«Poets and Historians» in «Tirant lo Blanc»: Joanot Martorell's Models and the Cultural Space of Chivalresque Fiction1
Josep Pujol
The growth in recent years of critical studies concerning the literary sources of Tirant to Blanc allows one to map the literary culture of Joanot Martorell with increasing precision, and shows above all the extent to which the reworking of his multiple sources implies a patient and attentive dedication to the writing of a novel that resonates throughout with literal reminiscences of classical Latin literature, of contemporary Catalan writing and that of the Italian trecento.2 The literary and cultural ambition implied by these methods of composition, and the high rhetoric which Martorell demonstrates as a result of the imitation and creative appropriation of his sources, can no longer be seen, then, with the Romantic prejudice which praised the «glory of ignorance» of the uninhibited «realistic» narrator and which attributed to the author of long rhetorical speeches the consequent «burden of knowledge», but must be the starting point for crediting Martorell __ apologetically, if need be__ with the «glory of knowledge» which is his due.3
To take into account the author's dealings with knowledge means assuming that the Tirant projects and realizes certain literary objectives which depend on Martorell's idea of the available literary traditions and that are the result of an elementary reflection on the methods of literary composition and on the value of chivalresque fiction in relation to these traditions. To be sure, the instruments on which the author could rely were limited. Martorell was a knight who had acquired his literary education through vernacular texts, and who had no proper schooling or direct access to Latin culture. Nevertheless, in 1460 the cultural possibilities of the vernacular, though limited, were sufficient __I give only two examples__ to inscribe the story of a Breton knight who fights with the Greeks within the schemes of the Trojan myth and to begin by invoking the power of bestowing fame possessed by «historians» and «poets», the two literary categories to which, in practice, the basic sources and models for the narrative and rhetorical structure of the Tirant are reduced. That is why, leaving aside the fact that the phrase «poets and historians» to which I refer derives directly from the source of the dedication of the Tirant, the model combination of history and poetry, without distinction between the factual truth of the one and the fabulous fictionality of the other, which clashes scandalously with the antipoetic belligerence of an influential model such as Guido delle Colonne, can serve as a guideline in sketching an interpretation of Tirant to Blanc which, by combining what we know of his chief sources with what Martorell states explicitly in the dedication and prologue of the novel __the only spaces he has reserved for the authorial voice__ will bring out the literary and cultural assumptions that make it possible. Moreover, these assumptions can also be seen as instruments for justifying and legitimizing fiction at a time when the problem of the legitimization of literary creation in the vernacular takes on its full urgency. The finest creations of fifteenth-century Catalan literature derive, in my opinion, from the need and capacity to face up to this problem, and Joanot Martorell is no exception.4
Although it is obvious that the main function of prologues is to establish a bridge between writer and reader in order to shape the perspective from which the latter must read the work that is being offered, one must remember that in a vernacular work composed in the middle of the fifteenth century the genre of the prologue, often adapted to academic categories, has the specific function of situating the text in a particular literary and cultural tradition and, by means of this situation, of establishing or vindicating the authority of the writer. Thus it becomes the vehicle of a particular concept of literature. However, with few exceptions (Hauf 1989; Badia 1993b: 132-5; Limorti 1993), the prefatory texts of the Tirant have scarcely been read from this point of view, perhaps because of the fact that the dedication is plagiarized5 and because of an unspoken prejudice to the effect that both the dedication and a prologue which quotes Cicero and St Luke and which displays a certain erudition in literary matters, could have nothing to do with recognized virtues of the Tirant such as narrative verisimilitude or the supposedly modem treatment of sexuality. If, on the other hand, we look at the novel from the coordinates of Martorell's literary culture, we must return to the dedication and prologue and take into account the exact terms in which the author thinks and authorizes his fiction.
The fact that prologues are strategies for establishing authority within the conventions of a particular tradition explains why, in the late Middle Ages, they adopt quite concrete formal configurations. Remaining with vernacular texts, one may choose between forms derived from the scholastic sermon (Juan Ruiz, Libro de Buen Amor; Antoni Canals, Scipió e Anibal), academic formulae of the accessus ad auctores type (anonymous Catalan translation of the Paradoxa; Gutierre Díez de Games, El Vectorial)), a laudatory history of translation (translation of the Paradoxa of Ferran Valenti) or of poetry (Marqués de Santillana, Prohemio; prologue of Juan Alfonso de Baena), or else the epistolographic formalization of the dedication, accompanied or not by a prologue, as in Tirant to Blanc and its model, Enric de Villena's Dotze treballs d'Hèrcules. That Martorell should have opted for the latter model, and not for any of the others, may have to do with a conscious refusal of the more markedly scholastic models and with a decided option for rhetoric __the same rhetoric that guides his pen throughout the novel__ but this does not mean that the content will differ noticeably from that of texts that conform to other models, for example the academic models which underlie the long prologue of Gutierre Díez de Games in the Victorial, where the author frames a biographical story within the prefatory norms of the accessus in their Aristotelian version (Beltrán 1997c).6 In this way the Castilian author proceeds to establish the four causae of the work in order to register its authority (efficient cause) and its values: since the praise of a knight (formal cause) allows him to construct a discourse on chivalry (material cause), the work is directed towards the moral end of instructing the reader (final cause). These same values may be extracted, mutatis mutandis, from the dedication and prologue of the Tirant: the material cause underlies the statement that «the aforesaid treatise contains at length the greater part of the code and order of arms and chivalry», the formal cause is explicit in the last paragraph of the prologue, which is concerned with the virtues of the «military order», and the penultimate paragraph of the dedication, devoted to the chivalresque and moral benefits which will ensue from the reading, corresponds to the final cause. The comparison is merely intended to show how, despite the differences in procedure, when presenting the novel to his readers, Martorell, following Villena, assumes a learned perspective which derives from the scholarly need to make clear the advantages of the work and which is resolved in the approximation between the novel itself and various models of a historiographic type. To be sure, the exemplum of Guillem de Vàroic, the doctrine based on Llull, the minute description of the ritual and codification of chivalresque combat, the lletres de batalla, the military harangues, the ordering of land and sea battles, the sermons and discourses de regimine principum may be read from that didactic point of view, all the more so since the prologue contains reflections on the importance of military ordering comparable to those which begin the De coniuratione Catalinae of Sallust (I and II), the De re militari of Vegetius (Badia 1983-4: 213-14) and practically all the prologues to the vernacular translations of ancient historiographic and epic works.7 Nevertheless, this doctrinal objective is not self-sufficient __in the sense that the novel is not intended to be a «doctrine for·knights», as Hauf had suggested (1989: 23)__ but depends on the two arguments with which Martorell establishes his authority (translation) and presents his book (the fixing in writing of the deeds of an historic hero).
The first argument corresponds to a necessary change of strategy in relation to the dedication of Enric de Villena's Dotze treballs d'Hèrcules to mossèn Pere Pardo, which serves as his model. Not so much in order to oppose it or detach himself from it (Cátedra 1993: 199-200), as from Martorell's awareness of the distance that separates him from a compilator and commentator who had «sought out, collected, expounded and ordered» the labours of Hercules.8 Villena's task makes sense in view of the material and the order to which he submits it, since his work is not a simple narration of the deeds of Hercules, but rather an ethico-political treatise which derives its pedagogical effectiveness from the allegorical, historical and tropological exegesis of the fictions of the poets and the historical truth they contain. Martorell, on the other hand, does not have to undertake any exegetical operations: his is a text confined to the biography of a hero in which the academic task of compilation would have no meaning. Hence, of Villena's four verbs, there remains only «to expound», meaning «to translate». Martorell, therefore, is very alert to his appropriation of Villena's prefatory epistle: he recognizes the historiographic value of the work, which allows him a tacit identification between the deeds of Hercules and those of Tirant, he assumes the academic categories and the rhetoric which the model embodies and, above all, he takes over a generic model of the author: that of cultural mediator by means of translation. This is of paramount importance, since translating is not only the culturally necessary task referred to in the exordia of the French romans of the twelfth century, but has also acquired, as Ferran Valentí explains around 1450, the same intellectual and moral dignity possessed by the auctores (Badia 1994). In the context which Valentí's reflections presuppose __and in the epistolar and rhetorical context of Martorell__ I do not think one can reduce Martorell's attitude to the simple mechanical repetition of a topos derived from the earliest Romance fictions, especially if we take into account the use of this topos in historical chronicles and biographies of knights which have strictly historical acts and personages as their basic material (Gaucher 1994: 276-9). One need only notice the clear-sighted coherence with which he reworks the obligatory captatio benevolentiae of Villena's text: where the latter merely compares himself to «others more sufficient than myself», Martorell converts the problems of a compiler into those of a translator who has trouble in «turning the words well ... because of the said English language», as medieval translators who work from Latin never cease to complain (Russell 1985: 11-26; Badia 1991). The equivalence between Martorell and a fifteenth-century translator, then, is complete. That he and all those other authors who take refuge in the same commonplace should tell us truths, half-truths or lies is of no importance from this point of view, since it is always a question of establishing the authority of the author by displacing it on to an original source, an older book which inevitably contains a truth that must be «recited»9 Martorell, in particular, belongs to the group of those who fall back on half-truths: on the one hand, he justifies his knowledge of English with an argument (his stay in England) not unknown to other translators;10 on the other, the initial narrative material __whether he read it in French or English, which I doubt__ is English, and his hero wins his fame in the England conceived by the author of the prose Guy of Warwick as «fontaine et miroir de toute proesse et chevalerie» (Conlon 1969: 57).11 Thus, to displace authority in no way means denying it: in the very act of translating, the author restores it through the linguistic appropriation of the source for which he becomes the one and only person responsible,12 since in the end the accent falls, not on an ancient auctor, but on the recording of certain deeds which Joanot Martorell, naming himself in the text, tries to make accessible to Prince Fernando of Portugal and to the public of his «nation» through the agency of his work.13 The result of the operation is, on the one hand, that Martorell's «translation» becomes an independent textual reality, similar to the way in which Ferran Valentí, breaking down the frontiers between literature and translation, foregrounds a number of Catalan translations (Badia 1994: 174); on the other hand, the authority and intellectual dignity of the translator increase in proportion to the grandeur of the deeds of a more or less ancient hero __ remember that Tirant belongs to the sphere of the «knights of the past» __whom we shall see acting in a skilful synthesis of a fifteenth-century knight and a Roman leader.
Tirant is an ancient knight, and his actions are «ancient deeds and histories» which Martorell «translates» following an obligation of status __«since by my order [i. e. of chivalry] I am obliged to show forth the virtuous deeds of the knights of the past» __ which reappears in various biographies of knights (Gaucher 1994: 94-5) and which supplies a justification de persona to add to the justifications de historia and de materia to be found everywhere in prefatory texts, thus reinforcing the links between text and author.14 Such insistence on deeds places the fictitious biography of Tirant in a previous and recognizable literary category, which can count on its own elements of legitimization since history implies, first of all, the presumption of truth («res verae quae factae sunt», according to Isidore), but also, and above all, because the writing of history has a specific function relative to the reality from which it derives: the perpetuation, and the subsequent actualization, of the memory of heroes. Isidore had also said: «quidquid dignum memoria est litteris mandatur. Historiae autem ideo monumenta dicuntur, eo quod memoriam tribuant rerun gestarum» (Etymologiae I, xli, 11). And the prologue of the Tirant begins precisely with the premise that writing makes up for the weakness of human memory __ a genuine commonplace of historiography writing:
Parallel examples could be multiplied, from the sentence with which Pero López de Ayala begins his Crónicas («The memory of men is very weak, and cannot recall everything which happened in the past» [Martin 1991: 3]) to Guido delle Colonne's prologue to the Historia destructionis Troiae: «Licet cotidie uetera recentibus obruant...» (Griffin 1936: 3). The sentence, therefore, implies that the book __more precisely, the chronicle and the history__ has been conceived in order to perpetuate memory and to overcome oblivion: the chronicles, the translations of ancient historiography and other praises of writing repeat it systematically, and it is with this statement that Martorell ends the second paragraph of his prologue: «And many deeds and innumerable ancient stories have been compiled so that they may not disappear from human thought through oblivion.»
We have already seen that in the dedication this task of memory is entrusted to «poets and historians», who do not represent opposing categories, rather the contrary, as shown by the examples Martorell gives in the second paragraph of the prologue. Guido delle Colonne, whom Martorell and his contemporaries knew and admired, maintained precisely the contrary, and his antipoetic militancy, together with the insistence on his supposed historical foundations in order to distance himself from the fictional abuses of the poets (Griffin 1936: 3-5; Miquel i Planas 1916: 6-7), revived and transmitted to the vernaculars the polemic about poetry which has a central place in Curial e Güelfa. Martorell remains on the margin. He has enough with Villena, whom he transcribes literally at this point, without worrying about Villena's further distinctions in a passage he suppresses («you thought I had read the historians who have treated of this and the poets who have decorated it with their fictions») (Riquer 1990a: 276), perhaps because he had realized that in the Dotze treballs d'Hèrcules the distinction disappears the moment the poetic fictions are reduced euhemeristically to the same historical truth which is conveyed by the historians. (Moreover, it is worth pointing out that in this early work there are signs of the theories of the ideal chronicler, founded on rhetoric and poetry, which Villena was later to expound in the prologue to his commented translation of the Aeneid and which also make the poet into a kind of chronicler [Cátedra 1989 I: 27-8, 47-8, 54-5]).15 We shall see how, in practice, Martorell's is a poetry without fable. That is why, in the theoretical dimension of the prologue, the list of works, deeds and memorable authors which takes up the central part can seem apparently indiscriminate: the heroes of biblical and classical history, of hagiography, of Arthurian fiction and of fable are alive because the writing perpetuates their memory. Also, of course, that of Tirant. Martorell, then, conforms precisely to an obligatory topos, not only of classical and medieval historiographical literature from Cicero, Sallust and St Isidore onwards, but also of any text which comes to the defence of writing, such as the Philobiblon of Richard of Bury which Antoni Canals used as a prologue to one of his translations (Bofarull 1857), the sermons of Felip de Malla on the gaia ciència (where Sallust serves to authorize the laudatory function of literature from the classics to Dante [Pujol 1996: 218-20]) or Juan Alfonso de Baena's prologus to his Cancionero, based on the prologue to the Historia de Espana of Alfonso X of Castile (Dutton and Gonzalez Cuenca 1993: 3-8). To adhere to a tradition composed of historians and poets thus implies the presumption of truth, but also means that Martorell himself could claim the ennobling value of writing and the moral and intellectual advantages that derive from it, sanctioned by a vague reference to «that great orator Tully» which Riquer (1990b: 7) related to Pro Archia poeta VI, 14.16 However, the lack of literal parallels and the rarity of this speech outside humanistic circles invites caution; perhaps it is sim ply a memory of an anthology piece like De oratore II, 9 («Historia verum testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis»), available in the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais (VI, xviii 1624: 180) and constantly paraphrased in the vernacular (Guenée 1980: 18-19). The effect, in any case, is that of the classical authority which gives free rein to Martorell's novel.
Despite the list referred to above, in practice Martorell is not so indiscriminate. Faced with a diversity which includes battles of Greeks, Trojans and Romans, Arthurian adventures, poetic fables and saints» lives, Martorell's terrain is that of battles, and his literary practice one that intends to found itself on the historical model, which in his eyes is represented just as well by the poet Homer as by the historian Livy. Reacting to the prestige and the vernacular diffusion of classical historiography and treatises de re militari, and assuming their justification as examples for modem chivalry, Martorell intends to write a knightly fiction that will resemble the true stories of the knights of the past and that will correspond to the ethical and literary demands of this kind of story. It should be said that, in view of the Tirant's sources, this past also includes more recent deeds, like the pseudohistorical actions of Guy of Warwick and the historical ones of Roger de Flor narrated by Ramon Muntaner, but it seems clear from what we have read in the prefatory texts that Martorell does not doubt the superiority of the ancients, to whom he has recourse by indirect means, like the Dotzè of Eiximenis, used in strategic matters (Riquer 1990a: 204-9), and directly in searching for models concerning the art of warfare, to the extent that many episodes that critics have interpreted as «realistic» and «modern» are the result of the deliberate imitation of Valerius Maximus, Frontinus, Vegetius, Sallust or Livy.17
However, the superiority of the ancients is also a matter of rhetorical elevation, perfectly manageable for someone who, like Martorell, read versions of the classics in a Latinized Catalan which created the illusion of a style adequate to the grandeur of the events narrated in the novel. In this sense, it is worth remembering that one of the best-known classical formulations of the value of eloquence in ennobling historical facts is chapter VIII of Sallust's De coniuratione Catilinae, which explains that, if the deeds of the Athenians, while inferior to those of the Romans, enjoy more fame, it is because they could rely on scriptores who were able to increase their worth.18 This was not a text to be passed over lightly: it is Sallust who guides the compiler of the donation document of the library of Pere III to Poblet when he explains that the deeds of the Catalan kings lacked the subtle arts which would improve them, and when he demands for the king a writer sufficiently lucid to provide him with praise or criticism worth recording (Rubió i Balaguer 1987: 447). Sallust also underlies the excuse of the author of the Curial for his hero's slight reputation: if he seems less worthy than the ancient heroes, he says, it is because these have had the benefit of Livys, Virgils and Statiuses who, even by feigning, have improved their actions (Aramon i Serra 1930-33 III: 13-16). Martorell knows perfectly well that rhetorical elevation is the cornerstone of a historiographical discourse that will rival the ancients and endow his hero with a comparable fame. And he does not avoid the consequences. What the anonymous author of the Curial did not wish, or was unable, to do, Martorell decisively resolves, and his hero, unlike Curial, undoubtedly was «a great captain, a great warrior and conqueror, as we might say Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, Pyrrho and Scipio and many others» (Aramon i Serra 1930-33 III: 13), since, while the Curial follows a chivalresque model derived from the medieval chronicle, Martorell adds to this model the ancient militia and classicizing rhetoric.
Martorell's recourse to classical historiography and to collections and manuals concerning the art of warfare is, then, essential when it comes to endowing his leader and the armies he commands with the ancient dimension referred to in the prologue. It is also certain, however, that some of the structural aspects of the novel derive from medieval historiography, and in particular from the chronicle of Ramon Muntaner. Thus, although fulfilling the historical requirements of the position adopted by Martorell, it only half fulfils them, since Muntaner, despite his novelesque tendencies, pursues a writing which is concerned with simple recitation and with the epic exaltation of warlike deeds, which is more or less what happens in the prose roman of Guy of Warwick: it is a text which pretends to be historical and which displays a style not essentially different from that which characterizes the Arthurian romans and vernacular historiography; the style which, despite the reduction to which it subjects the text, issues in Martorell's Guillem de Varoic. A comparison between the Guillem and the Tirant will make clear what I am trying to say. Between one work and the other, Martorell has discovered Corella (Hauf 1993; Cingolani 1995-96) and the classical militia, and, when he returns to the original sources (Llibre de l'orde de cavalleria and Guy of Warwick), he does not only take from them small details of slight relevance (Riquer 1990a: 257-71). Quite otherwise, as Espadaler has noted (1993: 263-7), the return to the Guy of Warwick implies the recuperation and redimensionalizing of a long episode which in the Guillem, concerned only with the exemplary skeleton of a text identified as a tractat («treatise»), Martorell had suppressed: the emotional crisis that Felice undergoes on hearing that Guy is to become a penitent, which furnishes the material for chapters 3 and 4 of the Tirant and offers a first taste of the emotional climate and high rhetoric that are to preside over the more «discursive» aspects of the love relationships. Love, then, enters the novel by way of the Guy of Warwick but redimensionalized by the Latinizing rhetoric. In other words, the adaptation of a medieval model to the narrative intrigue of the Tirant implies its systematic rewriting.
Martorell, however, had access to another soi-disant historiographical text which satisfied the double necessity of «ancient deeds and stories» and of the amorous material which the laws of the medieval narrative genre demanded: the fourteenth-century Catalan translation of the Historia destructionis Troiae of Guido delle Colonne, known as Històries troianes. Martorell took from this all kinds of material, and the Guidian origin of battle schemes, amorous situations, descriptions and speeches makes the work of the Sicilian writer one of the literary keys of the Tirant. In the following section I shall deal in more detail with the literary and cultural importance of the Històries troianes. Before doing so, however, I would emphasize a paradoxical phenomenon: what Guido presents as true history is for the Valencian novelist the means of access to poetry, in the sense that Ovid's Heroides, the Tragedies of Seneca and the prose works of Corella, all texts more or less connected with the Trojan myth, are, as it were, the «specialized sources» that complete and give a fuller rhetorical dimension to the episodes __chiefly amorous__ narrated by Guido. In a sense, one could claim that Martorell's models act as strata which fall into place one on top of the other: Guido on the schemes of Muntaner, classical and neoclassical poetry on Guido. As I have shown elsewhere (Pujol 1995-96 and 1997), in chapter 125 of Tirant to Blanc a scene from Guido's episode of Jason and Medea (Book II) is adapted to a narrative scheme that derives from chapter 213 of Muntaner's chronicle; in chapter 118, which explains how Tirant falls in love __and which is indirectly dependent on Muntaner and Guy of Warwick__ some borrowings from Books VII and XXIII of the Històries troianes are completed by recourse to the epistles of Paris and Helen in Ovid's Heroides; and in chapter 119, these same epistles provide the text of a narrative scheme that derives from Corella's Història de Jason i Medea. These are not the only instances, and the Heroides __ and modern derivations like the Bursario of Juan Rodríguez del Padrón__ continue to supply words for all kinds of previous narrative schemes. The same, more or less, happens with Seneca, and the mere fact that the death of Tirant is assimilated to the catastrophe implied by the fall of Troy leads Martorell inevitably to combine borrowings from Seneca's Troades and Corella's Plany de la reina Hècuba in order to give the appropriate tragic dimension to the end of the novel.
That poetry and history should mutually complete one another in the service of a chivalresque novel, without breaks between the two components, depends on an essentially rhetorical approach to the poetry of the ancients offered by Corella's rewritings of Ovidian themes, and which is perfectly compatible with the rhetoric displayed in the Catalan version of Guido delle Colonne or with the mastery of military eloquence which the treatises recommend and historiography exemplifies. Read avoiding the fabula component, poetry is reduced to «stories» __generally amorous__ which interest Martorell on account of the eloquence of their personages. And his way of reading the Històries troianes is scarcely different. Guido's work, as I have noted, is the literary key to Tirant to Blanc, the model in which Martorell mirrored himself in order to create a novelesque fiction that would give itself a classicizing appearance. This value as a model can be explained for two reasons. The first is the place which Guido's Historia occupies in the cultural panorama of the late Middle Ages. As is well known, Guido delle Colonne had translated the Roman de Troie without admitting it, and pretended that he was working from the supposedly historical sources that Benoît de Saint-Maure had used, that is to say, Dictys and Dares. Leaving aside the extent to which the Historia is a conscious falsification, Guido's operation had enormous implications, above all because it presupposed a reworking of the facts narrated in the Roman on another cultural, ideological and rhetorical plane: Latin __grammatica__ implied a true history uncontaminated by the fictions of the poets or the vernacular, and also implied a reinterpretation of history in the antiheroic and antierotic term s of a moralist (Dionisotti 1965; Bruni 1990: 143-5 and 1991: 50-6). This particular Guidian reinvention of the classical world in Latin prose rendered the Roman de Troie unserviceable, and became a mine of themes and models __as shown by Boccaccio, Chaucer or Corella__ provided one injected into the new text a good dose of Ovidian poetry and the «ampliores metaphoras et colores ... et transgressiones occurrentes» which Guido did not include in his own Historia (Griffin 1936: 276). The second reason for Guido's importance depends on the first. The model character of the Latin text gives rise to a rash of translations and adaptations to the vernaculars which demonstrate the pressure exerted by a secular world which wishes to provide itself with the standard text, crowned with the prestige of the learned language, on the war of Troy (Marcos Casquero 1996: 59-69). In this context, the Catalan translation of the Històries troianes begun by Jaume Conesa in 1367 is of capital importance, since it transfers to the horizon of cultural reference of the layman not only the cultural and ideological values of the Latin text, but also a Latinized linguistic model (Wittlin 1989) which was to favour Martorell's efforts to raise his individual style to what he believed was the style of the classics.
Evidently, these same statements could be applied to the translations of classical Latin poets into Catalan, whose stylistic results are in perfect harmony with the classicizing stylistic solutions of Boccaccio's tales or Corella's prose. The reason is simple enough once one realizes that the translation of ancient materials into the vernacular implies the transformation __in fact, the reinvention__ of the works translated, beginning with the prose to which the verse texts are reduced, and ending with the confusion of text and glosses which characterize, for example, the translation of Seneca's tragedies (Martínez 1995). The immediate consequence is the lack of generic distinction and the abolition of the frontiers that separate not only learned Latin culture from vernacular culture, but also prose from verse, history from poetry and «truth» from «fiction». Under these conditions, Martorell could read and admire the Històries troianes, which claimed to be history, just as he read and admire d Seneca's tragedies, Ovid's Heroides, Boccaccio's narratives or Corella's prose, which are, or wish to be, poetry.19 Once the distance between «historians» and «poets» is removed, the rhetoric they have in common imposes itself.
In its turn, this rhetorical reading of the classical tradition is explained by the kind of cultural consciousness we can suppose in Martorell, and which the comparison with Curial e Güelfa can help to illustrate. If the Curial is a «poeticized chronicle» (Turró i Torrent 1991), the result of a difficult balance between chronicle and poetry raised to the level of debate within the novel, it is because the anonymous author is fully conscious of the cultural fracture between two worlds. For that reason, from his own lay and vernacular world, he vindicates the appropriation of part of what is alien to him, the learned Latin universe of the reverenda letradura. Its author competes in full consciousness, and this competition between the modern layman and the ancient and modem sages explains the words referring to Curial's reputation I have already quoted. For Martorell, on the other hand, there is no fracture. His cultural world is sing le, not dual, in the sense that he has assumed quite unproblematically the cultural limitations inherent in his status as layman, and all that these limitations imply: a literary work executed on the basis of an exclusively vernacular culture in which historians and poets, vernacular and Latin, finally belong to an identical world to which the entry is vernacular prose, and which excludes the exegetical aspects of poetic fiction which belong to the academic dimension. His poets, like his historians, a re those ire could read in Catalan, reduced to a rhetorical and historical dimension, and are confined in practice to Seneca and Ovid and to the modern writers Boccaccio and Corella. With all these instruments to hand, the literary result would inevitably be a letteratura mezzana in which the weight of the Romance tradition and that of the classical and pseudoclassical tradition balance one another. But the application of this concept which Francesco Bruni coined by way of defining the narrative of Boccaccio from the Filocolo onwards (Bruni 1990) and which can be extended to the literary project of Curial e Güelfa (Cingolani 1994), needs an important qualification since, unlike the latter, Martorell constructs his writing on the basis of a culture which is already mezzana and which, consequently, does not involve the author in any dilemma between separate cultural worlds.
This mezzana culture of Martorell's allows him to go beyond other existing narrative models, for example, the «adventures of Lancelot and other knights» referred to in the prologue of the Tirant. In fact, despite their late-medieval diffusion, in French or in translation, the Arthurian novels have only a slight literary impact in Catalonia. They are read and admired, but not imitated, stifled by the increasing secular discovery of new literary models, from classical historiography to Guido delle Colonne or Boccaccio, which impose different narrative rules and nourish vernacular literature with ingredients deriving from Latin culture. To assume such models as guidelines for a new kind of chivalresque fiction is not an innocent act; it presupposes a desire to elevate and legitimize chivalresque fiction in the vernacular by means of a double ethical and cultural strategy which the dedication and prologue of the Tirant offer as a programme. Martorell is not the first or the only one to do this. A good part of the transformations of Catalan literature between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has to do with attributing cultural justification and prestige to non-Latin literary practice. It is on the basis of this interpretative key that one must read the conversion of poetry into a gaia ciència in Toulouse and Barcelona (Pujol 1994, 1996) or the laudatio of translations and learned literature in the vernacular by Ferran Valentí (Badia 1994), not to mention the Curial e Güelfa or the poetry of Ausiàs March. In the case of Martorell, his recourse to history, to antiquity and to poetry as guidelines could be a way of liberating chivalresque narrative from the cul-de-sac of useless and gratuitous fiction to which clergy and moralists had consigned it, insisting on the false and fictitious nature of certain Arthurian texts which Antoni Canals, Alonso de Cartagena or Jean Gerson had not hesitated to call «fables» in the most derogatory sense of the word. The term appears explicitly, together with the adjective «poetic», in a sermon of Gerson (Badel 1980: 448) and in Canals» prologue to the Carta de sant Bernat a sa germana (Bofarull 1857: 421) to define respectively the romans in French and «vain books» like those of Lancelot and Tristan; significantly, Eiximenis adds «romances» to the list of readings forbidden to the clergy he extracts from the Decretum graciani (Primer del Crestià chapter 31; Biblioteca de Catalunya ms. 456, f 29), and the whole of chapter 9 of Alonso de Cartagena's Epistula to the Count of Haro is based on the irreconcilable opposition between the «true things» of history and the ficte compositae of the books of Tristan, Lancelot and Amadís (Lawrance 1979: 53-4).20 One gathers, in the case of Cartagena, that knights should read chronicles: «Cronice quoque militaribus viris perutiles sunt», because they are true stories which incorporate didacticism.
From Martorell's cultural perspective, then, to accomodate fiction to history means bringing it into an area of writing that is not affected by clerical prejudice since it fulfils the double function of glorifying its heroes and, through their virtue, of constituting an example of moral and military virtue. If, moreover, this novel with an appearance of historiography admitted sermons, debates, letters, expositions of Christian faith, speeches de regimine principum, discussions about fortune, quotations from auctoritates and so on, and adorned itself with a Latinizing rhetoric suited to the reputation of the heroes and appropriate to the prestigious tradition of the Latin classics __although tremendously mediated__ the resulting text was freed from the promiscuity of Tristans, Lancelots and Amadises, and placed itself automatically in the dimension of the «ancient deeds and histories» entrusted to the «poets and historians». That, moreover, the heroes» deeds should continue in the bedroom is no longer a matter for «historians».
Translated by Arthur Terry