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Article Excerpt
This essay sets mouvance newly in motion by asking it to trace the steps of an ancient dance. As an approach to manuscript traditions, Paul Zumthor's term mouvance and the various critical models that revisit and elaborate upon it have proven extremely influential. Taken together, they offer an alternative to the Lachmannian quest for an unattainable original text. (1) While this older model of manuscript study privileged the stability and control that a conjectured original might wield, Zumthor's mouvance and its inheritors instead revealed to manuscript studies the sense of freedom and possibility to be found in a textual tradition's instabilities.
Privileging such a dynamic vision of manuscripts in motion, however, creates an interesting dilemma. Many critics, in their implicit or explicit references to mouvance, rely upon figurative language that seems to value the element of movement inherent within mouvance. We hear about texts "in motion," for instance, or a reading process that takes "steps" from one variant to another, (2) But while this language effectively captures the dynamism proposed in Zumthor's model, it simultaneously produces a difficult bind: verbs and nouns of motion invoke a concept that we rend to experience only through its concrete manifestations, and yet in this context, they ask us to envision movement in a purely abstract sense. What, in other words, does the movement in mouvance look like?
I propose to answer this question through the manuscript traditions of the medieval carol. Well known for its history of combining dance and song, the medieval carol intertwines varied and complex manuscript evidence with a particular tradition of physical movement. Rather than using dance as a cultural practice to reconstruct scenarios of a carol text's production, reception, and performance, however, I want to make a different kind of argument. This essay claims that through dance as formalized movement, we can see, or make concrete, the motion in mouvance. In dance practice, dance aesthetics, and choreography, the tension between control and instability has always played a crucial role. For this reason, I argue, dance can lend illuminating form to this same tension in the study of textual tradition. The dance world's push-and-pull between mastery and abandon provides an embodied shape for the gestures of interchange between manuscript variants.
My primary aim in this essay is thus not to present a positivist account of medieval dance practices. It is, rather, to show that the movement traditions underlying certain medieval dance traditions give us, as readers of the Middle Ages, a set of shapes and structures to assign to the interactions between manuscript variants. The theorization of dance, while not providing a way to reconstruct a danced medieval past, helps us to see anew how we apprehend and comprehend medieval manuscript traditions. In the first part of the essay, the cultural traditions and formal features associated with the English carol in general will illuminate within this genre a charged exchange between control and instability. The second part of the essay turns toward two specific variants of the English "Holly and Ivy" carol. The conventions of the carol as danced practice give shape to the processes of movement we might perceive between one "Holly and Ivy" variant and another when we read them. In this specific case as well, I argue, the movement between variants expresses dance's ambivalence about fixity, preservation, and control.
Editing medieval manuscripts with thoughtful attention to the existence of diverging variants has always posed challenges to our understanding of textual origins, authorship, and intention. One might of course see all situations of scribal transmission as exercises in--or, rather, struggles for--control, with "Adam Scrivyen" raising an unusual but by now iconic outcry. (3) Tim Machan suggests that the exercise of editing such complex and contested forms of transmission in fact requires extensive theorization--of reception, historicity, translation, and literary history. (4) Such theorization often necessarily calls into question the Lachmannian method, as Jerome McGann's Critique of Modern Textual Criticism illustrates. (5) But Ralph Hanna has argued that this particular critique is in some ways less relevant to the specific problems of medieval texts and their editing than it might first appear to be. McGann's argument, Hanna points out, unfolds from a preoccupation with a modern "superfluity of authority," as opposed to a kind of dearth of authority for medieval texts. Hanna makes a compelling case instead for taking into account the complexity of the interactive structures between a text's author and its various levels (variously motivated) of producers and disseminators. (6) In a different way, this model also de-emphasizes for editing purposes the Lachmannian ideal of a coherently intended original. Anne Hudson's survey of editing practices and theories in the specific realm of Middle English texts highlights the problem of the editor's identity and authority relative to text and reader. Whether editorial practice "exalts palaeography as the sole editor," or the textual critic takes the helm and asserts his own version of authority between author and reader, the nature of the text's means of transmission is inevitably complicated. (7) Averting one's eyes from the alluring light cast by a purported original makes it easier to see the many circumstances that intervene between us and the possibility of that original. Not only stemmatic complications and polygenous texts, but also phenomena such as the use of texts as play scripts, make it difficult in numerous ways for us to know exactly what we are looking at when we encounter either a manuscript or an edition of a medieval text. John Dagenais responds to some of these problems by advocating freeing "the physical text from its bondage to the metaphysics of presence," the desire to trace a lost path toward an absent original whose relationship to the physical text at hand can never be entirely clear. (8)
The possibility of improvisational elements also detracts meaningfully from the dream of the stable of text. Improvisation within a text further problematizes inquiries into the very identity of the literary work. Albert Baugh, for instance, looks closely at a passage from Beves of Hampton in attempting to determine which variations might be scribal and which might result from a performer's own embellishments. He makes a case for distinguishing isolated (scribal) changes from more global ones (improvisation), but the inevitable complexities of the claim's distinctions illustrate again certain fundamental problems that variations create in the ascertaining of authorial or artistic intentions. (9) Improvisation becomes a particularly interesting source and category of textual variation, and as we shall see, improvisation functions as an important shared term between textual and movement practices that feature the play of variation.
Paul Zumthor's introduction of the term mouvance into the study of medieval texts both crystallized earlier attempts to express the inherent complications of textual editing, and also wielded important influence upon subsequent manuscript studies, even those that ostensibly critique the term. Mouvance builds upon Joseph Bedier's earlier arguments for privileging variants as readings in their own right, given meaning by their context of production, over conjectured and invisible origins. (10) Hans Robert Jauss sees the freedom inherent in such a model, describing "the step from text to text," where "the pleasure is provided by the perception of difference." (11) Mouvance's importance lies, as Mary Speer argues, in encouraging medievalist editors and scholars to view change and instability as potentially productive and suggestive. (12) In Zumthor's terms, mouvance takes the physical motion of a manuscript's circulation, or the movement through "the mouths of reciters as it is handed down to posterity," and abstracts that motion into "an essential instability in medieval texts themselves." Ultimately this conceptual movement of the literary work "is of a more fundamental order than that due to mere circulation." The real identity of the literary work "exists outside and hierarchically above its textual manifestations"; it is "dynamic" rather than static. Mouvance takes up the issue of oral tradition and improvisation by incorporating the poles of orality and literacy into its conceptual structure. As Zumthor argues, the suggestive instability of the literary work derives from its identity as "the sum of material witnesses to current versions. These were the synthesis of signs used by successive 'authors' (singers, reciters, scribes) and of the text's own existence in the letter." (13) The dynamism of mouvance accommodates writing, speaking, improvisation, transmission, and other sources of variation.
Subsequent theorizations of manuscript study in some ways revise Zumthor's mouvance, and yet they often reveal their debt to the dynamism of this concept. (14) Bernard Cerquiglini, for instance, prefers the term variance to describe the medieval literary work's instability. He chooses to focus on interactions between textual manifestations rather than an oral-literate spectrum or dialectic. And yet Zumthor's dynamism of manuscript tradition still inheres within this argument. In describing the limitations of out current editing practices, Cerquiglini specifically critiques our "incapacity to leave the two-dimensional space of the printed page ... where medieval writing is before one's eyes but not set in motion." (15) Thus he makes motion an important part of his perspective on manuscript study.
At the same time, however, the model that he offers does not necessarily fulfill the desire for movement. Cerquiglini's solution draws upon the ability of windows-based applications to re-present the medieval text to us. But even the optimistic vision of the computer's "dialogic" nature, its capacity to create a "multidimensional" experience of textual editions, does not move this exciting visual panoply out of the realm of stasis, although it does usefully complicate how we might view different variants in a manuscript tradition. (16) The movement in mouvance evidently presents a few problems, despite its enduring power as a conceptual framework for thinking about medieval manuscripts and their study. As Cerquiglini's work implies, one problem involves the difficulty of representing medieval textual culture in motion. But underlying this problem is a deeper and more serious one, involving our way of understanding the nature of movement itself in constructs like mouvance and variance. We saw that Zumthor deflects attention from movement as a quality anchored in the physical world (through the literary tradition's literal passage across space), in favor of a more metaphoric or conceptual use of movement to designate an...
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