「所用為何？言之不盡」：剖析康沃爾郡黑爾德瑞思的作品《沈默的傳奇》中的沉默

“What’s the use? There’s too much to say”: A(na)tomizing Silence in Heldris of Cornwall’s Roman de Silence

在中世紀文化中，沉默（因為其與耐心此一美德的關聯）在道德思想中擁有重要的地位，亦於哲學、知識論、與神學論述裡佔據核心位置。透過檢視十三世紀法國文學作品《沈默的傳奇》中對於沉默重複且時而矛盾的描述，本文檢視中世紀詩人在倫理與沉默形上學之間如何商榷──中世紀詩人的詩歌有時似乎抗拒沉默的狀態，試圖用語言與敘述填滿整個世界。《沈默的傳奇》敘述者對於沉默的可能形式進行了仔細且時而諷刺的描述，並且對個人選擇沉默所根據的諸多相斥理由有所陳述。筆者認為，這些敘述反應了作者對於沉默作為社會與政治問題的解決方法懷抱著興趣，而這部引人注意的傳奇文學作品則體現了書寫沉默的中世紀作家與沉默之間所存在之矛盾、甚或緊張的關係。

In medieval culture, silence (through its connection with the virtue of Patience) has an important place in ethical thought, as well as a central place in philosophical, epistemological, and theological discourse. Examining the repeated and sometimes contradictory depictions of silence in the 13th-century French romance Roman de Silence, this essay investigates the way in which medieval poets – whose poetry at times seems to resist states of silence, to fill the world with as much language and narrative as possible – negotiate the ethics and metaphysics of medieval silence. I argue that the narrator’s careful, sometimes ironic, account of the variety of forms which silence can take and of the competing reasons the individual may choose to adopt silence, reflect his interest in silence as a solution to social and political problems; and that this curious romance exemplifies the paradoxical, even strained, relation between silence and the medieval writers who write about it.