Bruce W. Wardropper - An Apology for Philology

An Apology for PhilologyAuthor(s): Bruce W. WardropperSource: MLN, Vol. 102, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1987), pp. 176-190Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905683 .Accessed: 18/03/2014 15:50

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An Apology for Philology

Bruce W. Wardropper

The celebration of the first century of MLN's existence neces- sarily calls for some retrospection. The "Institution of Criticism" that dominated most of these hundred years was the now unfash- ionable philology. And yet, when one thinks about it, if ever there was an institution of criticism, it has to have been philology, which in one form or another has endured from classical antiquity to the present. Although philology is discredited in some intellectual circles today, it continues to be the staple fare of MLA conventions and of many literary journals, particularly the long established ones. In saying this, I understand philology as it was understood by Cicero and Seneca: a love of letters and literary pursuits and the explanation or interpretation of the writings of others. The word has never been better defined than it was by the Royal Spanish Academy in 1732, when it published the fifth volume of its first official dictionary. Under the heading PHILOLOGIA, we read: "a branch of learning composed of and adorned by grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, antiquities, the interpretation of authors, and more generally criticism, with a general speculation about all other branches of knowledge."' This joyfully comprehensive definition endorses Seneca's observation-a rueful one, to be sure,-that "what philosophy was has become philology."2 This sensus latusjus-

I "Ciencia compuesta y adornada de la Gramrtica, Rhet6rica, Historia, Poesia, Antiguedades, Interpretacion de Autores, y generalmente de la Critica, con espe- culacion general de todas las demas Ciencias." Except where indicated otherwise, the translations are the author's.

2 "Itaque quae philosophia fuit, facta philologia est." Ad Lucilium Epistulae Mo-


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tifies the admission to the honorable company of philologists (or philologues, or philologians, as Leo Spitzer liked to call them) not merely of etymologists but also of New Critics, stylisticians, Marxist critics, intellectual historians, semioticians, the practitioners of speech-act theory, and no doubt some other kinds of literary scholars. I would hope that all these scholars would consent to be called philologists in the broad sense of the Spanish Academy's definition. I am certain that many varieties of poststructuralists would decline to be so designated.

The main bone of contention between philologists and poststructuralists is the nature of a text. The philologist regards the literary text as a given, much as an art historian regards a painting. For them a text and a painting are objects of art, objective there- fore in their existence, constituting, as Hugh Kenner once put it,3 a "homemade world." They are things to be enjoyed and studied. Patina on a painting and corruption in a text are challenges to restore, not signs of instability. Poststructuralists (especially deconstructionists) do not, for the most part, share this optimistic certainty that a text is an object. On the contrary, they express a pro- found skepticism about the durability of texts. For them a text, whether literary or nonliterary, was an utterance in language, which changes in the language itself, the course of time, and a plurality of reader-responses have called into question. For them texts are indeterminate, undecidable, and lacking in referentiality. Since texts are so widely seen as ungraspable, it is hardly sur- prising that in recent years the literary avant-garde has been long on theory and short on actual criticism. There can be no doubt that the lively intellectual turmoil stirred up by poststructuralists has been salutary for a discipline-that of literary studies-which is prone to flaccid thinking and is itself too short on theory. We all stand indebted to contemporary literary theorists for challenging our assumptions and our prejudices. But these exciting new devel- opments in theory and, occasionally, in praxis seem to have re- sulted in more confusion than assurance. Since most of us who

rales, With an English Translation by Richard M. Gummere, The Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann and New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1925), III, 244. It is true that in context this statement is censorious. Seneca is reproaching those young students who "nowadays" come to their teachers not to develop their minds but their wits. Nevertheless, the old man is making an observation about what is coming to pass in his time.

3 The reference is to his book entitled A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York: Knopf, 1975).


178 BRUCE W. WARDROPPER

constitute Stanley Fish's interpretive communities must continue to teach texts, to study them, and to write about them, we find ourselves obliged in large part to evade in practice the issues raised by the poststructuralists. Which is why most writers in PMLA and other long-standing journals pay little more than grudging homage to the latest theories. If this is true of literary scholars in general, it is even more true of Hispanists. Very little Hispanic scholarship has embraced la nouvelle critique.

It might be argued that most Hispanic scholarship is backward or unenterprising or unintellectual. While this charge may be generally true, there is abundant evidence that some of the best His- panists have gone beyond the close reading of texts, as it was and is practiced by formalists. Although Elias Rivers' magnum opus is a strictly philological work, the surely definitive edition of Garci- laso's poetry, he has successfully applied speech-act theory to the anonymous Golden-Age play La Estrella de Sevilla;4 and he has in- spired the members of an NEH seminar that he directed on this theory to publish their papers in a stimulating book entitled Things Done With Words: Speech Acts in Hispanic Drama.5 Forging beyond speech-act theory, Rivers has gone on to explore, over a wide range of Hispanic literature, the complex interaction of orality and written discourse in his important book Quixotic Scriptures: Essays on the Textuality of Hispanic Literature.6 In Hispanic studies, semiotics has fared even better than speech-act theory. A conference held in Groningen in 1979 produced a book Teorias semiologicas aplicadas a textos espaioles, with the participation of no fewer than thirteen semioticians.7 Javier Herrero has brilliantly used semiotics to dem- onstrate how characteristic icons and codes shape the style and the action of Calderon's dramas.8 In Language and Society in La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, Harry Sieber has meditated profoundly on the meaning of the protagonist, his circumstances, and his problems as the power of language.9 Finally, there have been many studies of Spanish literature from the perspective of sociocriticism,

4 "The Shame of Writing in La Estrella de Sevilla," Folio, No. 12 (June 1980), pp. 105-17.

5 Ed. Elias L. Rivers (Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1986). 6 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). 7 Ed. J. L. Alonso-Herndndez (Groningen: Universidad, 1980). 8 "El volcin en el paraiso: El sistema ic6nico del teatro de Calder6n," Co-textes,

No. 3 (Calder6n: c6digos, monstruo, icones) (1982), pp. 59-113. 9 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).


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the chief exponent being Edmond Cros.10 Not all Hispanic scholarship, then, is benighted or formalist. 11 But deconstructionist criticism of Spanish texts, if its exists, has had little or no impact on our awareness of it.

The successful application to Spanish literature of theories and techniques developed since the heyday of the New Criticism has been possible only because the scholars I have mentioned, and others whom I might have mentioned, have believed in the deter- minacy and the referentiality of the texts they were studying. There is a nice irony in this state of affairs, for many Spanish literary texts are truly "undecidable"-undecidable in a sense that philologists, but probably not most poststructuralists, would ac- cept.

Lazarillo de Tormes, for example, was first published in 1554, in cities as far apart as Burgos, Alcala de Henares, and Antwerp. It is as though there were three, virtually simultaneous, first editions.12 There are naturally some variants among all three, and the Alcala edition contains to boot some lengthy interpolations.13 There had to have been an author's manuscript, although it is not extant. How, in the days before telecommunication and photocopying, did this manuscript come into the possession of three widely sepa- rated printing houses? Which of the three editions of 1554 is most faithful to the lost manuscript? Unless this manuscript is miracu- lously recovered, we will never know. Then there is the problem of the Lazarillo's surprisingly short chapters 4 and 6. Is the brevity part of the author's strategy? Or are a censor's scissors to blame? After more than four centuries of diligent philological research, the very name of the author remains a mystery. There is even much debate about the kind of man-humanist, Hieronymite monk, and so on-that he may have been. The Lazarillo is a decid- edly undecidable text; and yet we can and do teach it and study

10 An example of Cros's sociocriticism is L'Aristocrate et le carnaval des gueux: Etude sur le Busc6n de Quevedo (Montpellier: Centre d'Etudes Sociocritiques, 1975).

I1 A modified reader-response criticism has been attempted by Helen H. Reed in The Reader in the Picaresque Novel (London: Tamesis, 1984).

12 The three texts may be consulted in the facsimile edition of Lazarillo de Tormes (Alcald de Henares, Burgos y Amberes, 1554), noticia bibliogrifica de Enrique Moreno Baez (Cieza: ". . . la fonte que mana y corre ...," 1959).

13 The clearest account of the interpolations appears in La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, ed. R[oyston] 0. Jones (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963).



it, and every year we learn more about its structure and its meaning. 14

Let me review quickly some other important but slippery Spanish literary texts. What may well be the first literary work written in Spanish exists in a single manuscript. The liturgical play, untitled but known to modern scholars as the Auto de los Reyes Magos, is (I continue to believe) truncated;15 and it is almost cer- tainly the work of one whose native tongue was not Castilian Spanish: hence the incredible false rhymes that it contains.16 Most published texts of the epic poem Cantar de Mio Cid begin with a passage in verse that has been concocted by a modern scholar, the late Ramon Menendez Pidal, on the basis of his now largely discredited theories that the epic poem is rigorously historical and that the chronicles are prosified epics. Menendez Pidal's edition of the Cantar de Mio Cid, thought until recently to be definitive, has been succeeded and surpassed by others-notably those of Ian Michael and Colin Smith-that follow the original manuscript much more faithfully.17 The generically unclassifiable Libro de Buen Amor exists in three early fourteenth-century codices and a few later fragments. The text of the third manuscript, dating from 1343, differs considerably from those of the first two, both of 1330. Moreover, the author, Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, en- courages his readers to tamper at will with his text: "Whoever hears [my book]," he writes, "if he knows how to compose poetry, may add more to it and emend whatever he wishes."18 The texts of the orally transmitted ancient ballads are even more unstable than

14 An important recent contribution to our understanding of this text is Maxime Chevalier, "La manceba del abad (Lazarillo de Tormes, VII)," in Homenaje a Jose An- tonio Maravall (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociol6gicas, 1986), pp. 413-18.

15 For an opposing view-that the Auto de los Reyes Magos is "una obra integra"- see Alan D. Deyermond, ed., Edad Media, vol. I of Historia y critica de la literatura espanhola (general ed., Francisco Rico) (Barcelona: Editorial Critica, 1980), p. 454.

16 See Rafael Lapesa, "Sobre el Auto de los Reyes Magos: sus rimas an6malas y el posible origen de su autor," in Homenaje a Fritz Kriuger (Mendoza: Universidad Na- cional de Cuyo, 1954), II, 591-99, rpt. in his De la Edad Media a nuestros dias (Ma- drid: Gredos, 1967), pp. 37-47; Jose Maria Sola-Sole, "El Auto de los Reyes Magos: jimpacto gasc6n o mozarabe?," RPh, 29 (1976-77), 20-27; and Jose Maria Regueiro, "El Auto de los Reyes Magos y el teatro lituirgico medieval," HR, 45 (1977), 149-64.

17 Poema de mio Cid, ed. Colin C. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); and The Poem of the Cid, ed. Ian Michael, and trans. Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975).

18 Stanza 1629. The English version is cited from Juan Ruiz, Libro de Buen Amor, ed. with ... [an] English Paraphrase by Raymond S. Willis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 436.


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that of the Libro de Buen Amor. Is the short, truncated version of the ballad of "Conde Arnaldos" that was printed in the middle of the sixteenth century to be preferred to the full-length version re- tained in the folk memory of Moroccan Sephardim, and first printed in the twentieth century? Is the sixteen-act "comedy" called Celestina more or less authoritative than the extended twenty-one-act "tragicomedy" that its author, Fernando de Rojas, turned it into? And, to skip from works of the Middle Ages to some of the twentieth century, which text of a poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez, about whose poetry Paul Olson has written a most illuminating book,19 is, so to speak, the real one? The poem which begins "Viene una mu'sica languida / de no se donde, en el aire" undergoes some drastic transformations as it passes from its first appearance in Aires tristes in 1903 through two revisions on its way to a third and final one in Leyenda, published posthumously in 1978. This is only one of the many early poems that Juan Ramon Jimenez reworked throughout his lifetime. Constantly revising what he called his "Work in Progress," Jimenez has left us a text- fixer's nightmare.

These random examples of undecidable texts about which scholars and critics continue to write are not happenstances. A case that will perhaps surprise some non-Hispanists is that of Don Quixote. Cervantes' manuscript has no doubt been lost forever. The early editions, from which we derive modern texts of the novel, are, as Robert Flores has shown, quite unreliable because the type- setters were tired, lazy, indifferent to their job, prone to error, or disrespectful of the author's orthography, and perhaps even of his actual text.20 Furthermore, modern editions follow the idiosyn- cratic paragraphing established by the Royal Spanish Academy in the official edition it published in 1780. There is, as yet, no com- pletely trustworthy edition in which we may read the work that all acclaim as Spain's greatest masterpiece. Somewhat unreliable too must have been the manuscript that Cervantes delivered to his printers. Every reader of the novel will remember how Sancho Panza, having lost his donkey, is later seen riding it, and yet the author has offered no account either of how Sancho lost it or of how he recovered it. Ten years later, in Part II, chapter 4, Sancho

19 Circle of Paradox: Time and Essence in the Poetry ofJuan Ram6nJimenez (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967).

20 The Compositors of the First and Second Madrid Editions of Don Quixote Part I (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1975).



gives a lame explanation of Cervantes' gaffe: "the one who wrote the story must have made a mistake, or else it must be due to care- lessness on the part of the printer."21 This glimpse into the unre- liability of the text of Don Quixote, Part I, surfaced in the seventeenth century. We have had to wait until the twentieth century before philology was able to give us the true explanation of the mystery of the disappearing and reappearing donkey. In his haste to beat a self-imposed deadline for publication-trying unsuccess- fully to reach the bookstores before the second part of Mateo Aleman's best-seller Guzman de Alfarache appeared-Cervantes made some clumsy transpositions of some scenes of his novel. As Geoffrey Stagg has very convincingly proved, the pastoral episode about the beautiful Marcela and the suicidal Grisostomo was lifted, mountainous scenery and all, from its original place in the Sierra Morena sequence and interpolated into the earlier events which took place in La Mancha on "relatively open, flat or undulating country, interspersed with woods and meadows."22 One of the consequences of this crude surgery was the mangling of the story of the donkey's loss and recovery. Stagg has shown us what hap- pened, but he has not-no doubt he could not and should not have-given us the pristine text that existed before Cervantes re- vamped it. The text of Don Quixote, Part I, is thus inherently unstable. Perhaps, to some extent and in this sense, all literary texts are. But as long as they are understood to be unstable only in the philological sense, meaningful exegesis, like Stagg's on Don Quixote, is both feasible and useful.

The other great issue raised by deconstructionists concerns a text's essential lack of referentiality. Recent Hispanic scholarship, however, increasingly deepens our awareness of how unexpectedly referential some Spanish texts are. For many years Hispanists have tended to assume that the huge numbers of lyric poems written in the fifteenth century-the so-called cancionero poetry, the work of some 700 poets-were nothing more than, as it were, academic exercises ringing the changes on the trivial niceties of courtly love. If the poetic expression of courtly love ever reflected the courting and mating customs of a society (that, let us say, of the trouba- dours and knights of high-medieval Provence and Catalonia), it surely could no longer serve the same purpose in Castile and Ar-

21 Trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Viking, 1949), II, 534. 22 "Revision in Don Quixote, Part I," in Hispanic Studies in Honour of I. Gonzdlez

Llubera, ed. Frank Pierce (Oxford: Dolphin, 1959), p. 353.


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agon, as the Middle Ages drew to a close. These songs, then, would seem to be pointless attempts to produce infinite variations on an archaic theory of love. However, the cancionero poets' obsession with writing so many of them, the immense popularity of some of the poems well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (when they were glossed by Renaissance poets and set to new music), and the discovery of some obscene poems among the refined ones in- spired some scholars, notably the late Keith Whinnom,23 to under- take the task of reading the poems ever more closely and in ever narrower historical contexts. The results have been astonishing. Let us consider one such poem, a great favorite in the Golden Age, and attributed to no less a poet than Jorge Manrique.

Justa fue mi perdici6n, de mis males soy contento. Ya no espero galard6n, pues vuestro merecimiento satisfizo a mi pasi6n.

Es victoria conocida quien de v6s queda vencido, que en perder por v6s la vida es ganado el que es perdido. Pues lo consiente raz6n, consiento mi perdimiento sin esperar galard6n pues vuestro merecimiento satisfizo mi pasi6n.

Read as an expression of the paradoxical sufferings of a courtly lover, the poem seems trite. In this traditional sense, a glossing paraphrase might read:

My ruin [= utter loss of happiness in a future state] was just,

and I am happy to suffer. I expect no further favours, since your great worth was (ample) payment for my (previous) suffering.

To be conquered by you can be recognized as a victory, for in losing this life for you

23 "Hacia una interpretaci6n y apreciaci6n de las canciones del Cancionero general," Filologia, 13 (1968-69), 361-81, and especially La poesia amatoria de la epoca de los Reyes Cat6licos (Durham: University of Durham, 1981).



the man who is lost is won. Since my reason consents to it, I consent to the utter loss of happiness, expecting no further favours, since your great worth repaid all my suffering.

This explanation (as he calls it) is the work of Ian Macpherson, the scholar who has cracked the "courtly code" and the "secret language" of this particular poem.24

Macpherson notes that the first word of the poem, "Justa," usually construed as the adjective meaning "just," was commonly used as a lady's name in the fifteenth century; as a substantive, "justa" also means a joust or tournament; in obscene cancionero poetry, it usually refers to the battle of the bed. This and other clues have led Macpherson to the following, entirely justified, reading:

Tilting at Justa quite rightly was my downfall, but I am quite happy with my misdeeds. I no longer expect a reward, since making love to you gave me ecstasy and satisfaction.

The man who has been to bed with you has achieved a recognizable victory, for in a climax achieved with you the man who is lost is won. Since my reason consents to it, I consent to my downfall, expecting no reward, for making love to you gave me ecstasy and satisfaction.

Under the veneer of the archaic courtly-love poem is hidden a celebration of physical love. The haughty lady has descended from her conventional pedestal to become a woman leaping into bed with her gratified lover. Judging by Whinnom's research, this poem appears to be representative of much of this poetry that until recently was considered insipid and trite. The latest understanding, reached through philological methods, reveals a body of poetry written, as Macpherson puts it, for "a restricted 'in-group' of courtiers . . . writing primarily for each other" with "a range of

24 "Secret Language in the Cancioneros: Some Courtly Codes," BHS, 62 (1985), 51-63.


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vocabulary [that operates] at two levels at once" (p. 54). Its referentiality to a fifteenth-century reality is suddenly beyond dispute.

Other scholarly efforts are beginning to discover the referentiality of other Spanish literary texts which had previously seemed to exist in a vacuum. Don Luis de G6ngora's extremely difficult (and, for a long time, impenetrable) masterpiece, the major poem called Las soledades, was finally elucidated for modern readers in 1927 by Damaso Alonso. Since then readers have expended the great efforts still needed to unravel the syntax and the sense of the poem (even with the aid of Don Damaso's pony) only to feel defrauded by the apparent pointlessness of the whole work. They have ad- mired the ingenuity and the beauty of particular passages, while wondering what it all added up to. It is to two Marxist critics, Robert Jammes25 and John Beverley,26 that we are finally indebted for an understanding of some of the historical and ideological ramifications of this complex and engaging poem. Las soledades, left unfinished because of the poet's despair, expresses the shat- tering of the hope that, in a society made rotten by corruption and power, man might be able to live without concessions, compro- mises, or expectations: it is a wonderful declaration of desengano. The poem is a product of the social, political, and economic conditions in Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Celestina too has always been enigmatic; and its interpretation, a matter of speculation. Is it, as June Hall Martin would have it, simply a parody of what befalls an anachronistic courtly lover?27 Or is it rather, as Marcel Bataillon believed, an earnest warning against the follies of worshiping, rather than loving, a lady, and against having an unreasonable confidence in servants and panders?28 Is it, as Americo Castro and Stephen Gilman maintain, a moving expression of the anguish experienced by its author, a man of Jewish extraction living in an ever more intolerant Catholic Spain?29 Does Celestina reflect faithfully the life of the nobility, the

25 Etudes sur l'oeuvre pogtique de Don Luis de G6ngora y Argote (Bordeaux: Feret, 1967).

26 Aspects of G6ngora's "Soledades" (Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1979), and "Introducci6n" to his edition of Soledades (Madrid: Catedra, 1979).

27 Love's Fools: Aucassin, Troilus, Calisto and the Parody of the Courtly Lover (London: Tamesis, 1972).

28 "La Cglestine" selon Fernando de Rojas (Paris: Didier, 1961). 29 Americo Castro, "La Celestina" como contienda literaria (castas y casticismos) (Ma-

drid: Revista de Occidente, 1965); Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas: The Intellectual and Social Landscape (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).



bourgeoisie, and the lower class in urban Spain at the end of the fifteenth century? All these questions can be answered-so far, at least-only by conjectures. The one certainty is, as the philologist Jose Antonio Maravall has shown, that Celestina illustrates force- fully the deterioration of the master-man relationship.30 In the high Middle Ages this had been a relationship of mutual trust and respect: the servant, or criado, had been, as the Spanish word im- plies, "raised" in the master's household and treated as a son. By 1499, when Celestina was first published, the relationship had become one of insecurity, in which the master bought with money the services of an often untrustworthy hired hand. Once again, a text loath to surrender its mysteries has been shown to refer to a clearly defined historical circumstance.

It seems fair to conclude from the evidence I have presented that much of Spanish literature from the Middle Ages to the present consists of texts which are referential but at the same time philologically undecidable in the strictest sense. Of course, when most poststructuralists write about the indeterminacy of texts, both literary and nonliterary texts, they have in mind something quite different from the philological indeterminacy that I have been il- lustrating. For these poststructuralists, everything in the denota- tion and connotation of words belongs to a short period of history and to the linguistic system in which they were used. Since all uttered words form an idiolect, many poststructuralists maintain that it is impossible for us to recover the meanings of words written or spoken in another age. If we read a text from another age, we impose-some would say, we should impose-our notions on it. Once written, a text quickly emancipates itself from the circumstances of its production, and is freed to be possessed by each reader with his or her own linguistic system, his or her own historical period, and his or her own particular brand of culture. The meanings-if any-attached to the text are different each time it is read.

This no doubt extreme formulation of the poststructuralist manner of regarding texts excludes philological hermeneutics from the reading of texts generated in an earlier period. With or without the aid of philology, past meaning cannot be recovered. But experience tells us that at least to some extent it can. Let me give one example. At the beginning of the first chapter of Don Quixote, Cervantes introduces us to the village hidalgo who is to 30 El mundo social de "La Celestina" (Madrid: Gredos, 1964).


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become Don Quixote. Because Cervantes wants us to know the kind of man his hero is, he tells us about his household, his dress, his eating habits, his domestic arrangements, and more. To some degree this presentation escapes modern readers, even Spanish ones, because they can only with difficulty visualize the circumstances of a village squire in central Spain around the turn of the seventeenth century. To be sure, some of the terms used, while they are not timeless, at least have been common to several centuries of Western culture. Such terms as "una ama de casa que pasaba de los cuarenta" and "un mozo de campo y plaza," a middle-aged housekeeper and a yard man, present little difficulty. Others need some explanation if we are to get the full flavor of this particular squire's way of life. For example, from the recital of meals we learn that every Saturday our hero ate something called "duelos y quebrantos" (literally, "sufferings and [heart]breaks"). Here Cervantes is naming a dish whose ingredients are no longer known, and whose name, long lost from the Spanish language, sounds as historically exotic as that of the more recent English dish "bubble-and-squeak." Philologists have labored long trying to identify "duelos y quebrantos," without much success until one of them made an intertextual observation.3l In the fifteenth century Anton de Montoro, a poet of Jewish origins who had been converted to Christianity, wrote a wryly comic poem in which the notions of suffering and breaking are combined. In it the poet expresses the displeasure he feels because he can find nothing to buy at the butcher's shop but salt pork. He ends his short poem:

no hallando, por mis duelos, con que mi hambre matar, hanme hecho quebrantar la jura de mis ahuelos.

(Not finding, for my sufferings, / anything to satisfy my hunger, / I was made to break / the oath of my ancestors.) Duelos y quebrantos must be, then, a dish whose name conveys the lingering revulsion felt by Jews converted to Christianity, and their descendants, at having to eat foodstuffs proscribed by Jewish law. Alonso Quijano el Bueno ate pork products of some kind on every Jewish sabbath. This is a historically well documented custom, calculated to avert any suspicion that the eater might have had a Jewish ancestor.

31 Bruce W. Wardropper, "Duelos y quebrantos, Once Again," RomN, 20 (1980), 413-17.



Why, then, does our hidalgo seek to allay his neighbors' suspi- cions? The likelihood presented by this small detail is that the hidalgo who was to become Don Quixote is being subtly introduced to us as a covert New Christian, who, if his secret becomes publicly known, runs the risk of incurring statutory disabilities in that racist moment of Spanish history. It is a probability that readers need to bear in mind as they go on to read about Don Quixote's adven- tures and misadventures. Some lost meaning of the text and some of its referentiality have been retrieved by philological and historical means. The fact is that all serious readers of Don Quixote need the footnotes supplied by philological research if they are to understand as much as possible of this complex text. Extending this principle from the reading of Cervantes' novel to other texts, Felix Martinez Bonati puts it this way: "If the loss of original semantic substance were the necessary and irreversible fate of literary works, philological hermeneutics would make no difference in reading an old text. Yet we know that it does make a difference."32

Up to this point, my apology for philology has been a defense of its capacity to elucidate a text rather than of its capacity to criticize one. In deference to the critical discourse of the day, I have been referring to "literary texts." In considering philology as an instru- ment of criticism, I prefer to use an even older term, one with different connotations, the word "poem." If a text may be indeterminate, a poem is a perceived work of art, in verse or prose, to which readers or listeners respond with pleasure or distaste, de- light or revulsion, love or hate. How, then, are philologists to con- trol and express their reactions to poems?

In the first place, they must have acquired a vast experience with poetry of all kinds and in more than one language. This supposes that a lot of reading and a lot of meditation have been done. And also philologists must have acquired a great deal of learning in-to advert again to the Royal Spanish Academy's definition- "grammar, rhetoric, history ..., antiquities ..., [and] all other branches of knowledge." With this preparation, it becomes neces-

32 "The Stability of Literary Meaning," in Identity of the Literary Text, ed. Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 241. In his essay (pp. 231-45) Martinez Bonati has shown how Cervantes' presentation of his protagonist in chapter 1 evokes him not only for "a common, quick-minded contemporary" but also for "a reader of the perennial creations of the classics." And he asks: "Is this duplicity of appeal not constitutive of literature?" (p. 236).


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satry for philologists to select a method for approaching a particular poem. Which one, of the many that have existed and exist today, is the right one? Here I quote-and make my own-the words of a very eminent philologist: "Good sense is the critic's only guide. Good sense is what indicates to the critic the reading method that the work itself suggests and whose dictate he must obey without superimposing on the text categories from outside of it."33 No single method is appropriate to all poems, and none should be forced on any poem. This empiricism supposes that each poem is to be considered a "unique and unrepeatable experience" (p. 127). Still using, and still appropriating, the words of this distinguished philologist,

. . . no method can replace the fundamental sympathy that the critic feels for his field of study; philology is the love of works written in a particular language. And if a critic's methods must be applicable to works written in all languages, for the criticism to be convincing, it is necessary that, at least at the moment when he is commenting on a poem, he should love that language and that poem more than anything else in the world. After all, beneath his cold professional rationality, the critic is not an automaton or a robot, but a sentient human being, with his momentary contradictions and impulses (pp. 127-28).

This philologist's love for the poem has an almost erotic intensity. Translated from the Italian, the words I have been citing are the last publicly uttered ones of a man who by his presence graced Gilman Hall for over twenty years. Recently called by Fernando Laizaro Carreter "el honor de la filologia,"34 he was Leo Spitzer, whose published criticism stands the test of time, and whose last utterance is as alive and meaningful today as it was when he made it in 1960. On this memorable occasion, at the Johns Hopkins Uni- versity, it is fitting to do homage to this "honor of philology."

Some unforgettable literary scholars adorned the Department of Romance Languages when I was privileged to work at this great University: Henry Carrington Lancaster, Emile Malakis, Pedro Sa-

33 Leo Spitzer, "Sviluppo di un metodo," CN, 20 (1960), 109-28. The quotation is from p. 127. This lecture has been published, translated into Spanish by Silvia Furi6 under the title "Desarrollo de un metodo," in Leo Spitzer, Estilo y estructura en la literatura espafzola, ed. Francisco Rico, introducci6n de Fernando LAzaro Carreter (Barcelona: Editorial Critica, 1980), pp. 33-60.

34 The title of LAzaro's intoduction (see note 33) is "Leo Spitzer (1887-1960) o el honor de la filologia" (p. 8).



linas, Charles Singleton, Georges Poulet, Jean Starobinski, Nathan Edelman, Anna Granville Hatcher, and ... Leo Spitzer. They were all, in their several ways, great human beings as well as great philologists. What an institution of criticism the Department was then! And, as I hope some of my earlier allusions have made clear, what a splendid Department, united or (as now) divided, it has been since and still is!

Duke University


Article Contentsp. [176]p. 177p. 178p. 179p. 180p. 181p. 182p. 183p. 184p. 185p. 186p. 187p. 188p. 189p. 190

Issue Table of ContentsMLN, Vol. 102, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1987), pp. 175-412Front Matter [pp. ]Editorial Note [pp. 175]An Apology for Philology [pp. 176-190]The Rhetoric of Solidarity in the Poema del Cid [pp. 191-205]Problems of Genre in Golden Age Poetry [pp. 206-219]Writing Women in Golden Age Spain: Saint Teresa and Mara de Zayas[pp. 220-240]Quevedo's Converso Pcaro[pp. 241-254]La jerarqua, la letra y lo oral en Paradox, rey de Po Baroja[pp. 255-273]Interpreting La Regenta: Coherence vs. Entropy [pp. 274-291]The Sun-Hero Revisited: Inverted Archetypes in Unamuno's Amor y pedagoga[pp. 292-306]Unamuno's Break with the Nineteenth Century: Invention of the Nivola and the Linguistic Turn [pp. 307-315]Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, mrtir: Ethics through Fiction[pp. 316-333]Historicity and Literariness: Problems in the Literary Criticism of Spanish American Colonial Texts [pp. 334-346]Technology and Violence: Casal, Daro, Lugones[pp. 347-357]No Woman's Land: The Representation of Woman in Onetti [pp. 358-377]NotesQuevedo's Poetic Creativity: Some Comments on the Revisions to Contaba una labradora [pp. 378-386]Ruy Daz de Guzmn in the Context of Paraguayan Colonial Literature[pp. 387-392]Three "New" Avant-garde Poems of Jorge Luis Borges [pp. 393-398]

Review ArticleReview: untitled [pp. 399-401]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 402-403]Review: untitled [pp. 403-408]

List of Books Received [pp. 409-412]Back Matter [pp. ]

Documents

Bruce W. Wardropper - An Apology for Philology