Comments on H. R. Jauss's Article

Abstract

T IS with pleasure that I respond to New Literary History's invitation to express some of my reactions to reading the text of H. R. Jauss. I find myself, nevertheless, placed in a delicate situation. On the basic issue, and on all of the questions examined by Jauss, I am in perfect agreement, even if some of the examples that he cites (such as the animal epic) are less familiar to me than others. First of all (since I do not believe that this is what NLH expects), I must restrain the impulse that prompts me to praise his essay and to underline in doing so both its methodological and general theoretical importance. What Jauss questions (by pointing out the problematical) is the relationship existing between the Middle Ages and the medievalist. It is the mode of knowledge that we as men of the last quarter of the twentieth century can claim with respect to the object that we propose to study and which while studying we define. Indirectly (in the pages concerning allegory), the interrogation deals with the knowledge that the Middle Ages had of itself and with the ways which we can know that knowledge. I have no doubt but that these are the real problems, and perhaps, from our standpoint, the only real problems. The few points where I notice a divergence between Jauss's position and mine result less from this general point of view than superficially from terminological differences or, in a manner less easily reducible, from the differences in our respective intellectual backgrounds, and from certain presuppositions implied by these backgrounds. Although I have lived a very small time in France, I am aware of having been strongly influenced and sometimes confused by the work accomplished there in the last fifteen or twenty years, often among those very little concerned with the Middle Ages. Hence inevitably (and in spite of a constant effort not to allow myself to be captured by one mode of thought) certain of my orientations, choices, or metalanguage, compared with those of Jauss, inadvertently bring out our divergences rather than the long-term convergence of our efforts. What undoubtedly permits me to comment is the generosity with which Jauss repeatedly cites and discusses my Essai de poetique medievale and takes into account reactions provoked by it. It is not a question of polemics but, on the contrary, of responding to a tacit invitation and of reexamining several propositions of that work. The reexamination