Paul Zumthor
Brevity as Form1 Translated by Laurence Tiollier Moscato Moscato and William Wil liam Nelles
ABSRAC: Paul
Zumthor’s “La Brièveté comme forme” analyzes the relations between brevity and form and addresses such matters as narrative time and the definition of narrative as a genre. Zumthor summarizes classical rhetorical theories of brevity in narration, and he considers the roles played by variations in time, space, and cultural milieux in the objects to which the term “brevity” is applied. Drawing examples from geographically, generically, and culturally diverse traditions, from ancient to modern practices, he notes that the length of a text in terms of its linguistic materiality does not necessarily give the measure of its duration, and argues that discussions of brevity must take into account the real time of performance or reading and the immediate spatial and temporal contexts within which these works function in a given sociocultural situation. Zumthor concludes by listing a series of attributes found at the heart of all brief medieval narrative literature: the unity of the event narrated; the finality of the ending, in which the conclusion exhausts the narrative premises; a relatively explicit and univocal significance or meaning; and a cluster of shared stylistic features found in narratives of less than a few hundred lines. KEYWORDS: brevity, duration, form, narrative time, rhetoric
Native French speaker Laurence Tiollier Moscato earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in French literature, at Hunter College and Cal State Long Beach. Between 1987 and 2007 she taught French and Italian at Marymount University and Cal State Long Beach. Since retiring she has edited numerous translations for DreamWorks, including Bee Movie, Movie, and co-translated noted Swiss novelist Jean-Michel Olivier’s L’Enfant Secret. William Nelles teaches in the English department at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His pub-
lications include Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative and Narrative and numerous journal articles and book chapters on literature and narrative theory. He can be reached at
[email protected]. NARRATIVE, Vol 24, No. 1 (January 2016) Copyright 2016 by Te Ohio State University
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IN the context of a conference where our task is to elucidate, if possible, the various
problems posed by brief literary genres, I would like to start with a few general points. Tese “genres,” if we consider them in their distribution throughout the world, are in fact quite diverse: poetic genres (to wit, the Japanese haiku, or the epigram of the European tradition), narrative genres, as well as gnomic genres (such as proverbs) or, in certain cultures, ritualistic, especially divinatory genres (as were the Delphic or Sibylline oracles). Even if we decide to focus on questions regarding brief narrative genres, the fact remains that, by their very definition, they share one of their specific traits with several other genres that are not necessarily narrative: brevity. It remains now to specify what brevity is . . . in order, perhaps, to understand what it involves. I wish simply to offer a few remarks on this point. *** o clarify these remarks and put them within a historical perspective (given the “brevity” of the time allowed for this talk!), I begin by offering a thesis to which I hope the rest of the paper will lend support: that brevity is never random but constitutes a structuring model. Tis is doubtless why Latin rhetoric had recourse to the term brevitas (sermo brevis, “brief discourse”) to designate not a model per se, but essentially a virtus (capacity or virtue), a modality, and (in the scholastic sense) a qualitas (quality or property) of formal structure. Regarding this aspect of the problem, I refer to the abundant documentation gathered by Heinrich Lausberg in his Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik as well as to Antonio D’Andreas’s essay on Sermo brevis, published in 1981. Among the texts published by Edmond Faral in Arts poétiques, the most explicit is the Documentum of Geoffrey of Vinsauf § 30–44. On the whole, and without overemphasizing this rhetorical notion of brevitas, I cannot dodge its implications. It refers to three orders of textual reality—or rather of textual realization:2 •
• •
in a secondary manner, to the disposition of elements (thus dividing the matter into two parts rather than three by suppressing the middle term: Lausberg § 443; or else it can govern the use of paranomasia, § 638); in a more essential way, to elocution (where it affects the choice of words and figures); but principally to a shaping of narration: see Lausberg § 297–314 on narratio brevis. Tis approach is defined in opposition to two other modalities: narratio aperta (on the level of the intellectio of what is said) and narratio probabilis (on the level of persuasion); on either level, it is characterized by a certain internal sufficiency. It is notable that Cicero, in De oratorio, chapter 19, and Quintilian as well (Institutio 11.3) employ the adjective brevis to describe by analogy the movements of the orator’s body, especially the hands. In the order of intellection, brevitas strives to achieve a synthesizing percursio, if not an allusion. 3 Tis trait is of course fundamental: but even if we wish to generalize, it is necessary to be clear when explaining its presuppositions.
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We have no choice but to return to the quantitative, oundational nature o brevity (yet to be determined), and o a number o derived connotations or denotations that the term might have acquired in the course o its history. I we wish to proceed systematically, starting rom an opposition, let us, or the un o it, begin with a simple truism: brie is that which is not long. In act, a brie text is opposed to what is perceived as a long text. Te nuance is not negligible: it connotes the need to integrate history into the description o structures. In other words, brevity does not result rom an absolute norm; it is culturally conditioned, and in two ways: •
•
undamentally, given the sometimes considerable variations in time, space, cultural milieux, and objects to which the term is applied and given the judgment on the basis o which it is asserted “Tis is brie ” (thus, “this is opposed to that which, under the same conditions, would be long”); unctionally, in that the length o a text in terms o its linguistic materiality does not necessarily give the measure o its duration. Tis might be an effect o the unpredictable nature o the reading process: interruption, resumption, backtracking. In the oral transmission o texts this potential is even more evident, and can enter into the definition o perormance, or this constitutes one o the marks o temporalization. I have considered these issues in a book currently in press. 4 Certainly the duration o some texts coincides with their length, be it a ew minutes or several days. But I would be inclined to view that as rare, bordering on the ideal. In the reality o reading, and even more so o listening, the actors o length and duration tend at times even to reciprocally neutralize one another: the Zulus’ long panegyrics (one o the great poetic genres o humanity) are reeled off at a rapid pace in an uninterrupted flow; the Malay pantun and Somalian balwo, on the other hand, are set to a slow rhythm with a repetitive melody that greatly prolongs the perormance o their two or our lines. Other actors regulating duration result rom the particular characteristics o a given communicative situation, written or oral. Assessing the actual duration o the Nigerian epic Ozidi, Okepwho observes that it is measured less in time (seven evenings o declamation) than in accordance with the appropriate spacing out o the episodes: that is, by virtue o a narrative economy imposed by the physical and social conditions o the perormance. In a number o cultures, length and brevity are part o the characteristics o a genre and are perceived as such: in Romania, a Christmas carol never exceeds a hundred lines; an epic ballad has around eight hundred. All across black Arica one finds the practice o improvised songs, rising up rom the impact o some emotion, picked up immediately by the listeners, the passersby, sometimes uniting in a powerul emotional impulse an entire group o workers in a shop, o ellow travelers, o men or women enjoying their leisure in the village square. Such improvisations are characterized by the extreme brevity o the lyric content (ofen a single phrase), even i repetitions and reprises are developed in some instances to the point o creating a sort o collective drama. It may occur that a poet o talent exploits this custom
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and draws remarkable and complex effects rom it, as with the great Swahili poet Muyaka. In Islamized eastern Arica the genre o wimbo is defined (not without analogy with the Japanese tanka! ) by the number o syllables in the text: always thirty-six, divided into three or six lines. Te case is not much different or the Spanish coblas (Görög-Karady 24–26). Te most requently cited examples o genres defined by their brevity as described above belong to ancient and stable traditions. Nevertheless, technologized culture (which, given its temporality, can hardly be anything but a “pop” culture, a culture that reflects the latest trends, in direct opposition to tradition) is still subject to a poetic restriction that is, i not identical, at least analogous: a restriction that is due to the well-known three-minute rule imposed on singers by disk jockeys and the record industry. Fastidiously adhered to since the invention o “microgroove” recordings, it set the maximum duration o commercially marketable songs. Tis entailed stylistic and thematic constraints, the need or a certain concision, and all the interplay o suggestion. Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs were the first, in 1966–67, to cross that line, and although they were at risk o having to give up being heard on the radio, they successully released albums with songs whose lyrics lasted up to eight or nine, exceptionally even thirteen, minutes. But these breakthroughs have proven unsustainable. A powerul tendency toward brevity still predominates in this art orm. From this angle, I examined two hundred songs by fifeen French and American singers rom the 1960s and 70s: 42% o these texts lasted rom 2 to 3 minutes; 31% rom 3 to 4; 15% rom 1 to 2; 7% rom 4 to 5; the remainder is negligible, and the only durations put into practice by all o the singers in my corpus, and thus the “normal” temporal range, were between two and our minutes. Te pronounced brevity o a poem, as I have noted, 5 neutralizes the effects o its duration. Te discourse remains on this side o any clear-cut distinctions between narrative and lyric, dramatic and gnomic. Only beyond a certain threshold does time ully intervene in textual unctioning and a poem inscribe itsel in one or the other o these registers. *** It is thus in terms o the real time o perormance or reading that we should hone in on the notion o brevity by ocusing on what makes it essential within a given cultural situation. By “real time” I mean the duration organically lived through, and interiorized in, the act o reading or hearing. I mean this in the phenomenological sense in which lived experience cannot be conceived as such, as evidence o my existence, except in the present (Husserl 148ff). It is here, this situation of being-in-the-present, that every brief form of discourse aspires to as its desired end. Fundamentally, although imperectly, ofen blindly, even going against the grain o grammatical constraints, every brie literary orm, by virtue o a powerul urge, inscribed in the being o language itsel, in the being-o-language, has a tendency to lean toward what would be the pure present. Is this not precisely the same thing that becomes apparent (deep down) when we consider the requirement imposed upon the genre o the epigram in the classical
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Western tradition, whose raison d’être lies in its “point”? Similarly, it would be easy to glean statements about their art rom contemporary short story writers that would only elaborate on this antastical aspiration. By expressing mysel in this way, I’m placing mysel at a critical level that is hierarchically very elevated prior to setting up proper ormal definitions (which could only apply to genres or species); but in no way does it prevent me rom also touching upon an element o reality that remains perceptible in all particular maniestations o discursive brevity. Having “narrative time” intervene here, as we ofen do in narratological studies, constitutes a displacement, i not o perspective, at least o rank in critical genealogy (Greimas and Courtès). Narrative time belongs to the level o techniques o ormalization . . . techniques obviously implied in and by a “model,” weighed down, however, by various mediating, generic, or specific constraints. Tis set o actors, and the nature o the relations existing (rom this point o view) between real time and narrative time, cannot be better illustrated, it seems to me, than by the literary genre o the crônica peculiar (as ar as I know) to contemporary Brazil: a genre so utterly identified with local tradition that in addition to various critical studies, an anthology designed or educational purposes has recently been published (Hower and Preto-Rodas). Real time, being a lived-in time, necessarily modalizes, in the act o reception, the process o “concretizing” the text in the sense the term is used by the Constance Rezeptionsästhetik school (Warning 48). o put it simply, this process affects how memory works and thus the spontaneous mechanisms o interpretation as well as the perception o discourse cohesion. By cohesion (to which, ollowing Fillol and Mouchon, I oppose to coherence), I mean all actors leading to the perception o textual unity and its particular significance. Now the coherence o a text o some length is perceived progressively in the reading: there comes a point when indices appear and then become organized in the reader’s imagination into an ideal system o combinatory rules, an interpretive hypothesis confirmed or invalidated by what ollows. Te cohesion o the brie message is o another kind, at least tendentiously: it is given straightaway, empirically, sensorily, as a global certitude whose possible consequences are inerred during the course o a brie reading or o a brie period o listening. *** Brevity, as a undamental approach or the “presentification” o meaning, thereore constitutes one o the modes o literary discourse: a mode, in act, exploited in one way or another by every culture. One question nevertheless remains to be asked regarding the status this assertion might require in critical terminology. Tis question stems rom the nature o language—or, more precisely, o discourse. It boils down to this: what is the relationship between discourse and narrative? Does narrative constitute a class o discourse? Or, in accordance with an opposing ordering o structures, should we say that all discourse is necessarily (i only latently) narrative? In giving such a broad interpretation o the positions o Greimas and his school, one would be granting that a sort o generalized virtual narrativity invests all orms o
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organized discourse. Particular linguistic maniestations limit narrativity and define it by tying it to figurative orms. Pierre Janet used to say that what created humanity was narration. Tere is no doubt that the ability to tell stories is definitional or anthropological status, nor that, conversely, memory, dream, myth, legend, history and the rest collectively constitute the manner in which individuals and groups attempt to situate themselves in the world. It would not be absurd to propose hypothetically that every artistic production, in poetry as in painting and in the plastic arts, including architecture, is, in this very diluted sense, narrative. Narrative in the strict sense o the word emerged somewhere in a continuous series o cultural events. But where then? Shall we regard as narratives the metaphoric or metonymic names traditionally given in Arica, or by the native Americans, and elsewhere still, to individual humans, or indeed, as so ofen in our rural areas, to domestic animals? One reaches a limit here: a minimal orm and an allusive maximum. Would that be the acme o the brie narrative? Tis question requires a positive answer, considering the Arican “mottoes,” which specialists have never hesitated to classiy as a poetic (i not musical) genre, and which consist o a ormal enunciation o the Name. On this hypothesis, every brie orm would thus be a narrative, and nothing would authorize us to distinguish clearly between the proverb, or example, or the Mozarabian kharjas o medieval Andalusia, and the animal able or the short no vella. Moreover, this is a position adopted by many ethnologists. Personally, I am strongly inclined to avor it as well. Certainly, the opposition traditionally maintained between the terms narrative and lyric can still be used in practice (with a great deal o prudence), as long as one limits its scope to clearly discernible eatures, as P. Bec does or the French Middle Ages. While “narrative” implies a linear concatenation o interdependent units, “lyric” involves the addition, circular or unordered, o more or less autonomous units. Tese criteria urther require the “dramatic” be located on the narrative side and the “gnomic” on the lyric side. From these surace eatures it results that the “lyric” or “gnomic” poem is generally rather brie and that very long poems are almost necessarily narrative or dramatic. . . . But one can see how much o this remains problematic! And still it is perhaps necessary to introduce a more subtle dierence (but important here, as these are genres that lend themselves to declamation or recitation): are texts as received orally and texts as read governed by the same tendencies? Could we not suspect a Murder o Narrative in certain cases when passing rom orality to writing? Might gestural accompaniment, so undamental in every perormance, be interpreted as narrative content upon which, and in relation to which, discursive polyphony is opened up? *** Specialists in medieval European literature have never ormulated the problem o brevity except in relation to fictional narratives—excluding, moreover, rightly or wrongly, the epic phenomenon. Around 1960 iemann, taking advantage o a term current in his native language, suggested the existence o a proound literary unity o the medieval Kurzerzählung [short story]. 6 iemann was inclined to grant this des-
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ignation (despite the diversity o denominations in the vulgar languages), i not to a genre in the strictest sense o the word, at least to a coherent generic ensemble. I mysel ollowed iemann in my 1972 Essai, the chapter in which I addressed this problem having been written in 1970.7 Shortly afer my book appeared, the massive thesis o R. Dubuis was published, itsel also closely inspired by iemann. 8 Tese studies, which remained unique in the field until about the end o the 1970s, distinguish at the heart o narrative medieval literature a group o texts characterized by our correlated eatures, each o which seems to engender the other three: •
•
•
•
First trait: the unity o the event narrated, whatever the complexity o its causes or effects might be, both o them in act possessing more ofen than not a sort o internal evidence eliminating any superficial ambiguity. Tis structure is generally maniested in the result o the action culminating in a “point.” I mean by this a final cause by which what precedes the action and brings it about is produced and by virtue o which it is organized—all proportions maintained, as in the epigram. For the reader or listener perceiving it, according to the linearity o the narrative and its successive units, this results in a strong impression o temporal and spatial compactness, limiting considerably—i not eliminating—the unpredictability o actions and circumstances. Te narrative carries within itsel its own programming, sometimes explained or suggested rom the very beginning; the execution o that program implies a directly perceptible structural rounding off. It is in this sense that we speak o the coincidence o two orms: “exterior” and “interior.” Second trait: the unolding o the action thus tends to turn back on itsel. Te conclusion exhausts the premises. Te narratio (as we must recall) is here neither aperta nor probabilis. As a rule, no causality extrinsic to the initial situation will be introduced during the course o the narration: the end is an absolute end. Tird trait: meaning, called “senefiance” in Old French, is not only implied by the narration but contains explicit markers o one kind or another and is perceptible at the level o the narrative as a whole. Terein lies one o the strongest oppositions distinguishing the novel, or example, rom the texts under discussion here. Te senefiance o a novel is built up on the basis o each detail or episode and thus normally comprises an irreducible multiplicity. Te senefiance o a brie narrative has the entire text or its signifier and tends, apart rom exceptional cases, to be airly obvious and concrete. It oten happens that senefiance is handed over explicitly and in an apparently univocal way in didactic terms that are more or less well-integrated into the narration. Fourth trait: brevity. It is difficult to put a precise number on this, but two orders o length are in opposition on a consistent basis throughout the range o medieval poetic traditions: a ew dozen or a ew hundred verses or lines as opposed to several thousands. Te length o French abliaux can vary rom around twenty to a thousand or so lines, the norm being between two and five hundred. As o 1972, I was already stressing the pertinence o this opposition.
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Now, ten years later, I remain firmly convinced that there exists in this matter a set of “proprieties” peculiar to a certain type of narrative. One could readily point out the stylistic features that seem, for the 12th, 13th, or even the 14th centuries, tied to brevity—whether they are derived from it or whether they constitute its immediate cause. I need not produce such a catalogue here. At a deeper level, however, is the existence of the traditions to which the secular maintenance of these brief forms is due not based on a conviction characteristic of medieval culture, as expressed in the following words by a rhetorician from Antiquity, Aquila Romanus, one of those obscure items published by Halm? Illa (id est brevitas) res universas pluresque in eundum locum confert, haec distantia plura inter se percurrens velocitate ipsa circumponit. (24) 9 One thus encounters again the universal perspective that I was attempting to point out earlier. Te ancient author uses the “topical” language natural during his epoch, and he expresses himself in spatial terms: locus, percurrere, circumponere . . . However, does the ambiguity of these distantia plura that need to be abolished by some velocitas not imply, buried among the subterranean intentions of a text as it is being created, something like the rejection of time?
Endnotes 1. Originally published as “La Brièveté comme forme” in La Nouvelle. Our thanks to the readers from Narrative for their useful input, and especially to John Pier, who suggested numerous valuable improvements to our translation [ranslators’ note]. 2. Speaking to an audience of medievalists a generation ago, Zumthor could take for granted their familiarity with the intricacies of classical rhetoric, but a brief overview may be useful here. Tree specific intellectual frameworks are invoked in his discussion of the rhetorical notion of brevity in this section: the five elements of rhetoric, the six parts of a formal oration, and the three virtues of narration. Classical rhetorical study was divided into inventio (invention, discovery), dispositio (arrangement), elocutio (style), memoria (memory), and pronuntiatio (delivery or recitation). Narratio, “narration,” in which the speaker recounted the events of the case in question, was the second of the six components of an oration (along with the exordium or introduction, partitio or division, confirmatio or proof, refutatio or refutation, and peroratio or conclusion). “Narration” was also assumed to cover literary and historical narratives in addition to the narrative component of orations. Te three necessary virtues of narration ( virtutes narrationis) were brevity (narratio brevis), clarity (narratio aperta), and plausibility (narratio probabilis). Tese three virtues interact with one another in structuring a narrative: the proper degree of brevity, for example, can enhance the clarity (or plausibility) of a discourse by providing precisely what is needed, and no more, for the audience’s full comprehension, while too little (or too much) brevity can lessen the effectiveness of an oration by cluttering it with excess information (or by leaving out key elements) [ranslators’ note]. 3. Percursio, the shortest form of narratio, is a rhetorical figure in which a narrative is briefly summarized [ranslators’ note]. 4. Introduction à la poésie orale, translated as Oral Poetry: An Introduction [ranslators’ note].
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5. In Présence de la voix, which was actually published as Introduction à la poésie orale [ranslators’ note]. 6. Presumably Hermann iemann’s Die Entstehung der mittelalterlichen Novelle in Frankreich [ranslators’ note]. 7. Essai de poétique médiévale [ranslators’ note]. 8. Presumably Roger Dubuis’ Les cent nouvelles nouvelles et la tradition de la nouvelle en France au Moyen Age [ranslators’ note]. 9. Zumthor appears to be mistaken about the precise context of this passage, which is not about brevity per se, but rather makes a distinction between coacervatio (aggregation) and percursio (rapid review). Te full sentence runs as follows, with Zumthor’s excerpt underlined: “In the same way, this figure [ percursio] differs from coacervatio, in that that figure gathers together many and broad concepts into the same place, while this one [i.e., percursio] , rapidly reviewing many things that differ among themselves, binds them together by its very speed, as if you were to say, “Caesar rushed off to Italy, he kicked out Domitius, he was seizing Corfinium, was laying hold of Rome, was in pursuit of Pompey.” Tanks to Joel Relihan for his expert assistance in our treatment of this passage [ranslators’ note].
Works Cited
D’Andreas, Antonio. “Sermo brevis.” In Teoria e analisi del testo: atti del 5, edited by Daniele Goldin, 69–82. Padova: Cleup, 1981. Dubuis, Roger. Les cent nouvelles nouvelles et la tradition de la nouvelle en France au Moyen Age. Grenoble: Presses Univ. de Grenoble, 1973. Faral, Edmond. Les Arts Poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe Siècle. Paris: Champion, 2014. Fillol, Franćois, and Jean Mouchon, “Approche des notions de cohérence et de cohésion sur un corpus oral.” Langue française 38 (1978): 87–100. Görög-Karady, Veronika, ed. Genres, Forms, Meanings: Essays in African Oral Literature. Oxford: JASO, 1982. Greimas, A. J., and Joseph Courtès. “emporalisation.” In Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette, 1979. Halm, Carolus, ed. Rhetores latini minores. Leipzig: B. G. eubner, 1863. Husserl, Edmund. Idées directrices pour une phenomenology. ranslated by Paul Ricoeur. Paris: Gallimard, 1950. Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. Munich: Hueber, 1960. Preto-Rodas, Richard A., Alfred Hower, and Charles A. Perrone, eds. Crônicas brasileiras. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1971. iemann, Hermann. Die Entstehung der mittelalterlichen Novelle in Frankreich. Hamburg: Vortrag, 1961. Warning, Rainer. Rezeptionsästhetik. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1975. Zumthor, Paul. “La Brièveté comme forme.” In La Nouvelle: formation, codification et rayonnement d’un genre médiéval, edited by Michelangelo Picone, Giuseppe Di Stefano, and Pamela D. Stewart, 3–8. Montreal: Plato Academic Press, 1983. ———. Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. ———. Introduction à la poésie orale. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983.
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