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2 - Authorship and Setting: The Fictional Narrators and the Real Author(s)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2021

Frank A. Domínguez
Affiliation:
Professor of medieval Spanish literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Summary

“Como vn dia entre otros muchos oradores me hallaſe en la copioſa libreria del colegio del ſeñor ſant eſtrauagante donde al preſente reſido leyendo vnos ſermones del deuoto padre fray Bugeo Monteſino”

—Anon., Carajicomedia (Prefatory Letter)

An analysis of Carajicomedia has to begin by looking at its narrative complexity. El Laberinto has one author and two implied narrators. Both narrators have the name of the real author: Juan de Mena. One of them appears at the beginning and end of the poem, and occasionally interrupts to comment or to apply its lesson; the other takes part in the vision and describes what he sees. Their name draws the attention of the audience towards the author as a trustworthy spokesman and the fame he claims to be able to impart.

Las Trezientas does not change the text of El Laberinto, but it adds the voice of Núñez through a paratextual apparatus that is distinct from the text but always accompanies it. Carajicomedia, on the other hand, does away with the bond that unites Mena to his oneiric narrative avatars by dividing the role among the fictitious Fray Bugeo Montesino, as putative author and sometime character in the first poem (stanzas 1–2, 92), Fray Juan de Hempudia, the putative author and occasional narrator of the second poem (93–117), and Diego Fajardo, the primary narrator of both poems who, in telling his own story, operates as a diegetic narrator distinct from the other two characters. The voice of one of the glossators is also added to the first poem through the prefatory letter and notes. Although the glosses are peripheral to the poem itself, one of their writers later claims to have first-hand knowledge of Fajardo and some of the whores.

The writer of the prefatory letter states that he has exerted considerable influence on the language and style of Fray Bugeo's rewrite of Las Trezientas through his corrections and annotations. In this way, Carajicomedia presents itself as a re-elaboration of Fray Bugeo's re-elaboration of El Laberinto.3 In other words, the glossator claims the work before us is a third, cruder version of the original.

This puzzling fragmentation of the narrative voices in Carajicomedia's poems and in the glosses to the first poem, not only contrasts with the centrality and authority of the narrators (and author) of El Laberinto, but begs for a reason.

Type
Chapter
Information
Carajicomedia: Parody and Satire in Early Modern Spain
With an Edition and Translation of the Text
, pp. 45 - 86
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2015

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