From the notebook 3 (halfsheet): more rewriting, El libro de Alexandre

I have been studying Alexander’s relation of the Trojan War in the Libro de Alexandre. Casas-Rigall’s edition is a tireless one totaling 860 pages, including indexes, and glossaries. The critical apparatus is excellent, but one that encourages a patient reading of each of its comments and a jotting down of all related bibliography.

What I have found is that whatever we might mean by rewriting and intertextuality is unbelievably complicated in real life, real life in this case, being literature. I had first thought to write a small piece discussing as many possibilities for rewriting as I could think of for a passage that I thought at least had fewer identifiable sources, also something that I really like, such as the short discurso de Cleor (232-242). Yet even with this tiny passage which constitutes an amplificatio of a speech in the Alexandreis, a cántica in the Alexandre, questions start very obvious and quickly become more and more tenuous and difficult to answer.

In the Alexandre, Cleades from the Alexandreis becomes Cleor. Morros (2002) supplies one hypothesis for this change in name. More interesting is the change that in the Alexandre, Cleor is explicitly named a juglar and most importantly, an educated one: omne bien razonado que sabié bien leer. The speech also becomes an economic exchange and the juglar receives payment for a speech that, in effect, is unsuccessful in saving Thebes. Cleor is thus compensated, literally, for his knowledge of letters, his education, a trait praised and emphasized in Alexander, even though the content of his discourse is not taken to heart. This speech, then, is rewritten and redone from its source in the Alexandreis (and probably many other influences), not only in content, but also in the myriad ways it impacts the rest of the text.

What is further curious about this passage is that Cleor reiterates the greatness of Alexander’s education in his speech, yet Alexander chooses not to demonstrate it in his response to the speech. The status of the topos of Alexander’s sapientia et fortitudo is thus not necessarily questioned, but re-negotiated. We might say that it is not the topos itself that is re-negotiated, but the link between topos and actual action. This of course raises many questions between speech, specifically, the construction of characters, particularly Alexander, using words and the gap between these descriptions and subsequent activity.