“death of the civilization of the book”:
It is therefore as if what we called language could have been in its origin and in its end only a moment, an essential but determined mode, a phenomenon, an aspect, a species of writing. And as if it has succeeded in making us forget this, and in wilfully misleading us [à donner le change], only in the course of an adventure: as that adventure itself. All in all a short enough adventure. It merges with the history that has associated technics and logocentric metaphysics for nearly three millennia. And now it seems to be approaching what is really its own exhaustion; under the circumstances—and this is no more than one example among others—of this death of the civilization of the book, of which so much is said [dont on parle tant] and which manifests itself particularly through a convulsive proliferation of libraries.75
Perhaps we really are living on the edge of a total transformation of consciousness, a liminal situation that can only be understood partially, intermittently, and through the sallies of avant-garde philosophy. But even as Derrida evokes this millenarian transformation, the end of the book, the beginning of writing, he undercuts it, distancing himself from technological determinism, launching his paragraph from the starting point “as if” and reducing the commentary on this alleged death to predictable chatter with the dismissive occupatio, “of which so much is said.”76 So Derrida distances his metaphysical critique from historical causality and historical time—the end of the book is not the year 1967. Historians, on the other hand, have provided any number of precise moments for a decisive technological and epistemological break. The trouble is they have provided too many. Some point to the alphabet, some to the codex, some to the rise of textual communities, some to scholasticism, some to print as the key technological innovation that established book-based rationalism. Since we do not yet agree on when the “civilization of the book” began, we cannot expect a simple consensus on whether it is coming to an end.
Even if we can say with conviction that “the civilization of the book” is approaching its own exhaustion, or “the culture of print” is now deeply challenged, or that “the borders of what we call a text” are now in question, or that the adventure that linked certain technologies to “logocentric metaphysics” is coming to an end, it is not clear how these various transformations are connected, what they will mean, or how far we remain imbricated in the older orders of thought. For my purposes, however, it will be enough if the uncertainty about the future of our book-based culture helps us do better justice to the sung and drawn objects of the past.
Chapter 2
Bodleian MS Digby 23
In 1835 a young philologist named Francisque Michel was commissioned by the minister of public instruction, François Guizot, to visit England and transcribe a number of ancient works, including a poem on the Battle of Roncevaux that was known to exist in the Bodleian Library. Two years later Michel published La Chanson de Roland ou de Roncevaux du Xlle siècle publiée pour la premiére fois d’aprés le manuscrit de la Bibliothèque Bodléienne à Oxford, and the poem entered French literary history.1 Henceforth the standard version of the poem would be the text of the Oxford manuscript, and it would bear the title Michel had given it. The Song of Roland had been born.
Of course, the history of Roland’s death had never been entirely forgotten, especially in France. It was known through Dante, Ariosto, and Cervantes and through a popular tradition still potent enough for Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, author of the “Marseillaise,” to draw on it for another revolutionary song, “Roland à Ronceveaux,” which had the defiant refrain “Mourons pour la patrie.”2 Scholars knew of the account of the Pseudo-Turpin, the twelfth-century Latin chronicle allegedly composed by Charlemagne’s heroic archbishop, and of numerous other medieval references to the exploits of Roland, Oliver, and Charlemagne, and they knew that these exploits had been the subject of chansons de geste, including one version allegedly sung at the Battle of Hastings by a member of Duke William’s household, sometimes identified by the name Taillefer.3 The best-known account was that offered by the Anglo-Norman chronicler Wace in his Roman de Rou, composed sometime between 1160 and 1174. Wace describes Taillefer leading the Normans into Battle with his song:
Taillefer, qui mult bien chantout,
sor un cheval qui tost alout,
devant le duc alout chantant
de Karlemaigne e de Rollant,
e d’Oliver e des vassals
qui morurent en Rencevals.4
Taillefer, who sang very well, was mounted on a horse that raced along, and he went in front of the duke singing of Charlemagne, Roland, and Oliver and the knights who died at Roncevaux.
Wace’s story was noted by Claude Fauchet in his influential Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poésie françoise of 1581, by Voltaire, and by the British antiquarians Thomas Percy and Joseph Ritson, for whom it evoked the power and fascination of a lost oral tradition.5 Voltaire is perhaps the first to refer to Taillefer’s performance as a single song: “The old histories tell us that in the front rank of the Norman army, a squire named Taillefer, mounted on an armoured horse, sang the song of Roland, that has been for so long in the mouths of the French without the slightest trace remaining”6 This lost work was what so many early scholars hoped to find, not just another poem about Charlemagne and his twelve peers, but the very song of Taillefer.
By Michel’s day, the search for this work had been going on for some time. In 1777 the Marquis de Paulmy, chief editor of the Bibliothèque universelle des romans, a popular series devoted to summaries of “romances,” published an account of the stories of Charlemagne and Roland based on the Pseudo-Turpin. In his account Paulmy speculated that French troops going into battle might have sung the lost Chanson de Roland, and he actually went so far as to offer a possible reconstruction. As Paulmy explained, the Chanson de Roland could scarcely deal with all of Roland’s great deeds, and it therefore chose to present him as a model to imitate.7 The poem continues for eleven stanzas, praising Roland as a paragon: brave, modest, obedient, a good Christian, a moderate drinker, reluctant to seek a quarrel but a terror to his enemies—all in all, a perfect officer and gentleman (“Roland fut d’abord Officier, / Car il étoit bon Gentilhomme”).8 For the most part “Soldats François” won little praise; however, it may have provided inspiration for Rouget de Lisle when he composed his anthem “Roland à Roncevaux,” and it certainly drew renewed attention to the story.9 In 1814 Charles Nodier speculated in the Journal des débats about the possible survival of a fragment of the epic in some library, and in 1831 Chateaubriand suggested more specifically that fragments might survive in one of the former royal libraries.10 The search to recover the work had begun in earnest.
The earliest account of the story of Roland based on a specific medieval manuscript is that offered by Louis de Musset, marquis de Cogners, granduncle of the poet Alfred Musset, in his “Légende du bienheureux Roland, prince français” of 1817. Musset had access to what is now known as the Châteauroux manuscript and drew on it to retell the story of Charlemagne, Roland, and the Battle of Roncevaux.11 Guyot des Herbiers, a family relation, began to prepare an edition of this manuscript, but died in 1828 without having finished.12 It was not until 1832, however, when Louis-Henri Monin, a student at the Ecole Normale, published his Dissertation sur le roman de Roncevaux that a full version of the poem at last appeared in print. Monin based his edition on the Paris text (now Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Français 860), which he compared with the Châteauroux manuscript, using the transcription of Herbiers.
For
