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Article Excerpt
The thirteenth-century French Le Roman de Silence invites us to participate in a minstrel's perspective on silence. But it is only in performance that this perspective is embodied, and it is only in the discrepancies between what is explicitly stated about sound and the sound actually produced in performance that the fundamental thrust of the text can be realized. Disjunctions within the social fabric of the story are realized in disjunctions between performance and text. In this regard, it is the aural dimensions of performance, not the visual ones, that create perception of incongruous realities. Performance is an elusive term, describing anything from memorized minstrel performance, to public or private prelection, to imagined performance in silent reading; but Le Roman de Silence explicitly juxtaposes silent scribal text with articulated, instrumentally accompanied minstrel performance. Performance by a single narrator/musician can thus resound with meanings that are elusive and potentially misleading in a silent, primarily textual experience.
Le Roman de Silence describes how two counts, who are married to twins, fight over their wives' inheritance and kill each other. King Ebain of England unjustly decrees that women can no longer inherit. Subsequently, two of his subjects, Cador and Eufemie, both win the right to choose a spouse, but they are afraid to reveal their love to each other. Finally Eufemie ("Fair Speech") opens a way for their love with an ambiguous utterance, "Amis, Parles, haymmi! [Ami, speak, ah me!]" (Roche-Mahdi, line 882). (1) The text discusses in detail the difference between her multivalent exclamation and what she had intended to say, "Parles a mi [Speak to me]" (885), emphasizing by repetition the importance of the ambiguity (882-92). Cador responds by linking his two-fold hope to a further homonymic conjunction in her words: she first calls him "amis," giving evidence of love, and then exclaims "haymmi," indicating the pain love is causing her (893-907). Eufemie's ambiguous utterance leads ultimately to a kiss and then a wedding. The auditory effect of homonymy is thus the foundation of their marriage.
When Eufemie bears a girl, the couple determines to raise him as a boy, so that he will be able to inherit. They name their child Silence, pointing out that "silence" can take both masculine and feminine endings, "Scilenscius" and "Scilencia" (2075-82). His name is thus itself a homonym. The two endings, -a and -us, create a further homonymic contrast: -a, the feminine ending, represents the form of the name that is "par nature [natural]" (2082), and -us, the masculine ending, represents "us," usage or nature, which is "contre nature [contrary to nature]" (2081).
The text develops the multivalence generated by spoken sound on other levels. When Silence is old enough to realize his situation, Nature and Nurture engage in an allegorical debate, Nature urging him to live as a girl, and Nurture advising him to continue his life as a boy. Reason intervenes, convincing him to continue as a boy but to learn a skill he can pursue if he has to become a girl.
So Silence runs away with minstrels and learns to play vielle and harp. He tells himself that if he ever has to become a woman, he will have his harp and his vielle to make up for his lack of ability with needlework (2867-69). In less than four years, he surpasses his minstrel teachers, and people want to hear only Silence. The jealous minstrels plot to kill Silence, but Silence thwarts them and returns to his parents in Cornwall. In anger against the minstrels who have stolen away their son, Cador and Eufemie have banished all minstrels from the land on pain of death. When Silence returns as a minstrel, he is threatened with death, but his parents recognize him at last, and, with new understanding of their son, they repeal the law against minstrels. Even as they celebrate their son's return, however, messengers come from King Ebain demanding that Silence go live with him at court.
At Ebain's court, Queen Eufeme ("Ah, Woman" a near homonym with Eufemie, "Fair Speech") attempts to seduce Silence and, failing in her attempt, frames him. As a result, he is sent to France, where he becomes a valiant knight. When he returns to help King Ebain quell an uprising, the angry queen arranges for him to be sent to capture Merlin, who has prophesied that only a woman can ensnare him. An old man (possibly Merlin) teaches Silence how to capture Merlin, and Silence brings him to court, where Merlin reveals through laughter all the secrets of Ebain's court. The queen and her lover are killed, and the story ends with King Ebain marrying Silence.
Many aspects of the story suggest performance: the fierce and possibly ironic discursions of the author persona, the teller's awareness of the tale's dual embodiment in writing and in performance, the exciting and often humorous plot, the vivid dialogues among richly delineated characters, and, of course, the homonymic themes. In addition to these features, there are two striking performance elements: the appearance of the two nameless minstrels, and the transformation into a minstrel of the eponymous hero Silence.
Current scholarship has become increasingly aware of a rich fabric of medieval performance that resists modern categories. Carol Symes foregrounds the pervasive theatricality of medieval culture in her book on theatre in Arras. As she explains, her book "treats all premodern texts as potential participants in a culture of performance--some as the residue of performed actions, some as prompts for performance, some as the focal points of performance--and juxtaposes plays with the variety of other activities alongside which they were produced and transmitted: the display of charter, crying of news, taking of legal testimony, exhibition of relics, celebration of liturgies, organization of ceremonies, preaching of doctrine, telling of tales" (2). This perspective problematizes notions of the generation, transmission, and reception of a text, concepts that are also questioned within Le Roman de Silence.
There is no incontrovertible evidence indicating how this narrative might have been performed. Surprisingly, the topic of performance is rarely discussed. Thorpe surmises that the author, Heldris de Cornualle, was "a professional lay poet" (59), and discusses performance by "the jongleur who recited the poem" (59-60). Suzanne Kocher states that it was "designed to be read aloud" (95), an assumption corroborated by Joyce Coleman's general demonstration of the widespread practice of prelection.
Le Roman de Silence describes in considerable detail two feasts with performances by minstrels. The first feast includes minstrel performance of three specific narratives: one solo with self-accompaniment on vielle; one solo with self-accompaniment on harp; and one performance by two performers, one playing harp and the other vielle. The second feast is the one at which Silence performs, and everyone prefers his performance to that of the minstrels. Whether or not Le...
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