Eugene Vance, 1934–2011

Eugene Vance, Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle, died May 14, 2011, when a plane he was piloting crashed at Arlington Municipal Airport near Seattle. Vance joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1990. Raised in Newton, Massachusetts, Vance discovered his lifelong passion for medieval literature at Dartmouth College—where he was also an accomplished skier—from which he obtained his B.A. in 1957. He studied for his doctorate at Cornell University, which awarded him the Ph.D. in 1964. From 1962 to 1969, he taught English and French at Yale University. He subsequently taught at the Université de Montréal and at Emory University before moving to Seattle. Vance also held visiting professorships at the Universities of Toronto, Johns Hopkins, California at Berkeley, Duke, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Vance published five books: Reading the Song of Roland (1972), L’Archéologie du signe, co-edited with Lucie Brind’Amour (1983), Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (1986), From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages (1987), The Dragon and the Unicorn: The Rhetoric and Discourse of Power in Premodern Court Culture, co-edited with David Knechtges (2002). He also edited volume 45 of Yale French Studies, Language as Action, in 1970.

Few scholars in our time have thought about the writings of Saint Augustine as persistently and passionately as Eugene Vance. Augustine’s dictum that “faith inquires, but reason discovers and confirms,” was axiomatic for him. Although in Gene’s case, the “faith” in question was his belief in Augustine’s unparalleled genius in recognizing that a religion of the embodied Word, the Logos, desperately needed a new theory of signs to teach believers why it was so revolutionary. But, for Gene, Augustine’s sophisticated and complex sign theory was just as radical as the religion it was meant to teach. For Gene marveled at the skill with which Augustine combined his exposition of sign theory with man’s search not simply for the origin of truth, but also for the understanding of the self and its relation to the world that came from understanding how words mean.

Like most students, Gene first experienced Augustine while reading The Confessions, his spiritual autobiography. Anyone who ever heard Gene talk about this prototype of great Western literature remembers his pleasure at recounting the subtlety by which Augustine’s rhetorical power transforms Virgil’s Aeneid—the epic of the founding of secular Rome—into an intensely personal meditation on discovering his own spiritual “Rome” through the sacred texts that his mentor, Saint Ambrose, had taught him to read.

Gene rightly saw Confessions as a pedagogical treatise showing how humans achieve spiritual awakening either with the help of a teacher, or through the mediation of literary works where the author assumes the role of pedagogue by dialectically engaging questions, answers, and examples. He would go on to tell you how trenchantly Confessions illustrates themes from the saint’s other treatises that merge classical rhetoric with Christian doctrine: e.g., De doctrina christiana, De Trinitate, De magistro, De libero arbitrio, etc.

Unlike many of us, Gene did not limit his knowledge of Augustine to the major texts. He read widely in, and even perhaps all of the saint’s work . . . and, naturally, in Latin. As a result of this deep understanding, Gene came to realize the extent to which the vernacular literature evolving in France in the twelfth century adapted a version of the Bildungsstruktur familiar from the works of Augustine.

Very much in the mold of the saint’s own spiritual Odyssey, vernacular romance, Gene showed, created heroes initially confused by the bewildering panoply of sensory data confronting them on every side. The task of romance in his view was to portray the world as a series of complex, seemingly unconnected, signs that baffle the untutored protagonist. By trial and error, but always with the advice of sages who appear at crucial moments to teach him how to “read” the chaos of competing signs, the hero gradually makes his way through a labyrinth...