Showed the Genette post to Nick, and was once again reminded how useful it is to get ideas out of your head and into the conversational space between you and another person. He put what I was trying to get at in simple, sharply focused terms: “…distinguish a set (bunch of texts) from a property or set of properties defining that set.”
Well, precisely. It’s important to be aware of whether a text (loosely defined) is a piece of writing or a sculpture or a piece of music. If it’s a piece of writing, there will also be circumstances in which it’s useful to know that it’s rhymed verse, or a novel, or a theatrical script.
But the very fact of this separation, this compartmentalization of artistic works is the problem. We have literature departments, and art history departments, and music departments, and we study one of these to the exclusion of the others, and of course we haven’t seen the Roland corpus as a corpus. Scholars have alluded to it, discussing for example Roland’s reception in Italy or in Spain, but what they’ve concentrated on is literary production, or word-based anyway (oral performance included). The marvelous tradition of chivalric puppet shows in southern Italy and Sicily has never really been brought into the discussion in depth, except by theatre specialists.
Anyway, the important point is: Before being included in the Roland corpus, a work of art must be checked against an eligibility list; but this list has only two criteria. It must be a text produced by humans (or human-produced machines; we’ll get to sentient animals and aliens when we get to them); and it must feature Roland as a character, major or minor. That is all. Its medium of production, form, genre and anything else about it is unimportant with regard to its inclusion (or not) in the corpus. We will not fully see the larger set of texts and the interplay of borrowing and re-imagining among them unless we discard, just for the time being, the notion of homogeneity of form.
(And is specific recording N of musical composition X a different text from the notation of said composition on paper? Depends on what your purpose is; I do not make a distinction here. Multiple recordings and/or editions of the same work are the same text unit. But a 19th-century opera treating the same subject matter as the 11th-century epic poem is a distinct text from that poem.)
