Thinking Backward and Forward: Narrative Order and the Beginnings of Romance

In recent centuries it has often been thought that any critical assessment of an event involves thinking both backward and forward at once. Especially since the Romantic period, the very understanding of the past has come to seem inseparable from the sense of what it "will have been" in the retrospective account of a future time.¹ Such thoughts have seriously complicated the notion of an origin, and they have deeply implicated interpreters in the phenomena that they seek to explain. Not every disparate version of these general views, of course, commands intellectual consent. But the contemporary sense of a mind turning backward and forward in its meditation about a subject nearly gives point even to the hapless plight of that self-conscious critic (in the parody by Frederick Crews²) so involved in the apparent intricacies of Winnie-the-Pooh that he breathlessly begins: "Almost, one does not know where to begin."

In considering the broad question of "narrative as a way of thinking," I would like to begin by thinking backward for almost a millennium, to the beginnings of one of the formative developments in Western literature. This is the development of romance in European vernacular writing—a genre that emerges in the twelfth century, dominates much of European narrative during the late medieval and early modern periods, and deeply influences subsequent literary forms, including the novel.

During the past century a wide range of studies have explored diverse aspects of the genre, and a brief essay is not the setting in which to review such research.³ At the start, though—if it is still possible to speak of a start—perhaps I could recall at least schematically a few general perspectives about this narrative revolution in the Middle Ages.

The narrative of romance that emerges in twelfth-century France and rapidly passes into other parts of Europe significantly differs in orientation from the kinds of heroic narrative that originate earlier in the Middle Ages.⁴ Though recent scholarship has qualified old arguments about radical distinctions between epic and romance,⁵ substantial changes in content, perspective, and focus noticeably distinguish the developing medieval genre. Unlike the stories of communal warfare and national destiny composed in the milieu of the chansons de geste, for example, the chivalric romances that begin to emerge during the same period tend to stress the individual adventures of wayfaring knights, their amorous encounters with ladies who inspire them, and the inner workings of the minds and hearts of such figures. At times the narrative of romance explores that internal world with expansive interior monologues, dramatizing the divided impulses of inquiring characters seeking to clarify their own principles.

Such exposés are part of a broader drive in romance to articulate not just the external unfolding of a story, but the inner meaning of an action. Suggesting the deepening influence of literacy in Europe, with its gradual tendency to situate literary experience less in public presentations than in private reflections, this introspective turn in romance ranges from explicit interpretive meditations by the narrator to subtler forms of authorial organization that shape the significance of a plot.⁶

One of the most striking forms of such organization is the increasing development in early romance of interlaced narrative, or entrelacement.⁷ Though entrelacement takes a variety of forms, it normally involves at least two basic features. One is the interweaving of two or more narrative strands—for example, the distinct quests of two different knights—as the story turns back and forth from one character or topic to another. This modulation of intersecting motifs has sometimes been called "polyphonic" narrative. The other feature is the reshaping of conventional chronological sequence in a narrative, as the story turns back and forth in time—for example, recalling what one character was doing while a different character occupied the narrative foreground, or anticipating how one set of circumstances will eventually change before relating other circumstances which precede that change in time.⁸ By the early thirteenth century, only a few generations after the emergence of the genre, romance authors are...