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)
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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 Spanish studies, marked a watershed of sorts. Under the guest editorship of Michael Solomon, a cluster of articles appeared whose goal was to provoke a dialogue between contemporary literary and cultural theories and hispanomedievalism. The genesis of these pieces was a series of ongoing colloquia and panels, most notably a symposium at Emory held in November 1994, Textualities of Desire, 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 three papers insisted on, however, was an introspective examination of the praxis of hispanomedievalism. Along with Solomons introduction, the cluster constituted a challenge to the received way(s) of seeing medieval Spanish texts. In short, the contested issue was not the canon of what but the canon of how. The period of medieval Spanish literature in the vernacular(s) that most interests me, 8001250, can probably be described as textually underrepresented. This lack of textual documentation is not an uncommon occurrence in other national literatures of this period (e.g., Old Celtic literatures, Anglo-Saxon, Old Slavic)the notable exception being the Gallo-Romance literatures (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 literatures in which exclusion from the canon represents an ill-afforded luxury. In such 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 eviJournal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30:3, Fall 2000. Copyright by Duke University Press / 2000 / $2.00.

dence enough of its cultural worth. In early Iberian literature, fragments, such as the hundred surviving lines of the Carolingian-themed Roncesvalles epic found in a copy dated circa 1310, and works of uncertain and undenable linguistic and geographic provenance, for example the much-debated Auto de los reyes magos, are regularly discussed and included in even the most basic of medieval surveys of Spanish literature.2 Such inclusion, however, is not the result of openness to contemporary critical notions of incompleteness and fracture in the case of the Roncesvalles, or hybridity and ambiguity in the case of the Auto. Both texts serve an important purpose in the formation of a national canon. The Roncesvalles is cited as an example of how foreign epic material, that of Roland and Charlemagne, is nationalized, even in its scant 100 lines.3 The Auto is needed as a rst (and only) example of a prefteenth-century dramatic text in an Iberian dialect that even closely resembles Castilian. Nonetheless, as textual production increases, so does the contestation of value; the complex debate surrounding a texts literary/cultural worth becomes the principal determinant of a texts relationship to the canon.4 As such canons wend their way through the Castilian fteenth century, a more exclusionary triage can be performed and texts can be included or excluded according to the cultural/critical project at hand. As witnessed above, several things can inhibit the formation of a contested canon of early vernacular texts, in our modern sense of the concept. Those resonances that guarantee cultural authenticity in modernity, for example, authorship, language, or national boundaries, are more often than not unxed and indeterminate in early medieval textuality. Nonetheless, there is a need to authorize and impose cultural worth on even the most sparse assemblage of texts. A contestation of value directed at the texts themselves, however, threatens to erode such a fragile textual environment. Often times such a contestation is shifted away from the inventory of texts and is subsequently imposed upon the writing around and about the text. Thus in hispanomedievalism what has been manufactured is not the formation of a canon of early medieval texts but rather a canon of interpretation. Such a canon of interpretation serves to protect the textual ecology. This function is perhaps best illustrated by a modern parable.
Joe Orton: Philologist

It may seem strange to use a relatively contemporary British playwright, Joe Orton (19331967 ), to illustrate the praxis of medieval Hispanic philology.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, who bludgeoned Orton to death with a hammer and subsequently took his own life, Orton was a performer of what today would be considered radical queer sexualityhe was notorious for his sexual trysts in Londons public rest rooms. Ortons criminal notoriety, however, was assured not by his sexual proclivities but rather by a series of book defacings which he and Halliwell carried out at the Islington public library.6 Alexander Connell, the chief librarian, described three types of defacement: the addition of false blurbs; the fabrication by collage of amended jackets; and the collage method of alteration of illustrations, sometimes with mildly obscene results, or the insertion 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 rose in Collins Guide to Roses. Beehler goes to the heart of the matter when he claims that the defacing of the Collins rose undoes the onto-theo-logical idea 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 of an original, divine truth, while the improper book seems to obscure that truth by going beyond it, by exceeding it. Thus the sign of the dangerous, unnatural book is its heterogeneity, its going beyond or doubling of the natural source. In its difference is its error.9 The parable unfolds if the reader replaces Beehlers Book / book with Philology/philology. Proper Philology appears as the homogenous, literal transcription of an original, divine truth, while [the] improper philology seems to obscure that truth by going beyond it, by exceeding it. Thus the sign of [the] dangerous, unnatural philology is its heterogeneity, its going beyond or doubling of the natural source. In its difference is its error. Ortons writing around the text as described in Connells criminal prosecution re-creates and imposes a whole new paratextual reality on an old, established text. In this way, Ortons work mimics philological praxis. The unnatural superimposing of the monkeys face inside the ower, however, destabilizes and denies the nature (and with it the natural origin) of the rose. And in this lies the criminality of Ortons act. The canon of how (we should read) thus prescribes a homogenous, literal writing that illustrates
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or re-presents its source, the natural origin of its truth.10 And for hispanomedievalism, the most powerful and enduring argument for the literal, homologous inscription of the sources and natural origins of its literary monuments 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 an attempt to recover origins, in their full mystical sense, often articulated by Said as divine, mythical, and privileged.11 As a way of reading, tradicionalismo is all embracing. And though primarily associated with the epic, in its most mature Pidalian manifestation it simultaneously transcends and links the whole inventory of early medieval Iberian textual genres in its project of recovery: epic, ballad, chronicle, and lyric. As a Spanish national literary school, it rst emerges in the writings of Mil y Fontanals, especially his 1874 opus, De la poesa heroica-popular castellana.12 Writing against the dominant French school, who saw the origins of the epic as the result of unique, isolated compositions of individual poets, Mil treated the epic (and by extension the ballad and popular lyric) as the product of a continuous, uninterrupted popular transmission. His great contribution was to fuse the equally Romantic notions (however contradictory) of individual poetic genius to the creative spirit of the collective volk. Writing a mere seven years later, the Spanish jurist and educator Joaqun Costa y Martnez shows how quickly and solidly Mils ideas had been accepted:13 Lo primero que a cualquiera se le ocurre cuando reexiona sobre este tema es que el pueblo no puede ser, en modo alguno, poeta directo, esto es, colectivamente; que las entidades colectivas no pueden producir por s mismas la ms nma obra literaria, como no pueden crear una costumbre ni una ley. El pueblo no es una personalidad individual, no es un cerebro para sus pensamientos y sus sentimientos, ni una lengua con que traducir esas formas en el mundo exterior del lenguaje, ni una mano para pulsar la lira: es un conjunto orgnico, es un compuesto de elementos racionales y dotados de albedro, y slo mediante esos elementos puede concebir y dar vida social a sus concepciones. [The rst thing that comes to mind when one reects upon this theme 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 the most meager literary work, just as they cannot create a custom or a law. The people are not an individual, they are not the mind that guides the individuals thoughts or feelings, nor a tongue to translate these forms into the outside world of language, nor a hand to play the lyre: it (the people) is an organic entity, a composite of rational elements, endowed with free will, and only through these elements can it conceive and give social life to its conceptions.]14 The apex of romantic philology in Spain, tradicionalismo embraces and 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 condent ascertainment of ultimate origins in a distant past beyond the earliest written records.17 As an interpretive strategy, it is exclusionary as it serves a conservative discipline at the expense of different points of view. The ontotheological underpinning of this exclusivity is authenticitythat the multitude of discourses and voices that inhabit the early Spanish text are later documentations of an earlier, real articulation. In the case of the epic, it is the representation of an authentic history; in its editing 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 recording and privileging of an authentic popular voice.
The Monkey in the jarcha

In my contribution to the 1995 cluster in La Cornica, I suggested that anxieties about ethnic, linguistic, and sexual identity inform how hispanomedievalism chooses to (re)present its texts. Using the apocryphal genital dismemberment of the last Visigothic king (as recounted in both ballad and in the fteenth-century Crnica sarracina) as a metaphor for a nation lost,18 I modestly claimed that the jarchas, those verses in an Ibero-Romance (as well as Arabic) vernacular which close Arabic and Hebrew frame poems, moaxajas, are presented in anthologies and histories of Spanish literature as severed fragments, because often times the poems which contain them relate an
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unsettling (in this specic case, homoerotic) desire. Dismembered from their larger frame poems, the jarchas are presented in isolation and sanitized and thus free (and safe) to become part of the medieval Spanish vernacular canon. I concluded by showing that structural and thematic resonances between the frame poem and jarcha in question deed dismemberment and begged for an integral reading.19 In reaction to my study, Harriet Goldberg questions my resistance to severance and laments, Are we to ignore the presence of a traditional popular lyric? (onto which we can reattach the severed jarcha).20 In this way she repeats the canonical ideas surrounding early Iberian lyric. Goldberg echoes Garca Gmez echoing Menndez Pidal: A la suerte de esa segunda consecuencia [la existencia de una literatura romanceada en Andaluca] va ligada la de la tercera, que postula la similitud de las jarchas romances con la posterior lrica popular espaola, as como la inclusin de aqullas en los engranajes de la poesa tradicional hispnica, segn su abundante 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 romance jarchas with the later popular Spanish lyric, as well as the inclusion of those ( jarchas ) in the fabric of traditional Spanish poetry, as abundantly formulated by Menndez Pidal.]21 Many other intermediary authorities are echoed in Goldberg as well: Armistead, Armistead and Monroe, Clarke, Frenk Alatorre, Monroe.22 All share an unwavering belief in the oral, popular origins of the early lyric and its uninterrupted transmission, which even in its textual form must be seen as the transmission of an authentic, popular voice. So rm is this belief that Monroe writes, [E]ven if we were to adopt the extreme position that the Romance har as, rather than being authentic popular compositions, are all g learned imitations made by bilingual Arabic and Hebrew poets, the very fact that 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 that there is no relationship (or simply ignore that there may be one) between the undocumented popular lyric and its textualized counterpart. Extreme would be the case of Rezeptionsstandpunkt, and its trickle-down theory of
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culture, gesunkenes Kulturgut, in which we could posit that the tradition moves 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 de civilisation. Ainsi les prtendues chansons populaires sont des imitations plus ou moins altres de thmes et de formes littraires. [Popular poetry is a myth. The people have never created anything. They do nothing but take and imitate what the centers of civilization create. Therefore these supposed popular songs are more 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 which does not (re)state its popular origins and (re)articulate its authentic voice is like the monkey in the rose. Like the prosecution of Orton for an unnatural writing around (and over) the text, the canon of how demands acknowledgment 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 instruct its readership on how the edition came about. Reading the text then becomes a condent, self-referential act in which language, especially in its real, diachronic sense, and the cultural tracing of textual origins (a cultural diachrony of sorts) are foregrounded. Absent from such a praxis is the notion of interpretation (so prevalent in other periods of literary study)a forward-looking reading that attempts to link the medieval text to its modern readers. In Foucauldian terms, philology becomes for the deviant reader both clinic and holding-cell; as Cerquiglini writes, philology is hyginiste . . . pourchasse ladultre . . . seffraie de la contamination [hygienic . . . it hunts down the adulterer . . . 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 grafted onto another entity. Such an operation is needed given that these early lyric manifestations, supposedly popular and voiced by women in a natural setting, are found framed in a radically different poetic context, assembled in codicils, 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 have it, the excised fragment is authentic and natural in its articulation. To imagine 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 obsession with origins is an outgrowth of nineteenth-century nationalism; the need for the nation to imagine a textuality that creates an ethnic, linguistic and racial identity weds philology to the nation.26 As European print-culture attempted to grapple with a varied linguistic past, it confronted a peculiar paradox: How do you reconcile a polyglot past with the cultural and economic mandate for a monoglot identity, a common language of expression, representation, and exchange? Constantly deemphasizing the written, textual manifestations of its early monuments and continuously promoting their orality, Hispanic philology seems to have found a convenient escape. With textuality downplayed, Hispanic philology found itself in the privileged position to remake and imagine its texts as it saw t. A cut here, an emendation here is so much easier when the voice and not the text is the monument. This was philologys foundational moment. Focusing on the relationship of print-culture to the rise of early capitalism, Benedict Anderson frames this moment succinctly: In pre-print Europe, and, of course, elsewhere in the world, the diversity of spoken languages, those languages that for their speakers were (and are) the warp and woof of their lives, was immense; so immense, indeed that had print-capitalism sought to exploit each potential oral vernacular market, it would have remained a capitalism of petty proportions. But these varied idiolects were capable of being assembled, within denite limits, into print-languages far fewer in number.27 Analogously, the hispanomedievalists task was clear: to assemble the multitude of voices that became the early lyric into a consonance that represents the cultural nation it sought to dene. The real presence of the voice in these texts is crucial. For traditionalists, 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 of author and voice, is unacceptable. The next step, the mere symbolic representation 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 cited voice is a voice once removed; it is a trace, and, as such, is a blatant reminder of the absence of the object, its source. Those assertions about the lyric which we have seenthat the lyric voice must be viewed as authenticare protectionist; it is a desire to preserve a voice whose authentic presence they fear may vanish into absence at the slightest scrutiny. Of course, the voice does not vanish; if cited or imagined, it becomes bound to the text, far more difcult to alter and sever. The material text becomes the monkey in the rose as it overwrites its own natural origins. A case in point: in his edition of Galego-Portuguese cantares damigo, Nunes dedicates his volume to the women of Galicia and Portugal: s mulheres de Portugal e Galiza . . . pertence-vos de direito . . . como sucessoras daquelas em cujos lbios so gurados 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 gured the songs herein contained].28 The (trans)historical female voice authors his edition in the same way it authors the moaxaja. We are, however, confronted with an intrinsic problem. The male compiling /recording /citing /composing (I ask the reader to choose) of womens voices and female subjectivities, by both poet and editor, is a reminder that the female subject is simultaneously both subject and object, a subjected subject. It is this construct which inspires Cixous and Clment to state metaphorically as well as materially that women could never have exclaimed: The house I live in is my own, / I never copied anyone.29 The voice-text was never womens alone. And within the context of poetic containment, all subjects, all voices are themselves subjected beings: the poetic voice is not so much a source as a reection of received meanings.30 Recovering through citation, however, is not avoided in other moments in medieval Spanish literary history. For certain genres, most notably the epic, it is the state of the art. Much of the lost epic is reconstructed by reading through other literary genres, specically 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 their voice and at the same time destabilizes (by effeminizing ) the dominant, text-making, nation-building male voice. Witness the following moaxaja with its jarcha by Al-Am al-Tutili (d. 1126 ): P. Una noche llamamos a la puerta de un convento en que servan vino / y nos encontramos entre guardianes y trasnochadores.
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[One night we knocked on the door of a convent in which they served wine and we found ourselves among watchmen and nightowls.] 1. Y nos lleg el vino con toda presteza / y una joven vino a saludarnos y a hacernos los honores, / jurando por todo el Evangelio: / nunca lo vest ms que con un vestido de pez, / ni ha sido jams expuesto al fuego! [And soon the wine arrived and a young girl came to greet us and to do us honor, swearing on the Gospels: The wine I serve is the freshest and purest!] 2. Entonces yo le dije: oh la ms bella de las criaturas! / Segn vuestra religin, qu hay de mal en beber con el vaso? / Ella me respondi: no hay para nosotros nada de mal en ello; / as lo aprendemos de los anales / de la totalidad de los monjes y grandes sabios. [I then said to her: Oh most beautiful of creatures! According to your religion, is drinking from the cup bad? She answered: There is nothing wrong at all with it; thus we learn in the writings of the great monks and sages.] 3. Debo confesaros, oh muy ilustre pueblo mo, / que estoy perdido por el amor de Ahmad. / Tiene unos ojos que me matan con su rechazo. / Yo he guardado el amor secretamente en mi corazn, / pero mis lgrimas han revelado mi secreto. [I must confess to you, oh my illustrious people, that I am lost because of my love for Ahmad. He has eyes that slay me with his rejection. I have kept this love hidden in my heart, but my tears reveal my secret.] 4. Han revelado los lloros del enamorado la pasin / para quien su cara es como la luna llena en el horizonte. / Tiene unos ojos que atacan con fuerza a las criaturas. / A cuntos mataron de leones feroces! / Y no hay para el muerto de amor venganza alguna. [The weeping of the beloved has revealed his passion for him whose face is like a full moon on the horizon. He has eyes that ercely attack Gods creatures. How many have they slain like a ferocious 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 con el desdn y el orgullo, / enton unos versos rerindose a l . . . amnu amnu y al-mal h gare . borqe tu me qeres y-llh matare Merced, 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 his disdain 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 of voices embedded in one single text.34 In the poetic preface, the poet opens with the rst-person plural. He then gives voice to the servant-girl, and a dialogue ensues in which there is a self-citation. In harmonious conspiracy, both poet and editor produce a queer text. The editor/translator clearly marks the transition from the servant-girl to the love-sick poet by a break in direct quotation: the conversation is clearly signaled by quotation marks. Their dialogue concluded, the poet returns to his public and confesses to his audience, his people, his love for Ahmad, a clearly masculine binary through nomination in the original Arabic and grammatically gendered in the translated text (Ahmad /perdido). The jarcha, voiced by a young woman also seduced by Ahmad, glosses the poets own desire. However, it is now regendered away from a same-sex queer wanting toward one of heterosexual desire. The poets desire and own poetic language having been safely transformed and forgotten, the jarcha can be reclassied and presented as an independent poetic genre. Such a critical gesture removes the jarcha from its Hispano-Arabic containment and queer space and reattaches it to an IberoRomance canon through a procedure in which the poetic citation is authenticated as a real, autonomous, heteroglossal voice. Ironically, the very linguistic hybridity of the jarcha, perhaps because the Arabic is a plea for mercy and pity, does not seem to pose a problem. Our own Romance-speaking, dominant, heterosexual male culture is now free to dictate the signicance of the female voice, projecting its reection of received meanings. In practice, it mimics a colonial enterprise: a dominant power suppresses the voice of the colonized in order to establish material ascendance. The canon of how demands that both textual representation and production must be completely controlled 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 del sentido universal histrico e informndolo en un cuerpo esplendoroso [the poet has become nation, race, humanity, shedding himself of any selsh and private elements, absorbing a universal historical sense and giving radiant body to it].35 The poet is subservient to the cultural project of the nation. The voiced text becomes his offering to history, to the tradition. It is philologys task then to (re)form the text, to strip away the poets voice when it nds itself at odds with the nacin : for how can queer texts serve raza? Viewed intact, Al-Am al-Tutilis moaxaja and jarcha create a disturbing, triangulated desire with Ahmad in the center between the poet and the young girl. Anthologized in isolation, the jarcha erases all presence of the poet and the desire is sanitized, merely presenting a young girls love for a boy. Hispanomedievalisms canon of how refashions the text. As seen above, as well in my article that provoked such objection, isolating the jarcha repairs a desire not betting the nation, xing both gender as well as genre. As the moaxaja and jarcha lack a linguistic homogeneity, the critical canon attempts to forge a literary homology not based on a secure, unalterable textuality but rather on a common, transhistorical voice uttering a common, canonical desire. This projection of tradition guarantees the texts place in the canon as well as controls its reception. Philology can rest comfortably in this powerful imaginary, secure that neither deviant language nor desire contaminates the nations linguistic and textual origins.

Notes 1 Linde M. Brocato, Leading a Whore to Father: Confronting Celestina, La Cornica 24 (1995): 42 60; Catherine Brown, The Relics of Menndez Pidal: Mourning and Melancholia in Hispanomedieval Studies, ibid., 15 41; Anthony P. Espsito, Dismemberment of Things Past: Fixing the Jarchas, ibid., 4 14; Michael Solomon, Para quin edicamos torres? Theory and Hispanomedieval Studies, ibid., 2 3. Missing from this cluster is a piece presented by Julian Weiss on Berceos Poema de Santa Oria, subsequently published as Julian Weiss, Writing, Sanctity, and Gender in Berceos Poema de Santa Oria, Hispanic Review 64 (1996 ): 447 65. What further proof of canonicity need we than web space dedicated to the Roncesvalles: http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/santiago/roncpoem.html. Intact though short, the twelfth-century Auto de los reyes magos still remains an enigma. It has been at different times linguistically classied as Castilian with Mozarabic, Gascon, or

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5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

Catalan traits. See Rafael Lapesa, Mozrabe y cataln o gascn en el Auto de los Reyes Magos, in Miscel.lnia Aramon i Serra, ed. Antoni Badia i Margarit et al., 3 vols. (Barcelona: Curial, 1983), 3:27794; Ignacio Soldevila, Para aclarar la controversia en torno al llamado Auto de los Reyes Magos, Homenaje a lvaro Galms de Fuentes, 3 vols. (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo; Madrid: Gredos, 198587 ), 2:47581. 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 theme found in the reconstructed Cantar de los Infantes de Lara. Carlos Alvar and Manuel Alvar, eds., Epica medieval espaola (Madrid: Ctedra, 1991), 165. See John Guillory, Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate, English Literary History 54 (1987 ): 483527; and Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 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 of Occitan poetic production guaranteed a critical literary mass and provoked a literary triage of sorts among the various compilers and scribes. A hierarchy of poetic value usually determined the order in which the poems appeared in the manuscripts: the cans, the most highly valued poetic form, began each poets section, followed by less courtly genres and concluded by more popular compositions. I am grateful to my companion, Gary D. Pratt, whose work on Orton has inspired and informed this section. These ideas are as much his as mine. For more information, see John Lahrs controlling biography, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton (New York: Knopf, 1978). Alexander Connell, A Successful Prosecution, The Library Association Record 65.3 (1963): 102, as quoted in Michael Beehler, Joe Orton and the Heterogeneity of the Book, Sub-stance 3334 (1982): 8384. Ibid., 83; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatolog y, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 19. Beehler, Joe Orton, 84. Ibid., 85. See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975). Manuel Mil y Fontanals, De la poesa heroico-popular castellana (1874), ed. Martn de Riquer and Joaqun Molas (Barcelona: CSIC, 1959). I should like to acknowledge one of our University of Pennsylvania graduate students, Cristina Snchez-Carretero, whose work on Costa has inuenced my own thoughts on the origins and diffusion of tradicionalismo. For Costa and his contribution to the traditionalist debate, see Luis Daz G. Viana, La invencin del concepto de cultura tradicional en los estudios sobre poesa hispnica: las relaciones entre 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. Joaqun Costa y Martnez, Poesa popular espaola y mitologa y literatura celtohispnicas (Madrid, 1881), 140 41. Translations here and elsewhere are my own. 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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21

22

23 24 25

26 27

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It is important to note the two Lachmanns: the classical and sacred Lachmann that postulated the strict, scientic method known as stemmatics, an attempt to capture a 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. Ibid., 93. See Paloma Daz-Mas, Romancero (Barcelona: Crtica, 1994), 142. Espsito, Dismemberment. Harriet Goldberg, Letter to the editor, La Cornica 24 (1996 ): 196 97. Cf. my response: Anthony P. Espsito, Letter to the editor, La Cornica 24 (1996 ): 197 98. 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). See the many articles by Samuel Armistead, chiey, A Brief History of Kharja studies, Hispania 70 (1987 ): 816; Pet Theories and Paper Tigers, La Cronica 14 (1985): 5570; and Samuel Armistead and James T. Monroe, Beached Whales and Roaring Mice: Additional Remarks on Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, La Cronica 13 (1985): 206 42; also Dorothy Clotelle Clarke, The Prosody of the har as, La g Cronica 16 (1988): 5575; James T. Monroe, Formulaic Diction and the Common Origins of Romance Lyric Traditions, Hispanic Review 43 (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: Edad Media y Renacimiento (Mxico: El Colegio de Mxico, 1975). Monroe, Beached Whales, 347. Edgar Piguet, Lvolution de la pastourelle de XIIe sicle nos jours (Bale: Socit Suisse des Traditions Populaires, 1927 ), 175. 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, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). Though primarily concerned with Anglo-Saxon texts and their place in the canon, his reading of philology is penetrating and has greatly informed this study. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 ), introduction. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 43. See also Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Jos Joaquim Nunes, ed., Cantigas damigo dos trovadores galego-portugueses (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1926; repr. New York: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 2, dedication. Helne Cixous and Catherine Clment, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 ), 68. E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), xv.

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Proof of this is found in Alan Deyermond, La literatura perdida de la Edad Media castellana: catlogo y estudio, vol. 1 (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1995). Cf. Brown, The Relics of Menndez Pidal. 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). Josep Maria Sol Sol, Las jarchas romances y sus moaxajas (Barcelona: Taurus, 1990), 1046. Unlike my 1995 article, Espsito, Dismemberment, there is no controversy regarding the translation of this poem. Garca Gmezs version, Las jarchas romances, 10915, both in its transcription and translation, is not at variance with Sol Sol. I chose Sol Sols version because its translation of the Arabic is more literal. This gure, in which the poets own voice enters in dialogue with another, is called al-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 wichtigsten Quellen dargestellt und mit angefgten Textauszgen nebst einem literaturgeschichtlichen Anhange versehen (Kopenhagen-Wien, 1853; repr. New York: Georg Olms, 1970), 130. Costa, Poesa popular espaola, 144.

Espsito / The Monkey in the Jarcha 477