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Poem Unlimited: Medieval Genre Theory and the Fabliau Kathryn Gravdal The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historicalpastoral : scene individable, or poem unlimited. Shakespeare, Hamlet II, ii L IKE SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLARSHIP, medieval fabliau studies have long been dominated by a preoccupation with ques tions of genre and particularly the fate of individual texts that do not fit standard generic categories. More recently, literary critics have acknowledged that the path of post rem classification is covered with pit falls. It is folly to force texts into categories invented by another era— whether that of Aristotle or the nineteenth century—since those cate gories bear no relation to medieval discursive practices. Hans-Robert Jauss foregrounds the idea that a single literary work can be grasped or understood in light of more than one genre.1 Jauss gives the example of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, in which satire, parody, and moral allegory intersect. The critic’s question then becomes that of determining the dominante: the generic system governing the text; in the case of Jean de Meun, Jauss sees the dominante as the encyclo pedic genre.2The notion of the dominant or predominant generic group presupposes that any text bears within it independent functions (Jauss calls them constitutives) and dependent functions (termed concomi tantes). Jauss offers the example of satire: through the twelfth century, satire appears solely as a dependent function in texts; only in the thir teenth century, with authors like Rutebeuf, does satire take on an inde pendent function, becoming the dominant system in texts that can be grouped together as satires (83). A binary, intertextual model, however, identifying the text and the dominant, the historical group of texts to which the text belongs, does not suffice to account for the strikingly heterogeneous character of many medieval texts. As Curtius and Auerbach demonstrated in their early studies of the Christian or mixed style in medieval literature, the ten dency to intergeneric composition is characteristic of medieval texts.3 10 W in t e r 1993 G ravdal The discovery that medieval texts are related not just intertextually but also intergenerically opens the door to the possibility of redefining medieval textuality. It is possible to expand the usefulness of the binary conceptualization of the relation between text and dominant if we theorize it in conjunction with another theoretical concept, that of the interprétant. The idea of the interprétant was first articulated by Charles S. Peirce, who moved beyond binary linguistic paradigms to posit the nature of the sign as triple, and expressed this by means of a triangular model, composed of a sign, its object, and the idea mediating between the sign and the object, their interprétant.4 For Umberto Eco, the interprétant both signals and triggers a process not of triangulation but of infinite semiosis: “ In other words, in order to establish what the interprétant of a sign is, it is neces sary to name it by means of another sign which in turn has another inter prétant to be named by another and so on.” 5Michael Riffaterre rewrote Peirce’s definition to make it a model for the literary sign: the text stands for an object (intertext), and the idea to which this relation gives rise is the interprétant (a mediating intertext).6 In my own work on medieval textuality I have found the idea of the interprétant useful for understanding medieval parody. In that context, I redefine the sign as the parody (text), the object as the target (text paro died), and the interprétant as the third text, fragment of text, or tradi tion, which determined the specific direction in which the parody rewrote the target text.7 The triple model enables us to recognize that many medieval parodies have been marginalized as unclassifiable problem texts simply because critics did not expect to encounter complex parodie play in medieval literature. Jauss’s working idea of the dominant, perceived in conjunction with the interprétant, brings new discursive practices to light: the two constructs accurately describe not simply medieval parody but also the medieval...
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