“Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.”
Victor Hugo – Les Misérables.
Abstract
The fifteenth century Catalan chivalric romances, Tirant lo Blanc and Curial e Güelfa, constitute two literary landmarks in the evolution of the early modern novel. The use of Bahktin’s concepts of the carnivalesque and the grotesque deepen our understanding of the two texts by helping us understand both the subversion of traditional social order and its ultimate restoration. We explore the theoretical construct of the carnivalesque and its particular manifestations in medieval and early-modern Catalonia. We then explore uses of sexual misalliance, subversion of temporal and spiritual authority, masking and unmasking, games of mirrors, gender bending, temporal distortion, and other components of the construct as manifest in each of the two texts. While the construct of the carnivalesque has sometimes been overused and misapplied, as a manifestation of early modern culture in Western Europe, the carnivalesque becomes a powerful tool for understanding humor, parody and comedy in two important, if understudied, Catalan romances.
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Notes
As Dentith reminds us, part of the Roman Carnival included the ritual denigration of Jews and the medieval charivari involved satire of people who had transgressed community sexual norms, particularly widows or widowers who married partners younger than themselves, scolds, and husbands who allowed themselves to be beaten by their wives (74).
Whether Pedro the priest’s comments on Tirant lo Blanc are just another Cervantine satire of the chivalresque or should be read as true praise is the subject of much debate. While a full discussion is well beyond the scope of this study, see for example Bates (1953) or Eisenberg (1973). Suffice it to say, there seems to be an awareness on the part of Cervantes that the Catalan romance is indeed a satire of nearly every trope of chivalry, whether the author meant it as such or not.
When quoting from Curial y Güelfa and Tirant lo Blanc, I refer to book and chapter numbers rather than page numbers to make consultation easy for those who wish to refer to the works in other editions or translations than I have used here. For Curial, I consulted Aramon (1930) when writing this piece as this older edition is somewhat more readily available in North American libraries. However, I recommend Lola Badia and Jaume Torró’s edition (2011) for the excellent study, notes and critical apparatus if available. The Max Wheeler translation is excellent for those who wish to work in English. For Tirant lo Blanc, the recent Pujol (2021) is a valuable tool for scholars. For an English translation, see La Fontaine (1995).
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Lucas, J. Scripted Revolution: Aspects of the Carnivalesque and Grotesque in Tirant lo Blanc and Curial i Güelfa. Neophilologus 107, 1–11 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-022-09748-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-022-09748-3