Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du Monde. Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity

Simon Gaunt. Marco Polo's Le Devisement du Monde. Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity. Series: Gallica, v. 31. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2013. Pp.212. This learned, theoretically versed, and articulate monograph helpfully shifts the trajectory of Marco Polo studies from questions of the Devisemenfs historicity to its literary and ideological construction of a diverse thirteenth-century world. Gaunt attends to the text's mode of address, style, and perspective, its languages and translations, and the pragmatic realism with which it dispenses knowledge about the world. Through careful comparative analysis between recensions, Gaunt excavates an interest in diversity that subsequent textual redactors and scholars went out of their way to domesticate or elide. Gaunt's readings are informed by Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Freud, and Homi Bhabha as he examines how Marco Polo's text challenged its original audiences by deconstructing stable perspectives on a polarized world. In this way, Gaunt seeks to recover the Devisemenfs original shock value in a way that can also speak intimately to contemporary scholarship in its own globalized and polarized world. The introduction lays the groundwork for subsequent chapters by setting up the intrinsically hybrid linguistic, textual, and generic mobility of the Devisemenfs earliest texts. After careful analysis of the text's complex multilingual transmission, redaction, and translation history, Gaunt bolsters Benedetto's argument that the earliest versions of the text were in a Franco-Italian hybrid dialect, exemplified most closely by BNF f.fr. 1116. BNF f fr. 1116 is clearly structured. It begins with an ethos-establishing writers' biography, and proceeds through 214 chapters describing Asia, following an outbound land route along the silk road and a return sea route along the coasts of south Asia. Other versions followed, adapting the text to various interests and regional languages: Tuscan, French, Venetian, Pipino's Latin, Rasmussen's Latin, and the Z and L Latin redactions. Scholars interested in tracing nationalist linguistic traditions, such as Pierre Menard, have often canonized these subsequent versions, which sometimes results in anachronistic reifications both of nation and of language. By contrast, Gaunt underscores the hybridity of the dialect of BNF f.fr, 1116, which later redactions tend to expunge (though Gaunt stresses the relative "impurity" of all medieval languages). Its genre also mixes romance with geography, often using one trope to correct the other, as it fact-checks Alexander-romance accounts of the Iron Gate and the enclosure of Gog and Magog and, conversely, romanticizes the account of a historical battle. Gaunt argues that the Devisement uses recognizable literary genres and tropes to cue audiences and render the exotic more accessible to various receptions in different manuscript collations. Marco Polo's and Rusticello's text becomes less an authorized account than a mobile lens. The introduction ends with an account of two conceptual tools for Gaunt's analysis: Derrida's theory of the monolingualism of the other, and Freud's notion of the uncanny, inflected by a carefully delimited version of Homi Bhabha's hybridity. Chapter one focuses on narrative voice, reader response, and the author function of the Devisement, as Gaunt analyzes the indeterminate narrative voice of Marco Polo's and Rusticello's text, which is ambiguous and difficult to situate in BNF f.fr 1116, although subsequent recensions increasingly pin it down. Narrative voice drifts between first and third person, resulting in a Marco Polo who is at once author and character, purveying knowledge about the world to both east and west. Likewise, the text both instantiates and confuses the account of its own genesis and authorship, veering from the historical past of events to the performative present of writing, which invites readers to experience reading as a metaphor for journeying. …