The Openness of Medieval Texts

Introduction

Oral or written texts, which are unclear in various degrees, which allow for different interpretations and which lack comprehensibility, should, in general, be referred to as "open". On the grounds of this definition it becomes obvious that the openness of texts can basically concern any kind of linguistic utterance and that it is not confined to a particular era or age.

This is, first of all, due to the possibilities and basic characteristics of human communication. Human communication can be disturbed in various ways with regard to its process, both in horizontal and in vertical direction. The constituents relevant for this communication process can be involved in it, i.e. the text itself, its author(s), its recipient(s) and the communicative path(s) leading to both of them. All of them can be affected by disturbances, irregularities and discrepancies; the persons involved may lack the necessary understanding and background knowledge. This is also true, among other things, for scientific discourse, in which transparency and clarity should actually prevail (Selzer 1993; Schüttler 1994). However, this turns out to be a misconception if the people involved in this discourse do not possess the specialized knowledge required (Gibbons 1994; Munsberg 1994: 46-49). Of course, a lack of clarity can result on different levels: on the phonological, on the morph semantic as well as on the syntactic level.

Likewise, it is generally true that the openness of texts can be intended and planned in many ways. It occurs spontaneously whenever encoding, intended secrecy, disguise, mystification, pretended quasi-openness (Scott 1990: 126-31) are the objectives of an utterance. The same result occurs when linguistic material and its conventions are dealt with in a consciously playful and associative way. This can also apply to informative utterances, e.g. in advertising (Fritz 1994: 64-81). Openness can occur in any text, as long as it lacks acceptability and coherence or as long as the propositions which constitute the text are not intentionally controlled by linguistic illocutions and thus turn out to be ambiguous. It is known that free oral speech is generally characterized by a considerable degree of uncertainty, i.e. openness, which explains well-known features such as variability, corrections, change of construction, repetition, and redundancy (Ong 1982: 31-77; Barton 1994: 83-94). The phenomenon presents itself particularly in oral dialogue, which usually appears to be unplanned and is thus frequently hypothetical and full of modal verbs (Langford 1994: 19-30; Schwitalla 1994, Biere 1994). Studies of everyday dialogues have confirmed this phenomenon impressively (Stempel 1984). Ultimately, all of this is also connected with the important question as to how and to which degree the normal linguistic utterance is characterized by vagueness and openness. So far, this problem has hardly been studied. It seems, however, that vagueness, which can be traced both in written and in oral discourse, is often a natural form of utterance, not to be attributed to a deficient speaker competence and is thus an element of linguistic pragmatics (Channell 1994).

As far as openness of linguistic utterance is concerned, a literary or poetic text is a domain of its own (Pallotti 1990; Sell 1991). Its nature consists precisely in resisting the orderliness usually typical of texts, in revealing content structure and in planning often only sporadically, in diminishing the intensity of elements such as coherence and cohesion, i.e. factors characterizing the continuity of a discourse. Instead, it often employs means such as multiple perspective, aporia and ambiguity, complex metaphors and symbols, and its descriptions and accounts often refer to non-existent referents and situations. This implies a more or less high degree of uncertainty. The process indicated can reach relatively far, as there is indeed an art school extending from Antiquity to Baroque which chose obscuritas as its stylistic and structural ideal. In general, such an open way of conceptualization actually provokes the free imagination of the recipient, who is thus confronted with several possibilities of interpretation and has to rely on the subjectivity of his reading because the text denies an unequivocal explanation. Within the field of literary criticism this phenomenon has, for a long time, been studied by hermeneutics. Iser (1987 and 1991), as one of its many representatives, should be mentioned in this context. There is still a large potential for linguistic studies in this area, which is revealed particularly by Blake (1990).