Introduction to “Brevity as Form”

Editor’s Note: Paul Zumthor’s “La Brièveté comme forme” is a suggestive take on the relations between brevity and form, one that also addresses questions about such matters as narrative time and about what is and isn’t narrative. Because the essay is not well-known among narrative theorists, I welcomed William Nelles’s proposal that Narrative publish the translation by him and Laurence Thiollier Moscato. I am also grateful that Professor Nelles agreed to provide this introductory frame for the essay that puts it in the larger context of Zumthor’s career.

—James Phelan

PAUL Zumthor (1915–1995) taught comparative and medieval literature at several universities in Switzerland, France, Holland, the United States, and Canada, and was a prolific poet, short story writer, and award-winning novelist as well as a highly productive scholar. Obviously no brief overview can do full justice to nearly three hundred wide-ranging publications, including more than forty books, but I can sketch how “La Brièveté comme forme” fits within the larger context of his oeuvre.¹

Born in Geneva, Switzerland, Zumthor was raised and educated in France, where he took Latin classes at the Sorbonne in the 1930s with his contemporary Roland Barthes, who would prove a lifelong friend. His first big book, Histoire littéraire de la France médiévale (VI^e–XIV^e siècles) (Literary History of Medieval France [6^th–14^th centuries], 1954), established him early in his career as a major voice in medieval studies, and his subsequent turn to structuralist theory further extended his influence among medievalists. His renewed association with Barthes and subsequently A. J. Greimas in Paris in the 1960s led to his introduction into the critical-theoretical milieu that centered around Gérard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, and Hélène Cixous, known as the “Poétique” group from the name of the journal they founded in 1970. Zumthor wrote the lead article for the second number of Poétique (the lead article for the first number having been written by Barthes), and he would publish a total of nine articles in that journal by 1991 (only Todorov himself would appear there more often during that stretch).

His best-known book, Essai de poétique médiévale (Toward a Medieval Poetics, 1972), one of the great monuments of structuralist theory, was published as the third volume in the related Poétique book series, edited by Genette and Todorov. Here Zumthor brought semiotics to bear on medieval poetry in a conscious attempt to “semioticize” literary history (“Writing” 23), and he produced a colossal book bristling with diagrams, tables, and dozens of citations to Barthes, Genette, Greimas, and Todorov. Zumthor put forth a comprehensive theory and taxonomy of medieval genres derived purely from internal form, based on a classification of discourse types rather than on content. The impact of the book was immediate among European medievalists, but took longer to sink in with Anglophone scholars: as Roger Pensom noted in a review of the 1992 English translation of the book, “Like Australian Aborigines confronted by Cook’s ships, British scholars seem to have been culturally unequipped to perceive Professor Zumthor’s titanic structuralist description of French mediaeval literature” (294). His theories have now gained wide currency, especially his concept of mouvance, or textual mutability, which has revolutionized medieval textual studies. The concept challenges traditional approaches, which sought to reconstruct an “original” or “authentic” fixed authorial text solely on the basis of written manuscripts, arguing instead for an emphasis on the inherently dynamic interactions between collectively produced and continuously evolving oral works and their (relatively rare) written manifestations.

Just as he had been among the first European medievalists to adopt the Anglo-American emphasis on close reading and to assimilate structuralist theory, Zumthor was also among the first to understand fully the implications for medieval literature of the classical oral-formulaic theory developed by Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord. A switch in titles from his early books on “literature” to his later books on “poetics” reflected Zumthor’s growing conviction that “literature” is a misnomer for works whose primary mode...