Tirant Lo Blanc

The hero of the earliest Spanish chivalric romance, Tirant lo Blanc, makes his first appearance asleep on his horse. The horse stops to drink from a stream, Tirant wakes up and sees sitting by the stream a hermit with a white beard reading a book. Tirant tells the hermit of his intention to enter the chivalric order, and the hermit, a former knight, offers to instruct the young man in the rules of the order:

‘Hijo mío,’ dijo el ermitaño,
‘toda la orden está escrita en ese
libro, que algunas veces leo para
recordar la gracia que Nuestro Señor
me ha hecho en este mundo, puesto
que honraba y mantenía la orden de
caballería con todo mi poder.’
(‘My son,’ said the hermit, ‘the entire rules of the order are written in that book, which I sometimes read in order to recall the favour which Our Lord has done me in this world, since I used to honour and maintain the order of chivalry with all my might.’)

Right from its opening pages this first Spanish chivalric romance seems to want to warn us that every such text presupposes a preexisting chivalric book which the hero has to read in order to become a knight: ‘Tot l’ordre és en aques llibre escrit.’ From such a statement many conclusions can follow, including the one that perhaps chivalry never existed before chivalric books, or indeed that it only existed in books.

It is thus not hard to see how the last repository of chivalric virtues, Don Quixote, will be someone who has constructed his own being and his own world exclusively through books. As soon as the priest, the barber, the niece and housekeeper have consigned his library to the flames, chivalry is finished: Don Quixote will be the last exemplar of a species that has no successors.

The priest still manages to save from that provincial bonfire of vanities the major source texts, Amadís de Gaula and Tirant lo Blanc, along with the verse romances of Boiardo and Ariosto (in the original Italian and not in translation, in which they lose ‘su natural valor’). As far as these books are concerned, unlike others which are spared because they are considered to conform to morality (such as Palmerín de Inglaterra), it appears as if their salvation is due largely to their aesthetic values: but which ones? We shall see that the qualities that count for Cervantes (but to what extent can we be sure that Cervantes’ opinions coincide with those of the curate and the barber rather than with those of Don Quixote?) are literary originality (Amadís is defined as ‘único en su arte’) and human truth (Tirant lo Blanc is praised because ‘aquí comen los caballeros, y duermen y mueren en sus camas, y hacen testamento antes de sua muerte, con otras cosas de que los demás libros deste género carecen’ (here knights eat, sleep and die in their beds, and make a will before they die, along with other things which find no place in other books of this kind)). Thus Cervantes (or at least that part of Cervantes that coincides with etc.) respects chivalric works the more they contravene the rules of the genre: it is no longer the myth of chivalry that counts, but the worth of the book as a text. This is a criterion that is the opposite to Don Quixote’s (and to that part of Cervantes that identifies with his hero), who refuses to distinguish between literature and life and wants to find the myth outside the books.

What will be the fate of the world of chivalric romance, once the analytical spirit intervenes and establishes clear boundaries between the realm of the marvellous, the realm of moral values, and that of reality and verisimilitude? The sudden but grandiose catastrophe, in which the myth of chivalry dissolves on the sun-scorched roads of La Mancha, is an event of universal relevance, but one which has no counterpart in other literatures. In Italy, or more precisely in the courts of northern Italy, the same process had taken place a century previously, though in less dramatic form, as a literary sublimation of that tradition. The waning of chivalry had been celebrated by Pulci, Boiardo and Ariosto in an atmosphere of Renaissance festival, with more or less marked parodistic tones, but also with nostalgia for the simple popular tales of the cantastorie: the empty remains of the chivalric imagination were now valued only as a repertoire of conventional motifs, but at least the heaven of poetry opened up to welcome its spirit.

It might be worth recalling that many years before Cervantes, in 1526, we already find a pyre for books of chivalry, or more precisely, a choice between which books to condemn to the flames and which to save. I refer to a very minor text which is hardly known at all: the Orlandino, a brief epic poem in Italian verse by Teofilo Folengo (who was more famous under the name of Merlin Cocai as the author of the Baldus, a poem in macaronic Latin mixed with Mantuan dialect). In the first canto of the Orlandino, Folengo recounts that he was taken by a witch flying on the back of a ram to a cavern in the Alps where the real chronicles of Bishop Turpin are preserved: Turpin was the legendary source of the entire Carolingian cycle. When he compares them with this source he discovers that the poems by Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci and Cieco da Ferrara are all truthful, even though they contain rather arbitrary additions.

Ma Trebisunda, Ancroja, Spagna e Bovo
coll’altro resto al foco sian donate;
apocrife son tutte, e le riprovo
come nemiche d’ogni veritate;
Bojardo, l’Ariosto, Pulci e ’l Cieco
autentici sono, ed io con seco.
(But Trebisunda, Ancroja, Spagna and Bovo with all the others, should be consigned to the fire: they are all apocryphal, and I accuse them of being the enemies of all truthfulness; but Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci and Cieco are authentic, and I along with them.)

‘El verdadero historiador Turpin’, mentioned also by Cervantes, was a regular point of ludic reference in Renaissance Italian chivalric poems. Even Ariosto, when he feels he has been exaggerating too much, shields himself behind the authority of Turpin:

Il buon Turpin, che sa che dice il vero,
e lascia creder poi quel ch’a l’uom piace,
narra mirabil cose di Ruggiero,
ch’udendolo, il direste voi mendace. (O.F. 26.23)
(But the good Turpin, who knows he is telling the truth, though he allows men then to believe what they like, tells incredible tales about Ruggiero, which if you heard them you would call him a liar.)

The legendary Turpin’s role will be assigned by Cervantes in his work to the mysterious Cide Hamete Benengeli, whose Arabic manuscript he claims merely to be translating. But Cervantes is operating in a world that is by now radically different: truth for him has to be comparable with everyday experience, with common sense and also with the precepts of Counter-Reformation religion. For fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian poets (up to but not including Tasso, in whose case the question becomes really complicated) truth was still fidelity to a myth, as it was for the Knight of La Mancha.

We can see this even in a late sequel such as Folengo’s, which is halfway between popular and erudite poetry: the spirit of myth, handed down from time immemorial, is symbolised by a book, Turpin’s book, which lies at the origin of all books, a hypothetical book, accessible only through magic (Boiardo too, says Folengo, was a friend of witches), a book of magic as well as a book of magic tales.

The literary tradition of chivalry had died out first in its countries of origin, France and England: in England it received its definitive form in 1470 in Thomas Malory’s romance, though it also revived again in the Elizabethan faery world of Spenser; while in France it slowly declined after its earliest consecration in poetry in the twelfth-century masterpieces of Chrétien de Troyes. The revival of chivalry in the sixteenth century largely concerns Italy and Spain. When Bernal Díaz del Castillo tries to convey the amazement of the conquistadors at the sight of a completely unimaginable world such as that of Montezuma’s Mexico, he writes: ‘Decíamos que parecía a las cosas de encantamiento que cuentan en el libro de Amadís’ (We would say that it was like the enchanted things recounted in the book of Amadís). Here we feel that he can only compare this strange new reality to the traditions of ancient texts. But if we examine the dates, we shall see that Díaz del Castillo is recounting events which took place in 1519, when the Amadís could still be considered almost a publishing novelty … We can understand, then, that in the collective imagination the discovery of the New World and the Conquest went hand in hand with those stories of giants and magic spells which the contemporary book market offered in vast supply, in much the same way as the first European circulation of the French cycle of tales a few centuries earlier had accompanied the propaganda that mobilised the Crusades.

The millennium which is about to end has been the millennium of the novel (the successor of the romance). In the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the chivalric romances were the first secular books whose circulation had a profound impact on the life of ordinary people, not just on the learned. Dante himself provides evidence of this when he writes about Francesca da Rimini, the first character in world literature to find her life changed by the reading of romances, long before Don Quixote, long before Emma Bovary. In the French romance Lancelot, the knight Galahad persuades Guinevere to kiss Launcelot; in the Divine Comedy the book Lancelot takes on the role played by Galahad in the romance, persuading Francesca to let herself be kissed by Paolo. By seeing the identity between the character in the book who influences other characters and the book which influences its readers (‘Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse’ (the book and its author were Galahads to us)), Dante carries out the first ever, disorientating manoeuvre of metaliterature. In verses that are unsurpassed in density and sobriety, we follow Paolo and Francesca who, ‘senza alcun sospetto’ (completely unsuspecting), allow themselves to be carried away by the emotions aroused by their reading, looking into each other’s eyes every now and then, turning pale, and when they reach the point where Launcelot kisses Guinevere on the mouth (‘il desiato riso’ (her desirable smile)), the desire described in the book makes obvious the desire felt in real life, and at that point life takes on the form narrated in the book: ‘la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante’ (trembling all over, he kissed me on the mouth).

[1985]