Abstract
Reading an aged text: that's what every reader does, as soon as he or she reads something other than the newspaper of the day or a novel of the year. The distance created by the ageing of a text is the primary reason why literature is an experience of time and an uprooting from oneself. This distance is essential to our idea of literature. It always has been. For over two millennia in our civilization, and even longer in others, literature has been taught through ancient texts, the classics. The Homeric poems were the basis of education at a time when they were already old and their language old.
This distance is both experienced and savored. It is suffered, since it is a source of misunderstanding or misunderstandings. It is tasted, because the aging of the language and the disorientation of the past exert in themselves a charm on the reader, while increasing the misunderstanding, since the text was not born old and was written for its contemporaries.
Medieval literature lends itself particularly well to the examination of these questions. Written in young languages, or in languages that are only now attaining the status of fluently written languages, they are not themselves initially confronted with this phenomenon, but nevertheless encounter it, or even provoke it, by deliberately emphasizing an ancient tradition from which they claim to draw inspiration, either in the same language (scaldic poetry for Norse literature), or in another (Latin, "Breton").
Faced with the works of classical Latin and Christian antiquity, with which they felt a sense of continuity, medieval readers, depending on their status, their era, their culture, their language and the language of the text they were reading, may have had a feeling of either an ancient state of their language, or a learned state of their language, or another language.
The Middle Ages was a long period, which saw the emergence and development of literature written in Romance languages. At a certain point, the first texts were written in a language that was now considered old-fashioned. The study of medieval literature enables us to grasp the moment when a language becomes aware of its own ageing, and to study the literary responses to the difficulties and new effects of this ageing.
Later, medieval literature, the oldest literature written in modern European languages, offered these languages the most extreme cases of texts reflecting their ancient state. The various attitudes adopted towards them, simultaneously or over the ages, are therefore revealing: rejection, modernization, translation, restitution, conservation, imitation.
The distance created by the ageing of the text is certainly appreciated, and plays a part in literary aesthetics. But it is also, and above all, suffered. It is a source of incomprehension. Ancient texts are becoming increasingly distant. Our contemporaries can only read them if we equip them with a whole apparatus - introductions, explanations, notes and, in extreme cases, modernization of the text or translation. A whole apparatus that brings the text closer to the reader, but at the same time erects a screen between them. Philologists, text editors and literary historians are faced with choices that are not only practical, but also call into question what we expect from the past. The modern editor may choose to make the distance that separates us from an ancient text tangible by preserving the original language, spelling, punctuation and even layout. In this case, the emphasis is on historical understanding. Or, he may choose to reduce this distance by making reading as easy as possible. In this case, the focus is on the relationship between the text and the reader. The first attitude is that of a historian: the important thing is to understand an era. It doesn't matter if the effort required reduces the number of readers, since in any case, without this effort, reading is worthless. The second attitude is a literary one: the important thing is that the texts live on, that they are still read, tasted and loved, that they contribute to the enrichment and pleasure of our contemporaries' minds, that they are associated with their awareness of the world. It doesn't matter if this reading leads to distortions, or even errors, since the passage of time inevitably creates distortions even in the mind of the most learned and scrupulous scholar, and after all, literary art feeds on these distortions.
The question arises all the more because the forms of culture and languages themselves are changing so rapidly today that the flight of texts into the past is suddenly accelerated. The canon has collapsed, and the very modes of reading and, more generally, of apprehending reality and the imaginary are changing, sometimes in unexpected directions, at the pace of the digital revolution. So much so that the questions raised by reading an aged text tend to become the very questions of all reading.
Michel Zink set out and developed these reflections, which were at the root of this symposium, in his opening remarks.
