Keine Poetik des Widerspruchs – aber Poetiken des Paradoxen und fehlende Aufmerksamkeit gegenüber logischer Inkohärenz

Zusammenfassung

The article questions the proposed concept of a medieval ‘poetics of contradiction’ and the role it plays in diminishing the coherence of a narrative. In medieval literature two phenomena conventionally labeled as contradiction manifest themselves: firstly, explicit, exposed contradictions i.e. in the form of paradoxical assertions and adynata, as can be found especially in spiritual texts, courtly love literature, and nonsense poetry like fatrasies; secondly, as demonstrated by examples taken from the Eckenlied, narrative inconsistencies such as blind motives, redundant motivations, shifting descriptions of characters, and lacking continuity of story. Phrasings of the first kind imply a high grade of deliberate forming. Obviously they can be regarded as engendered by a ‘poetics of paradox’. In addition, these verbal techniques serve to increase textual coherence. By contrast, contradictions of the second kind will definitely lessen coherence, but as they were not deliberately authored they should not be attributed to a ‘poetics’. Instead, it might be modern literary expectations of motivational logic and coherence that bring several of the inconsistencies in texts like the Eckenlied into being.