Literary Theory, History, and Historical Fencing
A funny thing happened to me on the way to being where I am with historical fencing:
I realized that the literature stuff I studied in school was actually relevant - both to thinking about history, and to thinking about fencing. Here is how.
Literary Theory
Part of my life path involved getting a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. Before that, though, I wanted to be a fiction writer.
The main reason I never did pursue the literature path was - if I’m honest - I found a lot of it boring. I liked reading fine, but I didn’t enjoy writing - at least not writing fiction. I was engaged by some of the ideas in literary theory, though.
Literary theory doesn’t seem at first like it’s all that relevant to historical fencing, but I think it is actually pretty relevant. Literary theory, as a field, came into existence because of theoretical problems around how to interpret and understand books, stories, and other bits of text. Historical fencers working to understand and interpret the text of fencing books encounter a lot of the same theoretical problems.
Some of these theoretical problems can be inventoried almost as a kind of narrative. (Imagine we are talking here about a historical fencing text, if you need to.) For example:
One of the most intuitive ways of thinking about literature is to suppose that the meaning of a book or story is “fixed” or “given to us” by its author. They are the most familiar with it, after all, and they created it for us to read - they thought carefully about the individual words and phrases that make up the work, so we should weigh each of these carefully to discern their meaning. Clearly, this is the right way to read a book.
On the other hand, authors are human beings who have lives, problems, goals, and all sorts of complicating factors that may influence what they think the meaning of their book is or why and how it was created. What if someone wrote a book just for money, and there’s no deep meaning they intended? (What if they were paid by the word?) What if they were grappling with depression when they wrote a book? What if a romance someone wrote should be understood as a kind of “love poem” to the great love of their life - and if so, what does the relationship between the author and the person they loved tell us about the meaning of their book? Clearly, this is the right way to read a book.
“Not so fast,” some clever person says, and raises the point that - in a very real and important way - the “meaning” of a text is whatever we, the audience, take away from it after reading it. The text itself is just marks on paper, after all - so is there really even a sense in which the book “exists” apart from the meaning we give it? If the author of a book dies, all we have of the book is the text itself and whatever we can make of it - no? So why are we suddenly treating authors with this reverence, as though they are the only ones who know what their book is about? Clearly, this is the right way to read a book.
“Wait, this is getting too far afield,” someone complains: Even if there’s a degree of variance between what individual readers see in the book, can’t we just talk to each other and agree that there’s certain themes there? Can’t we focus on the themes we agreed are there and try to unpack the relationship between those themes and the language and structure of the book to see what we can learn? Clearly, this is the right way to read a book.
What about what you might call “ad-hoc” analysis, where we might want to read and interpret a text through a particular “lens” in order to learn how relevant it is to some kind of purpose or goal we have, regardless of what the author’s goals might have been, or how other people interpret the book? Do we need to know what the author intended to do this? Is there something we can learn about a particular topic by cross-comparing multiple texts from the same time period and region among each other? How about across different time periods, or different regions? Is this the right way to read a book?
The list could continue. Each of these vignettes loosely corresponds to various schools of thought in literary theory - Authorial Intent criticism; Biographical criticism; Reader-Response criticism; the New Criticism; and finally, the multiplicity of “lenses” - Marxist crit, feminist crit, gender crit, psychoanalytical crit, eco-crit, post-colonial crit, historicist crit, etc.
It does have to be noted that the analogy between literary interpretation and fencing interpretation has limits - for example, fencing books are instructional in nature, and literature is (mostly) not. So, generally speaking, we can more or less safely assume something about the author's intent: To teach the reader something about fencing.
Even with this being said, though, it does not in any way entail that we can escape interpretive differences, and for anyone who has tried to interpret a historical fencing text, I wager that at least elements of the above are familiar: "This passage means X." "What? No, it means Y." "Based on what?" "The author told us in the last section to do Thing A, so this is an example of that." "I don't agree at all, this is a new chapter unconnected to the last one and we’re not supposed to do Thing A anymore, this is teaching a whole new lesson on Thing B." “Well how do you know what the author intended? I think it means this because what else could it mean, that’s the only way I can make sense of it!” And so on.
Ultimately there are two salient points about all this:
There are many different intelligible approaches to reading a given text, none of which change the actual text itself, but which may all yield big differences in what you get from that text. Like a lot of things in life, what you get out of a text depends on the perspective you bring to it.
These different approaches sometimes have a tendency to “talk past each other,” making discussions of literary theory (and fencing interpretation) difficult to ever “resolve,” because there is no one “correct” way to approach a text. This means that a common state of many interpretive discussions is what we might call “dueling headcanons” - once we decide what we feel a given passage of text means, that’s the end of the interpretive process. We can easily agree on what the actual text of the book is, because that’s a matter of fact. You can just look it up.
This does not necessarily convey anything about its meaning, though. We can go through the social ritual of demonstrating our knowledgeability about the text, and talking to others to see if they agree with us about its meaning if we want to. Maybe that discussion will be fun, or maybe it won’t. If it’s not fun, or if they don’t agree with your interpretation, you can choose to engage further, or not. If they seem smart and seem like they have good reasons, maybe you change your mind; maybe you don’t. Who cares?
If all this sounds like a drain-circling discussion about what the meaning of a book is, with smart people talking past each other, then you have gotten in touch with one of the reasons I decided literature and literary theory was not for me when I was 19.
I think there are ways out of this somewhat circular form of argument, though, based on what someone’s goals are.
Modes of interpreting a text that help someone achieve their goals are objectively more useful to them than other modes of interpreting it, and this helps us understand what approaches to a text are actually better or worse than others for the purposes of achieving a goal. For example:
Fencers who want to win competitions need to compare notes with others who share that goal and identify which elements of a source help them win matches.
Fencers who want to achieve deep fluency with a given source or cluster of sources need to find others who also want to do deep, close reads.
One of my own personal goals as a fencer is to try to reconstruct, replicate, and practice the fencing given to us in whatever source I am working from (mostly Liechtenauer, but not exclusively).
Goals can overlap, and so can interpretive approaches. However, if one has multiple goals at once, one needs to be clear about which goal is being worked on at any one time and adapt their interpretive approach accordingly.
For anyone who shares this last goal, doing the best job we can to reconstruct a source’s fencing implicitly commits us to trying to understand the historical context of that source - and this brings us to the role of history in historical fencing.
History
Here is a list of some contextual and interpretive factors that may vary from fencing source to fencing source:
Who was the intended audience for the source?
How much background did that audience have with fencing, martial arts, and related physical training?
What “role” did written books have in the culture in which the source appeared? How common were books in general, and how common were fencing books as a genre? How much subject knowledge were readers in-period generally expected to have when opening a book they had not read before?
How did the culture that produced the source understand knowledge and skill transmission to work, and how did they put that into practice?
How frequently was the audience of the source called on to “fence for real,” and not in the context of fencing practice? (Note well the scare-quotes - what “for real” fencing was is the thing that might vary);
Was there an “intended context” for the fencing in a source or not? If so, what was it - Self-defense? “Duels”? Battlefield? Mounted or dismounted? With protective equipment or without? Etc.
What conceptually connects different passages of a fencing text, if anything? Did the author intend us to make these connections, and/or would they find them “acceptable”?
Are there "principles" for how to fence being offered by the text? If so, can we "extend" the application of principles or doctrines in a text to cover situations not explicitly described by it, or are we not supposed to do that?
How literally is the reader supposed to take illustrations when trying to reproduce the motions described in the text?
What were the laws and regulations around weapon use in the period/region the source was created? How vigorously were such laws enforced? And regardless of what the laws were, what were the social expectations around the use of weapons?
This is a big list, but there are probably more that I have not thought of.
Some of these are questions of fact, but many of them are instead questions of interpretation. This brings us right back to the question of how we are “supposed to” approach a text.
I bring these up because I see answering questions like these as being part of the essential “mission” for anyone who sets themselves the goal of reconstructing the fencing in a source. Doing the best job we can at this implicitly commits us to learning a whole lot of information that “is not fencing,” but which is necessary to put the source in context.
It is for this reason that I see the study of history (i.e. non-fencing history) as fitting cleanly into the study of historical fencing, in a few different ways:
History can answer questions of fact related to our sources. This one doesn’t need much unpacking, but - History can sometimes supply answers to at least some of the questions listed above. Sometimes not though, a possibility that one needs to be prepared for.
Even in cases where the answers are not clear, probing these questions can help us make informed guesses about what was most likely. Even if our answers are uncertain, that does not mean “nothing has been learned” - we will still understand more than we knew before about the context in which a source originated and what uses it may have been put to. This in turn can guide our attempts to replicate its fencing.
History can help us probe the mindset and goals of the creators and audience of a source. As mentioned above, one of the key differences between analysis of literature and analysis of an instructional text is that the author of an instructional text really does intend for the audience to learn a particular thing, as opposed to merely enjoying their work. But we know they were not writing for us particular modern people, at least!
So, when we are trying to reconstruct the fencing in a text, we don’t need to worry so much about how we or other modern people understand the text. Instead, what we really need to figure out is how to approach the text as the original author would have intended it, and how the original audience would have understood it.
From the standpoint of how to interpret a text, this mode of analysis fits relatively well within a school of thought in literary theory called “Reception Theory” (a subset of “Reader-Response Theory.”) The central idea of Reception Theory is to review and analyze a text in terms of how its intended audience might have “received” it, sometimes incorporating focus on how the creator of the work may have added features to it that the audience would understand and “receive easily” because they recognized ideas that were familiar to them.
In literary analysis, this is done by inventorying the intended audience’s background, what their lives were like, and so on - but this mode of thinking has obvious uses for historiography as well, and historians use approaches like this to draw in literary or cultural products to support a historiographical argument. When we know who wrote a document and what the conditions of its creation were, and have enough general background knowledge about what the life situations and mindset of the original audience was, this allows us to “back into” how the audience would have received a text, a piece of art, an object, and so on.
As historical fencers, we can also utilize the methods of Reception Theory to find the correct “theoretical place” for insights from history in our interpretations of historical fencing sources:
We can infer who authors and audiences may have been and what their backgrounds were like based on the references and content of the fencing source we are looking at;
We can compare motions described in a source to other types of “embodied” culture that were present at the time and place of its creation, such as dance traditions;
We can look at the language the book uses and see if the same language is used elsewhere in the culture of the time. This can help us develop better translations, or simply gain a deeper appreciation of its meaning;
We can use biographical information about the author, their students, what the facts of their life-situations were, historical events that occurred during their lives, and so on, allowing us to build as robust an understanding of the mindset of the creator and receivers of a work as possible.
Finally, history can help us understand fencing sources as products not just of individual authors, but as cultural artifacts. It is intuitive enough to say that the historical master who created a fencing book influenced the fencing culture of their era through their special skill, acumen, and cleverness. This is in some ways very similar to the “Great Man Theory of History” - a “top-down” historiographical approach reaching as far back as Thucydides that posits that the best explanations for why historical events happened the way they did was the decisions of the great, powerful, and clever.
I submit that this approach to understanding fencing sources and fencing culture is, at minimum, incomplete. It takes very little account of the role of the audience in the reception and acceptance of a fencing source’s guidance, or why they might like it and endorse it. Understanding why a work was popular with an audience is important. It allows us to understand something about the culture that received the work, and form “bottom-up” explanations for why a work was received well. The audience’s mindset, mode of living, and the facts of what their world was like affected how they would have understood the fencing source, and accordingly what their fencing was like when it was practiced.
So What
The intellectual tools developed in literary theory create a framework for understanding how multiple interpretations of a historical fencing text are both present and justifiable. Since a great deal of literary analysis happens when the creator of a piece is still alive and can speak to their own intent, literary analysis - and particularly Reception Theory - also gives some perspective on how we should attempt to analyze and interpret historical sources, in which the creator, audience, and intent is sometimes more difficult to identify.
For others in the community who share the goal of replicating the fencing described in our sources and putting that fencing in context, I hope these thoughts are helpful in explaining what we are doing and why.
For those in the community who have had only a vague sense of why “non-fencing history” matters for the study of historical fencing, I hope these thoughts are helpful, or at least something to think about. Because I selfishly want others to share my goal of bringing history into the interpretive process, I would urge you to start thinking about what elements of historical context are interesting to you and talking with members of the community who might know about them and are able to point you towards good books.
Comments
Post a Comment