The Myth of Roland and Its Function as Cultural Hypertext as Expressed in 'RolandHT'

The Myth of Roland and Its Function as Cultural
Hypertext as Expressed in 'RolandHT'

Vika
Zafrin

Brown University
vika@wordsend.org

2002

University of Tübingen

Tübingen

ALLC/ACH 2002

editor

Harald
Fuchs

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Overview
This paper will present an innovative treatment of the literary phenomenon of
Roland, alleged historical personnage and an epic hero almost unique in his
breadth of influence from the eighth century to today. The treatment, which
attempts more successfully than a printed book to present all the
contributor works as equal, is made possible for the first time by the
electronic medium. The combining of works with such different cultural
contexts is reconciled by highlighting similarities and explicitly
juxtaposing the differences between them, and by thematically connecting the
works using both hyperlinks and critical discussion. At the same time, the
reader is given a chance to create his own mental picture of the composite
Roland character by following carefully explicated links. I will argue that
the hypertextual experience of Roland is closer to the way in which the
character was experienced originally--both by storytellers and by
audiences--an experience that reading a paperbound book cannot replicate.
Among the issues discussed will be the relationship between oral tradition
and hypertext, the issue of character identity across cultural boundaries,
and the role of the reader/audience in the epic experience.

Abstract
Vanhoutte 2000 speaks of "the advent of the electronic paradigm to the field
of scholarly editing and textual criticism," which facilitates the creation
of "new kinds of editions in which the record of textual variation becomes a
central point of attention, both on the markup- and on the delivery- side."
RolandHT is a work which, while it is not a
critical edition of any one text, certainly speaks to text variation as its
main focus.
RolandHT began as a critical exposition and literary
experiment. At its center is the protagonist of the 11th-century Song of Roland and of many other works in Europe's
literary canons. Currently in its second year of development at Brown
University, RolandHT uses hypertext theory and Jean
Baudrillard's idea of fragmentary writing to weave Roland storylines from
different literary traditions into a single multi-pathed narrative. A new,
composite, often self-contradictory virtual character is thus created,
drawing upon such contributor works as the French Song of
Roland, the Italian Orlando Furioso,
the Welsh Can Rolant and many others.
In RolandHT, passages from a set of primary sources
are combined into a heavily interlinked web. The hyperlinks, which lead
directly from one quoted passage to another in the same work or in a
different one, highlight both similarities and differences among the themes
and imagery in the storylines. This is true both for works whose plots
parallel (for example, in the German, Welsh and Norse retellings of the
French Song of Roland) and for writings with
differing plots (such as a rendition of the Song of
Roland on one hand and the Italian Renaissance epic Roland in Love on the other). Some of these hyperlinks
point to the next passage in the work through an intermediary paragraph
which explicates the connection between the two passages.
The project's aim is not a coherent linear narrative. It is, rather, an
exploration of this character, so pervasive in Europe's writing between the
Middle Ages and the present day, that reaches beyond the confines of any one
work written about him. Roland evolved as an oral epic hero for three
hundred years before the first extant written work about him was created.
The electronic environment is an invaluable and unique tool for exploring
the relationship between orality and literacy in the context of the
evolution of this character. Before we had the technology we have now, this
sort of study was performed in a one-sided fashion, by studying and trying
to understand orality in its own context, as Walter Ong has done, and
viewing literacy separately. Now an attempt can be made to reproduce the fragmentary nature of oral
storytelling in a written context, and let the readers experience it in a
fashion which will enable them to better understand how people learned about
Roland in the first place, during his proliferation in the age of primarily
oral storytelling.
The project cannot possibly reproduce fully the literary aspects of Ong's
primary oral culture. The Carolingians (inhabitants of France and Germany in
the eighth and ninth centuries, when the Roland legend was conceived) were
not a primary oral culture (McKitterick). Their storytelling tradition,
however, was oral, as was the Roland legend, which first appears in writing
only in the eleventh century. Instead, the new approach to reading epic
poetry that RolandHT presents is arguably closer to
the way in which epic poetry was perceived by
its audience when it was presented orally--no story was seen as an isolated
phenomenon, but rather as part of a cultural network. In the process of
reading a work of print literature, even a well-annotated one, it is easy to
forget the impossibility of its existence outside of its cultural context.
This fact, while certainly true when cultural boundaries are being crossed,
becomes even more relevant when there is a large difference between the
reader's temporal context and the time period in which the work was written.
In this case, especially if the work's original language is the same as that
of the reader, one can be mislead into a false sense of understanding of the
work, and fail to delve into it more deeply. This new electronic version of
the Roland texts simply does not allow one to think of a work of literature
as an isolated event. In the traditional study of literature one is
compelled to study one text at a time in depth, subsequently branching out.
Here we have the opportunity instead to piece knowledge together from many
starting points and eventually to converge toward an understanding, instead
of branching away from generalized, theoretical knowledge to specific
points.
The knowledge to be gained from this ongoing investigation will fill a void
in Roland scholarship. This work provides its readers with a tool to help
them visualize the complexity of the Roland canon by presenting it as a
whole. At the same time, it makes it possible to trace themes and imagery
common to some or all of the works, presenting them together, interwoven as
they are in the source materials but clarified by critical commentary
interspersed with fragments of primary texts illustrating the points. These
analyses could be presented on paper, each of them separately; however, this
would make visualizing the whole much more difficult, and be discordant with
Roland's multi-faceted nature.

Bibliography

Rosamond
McKitterick

The Carolingians and the Written Word

Cambridge
Cambridge University Press
1989

Walter
Ong

Orality and Literacy

New York
Routledge
1982

Edward
Vanhoutte

Textual Variation, Electronic Editions and
Hypertext

Paper presented at ACH/ALLC 2000, Glasgow

2000