Counter-figural Topics: Theorizing Romance with Eugene Vinaver and Eugene Vance

If romance assumed a defining role in medieval literary studies during the twentieth century, it’s thanks in no small measure to the vision of two scholars who perceived the perilous quest of romance—the aventure—as a prism refracting key components of the society that imagined them. These two scholars were Eugene Vinaver, born in Russia in 1899, and Eugene Vance, born in Massachusetts in 1934. Both view romance as essential to understanding a culture evolving from rural isolation to social and political complexity. They understood that a poetic mode capable of inaugurating vernacular literary culture was an intellectual achievement on a par with advances in philosophy, science, and language. Each saw it as a vehicle for proving the powers of vernacular society’s new intellectual tools, and of confronting a radically unstable world.

Collectively, Vinaver and Vance spanned the twentieth century— experiencing and deploring its destructive excesses, while embracing and celebrating its intellectual achievements. They came to the Middle Ages by unusual routes, differently marked by the history of their own time: Vinaver via the cataclysmic political events of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism; Vance via the transformation of the U.S. by the wars, both hot and cold, that dominated the last seventy years of his life. And yet each shared a profound conviction of the value—which they perceived as an urgent need—of the lessons that classical and medieval culture might impart to the modern world.

Without succumbing to facile comparisons between historical periods, Vinaver and Vance perceived analogies between two worlds in transformation, the medieval and the modern, where traditional boundaries—geographical, cultural, political, linguistic, and religious—were swept away or radically altered. In different ways, each scholar saw romance less as a literary genre, in the formalist sense, than as a mode of perception and thought that mapped historical ruptures and continuities.

What Vance appreciated in Vinaver, whom he called “one of the more independent and original readers of medieval poetry of our time,” was his conception of the “problems of medieval romance as bearing as well on subsequent traditions in European narrative.”¹ Vance admired the boldness with which Vinaver “equates the notion of romance with nothing less than the very concept of ‘literature’ itself.”² He himself formulates the thought somewhat more expansively as a desire to enlist the senses and the intellect in modeling reality:

Since intellectuals throughout the Middle Ages held that the structure of language and its functions served to reflect, within the human soul, exterior reality, we may presume that as textuality became a new determinant of vernacular language, so too came the imperative to elaborate new and specifically textual models for understanding and expressing reality—and, by extension, to invent a “possible world” whose presuppositions were rooted in its textuality. We now call that “world” romance.³

Just as the term “modernity” allowed Baudelaire to suggest an innovative synthesis of contingency and immutability as the authentic characteristic of his own era, for Vinaver and Vance, “romance,” also, denoted a distinctive identity.⁴ One is struck by the emphasis on period specificity that both poet and scholars insist upon as a defining quality of modernity, on the one hand, and romance—as the eponymous genre of “Romanesque”—on the other. In both cases, we note, it is the artist who perceives and represents the traits that symbolize the era. Baudelaire leaves no doubt as to the artist’s role . . . as an active participant in the history he seeks to define:

And so he goes, hurrying, searching. But searching for what? Undoubtedly, this man, as I have depicted him—this solitary being, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert—has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim beyond the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call “modernity”; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion...