Inventing the Vernacular in the Gutters of Virgil's Aeneid: From Marginal "Dirt" to Seminal Romance

Inventing the Vernacular in the Gutters of Virgil's Aeneid: From Marginal "Dirt" to Seminal Romance Raymond Cormier THERE IS MAGIC in walking in the footprints of a great poet. The excitement of vivid discovery urges us on to proceed until we see through his eyes and feel through his emotions, until we know more and more. Today, it is possible to recreate such a palpable literary and artistic process, on a limited yet potent scale. The Aeneid of Virgil exists in a fascinating 12th-century French version, a text that—while it preserves the "dirty" brick and mortar, but not always the white marble of the Aeneid—at once emblemizes and vouchsafes the transmission of antiquity in the Middle Ages.1 In an early chapter of his challenging and brilliant book, Coming to Our Senses, Morris Berman traces the development of domestication of animals by humans, from the Paleolithic era down to modern times. In "The Wild and the Tame," he writes: Domestication means, by definition, that the Wild is made Tame; that the Other becomes more like yourself. Or rather, a distinction is made between the Other that is now regarded as "me" and the Other that is identified as "not-me."2 As a result, the Neolithic binary mode now presented two fundamental categories; certain animals became "familiar," others became "strange," which implied a polarity of tame and good Self vs. wild and bad Other (71). Berman also associates Freud's notion of unheimlich, "uncanny," with the wild—reptiles, amphibians, and insects, among others—which are allied with "negative enchantment, metamorphosis, and monsters" (73). Deformed freaks and terrifying hags also belong to this grouping: they are often the "agents of liberation" in fairy tales (73). In the context of marginal literary genres, can we exploit these vital insights? My answer is yes. In this essay, the theme of marginal French literature will be interpreted in quite literal terms: first of all, the text analyzed is usually taken by medievalists as a marginal one. Not unlike the language of Kafka's deterritoriaUzed and ever political literary VOL. XXXVIII, NO. 1 15 L'Esprit Créateur German (i.e., not Czech, not Yiddish), appropriated for his "minor" Jewish writings, as studied by Deleuze,3 the Old French Roman d'Eneas belongs to the mid-twelfth-century genre known as the Romances and Tales of Antiquity, a lesser one in relation to the major, mainstream, canonical, and what might be termed the "tame" mode, that of Arthurian romance. Numerous critics have described the Romance of Eneas as cold, dry, dull, eccentric, inhuman, irrational, grotesque, hétéroclite, unrefined, anachronistic, and naive.4 More importantly, the anonymous author has constructed virtually half of his romance out of Latin marginalia—often microscopic and illegible glosses—found in the manuscripts of Virgil's Aeneid. In other words, Virgil's domesticated text is neatly presented on the manuscript page in a very orderly, ruled, and regular fashion. What surrounds the sacred text (in most high medieval codices) are unrestrained and irregular interpretive annotations—in the gutters, in the side, top, and bottom margins, and between the lines as well. Modern readers may visualize the Gestalt by recalling Derrida's Margins of Philosophy: the text in the center of the page deals with the subject of the tympan, the margins are filled with a kind of parallel commentary drawn from Michel Leiris's Biffures.s Most classical scholars and many medievalists would look upon these complex problems as the abject work of that pathological monster Mr. Hyde; but when the Eneas romance is scrutinized, in relation to its various models, an elegant Dr. Jekyll emerges. The process of transformation will be illustrated in some detail—how a "tame" classic was turned into the "wild" vernacular—in our free Old French adaptation of the classical Latin epic. What has recently been dubbed the "retro-prospective" Judgment of Paris episode, as it appears in the Eneas romance will serve as a lever.6 By focusing on a single textual divergence or anomaly it should be possible to understand better how the Roman d'Eneas fits into this scheme—literally and figuratively on the margins of French literature...