not perceive his behavior as a contradiction, because in the kitchen he acted as a person, and at the meeting as a cog of a social machine, which, in the case of an unprogrammed act, could be unscrewed and thrown into the trash.

Similarly, in the Middle Ages. For a simpleton, the king was perceived in the scheme (and not in the logic of Aristotle) – among his knights he was "first among equals", and in the temple "by the grace of God". But for an educated person, especially a philosopher, who probably read Plato, Aristotle or Plotinus, the two meanings of the king or the reality that the Old and New Testaments or the Holy Scriptures and ancient philosophers told about were a problem that began to be discussed in the early Middle Ages. For example, in the wonderful book "The Believing Mind" Neretina cites a fragment of the speech of Titian the Assyrian, a disciple of Justin (2nd century), who tries to overcome the ambiguity arising from the interpretation of reality, read simultaneously from the point of view of  Holy Scripture and ancient science.

Titianus writes: "God was in the beginning; and the beginning is, as we have accepted, a rational force. The Lord of all, being the foundation of all, was one before the foundation of the world; since He is the power and foundation of the visible and invisible, then everything was with Him; with Him existed as a rational force, and the Word itself, which was in Him. By the will of His simple being, the Word happened, and the Word did not happen in vain – it becomes the first-born work of the Father. It, as we know, is the beginning of the world. It was born through a message, not a clipping. For what is cut off is separated from the original, and what came from the message and took free service does not diminish the one from whom it came. So the Word that came from the power of the Father did not deprive the Parent of the Word" (cit. according to ^{[5, p. 70]}).  

The text is absolutely wonderful, overcoming for an enlightened person of the early Middle Ages the indicated ambiguity. For different readers of the Roman Acts, the ambiguity was different or it did not exist at all. More importantly, Svetlana Sergeevna shows the ambiguity of the poetic reality of the "Roman Deeds", the transformation of this reality during the transition from the title to history, from history to moralization. At the same time, an important task is always solved – the introduction of the "old man" to Christianity, to the Holy Scriptures.  

"The fact that the world is linked anew," writes Neretina, "is also evidenced by the moralization of the novel about two skilled doctors, where these doctors personified the old and new laws, the "eternal" dispute between Christ and the Jews about whose truth is truer... Addenda transform the originally profane, rational meanings into mystical and magical, they wrap metaphors with spiritual symbols. But only the whole book as a whole outlines a system of learning, a system of solving the mystery of being, designates the path of perfection of a person passing – this is the condition of the task – through a series of delusions, mistakes, adventures that develop the will, form it as a book. The book is the basis of all transformations. It was the book – the Holy Scripture – for the literate and profane personified their time" ^{[4, p.158]}.

  I can continue to comment on the novel "Paradoxes of the Roman Acts", but I think it is clear that my questions and considerations stem from the discrepancy between our discourses and systems, which, in my opinion, is completely normal and serves only for the benefit of thinking.

You can simply select and copy link from below text field.