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Medieval Attitudes toward Literary Pleasure
Literature gives pleasure. From Plato’s recognition of Homer’s power to charm and enthrall to Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, critics and theorists of literature have always acknowledged its capacity to give delight. There is even more persuasive evidence from a larger audience, the people who in the Middle Ages listened to minstrels tell stories, who in the Renaissance made Shakespeare a commercial success, who in the nineteenth century waited for the next installment of Dickens, and who today buy paperback editions of Harold Robbins or Joseph Heller. Although to some extent literary enjoyment remains suspect even now,1 we have a fully institutionalized, philosophical rationale for it: a separate intellectual category of “aesthetic pleasure” that makes the experience of works of art a valid mode of knowledge in itself. And if such academic approaches usually restrict themselves to only the “best” literature, we have another category, popular culture, for explaining the psychological, sociological, and even artistic satisfactions that obtain from movies, television, and formula fiction. In general, gaining pleasure from works of art seems a decent, even laudable, activity.
In the Middle Ages, according to the conventional wisdom, such was not the case. The early Christian hostility to pagan culture, and hence to classical poetry, resulted in the most cautious and restricted acceptance of literature. Throughout the period the emphasis in literary theory and in the justifications put forward by the works themselves is not on the pleasure poetry provides but on the moral benefit it bestows. This exemplum is worth hearing because it teaches you about the dangers of avarice. This ancient story is worth reading because it depicts virtuous actions you should imitate. This pagan fable, which if taken literally involves immoral acts by gods, has an allegorical meaning that is consistent with natural or religious truth. Literature becomes the servant of Christian morality and faith. To respond to a text only for the pleasure it gives is to misspend one’s time; the pleasure, rather, should lie in the satisfactions of using literature to further one’s understanding of right action or right belief.
No one should deny that such attitudes existed, and dominated, in the Middle Ages and that many important artists and thinkers held them, as we will see shortly. But I want to begin this survey of medieval views of literary pleasure not with statements about what literature should do but with a very broad generalization about what in fact it does. Medieval understanding of the function of poetry depended to a large extent on these lines from Horace’s Ars poetica:
Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae 333
aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae.
quidquid praecipies, esto brevis, ut cito dicta
percipiant animi dociles teneantque fideles:
omne supervacuum pleno de pectore manat.
ficta voluptatis causa sint proxima veris,
ne quodcumque velit poscat sibi fabula credi,
neu pransae Lamiae vivum puerum extrahat alvo.
centuriae seniorum agitant expertia frugis,
celsi praetereunt austera poemata Ramnes:
omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci,
lectorem delectando pariterque monendo. 344
Poets aim either to benefit, or to amuse, or to utter words at once both pleasing and helpful to life. Whenever you instruct, be brief, so that what is quickly said the mind may readily grasp and faithfully hold: every word in excess flows away from the full mind. Fictions meant to please should be close to the real, so that your story must not ask for belief in anything it chooses, nor from the Ogress’s belly, after dinner, draw forth a living child. The centuries of the elders chase from the stage what is profitless; the proud Ramnes disdain poems devoid of charms. He has won every vote who has blended profit and pleasure, at once delighting and instructing the reader.2
The first two lines are probably the most familiar literary commonplace in the Middle Ages, and line 343 often accompanies them. I have cited the entire passage so that we can see what Horace means when he talks about the different poetic goals. Having posed three literary intentions—profit, pleasure, and the combination of the two—he first takes up the matter of instruction. That which profits in poetry should be briefly but clearly stated; Horace seems to be thinking in terms of straightforward moralizing here, points stated rather than dramatized, what Brink calls “the teaching of lessons” (Prolegomena, p. 263). Lines 338–40 give advice on the second goal: literary pleasure comes from a verisimilar fiction, not from fairy-tale exotica. The rest of the passage points to the superiority of the third kind of poetic work, that which combines pleasure and profit: it will appeal to both old and young, bringing, as Horace goes on to point out, fame to its author.
Certainly the Ars poetica intends the third kind of poetry to be valued most. But the firm categorizing oflines 333–34, emphasized by the three “aut”s, and the repeated use of words that denote one or the other poetic goal (“delectare,” “iucunda,” “voluptatis causa,” “dulci,” “delectando” versus “prodesse,” “idonea ... vitae,” “praecipies,” “utile,” “monendo”) contribute to the likelihood of the passage’s being taken more descriptively than prescriptively. Quoting line 333 by itself, as medieval texts sometimes did, would lead further in that direction, especially to the frequent habit of taking the prodesse-delectare distinction to indicate the difference between serious and frivolous work. But the medieval understanding of Horace’s lines involves more than just the reading or misreading of this passage. The evolution of a conception of fiction in the classical period which is more rhetorically based than Aristotle’s in the Poetics, which tends to separate content (ideas, truth) and form (story, style) rather than fuse them in the way that Aristotelian mimesis does, lies behind both Horace’s terminology of profit and pleasure and the even more extreme separations of content and form in medieval Christian literary thought.3 The very fact that Horace’s literary ideal combines the two functions suggests an understanding of fiction that is inherently dualistic; it is one that does not substantially change until the emergence in recent centuries of a conception of aesthetic experience more Aristotelian than Platonic or Christian in its willingness to accord works of art an independent status as a form of human understanding.
Accordingly, one strain of medieval literary thought developed by taking the distinction between pleasure and profit as a means of justifying fiction by its conformity to moral and religious truth. Delectare became the function of the narrative surface, prodesse the function of the spiritual truth embodied in the fiction. A medieval commentary on Statius known as On the Thebaid, attributed to Fulgentius the Mythographer but probably written some centuries later, makes explicit the allegorical use of Horace:
I take up again, with great respect, that knowledge deserving of scrutiny and that inexhaustible vein of intellect found in those poets who, under the alluring cover of a poetic fiction, have inserted a set of moral precepts for practical use. For when Horace testifies that “poets seek to instruct or delight, or say what is both pleasing and useful in life,” they are found to be no more delightful and entertaining through their literal meaning and narrative skill than they are instructive and serviceable, for the building of habits of life, through the hidden revealing of their allegories.4
The commentary goes on to compare a poem to a nut, its literal meaning like a shell one needs to break in order to get to the desirable kernel of allegorical truth. “A child is happy to play with the whole nut, but a wise adult breaks it open to get the taste.” The analogy not only delineates the sources of pleasure and profit but ranks the two poetic functions: being content with surface delight alone is childish play, seeking the inner wisdom is properly mature activity.
D. W. Robertson, Jr., has firmly established that such a conception of poetry was pervasive in the Middle Ages.5 The critical approach of Robertson and those who adopt his theories, an exceptionally important influence on modern medieval studies, has occasioned so much discussion that a full-scale presentation of it here is unnecessary. But I do need to comment on it briefly from the standpoint of literary thought and as it relates to this book. Roughly, Robertson believes that the theory of poetry enunciated in the Statius commentary was virtually the only respectable one in the Middle Ages, that therefore medieval writers wrote in accord with it, and that consequently modern critics must adopt it in order to approach medieval literature in a valid historical way. Many of the critical readings that have emerged from these principles have occasioned sometimes reasonable, sometimes irrational, disagreement. I do not think specific quarrels with Robertsonian interpretations deal very effectively with the approach. A more important general question is whether Robertson is correct in imputing the views of On the Thebaid to all writers of medieval literature, and one (certainly not the only) means of answering that question is to see exactly what other ideas about literature were current. That there were other ideas seems to me undeniable, and this book is about a few of them. It is meant not to refute Robertson’s assertions of a medieval theory of allegory but to suggest that there are limits to its applicability, that the belief in a single “medieval” way of responding to literature is unwarranted, and that accordingly the judicious use of medieval literary thought in the interpretation of any individual work entails first establishing rather than assuming what critical ideas are most relevant to it.
So let us return to the Horatian distinctions and to some references that use them not to justify allegorical readings but to indicate, frequently with some objectivity, the varying functions poetry may serve. A fourteenth-century commentator handily summarizes the three goals of fiction as he explains Ovid’s purpose in composing the Metamorphoses: “His intention is to write down fables so that he may please and profit by means of their presentation, as Horace says: ‘Poets wish either to profit or to please.’ Some profit but do not please, as when they produce unpolished sermons; some deal with buffoonery that pleases but does not profit; some do both, and they are complete. Ovid is one of these.”6 That a tale from the Metamorphoses offers both pleasure and profit is understandable enough when one considers medieval allegorizations of that book. But what is the commentator thinking of when he speaks of “sermones scabros” that only profit and “scurrilia” that only please? “Sermo” has a variety of meanings in the Middle Ages; here it perhaps suggests something of the classical conversational sermo, something of its Christian adaptation into sermo humilis. Seneca in one of his letters contrasts a plain style meant to profit the soul with a more ornate style meant to please, and this seems to be much the sense here, in which the purely profitable is linked with both a stylistic level and a nonfictional genre.7 “Scurrilia” also suggests both content and style. What pleases is the buffoonery of jests and funny stories, doubtless with some implication of vulgarity in language or action, though it is not always appropriate to read modern senses of “scurrilous” into the Latin, which on occasion may simply refer to improper levity.8 In any case, this passage acknowledges that although the best poetry fulfills both Horatian precepts, there are recognized types of literature that aim at only one.
Other testimony throughout the Middle Ages confirms the polarization of pleasure and profit as indications of literary purpose. Augustine defines fabula as “a lie composed for profit or delight (compositum ad utilitatem delectationemve mendacium),” the disjunction indicating that he does not consider all fictions to be profitable. This definition occurs in the Soliloquia, following a discussion of falsity, in which Reas...
