¹ I do not quite understand Warnke's statement (p. xlvii): ‘Daneben spricht sie in eigener Person … und weiter in den Übergangsversen 29 und 30.’ Marie always speaks ‘in eigener Person’; it is we modern philologians alone who are able to discover that in lines 9–24 Marie is ascribing to herself what the Monk of Saltrey had already narrated in the first person. In other words, the reference point of Marie's ‘I’ remains constant.Google Scholar

² Marie tells us that she has ‘heard’ the story, whereas we know that she must have read it. Here we have the ‘topos of aural transmission’, so frequent in the Middle Ages, cf. Traditio 2 (1944) 447 n. 32, and Revista de filología hispánica 6, 176; 283.Google Scholar

³ One will note that Marie, like so many medieval authors who translate from Latin into the vernacular, speaks of her source as ‘li livre’ without mentioning the name of the author of the particular book which modern critics have taken pains to discover. The existence of a source was more important for that tradition-bound civilization than was the specification of the particular source. ‘Li livre’ was an objectively existing entity, unattached to any particular author. Even the place where it might be found was more important than the author's name: Chrestien de Troyes says, in his Cligès: ‘Ceste estoire trovons escrite / … An un des livres de l'aumeire, / Mon seignor saint Peire a Biauvés. / … Li livres est mout anciens.’ Foerster, , Kristian v. Troyes, Wörterbuch 59 remarks: ‘Es ist allgemein bekannt dass im M.-A. die Erzählungen … sich für wahre Geschichten ausgeben, oder doch dafür gehalten wurden, daher denn ihre Verfasser, um das Vertrauen der Leser [zu gewinnen] … sich gern auf glaubwürdige Zeugen berufen. … Solche Berufungen mögen ja meist ersonnen sein. …’ The novelistic fiction of a written source (which should testify to the veracity of the author—while his mind is left free to fabulate) requires only an indication of the book's existence: one does not need to know the source of a Source.Google Scholar

⁴ Henceforth we shall have to revise the wording of such statements about medieval writers as that of Maler, B., Studia neophilologica 17, 48; ‘nous sommes en présence d'un de ces cas oú, en donnant l'apparence de connaître de première main les autorités qu'il cite, Jean de Meun [in the Roman de la Rose] ne fait que reproduire des passages empruntés à d'autres’ [italics mine].Google Scholar

⁵ This same empirical-universal I is twofold in still another regard: Dante the protagonist is quite distinct from Dante the narrator, who performs the task of retelling (ridire) what he has seen; it is this Dante who has included the many details of his personal autobiography (a list of which can be easily found in Toynbee's Concise Dante Dictionary s.v. ‘Dante’).Google Scholar

⁶ Cf. Auerbach, E., Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin 1929) and Frank, E., Philosophical Understanding and Religious Truth (London-New York 1945). In the progress of this poem, which treats of the gradual perception of the divine, the personal profile of Dante becomes more and more clear-cut. It is well known that, though from the start Dante speaks in the first person, it is not until canto xxx of the Purgatorio that we hear the name ‘Dante’ pronounced (in the scene where, after Vergil has disappeared, Beatrice is to predict for the poet still new trials and the necessity for deep repentance and spiritual regeneration: repentance being the means by which the Christian can become a genuine personality, cf. Frank 158). It is while the poet is still immersed in his sorrow over Vergil's departure that he suddenly hears the consoling words (which make known to him Beatrice's presence): ‘Dante, perchè Virgilio se ne vada, / Non pianger anco, non pianger ancora;’ and the poet continues the narrative as follows: ‘Quando mi volsi al suon del nome mio, / Che di necessità qui sí registra, / Vidi la donna. …’ Some commentators, while emphasizing the poetic value of this sudden address to Dante, justify it only as a poetic device (Beatrice, in this way, is calling the attention of the reader to herself, or, perhaps, is emphasizing her close relationship with the poet); others (particularly Torraca) are content to point out that, because of the extraordinary situation, Dante can be exculpated for infringing on the rhetorical principle that the author should not mention his own name in the narrative. None of them seems to have realized the dogmatic value of Beatrice's address to Dante, a value which is underlined by ‘di necessità qui sí registra’ (and which Torraca fails to sense, in his paraphrase: ‘per l'esattezza del racconto’). From the beginning, Dante had been speaking with the ‘poetic I’; but now that the principle of repentance is to be presented to him by Beatrice, now that he is to become a true Christian personality, he is addressed by his objective name—as if the supernal powers recognized, thereby, his entrance into this final stage.Google Scholar

⁷ The idea of the accessibility of the divine to man explains the medieval literary device of the vision or dream: the writer who wished to teach some transcendental truth to which man has access could do so by imagining a dreaming or visionary ‘I’. The ‘fictional I’ of modern writers is no doubt an outgrowth of the ‘visionary I’ of the Middle Ages.—Werfel, in his posthumous book, Star of the Unborn, has attempted to rehabilitate the medieval ‘visionary I’; in his prologue he writes that the ‘I’ in his own story is ‘not a deceptive, novelistic, assumed, fictitious “I”, any more than the story itself is a mere offspring of speculative imagination. … It happened to me, as I must confess, quite against my will. … I was sent out one night as an explorer …’ (that is to say, he saw in a prophetic vision the world of the far-distant future). The adverse criticism which this book received at the hands of one reviewer (in The New Yorker, March 2, 1946), who seemed to object, on principle, to the prophetic visions of a ‘historian of the future’, makes one wonder why critics seem so seldom to question the device, current in historical fiction, by which the author must pretend to be a ‘prophet of the past’, assuming to have knowledge not only of situations at which he was not present, but even of the intimate thoughts of characters to which he could not have had direct access, even if he had been present. In both cases, whether the author assume the rôle of ‘historian of the future’ or of ‘prophet of the past’, he must depend upon his private vision.—Needless to say, I cannot agree with the statement of Loomis, C. S., who writes (The Allegory of Love, p. 118): ‘he [the author of the Roman de la Rose] practically abolishes the hero, as one of his dramatis personae, by reducing him to the colorless teller of the tale. The whole story is in the first person and we look through the lover's eyes, not at him.’ The medieval ‘poetic I’ is not ‘colorless’: it was used to give the ring of truth to the fantastic story of rapturous love.Google Scholar

⁸ A civilization in which the poetic ‘I’ in its representative function is recognized by the public, does not expose its writers to the complications with which Rousseau and Goethe were confronted in writing their autobiographies: when the reader feels entitled to identify the empirical ego of the autobiographical writer, then the latter must resort to subterfuge or else face the most painful exposure. Indeed, even when a modern autobiographer chooses to hide behind the third person, this fictional He is apt to be overshadowed, in the mind of his readers, by the empirical He.—It must be borne in mind that Rousseau's autobiography is a worldly version of the Confessions of Augustine. The Church Father wrote his confessions, as it were, for God, in the presence of God; he directed them to Him who is ever-ready to listen to his sinful children. And the link between this writer of confessions, and God his Confessor, is underlined by a continuous Thou, used by Augustine in the numerous prayers and apostrophes throughout his work. Rousseau, who writes about ‘moi seul’, on the contrary, writes only for his fellow-men—so that his apostrophe: ‘j'ai dévoilé mon intérieur tel que tu l'as vu toi-même, Etre Eternel’ is pure rhetoric. The disappearance of the literary device of the ‘poetic I’ entails the disappearance of the ‘ever-present Thou’. (A medieval religious poet such as Gonzalo de Berceo was able, quite suddenly, in the midst of a long narrative, to address an apostrophe a ti, Virgo Maria— evidently because he believed the Virgin to have been present all the time that he was writing down her Miracles.) Google Scholar

⁹ It is not sufficiently recognized by scholars that Villon's Grand Testament is only a pseudo-biographical cancionero, comparable to the Libro de buen amor, and that to treat it as a biographical document instead of a work of fiction is doing wrong to the work of art. The documents that shed light on Villon's personal life, as unearthed by Longnon and others, have rather beclouded the issue: the protagonist of the Testaments speaks with his ‘poetic I’, and even where there is a partial concordance of established facts of Villon's private life with facts narrated in his artistic work, we are not permitted to use the two sets of facts as interchangeable entities.Google Scholar

¹⁰ When I say ‘Trotaconventos’, I am well-aware of the problem of identity involved in this name. I have shown earlier (Zeitschr.f. Rom. Phil. 54, 237) that the character Trotaconventos (as well as some of the other characters of the Libro del buen amor) is endowed only secondarily with individuality: in the Pamphilus episode, she grows, as it were, out of the sentence: ‘busqué trotaconventos’ (‘I looked for a go-between’), and for the rest of the episode, she bears this designation as a proper name. In the adventure immediately following, where again a go-between is involved, we find once more the words ‘busqué trotaconventos’—the last word is printed by Cejador y Frauca with a capital letter, and is interpreted by Mme Lida, in her edition, as a proper name referring to the same character with whom Juan Ruiz had acquainted us in the Pamphilus episode. This would seem to be contradicted, however, by stanza 919, in which the woman is referred to as ‘esta vieja, por nombre ha Urraca’. Are Urraca and the individual named Trotaconventos the same? If so, why should Juan Ruiz find it necessary, as he does, to describe her again, in the next episode? (It is true that she is described in the identical terms used of Trotaconventos [937–8 = 699–700], but this description is purely generic: in both cases the go-between is ‘one of those women who …’) And this repetition is deliberate, and due to no slip of memory, as is shown by Juan Ruiz' words (st. 938): ‘otrosi ya vos dixe qu'estas tales buhonas …’). On the other hand, one could argue in favor of identifying Urraca with Trotaconventos, because of the fact that Juan Ruiz contrasts Urraca, not with her immediate predecessor, Trotaconventos, but with a certain Ferrand Garcia, a male go-between of a still earlier episode, who had proved to be a cheat; but then we could also wonder, if Urraca is Trotaconventos, why this contrast was not offered when we first met Trotaconventos (unless we may assume an indiscriminate juxtaposition of episodes dating from different periods of composition). Juan Ruiz makes the confusion even worse by playing with the possibility of giving Urraca more than forty ill-sounding epithets, which are all rejected by the ‘vieja’ in favor of ‘Buen Amor’. The same problem of identity arises later on when, after several more adventures, in the first of which appears a go-between known only as ‘una vieja’, we witness again the appearance (beyond the shadow of a doubt) of Trotaconventos; after faithfully serving Juan Ruiz in new adventures, she meets a premature death, whereupon he composes a lengthy invocation to ‘La Muerte’, and implores divine pardon for the sins of the dead woman, whom he refers to consistently as Trotaconventos. But in the epitaph, in which, from her grave, she is allowed to address the passer-by, she begins with the words: ‘Urraca soy’.Google Scholar

What is the key to this conflict of identities? Perhaps that (with the possible exception of the ‘vieja’) we have had, all along, to do with only one woman, ‘Trotaconventos’ being a generic proper name, of professional derivation, while ‘Urraca’ is the personal proper name: the name of that individual who, while temporarily submerged in her office, survives in death. But it is the generic name, the generic nature of this sinful woman, which the poet would put in relief. For it is the type which is eternal—susceptible of bearing many names like the fox (st. 927), and eternally significant of human cupiditas (and this basic cupiditas of man explains also the somewhat static character of the whole Libro, which offers over and over again the same basic situation of light adventure, slightly varied every time).Google Scholar

¹¹ It is true that, in the self-portrait which the archpriest has inserted into his poem (st. 1486–9: Trotaconventos describes the archpriest to one of his loves), emphasis is laid on the strong and virile traits of the protagonist, not on his ‘rotundity’: if we were to trust the realistic veracity of Trotaconventos‘ portrait (but notice the absence in it of any suggestion of tonsure!), it would not concord with the picture evoked by the name of Juan Ruiz’ avatar, ‘Don Melon’.—Perhaps these seemingly contradictory descriptions are deliberately introduced in order to blur the individual features of the author-protagonist (an anticipation, as it were, of the modern photographic technique of superimposed portraits which annihilate each other): that he is meant to appear only as a composite type is suggested by the stanza (1321) in which Trotaconventos addresses him as ‘Don Polo’— where we have, not polo = ‘pole’ (the pole around which her thoughts circle, as Cejador y Frauca would have it) but simply a variant form of Pablo, that most common Spanish name, in the meaning ‘fulano’: ‘Mr. Somebody’. [Melón could also mean ‘stupid’ as it does in modern popular Spanish.] Google Scholar

¹² Fyta is in the rhyme, so that there is no possibility of assuming a textual alteration— and surely none of assuming ‘forgetfulness’ on the part of the author, as the commentator Cejador y Frauca would have it.Google Scholar

¹³ How else could we explain the fact that Juan Ruiz purports to have had adventures, one after the other, with different serranas? Surely this was because the author wished to present a bouquet of serranillas. Google Scholar

¹⁴ The Spanish Boccaccio, Juan Ruiz, differs from his Italian contemporary (with whom he has in common the interest for all things human: ‘Provar todas las cosas, el apóstol lo manda’) in that, with him, the weaknesses of the flesh are seen by a humble and charitable soul which knows of its own potential sinfulness, whereas, in the Decameron, the pageant of worldliness develops before the impersonally amused eye of a sophisticated social group that seeks to be distracted from the atrocities of the plague by the narration of novelle. Boccaccio introduces a ‘frame of society’ whereby the anarchic material of the narrative is bound together, whereas, for Juan Ruiz, the ‘frame’ was only his own God-seeking soul (‘escoge el alma el buen amor que es de Dios’). The replacement in literature of the ‘poetic I’ by the ‘They’ of society is an important step in the secularization of the Occidental mind.Google Scholar

After having written this article, I received, through the kindness of Professor Werner Krauss (Marburg) an offprint of an article of his in Zeitschr.f. rom. Phil, (the year of publication unfortunately does not appear in the offprint) in which he points out the basic deterministic attitude of Juan Ruiz (‘die Anerkennung der kreatürlichen und gottgewollten Bedingtheit, die unlösbare Verstrickung durch die irdische Liebe’) which requires, as a logical complement, the belief that the only possible counteraction against the weakness of human nature is divine grace—hence, the openness of Juan Ruiz to all human experiences and his continuous moralization (‘Das Leben ist ein fortgesetztes Experimentieren und insofern auch ein fortgesetztes Moralisieren’). Krauss touches upon the problem of the ‘poetic I’ when he describes ‘das Widerspiel der Selbsterlebnisse und eines sich verlierenden Ich, das nur noch Sinnträger des exemplo ist und zuweilen an den Rand des epischen Geschehens als eine blosse Zuschauerfigur gedrückt wird.’ I should like to modify slightly the wording about ‘an “I” that looses itself and is pushed to the periphery by the epic narrative': in my opinion, there is in Juan Ruiz’ work an everpresent ‘I’, ever ready to include itself in the experimenting and moralizing narrative because of the author's very belief in the ‘Kreatürlichkeit’ of man, and in the necessary recourse to Grace. Juan Ruiz' personality appears and disappears in his poem, just as does that of his sinful Trotaconventos. Are not both ever-present types of misdirected buen amor? Google Scholar