Esposito-The Monkey in the Jarcha - Tradition and Canonicity in the Early Iberian Lyric

7/31/2019 Esposito-The Monkey in the Jarcha - Tradition and Canonicity in the Early Iberian Lyric

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The Monkey in the Jarcha: Tradition and Canonicity in the Early

Iberian Lyric

Esposito, Anthony P.

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Volume 30, Number

3, Fall 2000, pp. 463-477 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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The Monkey in the Jarcha:

Tradition and Canonicity in

the Early Iberian Lyric

Anthony P. Espsito

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Protecting the textual ecology

The fall 1995 issue of La Cornica, a journal devoted to medieval Spanishstudies, marked a watershed of sorts. Under the guest editorship of MichaelSolomon, a cluster of articles appeared whose goal was to provoke a dialoguebetween contemporary literary and cultural theories and hispanomedieval-ism. The genesis of these pieces was a series of ongoing colloquia and panels,most notably a symposium at Emory held in November 1994, Textualities ofDesire, and a special session at the 1995 MLA convention, In and of This

World. The three papers which appeared in La Cornica did little to challenge

the standard inventory of medieval Iberian literature: Brocato on La Celestina ;Brown on Menndez Pidal; and Espsito on the jarchas.1 What the threepapers insisted on, however, was an introspective examination of the praxis ofhispanomedievalism. Along with Solomons introduction, the cluster consti-tuted a challenge to the received way(s) of seeing medieval Spanish texts. Inshort, the contested issue was not the canon ofwhatbut the canon ofhow.

The period of medieval Spanish literature in the vernacular(s) thatmost interests me, 8001250, can probably be described as textually under-

represented. This lack of textual documentation is not an uncommon occur-rence in other national literatures of this period (e.g., Old Celtic literatures,

Anglo-Saxon, Old Slavic) the notable exception being the Gallo-Romanceliteratures (against which Hispanic philology often imagines itself writing).The cultural border that a literary canon patrolsthe space between writing

judged to be good and writing judged to be badis often deferred in litera-tures in which exclusion from the canon represents an ill-afforded luxury. Insuch literary systems, canonicity is guaranteed by the mere extancy of a text;the literary value of the text is never seriously contested as its survival is evi-

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30:3, Fall 2000.Copyright by Duke University Press / 2000 / $2.00.


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dence enough of its cultural worth. In early Iberian literature, fragments,such as the hundred surviving lines of the Carolingian-themed Roncesvallesepic found in a copy dated circa 1310, and works of uncertain and undefinable

linguistic and geographic provenance, for example the much-debatedAuto delos reyes magos, are regularly discussed and included in even the most basic ofmedieval surveys of Spanish literature.2 Such inclusion, however, is not theresult of openness to contemporary critical notions of incompleteness andfracture in the case of the Roncesvalles, or hybridity and ambiguity in the caseof theAuto. Both texts serve an important purpose in the formation of anational canon. The Roncesvalles is cited as an example of how foreign epicmaterial, that of Roland and Charlemagne, is nationalized, even in its scant

100 lines.3 The Auto is needed as a first (and only) example of a pre-fifteenth-century dramatic text in an Iberian dialect that even closely resem-bles Castilian. Nonetheless, as textual production increases, so does the con-testation of value; the complex debate surrounding a texts literary/cultural

worth becomes the principal determinant of a texts relationship to thecanon.4As such canons wend their way through the Castilian fifteenth cen-tury, a more exclusionary triage can be performed and texts can be includedor excluded according to the cultural/critical project at hand.

As witnessed above, several things can inhibit the formation of acontested canon of early vernacular texts, in our modern sense of the con-cept. Those resonances that guarantee cultural authenticity in modernity,for example, authorship, language, or national boundaries, are more oftenthan not unfixed and indeterminate in early medieval textuality. Nonethe-less, there is a need to authorize and impose cultural worth on even the mostsparse assemblage of texts. A contestation of value directed at the texts them-selves, however, threatens to erode such a fragile textual environment. Oftentimes such a contestation is shifted away from the inventory of texts and issubsequently imposed upon the writing around and about the text. Thus inhispanomedievalism what has been manufactured is not the formation of acanon of early medieval texts but rather a canon of interpretation. Such acanon of interpretation serves to protect the textual ecology. This functionis perhaps best illustrated by a modern parable.

Joe Orton: Philologist

It may seem strange to use a relatively contemporary British playwright, JoeOrton (19331967), to illustrate the praxis of medieval Hispanic philol-ogy.5 Best known for his plays, What the Butler Saw, Entertaining Mr. Sloane,

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and his sensational murder at the hands of his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, whobludgeoned Orton to death with a hammer and subsequently took his ownlife, Orton was a performer of what today would be considered radical queer

sexualityhe was notorious for his sexual trysts in Londons public restrooms. Ortons criminal notoriety, however, was assured not by his sexualproclivities but rather by a series of book defacings which he and Halliwellcarried out at the Islington public library.6 Alexander Connell, the chieflibrarian, described three types of defacement: the addition of false blurbs;the fabrication by collage of amended jackets; and the collage method ofalteration of illustrations, sometimes with mildly obscene results, or the inser-tion of humorous captions, or the writing-in of critical comments.7 Most

outrageous was the pasting of a monkeys face in the center of a yellow rosein Collins Guide to Roses. Beehler goes to the heart of the matter when heclaims that the defacing of the Collins rose undoes the onto-theo-logicalidea of the Book, or as Derrida often writes, the book of Nature and Gods

writing.8 Ortons undoing of textual integrity resonates in Beehlers analysis:

The proper Book appears as the homogenous, literal transcription ofan original, divine truth, while the improper book seems to obscure

that truth by going beyond it, by exceeding it. Thus the sign of thedangerous, unnatural book is its heterogeneity, its going beyondor doubling of the natural source. In its difference is its error.9

The parable unfolds if the reader replaces Beehlers Book/book withPhilology/philology.

Proper Philology appears as the homogenous, literal transcriptionof an original, divine truth, while [the] improper philologyseems to obscure that truth by going beyond it, by exceedingit. Thus the sign of [the] dangerous, unnatural philology isits heterogeneity, its going beyond or doubling of the naturalsource. In its difference is its error.

Ortons writing around the text as described in Connells criminal prose-cution re-creates and imposes a whole new paratextual reality on an old,

established text. In this way, Ortons work mimics philological praxis. Theunnatural superimposing of the monkeys face inside the flower, however,destabilizes and denies the nature (and with it the natural origin) of therose. And in this lies the criminality of Ortons act. The canon ofhow(weshould read) thus prescribes a homogenous, literal writing that illustrates

Espsito / The Monkey in the Jarcha 465


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or re-presents its source, the natural origin of its truth.10 And for his-panomedievalism, the most powerful and enduring argument for the literal,homologous inscription of the sources and natural origins of its literary mon-

uments is the theory of traditionalism (tradicionalismo or neo-tradicionalismo)as perfected by Menndez Pidal and his followers.

Guaranteeing the authentic

Tradicionalismo is a way of seeing early medieval Spanish literature. It is anattempt to recover origins, in their full mystical sense, often articulated bySaid as divine, mythical, and privileged.11As a way of reading, tradicional-

ismo is all embracing. And though primarily associated with the epic, in itsmost mature Pidalian manifestation it simultaneously transcends and linksthe whole inventory of early medieval Iberian textual genres in its project ofrecovery: epic, ballad, chronicle, and lyric. As a Spanish national literaryschool, it first emerges in the writings of Mil y Fontanals, especially his1874 opus, De la poesa heroica-popular castellana.12 Writing against thedominant French school, who saw the origins of the epic as the result ofunique, isolated compositions of individual poets, Mil treated the epic

(and by extension the ballad and popular lyric) as the product of a con-tinuous, uninterrupted popular transmission. His great contribution was tofuse the equally Romantic notions (however contradictory) of individualpoetic genius to the creative spirit of the collective volk. Writing a mereseven years later, the Spanish jurist and educator Joaqun Costa y Martnezshows how quickly and solidly Mils ideas had been accepted:13

Lo primero que a cualquiera se le ocurre cuando reflexiona sobre

este tema es que el pueblo no puede ser, en modo alguno, poetadirecto, esto es, colectivamente; que las entidades colectivas nopueden producirpor s mismasla ms nfima obra literaria, comono pueden crear una costumbre ni una ley. El pueblo no es unapersonalidad individual, no es un cerebro para sus pensamientos ysus sentimientos, ni una lengua con que traducir esas formas en elmundo exterior del lenguaje, ni una mano para pulsar la lira: es unconjunto orgnico, es un compuesto de elementos racionales y

dotados de albedro, y slo medianteesos elementos puedeconcebir y dar vida social a sus concepciones.

[The first thing that comes to mind when one reflects upon thistheme is that the people cannot in any way be the actual poet, that



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is, collectively; collective entities cannot produce by themselves themost meager literary work, just as they cannot create a custom or alaw. The people are not an individual, they are not the mind that

guides the individuals thoughts or feelings, nor a tongue totranslate these forms into the outside world of language, nor a handto play the lyre: it (the people) is an organic entity, a composite ofrational elements, endowed with free will, and only through theseelements can it conceive and give social life to its conceptions.]14

The apex of romantic philology in Spain, tradicionalismo embracesand promotes the four gospels of nineteenth-century philological practice:15

1. the long and reliable oral transmission of early poetry;2. the historicity of early medieval epic;3. the eastern origins of the folk narrative;4. the unwavering adherence to Lachmannian editing practices.16

As a doctrine, tradicionalismo projects the confident ascertainment of ultimateorigins in a distant past beyond the earliest written records.17As an interpretive

strategy, it is exclusionary as it serves a conservative discipline at the expense ofdifferent points of view. The ontotheological underpinning of this exclusivityis authenticitythat the multitude of discourses and voices that inhabit theearly Spanish text are later documentations of an earlier, real articulation. Inthe case of the epic, it is the representation of an authentic history; in its edit-ing practices, it is the reconstruction of an authentic text, a text as the author

would have it; and for the early lyric, the focus of this study, it is the recordingand privileging of an authentic popular voice.

The Monkey in thejarcha

In my contribution to the 1995 cluster in La Cornica, I suggested that anx-ieties about ethnic, linguistic, and sexual identity inform how hispanome-dievalism chooses to (re)present its texts. Using the apocryphal genital dis-memberment of the last Visigothic king (as recounted in both ballad and inthe fifteenth-centuryCrnica sarracina) as a metaphor for a nation lost,18 I

modestly claimed that thejarchas, those verses in an Ibero-Romance (as wellas Arabic) vernacular which close Arabic and Hebrew frame poems, moax-ajas, are presented in anthologies and histories of Spanish literature as sev-ered fragments, because often times the poems which contain them relate an



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unsettling (in this specific case, homoerotic) desire. Dismembered fromtheir larger frame poems, thejarchasare presented in isolation and sanitizedand thus free (and safe) to become part of the medieval Spanish vernacu-

lar canon. I concluded by showing that structural and thematic resonancesbetween the frame poem andjarcha in question defied dismemberment andbegged for an integral reading.19

In reaction to my study, Harriet Goldberg questions my resistanceto severance and laments, Are we to ignore the presence of a traditional pop-ular lyric? (onto which we can reattach the severedjarcha).20 In this way sherepeats the canonical ideas surrounding early Iberian lyric. Goldberg echoesGarca Gmez echoing Menndez Pidal:

A la suerte de esa segunda consecuencia [la existencia de unaliteratura romanceada en Andaluca] va ligada la de la tercera,que postula la similitud de las jarchas romances con la posteriorlrica popular espaola, as como la inclusin de aqullas enlos engranajes de la poesa tradicional hispnica, segn suabundante formulacin menndezpidaliana.

[Along with this second consequence (the existence of a

literature written in romance in Andalucia) is linked the third:the similarity of the romancejarchaswith the later popularSpanish lyric, as well as the inclusion of those (jarchas) inthe fabric of traditional Spanish poetry, as abundantlyformulated by Menndez Pidal.]21

Many other intermediary authorities are echoed in Goldberg as well: Armis-tead, Armistead and Monroe, Clarke, Frenk Alatorre, Monroe.22All sharean unwavering belief in the oral, popular origins of the early lyric and itsuninterrupted transmission, which even in its textual form must be seen asthe transmission of an authentic, popular voice. So firm is this belief thatMonroe writes, [E]ven if we were to adopt the extreme position that theRomance hargas, rather than being authentic popular compositions, are alllearned imitations made by bilingual Arabic and Hebrew poets, the very factthat they are imitations suggests the existence of a model, for where there is

an echo, there must be a voice.23

Of course, this view is not extreme at all.Extreme (or perhaps better stated, unimaginable) would be to assert thatthere is no relationship (or simply ignore that there may be one) betweenthe undocumented popular lyric and its textualized counterpart. Extreme

would be the case ofRezeptionsstandpunkt, and its trickle-down theory of



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culture, gesunkenes Kulturgut, in which we could posit that the traditionmoves in the other direction. Witness Edgar Piguet echoing Bdier:

La posie populaire est un mythe. Le peuple na jamais rien cr.

Il ne fait que reprendre et imiter ce que crent les centres decivilisation. Ainsi les prtendues chansons populaires sont desimitations plus ou moins altres de thmes et de formes littraires.

[Popular poetry is a myth. The people have never createdanything. They do nothing but take and imitate what the centersof civilization create. Therefore these supposed popular songs aremore or less adapted from literary themes and forms.]24

What appears to be a reasonable compromise, that there is a poetic citation,for Monroe becomes an extreme. Any writing about the early lyric whichdoes not (re)state its popular origins and (re)articulate its authentic voice islike the monkey in the rose. Like the prosecution of Orton for an unnatural

writing around (and over) the text, the canon of how demands acknowl-edgment of the natural origins of its study.

In this way, philology serves to discipline both text and reader. Its

goal is to produce clean and stable texts; its pedagogical mission is to instructits readership on how the edition came about. Reading the text then becomesa confident, self-referential act in which language, especially in its real, dia-chronic sense, and the cultural tracing of textual origins (a cultural diachronyof sorts) are foregrounded. Absent from such a praxis is the notion of inter-pretation (so prevalent in other periods of literary study)a forward-lookingreading that attempts to link the medieval text to its modern readers. In Fou-cauldian terms, philology becomes for the deviant reader both clinic andholding-cell; as Cerquiglini writes, philology is hyginiste . . . pourchasseladultre . . . seffraie de la contamination [hygienic . . . it hunts down theadulterer . . . it recoils from contamination].25

Gender Trouble

Recovering the early medieval Iberian lyric mimics a surgical procedure, a

transplant in which the poetic organ is excised and subsequently graftedonto another entity. Such an operation is needed given that these early lyricmanifestations, supposedly popular and voiced by women in a natural set-ting, are found framed in a radically different poetic context, assembled incodicils, of courtly (not popular) origin, and claimed to be in great part



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authored by men. As critics such as Monroe and Frenk Alatorre would haveit, the excised fragment is authentic and natural in its articulation. To imag-ine the fragment as a citation is, as we have seen, viewed as extreme (read

unnatural). What motivates this position?As Bloch and Nichols convincingly demonstrate, philologys obses-sion with origins is an outgrowth of nineteenth-century nationalism; theneed for the nation to imagine a textuality that creates an ethnic, linguisticand racial identity weds philology to the nation.26As European print-cultureattempted to grapple with a varied linguistic past, it confronted a peculiarparadox: How do you reconcile a polyglot past with the cultural and eco-nomic mandate for a monoglot identity, a common language of expression,

representation, and exchange? Constantly deemphasizing the written, tex-tual manifestations of its early monuments and continuously promotingtheir orality, Hispanic philology seems to have found a convenient escape.

With textuality downplayed, Hispanic philology found itself in the privi-leged position to remake and imagine its texts as it saw fit. A cut here, anemendation here is so much easier when the voice and not the text is themonument.

This was philologys foundational moment. Focusing on the rela-

tionship of print-culture to the rise of early capitalism, Benedict Andersonframes this moment succinctly:

In pre-print Europe, and, of course, elsewhere in the world,the diversity of spoken languages, those languages that for theirspeakers were (and are) the warp and woof of their lives, wasimmense; so immense, indeed that had print-capitalism soughtto exploit each potential oral vernacular market, it would have

remained a capitalism of petty proportions. But these variedidiolects were capable of being assembled, within definite limits,into print-languages far fewer in number.27

Analogously, the hispanomedievalists task was clear: to assemble the multi-tude of voices that became the early lyric into a consonance that representsthe cultural nation it sought to define.

The real presence of the voice in these texts is crucial. For tradition-

alists, the lyric can only be viewed as transubstantiated: the text is the voice.Citation (a consubstantiation of sorts), in which there is a dual presence ofauthor and voice, is unacceptable. The next step, the mere symbolic repre-sentation of the voice in a purely author-imagined text, broaches heresy. That



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which is to be remade into the canon of origins must be authentic. A citedvoice is a voice once removed; it is a trace, and, as such, is a blatant reminderof the absence of the object, its source. Those assertions about the lyric which

we have seen that the lyric voice must be viewed as authenticare pro-tectionist; it is a desire to preserve a voice whose authentic presence they fearmay vanish into absence at the slightest scrutiny. Of course, the voice doesnotvanish; if cited or imagined, it becomes bound to the text, far moredifficult to alter and sever. The material text becomes the monkey in the roseas it overwrites its own natural origins.

A case in point: in his edition of Galego-Portuguese cantaresdamigo, Nunes dedicates his volume to the women of Galicia and Portugal:

s mulheres de Portugal e Galiza . . . pertence-vos de direito . . . comosucessoras daquelas em cujos lbios so figurados os cantares a contidos[For the women of Portugal and Galicia . . . it rightfully belongs to you . . .as the successors of those women in whose lips are figured the songs hereincontained].28 The (trans)historical female voice authors his edition in thesame way it authors the moaxaja. We are, however, confronted with anintrinsic problem. The male compiling/recording/citing/composing (I askthe reader to choose) of womens voices and female subjectivities, by both

poet and editor, is a reminder that the female subject is simultaneouslyboth subject and object, a subjected subject. It is this construct whichinspires Cixous and Clment to state metaphorically as well as materiallythat women could never have exclaimed: The house I live in is my own,/ I never copied anyone.29 The voice-text was neverwomens alone. And

within the context of poetic containment, all subjects, all voices are them-selves subjected beings: the poetic voice is not so much a source as areflection of received meanings.30

Recovering through citation, however, is not avoided in othermoments in medieval Spanish literary history. For certain genres, most notablythe epic, it is the state of the art. Much of the lost epic is reconstructed byreading through other literary genres, specifically ballad and chronicle.31

The problem with citation in the lyric is that it makes gender trouble.32

Men ventriloquize womens voices; this cross-voicing denies women theirvoice and at the same time destabilizes (by effeminizing) the dominant,

text-making, nation-building male voice. Witness the following moaxajawith itsjarcha by Al-Am al-Tutili (d. 1126 ):

P. Una noche llamamos a la puerta de un convento en que servanvino / y nos encontramos entre guardianes y trasnochadores.



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[One night we knocked on the door of a convent in which theyserved wine and we found ourselves among watchmen andnightowls.]

1. Y nos lleg el vino con toda presteza / y una joven vino asaludarnos y a hacernos los honores, / jurando por todo elEvangelio: / nunca lo vest ms que con un vestido de pez, / ni hasido jams expuesto al fuego!

[And soon the wine arrived and a young girl came to greet us andto do us honor, swearing on the Gospels: The wine I serve is thefreshest and purest!]

2. Entonces yo le dije: oh la ms bella de las criaturas! / Segnvuestra religin, qu hay de mal en beber con el vaso? / Ella merespondi: no hay para nosotros nada de mal en ello; / as loaprendemos de los anales / de la totalidad de los monjes y grandessabios.

[I then said to her: Oh most beautiful of creatures! According toyour religion, is drinking from the cup bad? She answered:

There is nothing wrong at all with it; thus we learn in thewritings of the great monks and sages.]

3. Debo confesaros, oh muy ilustre pueblo mo, / que estoyperdido por el amor de Ahmad. / Tiene unos ojos que me matancon su rechazo. / Yo he guardado el amor secretamente en micorazn, / pero mis lgrimas han revelado mi secreto.

[I must confess to you, oh my illustrious people, that I am lostbecause of my love for Ahmad. He has eyes that slay me with hisrejection. I have kept this love hidden in my heart, but my tearsreveal my secret.]

4. Han revelado los lloros del enamorado la pasin / para quien sucara es como la luna llena en el horizonte. / Tiene unos ojos queatacan con fuerza a las criaturas. / A cuntos mataron de leonesferoces! / Y no hay para el muerto de amor venganza alguna.

[The weeping of the beloved has revealed his passion for himwhose face is like a full moon on the horizon. He has eyes thatfiercely attack Gods creatures. How many have they slain like aferocious lion! There is no vengenace for one killed by love.]



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5. Una joven que fue seducida por l, / a la que pone enferma conel desdn y el orgullo, / enton unos versos refirindose a l . . .

amnu amnu y al-malh.gare

borqe tu me qeresy

-ll

h matareMerced, merced, oh hermoso! Di: /por qu t me quieres, ay Dios, matar?

[A young girl that was seduced by him, whom he made sick by hisdisdain and pride, sang some verses referring to him:

Mercy, mercy, oh beautiful one! Tell me:why by God do you want to kill me?]33

As we can see by a careful reading of the moaxaja, there is a multiplicity ofvoices embedded in one single text.34 In the poetic preface, the poet opens

with the first-person plural. He then gives voice to the servant-girl, and a dia-logue ensues in which there is a self-citation. In harmonious conspiracy, bothpoet and editor produce a queer text. The editor/translator clearly marks thetransition from the servant-girl to the love-sick poet by a break in direct quo-tation: the conversation is clearly signaled by quotation marks. Their dia-

logue concluded, the poet returns to his public and confesses to his audience,his people, his love for Ahmad, a clearly masculine binary through nomi-nation in the original Arabic and grammatically gendered in the translatedtext (Ahmad /perdido). Thejarcha, voiced by a young woman also seduced by

Ahmad, glosses the poets own desire. However, it is now regendered awayfrom a same-sex queer wanting toward one of heterosexual desire.

The poets desire and own poetic language having been safely trans-formed and forgotten, the jarcha can be reclassified and presented as anindependent poetic genre. Such a critical gesture removes thejarcha from itsHispano-Arabic containment and queer space and reattaches it to an Ibero-Romance canon through a procedure in which the poetic citation is authen-ticated as a real, autonomous, heteroglossal voice. Ironically, the very lin-guistic hybridity of thejarcha, perhaps because the Arabic is a plea for mercyand pity, does not seem to pose a problem. Our own Romance-speaking,dominant, heterosexual male culture is now free to dictate the significance

of the female voice, projecting its reflection of received meanings. In prac-tice, it mimics a colonial enterprise: a dominant power suppresses the voiceof the colonized in order to establish material ascendance. The canon of howdemands that both textual representation and production must be completelycontrolled by the dominant culture.



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Let us return to Costa: el poeta se ha hecho nacin, raza, humanidad,desprendindose de todo elemento egosta y particular empapndose delsentido universal histrico e informndolo en un cuerpo esplendoroso [the

poet has become nation, race, humanity, shedding himself of any selfishand private elements, absorbing a universal historical sense and giving radi-ant body to it].35 The poet is subservient to the cultural project of thenation. The voiced text becomes his offering to history, to the tradition. Itis philologys task then to (re)form the text, to strip away the poets voice

when it finds itself at odds with the nacin : for how can queer texts serveraza? Viewed intact, Al-Am al-Tutilis moaxaja andjarcha create a disturb-ing, triangulated desire with Ahmad in the center between the poet and the

young girl. Anthologized in isolation, thejarcha erases all presence of thepoet and the desire is sanitized, merely presenting a young girls love for aboy. Hispanomedievalisms canon of how refashions the text. As seen above,as well in my article that provoked such objection, isolating the jarcharepairs a desire not befitting the nation, fixing both gender as well as genre.

As the moaxaja andjarcha lack a linguistic homogeneity, the critical canonattempts to forge a literary homology not based on a secure, unalterable tex-tuality but rather on a common, transhistorical voice uttering a common,

canonical desire. This projection of tradition guarantees the texts place inthe canon as well as controls its reception. Philology can rest comfortably inthis powerful imaginary, secure that neither deviant language nor desirecontaminates the nations linguistic and textual origins.

Notes

1 Linde M. Brocato, Leading a Whore to Father: Confronting Celestina, LaCornica 24 (1995): 42 60; Catherine Brown, The Relics of Menndez Pidal:Mourning and Melancholia in Hispanomedieval Studies, ibid., 15 41; AnthonyP. Espsito, Dismemberment of Things Past: Fixing theJarchas, ibid., 414;Michael Solomon, Para quin edificamos torres? Theory and HispanomedievalStudies, ibid., 23. Missing from this cluster is a piece presented by Julian Weisson Berceos Poema de Santa Oria, subsequently published as Julian Weiss,Writing, Sanctity, and Gender in Berceos Poema de Santa Oria, Hispanic Review64 (1996): 447 65.

2 What further proof of canonicity need we than web space dedicated to theRoncesvalles: http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/santiago/roncpoem.html. Intact thoughshort, the twelfth-centuryAuto de los reyes magosstill remains an enigma. It has beenat different times linguistically classified as Castilian with Mozarabic, Gascon, or



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Catalan traits. See Rafael Lapesa, Mozrabe y cataln o gascn en el Auto de los ReyesMagos, inMiscel.lnia Aramon i Serra, ed. Antoni Badia i Margarit et al., 3 vols.(Barcelona: Curial, 1983), 3:27794; Ignacio Soldevila, Para aclarar la controversiaen torno al llamadoAuto de los Reyes Magos, Homenaje a lvaro Galms de Fuentes, 3

vols. (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo; Madrid: Gredos, 198587), 2:47581.3 Charlemagnes mourning the severed heads of his vassals, unique to this version of

the Roland legend, is seen by Alvar and Alvar as a clear evocation of a similar themefound in the reconstructed Cantar de los Infantes de Lara. Carlos Alvar and ManuelAlvar, eds., Epica medieval espaola (Madrid: Ctedra, 1991), 165.

4 See John Guillory, Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the CurrentDebate, English Literary History54 (1987): 483527; and Guillory, CulturalCapital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1993). The assembly of the medieval Occitan chansonniers is a case in point.

That these lyric anthologies were compiled at least one century after the bulk ofOccitan poetic production guaranteed a critical literary mass and provoked a literarytriage of sorts among the various compilers and scribes. A hierarchy of poetic valueusually determined the order in which the poems appeared in the manuscripts: thecans, the most highly valued poetic form, began each poets section, followed by lesscourtly genres and concluded by more popular compositions.

5 I am grateful to my companion, Gary D. Pratt, whose work on Orton has inspiredand informed this section. These ideas are as much his as mine.

6 For more information, see John Lahrs controlling biography, Prick Up Your Ears: The

Biography of Joe Orton (New York: Knopf, 1978).7 Alexander Connell, A Successful Prosecution, The Library Association Record65.3

(1963): 102, as quoted in Michael Beehler, Joe Orton and the Heterogeneity of theBook, Sub-stance33 34 (1982): 8384.

8 Ibid., 83; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatolog y, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 19.

9 Beehler, Joe Orton, 84.10 Ibid., 85.11 See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method(New York: Basic Books,

1975).12 Manuel Mil y Fontanals, De la poesa heroico-popular castellana (1874), ed. Martn

de Riquer and Joaqun Molas (Barcelona: CSIC, 1959).13 I should like to acknowledge one of our University of Pennsylvania graduate

students, Cristina Snchez-Carretero, whose work on Costa has influenced my ownthoughts on the origins and diffusion of tradicionalismo. For Costa and hiscontribution to the traditionalist debate, see Luis Daz G. Viana, La invencin delconcepto de cultura tradicional en los estudios sobre poesa hispnica: las relacionesentre lo oral y lo escrito, Entre la palabra y el texto, ed. Luis Daz G. Viana and

Matilde Fernndez Montes (Sendoa: Oiartzun; Madrid: CSIC, 1997), 1332.14 Joaqun Costa y Martnez, Poesa popular espaola y mitologa y literatura celto-

hispnicas(Madrid, 1881), 140 41. Translations here and elsewhere are my own.15 As interpreted by Hans Aarslef, Scholarship and Ideology: Joseph Bdiers Critique

of Romantic Medievalism, Historical Studies and Literary Criticism, ed. Jerome J.McGann (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 94.



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16 It is important to note the two Lachmanns: the classical and sacred Lachmann thatpostulated the strict, scientific method known as stemmatics, an attempt to capturea text in its earliest extant manuscript; and the idiosyncratic and interventionist,vernacular Lachmann, who attempted to reproduce the earliest versions of early

Germanic texts. Both Lachmanns are well represented in hispanomedievalism.17 Ibid., 93.18 See Paloma Daz-Mas, Romancero (Barcelona: Crtica, 1994), 142.19 Espsito, Dismemberment.20 Harriet Goldberg, Letter to the editor, La Cornica 24 (1996): 19697. Cf. my

response: Anthony P. Espsito, Letter to the editor, La Cornica 24 (1996 ):19798.

21 Emilio Garca Gmez, Las jarchas romances de la serie rabe en su marco, 2nd ed.(Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1975), 3334. See also Ramn Menndez Pidal, De

primitiva lrica espaola y antigua pica, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1968).22 See the many articles by Samuel Armistead, chiefly, A Brief History ofKharja

studies, Hispania 70 (1987 ): 816; Pet Theories and Paper Tigers, La Cronica 14(1985): 5570; and Samuel Armistead and James T. Monroe, Beached Whales andRoaring Mice: Additional Remarks on Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, La Cronica13 (1985): 206 42; also Dorothy Clotelle Clarke, The Prosody of the hargas, LaCronica 16 (1988): 5575; James T. Monroe, Formulaic Diction and theCommon Origins of Romance Lyric Traditions, Hispanic Review43 (1975):34150; Margit Frenk Alatorre, Estudios sobre lrica antigua (Madrid: Castalia,

1975); Alatorre, Las jarchas mozrabes y los comienzos de la lrica romnica (Mxico:El Colegio de Mxico, 1975); and Alatorre, Lrica popular de tipo tradicional: EdadMedia y Renacimiento (Mxico: El Colegio de Mxico, 1975).

23 Monroe, Beached Whales, 347.24 Edgar Piguet, Lvolution de la pastourelle de XIIe sicle nos jours(Bale: Socit Suisse

des Traditions Populaires, 1927 ), 175.25 Bernard Cerquiglini, loge de la variante(Paris: Seuil, 1989), 7677. I also direct the

reader to Allen Frantzens book, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, andTeaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). Though

primarily concerned with Anglo-Saxon texts and their place in the canon, his readingof philology is penetrating and has greatly informed this study.

26 R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, eds.,Medievalism and the ModernistTemper(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), introduction.

27 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 43. See also Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger,eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

28 Jos Joaquim Nunes, ed., Cantigas damigo dos trovadores galego-portugueses(Coimbra:Imprensa da Universidade, 1926; repr. New York: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 2,

dedication.29 Helne Cixous and Catherine Clment, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 ), 68.30 E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature(Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), xv.



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31 Proof of this is found in Alan Deyermond, La literatura perdida de la Edad Mediacastellana: catlogo y estudio, vol. 1 (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca,1995). Cf. Brown, The Relics of Menndez Pidal.

32 See the preface and introduction to Burns, Bodytalk; as well as Judith Butler, Gender

Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity(New York: Routledge, 1990).33 Josep Maria Sol Sol, Las jarchas romances y sus moaxajas(Barcelona: Taurus, 1990),

1046. Unlike my 1995 article, Espsito, Dismemberment, there is nocontroversy regarding the translation of this poem. Garca Gmezs version, Lasjarchas romances, 10915, both in its transcription and translation, is not at variancewith Sol Sol. I chose Sol Sols version because its translation of the Arabic ismore literal.

34 This figure, in which the poets own voice enters in dialogue with another, is calledal-murajaa. According to medieval Arabic poetic treatises, it is not held in high

regard. See A. F. M. von Mehren, Die Rhetoric der Araber: Nach den wichtigstenQuellen dargestellt und mit angefgten Textauszgen nebst einem literatur-geschichtlichen Anhange versehen (Kopenhagen-Wien, 1853; repr. New York: GeorgOlms, 1970), 130.

35 Costa, Poesa popular espaola, 144.


Esposito-The Monkey in the Jarcha - Tradition and Canonicity in the Early Iberian Lyric

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