Evoking Pure Narrative in La Chanson de Roland’s Laisses Similaires

ABSTRACT This article proposes a rereading of the famed laisses similaires of the Oxford manuscript of La Chanson de Roland to highlight how contradictory elements (emotions, actions, dialogue, etc.) stubbornly resist being smoothed away for conventional narrative harmony’s sake. These laisses similaires, successive retellings of presumably the same event in different words, occur at several key moments in the text and have attracted scholarly attention for their particularity and confounding nature. I adapt Walter Benjamin’s concept of reine Sprache (pure language) — which theorizes that through their intersections and totality, languages tangentially approach a language free from the burden of signifying — from the context of translation to narrative theory, positing an analogous term: pure narrative. Laisses similaires are thus treated as types of translations for an inexistent, and impossible, original. Just as all idioms gesture towards, without arriving at, pure language, no one laisse expresses pure narrative. Through their interactions, we glimpse its possibility.