This week in books. From the notebook 6.

Images in the Charrette.

The careful placement of images gives rise to a subtle show of suggestions in the Charrette. Throughout, images are placed, but not pressed upon or explicitly linked to others. In cases such as Lancelot’s crossing of the sword bridge, he begins to look a lot like Jesus as the poet evokes the picture of being born again from a mother’s womb and Lancelot’s bloody hands—both of these immediately after the scene in the grave yard in which he shows himself to be the liberator of the prisoners in Gorre. Yet Lancelot never becomes a figure, exactly, for Christ; rather, for a moment, the images, rebirth, bloody hands, liberator and the sympathy he receives represent at once part of the present narrative (of Lancelot, the Charrette) and also operate metonymically to refer to a story that would be familiar to the romance’s public. A complete allegory is never allowed to come to fruition. What results, instead, is a careful placement of suggestive images (we might think also of the empty tombs inscribed with the names of those who will one day come to fill them, a story that is taken up in the grail stories) that do just that: suggest for a moment, but do not form a chain, system or allegory, but, rather, simply represent. In the end, they serve as a slideshow that allows a moment of reflection and questioning, but not of identification. There is a distance created from the characters in this romance and also in Yvain that I have yet to understand fully that while in part is related to a lack of a psychological development of the characters, also seems closely tied to Chrétien’s rhetoric and the desire to create an accomplished romance: a curious balance between creating a sympathy for the lovers and at the same time, not allowing them, or the images discussed here, to steal the show.

Translation.

If the 13^th century mester texts can be characterized in part by a desire to translate Latin and other vernacular sources into Castilian, yet, at the same time, to update, by means of an exchange, negotiation and translation of the current context, said sources, was this translation of the sources, both in language and in time, necessarily for the public good? And what would public good actually mean, particularly if the poet had as a goal the promotion of a certain monastery, for example? The last questions came directly from a discussion of translatio at the mid-point of the Roman de la Rose, in which the God of Love explains how Guillaume de Lorris has followed the classical love poets Tibullus, Gallus, Catullus and Ovid. In turn, Jean de Meun ("Jean Chopinel") will complete the romance.

Despite the unique cultural context of the Rose, this passage is useful for thinking about intertextuality and motivations. When an author engages with a Latin source and decides to translate it, we can only really be sure, unless he says otherwise (and even then we can’t really be sure) that the author deemed it appropriate, or good enough (or bad enough, should a critique come after) to include it in his text. This is one of the difficulties of the idea of ideology.

Mester de clerecía.

These questions are related to my attempt to further pin down, or, alternatively, to discard completely the idea of mester de clerecía. Knowing, really, that both of these attempts are futile, I have set myself to the task of developing a working definition. These past days thinking about the metrical forms and poetic techniques used by the poets writing in Galician-Portuguese, I couldn’t help but think that the space of the cancioneiros and the manuscripts of Alfonso’s cantigas was an excellent one for considering the validity of the idea of a school. If we are to say that a certain meter and poetic techniques (mostly parallelism, repetition and variations of words, verses, and rhymes) in the case of the cantiga/Cantigas) constitute a school, does the idea of school, even if it is established simply on the basis of meter, suggest that the group of poets working in a similar form have similar goals, or projects as authors? Does the writing, for that matter, mean, in that empirical sort of way, the same thing? By the same token, Libro de buen amor, for its unique cuaderna vía, presentation of an anti-hero who, nevertheless, appears at moments to throw off such a designation, could be used for either argument. In the case of the first:

1) because the Libro de buen amor shows innovations in the cuaderna via form, as well as a increasing complex content arranged in episodes, many of which are difficult to tie neatly to what might be considered the narrative frame, Juan Ruiz clearly sought to break from the 13^th century poems

Or, alternatively,

2) Because Juan Ruiz chose to write in cuaderna vía, we can infer that his use of the form indicated a respect for it, and presumably, the previous poems

As simple as these approximations to the Libro de buen amor might be, they raise the important question of the relationship between form and content and also, if the use of a certain form is a statement of sorts, and consequently, if it is a statement, what does the statement say? All of these questions are useful for thinking about translation, as I have engaged with it above, and also, thinking about the relationship between Occitan lyric traditions and the compositions written in Galician-Portuguese.

Poetry

A few material considerations and questions.

The Códice Rico (and considering in this case, that Escorial MS T.I.1 and Escorial MS b.I.2 could have constituted a complete set of Alfonso’s compositions) is clearly a luxury book, that not only has the possibility of increasing Alfonso’s personal prestige, but to portray him at once as king, trovador, faithful servant of his lady, the Virgin, and bringer of good news. All of these characterizations of Alfonso fit under a project to educate those uneducated, although the last could have easily been misconstrued and indeed, probably was, as evidenced by Pope Nicholas III’s accusations against him in March 1279, which included an allusion to a new religious order. If these luxury books were kept in Alfonso’s private library for safe-keeping, or even closer to him, as talisman or relic, were other manuscript copies of the cantigas circulating his court? It is clear from the extant exchange between Alfonso and Guiraut Riquier that distinctions between troubadors and jongleurs (and maybe segreles) were made, I have yet to understand how these songs were disseminated in the court, how and if compositions in Galician Portuguese and those in Occitan, like those of Riquier, were sung concurrently, if there were sung in different contexts, etcetera.

Two articles in the current PMLA issue that Jesús recommended have proven very useful for thinking about poetry and the idea of slip and the things outside of meaning. Although it could and has been said, although I think the distinction is not particularly useful, that all poetry has pure lyrical elements and also a narrative component, in that we can construct a story about the poetic voice as he or she travels throughout the poem, which, in turn, is enriched by poetic devices, the extant Galician-Portuguese lyric proves a fascinating space to investigate and perhaps discard this method of reading poetry. The compositions we possess are from three cancioneiros: (A) Cancionero de Ajuda (Biblioteca del Palacio Real de Ajuda), s. XIII, which seems to have come from Alfonso’s scriptorium; (B) Cancionero Colocci-Brancuti o de la Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa. s. XVI, copied in Italy under the humanist Angello Colocci, and containing the Arte de trobar; and (V) Cancionero de la Biblioteca Vaticana, also copied in Italy, probably at the beginning of the 16^th century. One fundamental element of the cantigas, particularly in the cantigas de amigo (although there is a good example in Fernán Rodríguez de Calheyros’ cantiga de amor “Ja m’eu quisera leixar do trobar,” is the relationship between the exordio and theme presented in the first stanza, and the rest of the stanzas, in particular how the initial idea is developed, commented, amplified and repeated throughout.

Although this is something I will discuss specifically in another post, I would like to summarize and discuss sections of the two PMLA articles, one by Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric,” and another by Oren Izenberg, “Poems out of our Heads.” Although in different ways, both of these authors propose a new way of reading poems, specifically one that is not reliant, or not as reliant, on the models we use to study narrative. As Culler tells us in his crisp prose, drawing on Alice Fulton’s (“Fiction is about what happens next, poetry is about what happens now) “If narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now—in the readers engagement with each line,” poetry is better seen as a linguistic event.

Drawing on Emily Dickinson’s poetic production, in particular, a stanza of “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” [I felt a funeral, in my Brain, / And Mourners to and fro / Kept treading—treading til it seemed / That Sense was breaking through—], Izenberg evokes, in different terminology and drawing further on the theory of the philosophy of the mind, the concept of Qualia. This is surely related to slip, to presence effects, and to the phenomena that Runia discusses in “Spots of Time.” These are elements of the imagination, the things typically left out, or, rather, naturally left out of hermeneutic analyses: “Qualia are…the subjective or phenomenal aspects of conscious experience—what it is like to see a color or to hear a sound. Thus, qualia (if they exist) are nonrepresentational (features of experiences rather than of objects) and non-cognitive (“feels”) not concepts (220). Izenberg suggests that Dickinson’s “recourse to the literalness of sensation…is not a way of producing or attesting to enclosure in experience but a way of using experience to indicate the contours of a world whose properties are unconceptualized or unnamed except by our experience of them” (221). Thus far, even though it is aimed at a very specific concept, this is the clearest articulation I have seen of the idea of presence effects. “The problem with poetry”, I would say, is that since it is a “now,” as Culler explains, our discussions of at least parts of a poem will always be too late, old news. I wonder here about my qualification of “parts of a poem” and how that essentially contradicts a previous idea presented in this very post, of the distinction between narrative and “poetic” elements. Maybe the question to ask, then, is if it is possible to admit some story in our analyses of poems, a scathing critique of poet Sueir’Eanes, for instance, or of María Pérez Balteira in the court of Alfonso X, while at the same time appreciating and communicating to others the particulars of the space of the poem that we are, in fact, experiencing.