Structure

Abstract In studying the structure of the Chronicle of Morea, a distinction should be made between ‘story’ and ‘narrative’: the former is simply the raw material or content, while the latter is the artistic construction into which that content is moulded with the help of devices such as temporal deformation. A comparison of the temporal order of the succession of events in the story and the pseudo-temporal order of their arrangement in the narrative reveals that the overall shape of the Greek and French versions of the Chronicle conforms to the pressures of chronological progression. Thus, the two versions begin with the First Crusade and, having covered—in sequence—the Fourth Crusade, the capture of Constantinople and creation of the Latin Empire, the conquest of the Peloponnese by Guillaume I de Champlitte, and the reigns of Geoffroy I de Villehardouin and his sons Geoffroy II and Guillaume II, break off in the time of Princess Isabeau, the fourth Villehardouin ruler. Even so, a number of deviations, or ‘anachronies’, may be discerned within that broad schema. These anachronies are of particular interest. In a situation where reception is achieved through the written word, if for any reason there is ignorance or confusion regarding the context out of which emerges the material being read at a particular moment, that context can be rediscovered with relative ease by glancing back or forward over the material selectively. By contrast, when oral discourse is involved, this possibility obviously does not present itself, for an utterance is by its very essence ephemeral, confined to the moment when it is pronounced. So as to compensate for the difficulties posed by its medium, a non-written narrative has recourse to distinctive devices. As we shall see, specific types of anachrony in the Greek and French versions of the Chronicle of Morea reflect narrative methods characteristic of orality.