Paul Zumthor on Pilgrimage Narratives

            I found this essay by Paul Zumthor absolutely fascinating. Zumthor looks at the unifying characteristics of a diverse array of medieval narrative, and how these narratives interact with their audiences rhetorically. He dissects the societal value of pilgrimage and explores why pilgrimage was so popular, not as a spiritual expression or amode of tourism but as a form of narrative in the middle ages. He notes a medieval “fascination…of a special order, the understanding of which is an experience of otherness, for better or for worse” (812), and creates a link between the medieval audiences curiosity for the “other” and the reality of a physical and distancing spatial order. This fascination is drives the production of what Zumthor believes is a “double account, narrative and descriptive” (812) of every pilgrimage tale, and often one quality subverts the other depending on the tone of a text. For example, the Canterbury Tales is a rich collection of narratives from various speakers, but the description of the actual pilgrimage is rather sparse. The narrative side of the tale takes precedence over the descriptive side. Zumthor’s article has a lot of really interesting ways of understanding travel narratives (he even has a little something to say on science-fiction as a travel narrative!), and I would highly recommend reading it—even if, dare I say, just for fun.

Zumthor, Paul, and Catherine Peebles. “The Medieval Travel Narrative”. New Literary History 25.4 (1994): 809–824. Web.