Bruce W. Wardropper - An Apology For Philology

An Apology for Philology Author(s): Bruce W. Wardropper Source: MLN, Vol. 102, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar.
, 1987), pp. 176-190 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905683 . Accessed: 18/03/2014 15:50
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An ApologyforPhilology
BruceW. Wardropper
The celebration of the firstcentury of MLN's existence necessarilycalls for some retrospection.The "Institutionof Criticism" that dominated most of these hundred years was the now unfashionable philology.And yet,when one thinksabout it,if ever there it has to have been philology,which of criticism, was an institution to the in one formor another has endured fromclassical antiquity present. Although philology is discredited in some intellectual circlestoday,it continuesto be the staple fare of MLA conventions and of many literaryjournals, particularlythe long established ones. In saying this, I understand philologyas it was understood pursuitsand the and literary by Cicero and Seneca: a love of letters of The word others. of the writings or interpretation explanation has never been better defined than it was by the Royal Spanish volume of its first Academy in 1732, when it published the fifth officialdictionary.Under the heading PHILOLOGIA, we read: "a branch of learning composed of and adorned by grammar,rhetof authors,and poetry,antiquities,the interpretation oric, history, witha general speculationabout all other more generallycriticism, branches of knowledge."' This joyfullycomprehensivedefinition endorses Seneca's observation-a rueful one, to be sure,-that latusjusThis sensus "what philosophywas has become philology."2
I "Ciencia compuesta y adornada de la Gramrtica,Rhet6rica, Historia, Poesia, Antiguedades, Interpretacionde Autores, y generalmentede la Critica,con especulacion general de todas las demas Ciencias." Except where indicated otherwise, the translationsare the author's. 2 "Itaque quae philosophia fuit,facta philologia est." Ad Lucilium EpistulaeMo-
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tifiesthe admission to the honorable company of philologists(or philologues, or philologians,as Leo Spitzer liked to call them) not merelyof etymologists but also of New Critics, stylisticians, Marxist critics, intellectual historians, semioticians, the practitionersof speech-act theory, and no doubt some other kinds of literary scholars. I would hope that all these scholars would consent to be called philologistsin 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 philologistregards the literary textas a given,much as an art historianregards a painting. For them a text and a painting are objects of art, objectivetherefore in theirexistence,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 (especiallydecondo not, for the most part, share this optimisticcerstructionists) taintythat a textis an object. On the contrary, theyexpress a profound skepticismabout the durabilityof 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 pluralityof reader-responseshave called into question. For them textsare indeterminate, undecidable, and lackingin referentiality. Since texts are so widely seen as ungraspable, it is hardly surprisingthat in recent years the literary avant-gardehas been long on theory and short on actual criticism. There can be no doubt that the livelyintellectualturmoilstirredup by poststructuralists has been salutaryfor a discipline-that of literary studies-which is prone to flaccid thinking and is itselftoo shorton theory.We all stand indebted to contemporaryliterarytheoristsfor challenging our assumptionsand our prejudices. But these excitingnew developments in theory and, occasionally,in praxis seem to have resulted 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'sSons, 1925), III, 244. It is true that in context this statementis censorious. Seneca is reproaching those young studentswho "nowadays" come to theirteachersnot to develop theirminds but their wits. Nevertheless,the old man is making an observationabout what is coming to pass in his time. 3 The referenceis to his book entitledA Homemade Modernist World:TheAmerican Writers (New York: Knopf, 1975).
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communitiesmust continue constituteStanley Fish's interpretive to teach texts,to study them, and to write about them, we find ourselves obliged in large part to evade in practicethe issues raised Which is why most writersin PMLA and by the poststructuralists. other long-standing journals pay little more than grudging scholars in homage to the latest theories. If this is true of literary general, it is even more true of Hispanists. Very little Hispanic critique. scholarship has embraced la nouvelle It mightbe argued that most Hispanic scholarshipis backward or unenterprising or unintellectual.While thischarge may be generally true, there is abundant evidence that some of the best Hispanistshave gone beyond the close reading of texts,as it was and is opus is a practiced by formalists.Although Elias Rivers' magnum strictly philological work, the surely definitiveedition of Garciapplied speech-act theoryto the laso's poetry,he has successfully anonymous Golden-Age play La Estrellade Sevilla;4and he has inspired the members of an NEH seminar that he directed on this book entitledThings theoryto publish theirpapers in a stimulating Done WithWords:SpeechActsin Hispanic Drama.5 Forging beyond speech-act theory, Rivers has gone on to explore, over a wide of oralityand the complex interaction range of Hispanic literature, book Quixotic Essayson Scriptures: written discourse in his important of Hispanic Literature.6 In Hispanic studies, semiotics theTextuality has fared even betterthan speech-acttheory.A conferenceheld in aplicadasa Groningen in 1979 produced a book Teoriassemiologicas textos espaioles,withthe participationof no fewerthan thirteensemioticians.7 Javier Herrero has brilliantly used semioticsto demonstratehow characteristic icons and codes shape the styleand the in La vida de action of Calderon's dramas.8 In Language and Society on meditated profoundly Harry Sieber has Lazarillo de Tormes, the meaning of the protagonist, his circumstances, and his problemsas the power of language.9 Finally,therehave been many studies of Spanish literaturefromthe perspectiveof sociocriticism,
4 "The Shame of Writingin La Estrellade 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.10Not all Hispanic scholcrit11But deconstructionist arship, then,is benightedor formalist. icism of Spanish texts,if its exists,has had littleor no impact on our awareness of it. The successfulapplication to Spanish literatureof theoriesand techniques developed since the heyday of the New Criticismhas been possible only because the scholars I have mentioned, and others whom I mighthave mentioned,have believed in the deterof the texts they were studying. minacy and the referentiality There is a nice ironyin this state of affairs,for many Spanish literary texts are truly"undecidable"-undecidable in a sense that would acphilologists,but probably not most poststructuralists, cept. for example, was firstpublished in 1554, in Lazarillo de Tormes, citiesas far apart as Burgos, Alcala de Henares, and Antwerp.It is editions.12 simultaneous,first as though there were three,virtually There are naturallysome variantsamong all three,and the Alcala There had edition contains to boot some lengthyinterpolations.13 to have been an author's manuscript,although it is not extant. How, in the days before telecommunicationand photocopying, did this manuscriptcome into the possession of threewidelyseparated printinghouses? Which of the three editionsof 1554 is most faithfulto the lost manuscript?Unless this manuscriptis miraculouslyrecovered,we willnever know. Then thereis the problem of short chapters 4 and 6. Is the brevity the Lazarillo's surprisingly Or are a censor's scissorsto blame? part of the author's strategy? After more than four centuries of diligent philological research, There is even the very name of the author remains a mystery. much debate about the kind of man-humanist, Hieronymite monk, and so on-that he may have been. The Lazarillois a decidedly undecidable text; and yet we can and do teach it and study
10 An example of Cros's sociocriticism etle carnavaldesgueux:Etude is L'Aristocrate sur le Busc6n de Quevedo(Montpellier: Centre d'Etudes Sociocritiques,1975). I1 A modifiedreader-responsecriticism has been attemptedby Helen H. Reed in Novel (London: Tamesis, 1984). The Readerin thePicaresque 12 The three textsmay be consulted in the facsimile edition of Lazarillode Tormes 1554), noticiabibliogrificade Enrique Moreno (Alcaldde Henares,Burgosy Amberes, Baez (Cieza: ". . . la fonteque mana y corre ...," 1959). 13 The clearest account of the interpolationsappears in La vida de Lazarillo de Press, 1963). Tormes, ed. R[oyston]0. Jones (Manchester: Manchester University
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it, and every year we learn more about its structure and its meaning.14 Let me review quickly some other important but slippery Spanish literarytexts. What may well be the firstliterarywork in Spanish existsin a singlemanuscript.The liturgical written 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 certainly the work of one whose native tongue was not Castilian Spanish: hence the incrediblefalse rhymesthatit contains.16 Most published texts of the epic poem Cantar de Mio Cid begin with a passage in verse thathas been concocted by a modern scholar,the late Ramon Menendez Pidal, on the basis of his now largelydiscredited theories that the epic poem is rigorouslyhistoricaland thatthe chroniclesare prosifiedepics. Menendez Pidal's edition of the Cantar de Mio Cid, thoughtuntil recentlyto 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 Amorexists in three early fourteenth-century codices and a fewlater fragments. The textof the thirdmanuscript, dating from 1343, differsconsiderably from those of the firsttwo, both of 1330. Moreover, the author, Juan Ruiz, Archpriestof Hita, encourages his readers to tamper at will with his text: "Whoever hears [mybook]," he writes,"if he knows how to compose poetry, may add more to it and emend whateverhe wishes."18 The textsof the orallytransmitted ancientballads are even more unstable than
14 An important recent contribution to our understandingof thistextis Maxime Chevalier, "La manceba del abad (Lazarillode Tormes, VII)," in Homenajea JoseAntonio Maravall (Madrid: Centro de InvestigacionesSociol6gicas, 1986), pp. 413-18. 15 For an opposing view-that the Autode losReyes Magos is "una obra integra"see Alan D. Deyermond, ed., Edad Media, vol. I of Historia de la literatura y critica espanhola (general ed., Francisco Rico) (Barcelona: Editorial Critica, 1980), p. 454. 16 See Rafael Lapesa, "Sobre el Autode los Reyes Magos: sus rimas an6malas y el posible origen de su autor," in Homenajea FritzKriuger (Mendoza: Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, 1954), II, 591-99, rpt. in his De la Edad Media a nuestros dias (Madrid: Gredos, 1967), pp. 37-47; Jose Maria Sola-Sole, "El Autode los Reyes Magos: jimpacto gasc6n o mozarabe?," RPh, 29 (1976-77), 20-27; and Jose Maria Regueiro, "El Autode losReyes Magos y el teatrolituirgico medieval,"HR, 45 (1977), 149-64. 17 Poema de mioCid, ed. Colin C. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); and ThePoem oftheCid, 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, Librode 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 Librode Buen Amor.Is the short,truncatedversion of the ballad of "Conde Arnaldos"thatwas printed in the middleof the sixteenth century to be preferred to the full-length version retained in the folk memory of Moroccan Sephardim, and first printed in the twentiethcentury? 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 twentiethcentury, which text of a poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez,about whose poetryPaul Olson has written a most illuminating book,19is, so to speak, the real one? The poem which begins "Viene una mu'sicalanguida / de no se donde, en el aire" undergoes some drastic transformations as it passes from its first in 1903 throughtwo revisionson its way appearance in Airestristes to a third and final one in Leyenda,published posthumouslyin 1978. This is only one of the many early poems thatJuan Ramon Jimenez reworked throughout his lifetime. Constantly revising what he called his "Work in Progress,"Jimenez has leftus a textfixer'snightmare. These random examples of undecidable texts about which scholarsand critics continue to writeare not happenstances.A case that will perhaps surprise some non-Hispanists is that of Don Cervantes' manuscripthas no doubt been lost forever.The Quixote. early editions, from which we derive modern texts of the novel, are, as Robert Flores has shown,quite unreliablebecause the typesetterswere tired,lazy, indifferent to theirjob, prone to error,or of the author's orthography, disrespectful and perhaps even of his actual text.20Furthermore,modern editions follow the idiosyncratic paragraphing establishedby the Royal Spanish Academy in the officialedition it published in 1780. There is, as yet,no completelytrustworthy edition in whichwe may read the work thatall acclaim as Spain's greatestmasterpiece. 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
19CircleofParadox: Timeand Essencein the Poetry ofJuan Ram6nJimenez (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967). 20 The Compositors of theFirstand SecondMadrid Editionsof Don Quixote Part I (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1975).
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gives a lame explanation of Cervantes' gaffe: "the one who wrote the storymust have made a mistake,or else it mustbe due to careThis glimpse into the unrelessness on the part of the printer."21 I, surfaced in the sevenPart Quixote, Don of liabilityof the text century the twentieth until wait to had have We teenth century. of the explanation the true us give to able was before philology In haste his donkey. reappearing and disappearing of the mystery to beat a self-imposeddeadline for publication-trying unsuccessfully to reach the bookstores before the second part of Mateo Aleman's best-seller Guzman de Alfaracheappeared-Cervantes of some scenes of his novel. As made some clumsytranspositions proved, the pastoral episode Stagg has veryconvincingly Geoffrey about the beautifulMarcela and the suicidal Grisostomowas lifted, mountainous sceneryand all, fromits original place in the Sierra Morena sequence and interpolated into the earlier events which open, flat or undulating took place in La Mancha on "relatively country, interspersed with woods and meadows."22 One of the consequences of this crude surgerywas the manglingof the story of the donkey's loss and recovery.Stagg has shown us what happened, but he has not-no doubt he could not and should not have-given us the pristinetextthat existed before Cervantes reunPart I, is thus inherently vamped it. The text of Don Quixote, texts stable. Perhaps, to some extent and in this sense, all literary are. But as long as theyare understood to be unstable only in the philological sense, meaningful exegesis, like Stagg's on Don is both feasible and useful. Quixote, concerns a The other great issue raised by deconstructionists scholarship, Hispanic Recent text's essential lack of referentiality. deepens our awareness of how unexpectedly however,increasingly some Spanish textsare. For manyyears Hispanistshave referential in tended to assume thatthe huge numbersof lyricpoems written poetry,the workof century-the so-called cancionero the fifteenth some 700 poets-were nothing more than, as it were, academic exercises ringingthe changes on the trivialnicetiesof courtlylove. If the poetic expression of courtlylove ever reflectedthe courting and mating customs of a society (that, let us say, of the troubadours and knightsof high-medievalProvence and Catalonia), it surelycould no longer serve the same purpose in Castile and ArTrans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Viking, 1949), II, 534. Part I," in Hispanic Studiesin Honour of I. Gonzdlez "Revision in Don Quixote, Llubera,ed. Frank Pierce (Oxford: Dolphin, 1959), p. 353.
21 22
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agon, as the Middle Ages drew to a close. These songs,then,would seem to be pointless attemptsto produce infinite variationson an archaic theory of love. However, the cancionero poets' obsession withwritingso many of them,the immense popularityof some of the poems well into the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries(when theywere glossed by Renaissance poets and set to new music),and the discoveryof some obscene poems among the refinedones inspired some scholars,notablythe late Keith Whinnom,23 to undertake the task of reading the poems ever more closelyand in ever narrower historicalcontexts. The results have been astonishing. Let us consider one such poem, a great favorite in the Golden Age, and attributedto no less a poet thanJorge Manrique. Justa fuemi perdici6n, de mismalessoycontento.
Ya no espero galard6n,
pues vuestro merecimiento
satisfizoa mi pasi6n. Es victoriaconocida quien de v6s queda vencido, que en perder por v6s la vida
es ganadoel que es perdido.

Pues lo consiente raz6n,
consiento mi perdimiento
sin esperar galard6n pues vuestromerecimiento satisfizomi pasi6n.
Read as an expression of the paradoxical sufferings of a courtly lover, the poem seems trite. In this traditionalsense, a glossing paraphrase mightread:
My ruin [= utterloss of happiness in a future state]was just, and I am happy to suffer. I expect no furtherfavours, since your great worth was (ample) paymentfor my (previous) suffering. To be conquered by you can be recognized as a victory, for in losing thislife for you
23 "Hacia una interpretaci6n y apreciaci6n de las canciones del Cancionero general,"Filologia, 13 (1968-69), 361-81, and especiallyLa poesiaamatoria de la epocade los ReyesCat6licos (Durham: University of Durham, 1981).
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BRUCE W. WARDROPPER the man who is lost is won. Since my reason consentsto it, I consent to the utterloss 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 cancioneropoetry, it usually refers to the battle of the bed. This and other clues have led Macpherson to the following, entirelyjustified, reading: Tilting at Justa quite rightly was my downfall, but I am quite happy withmy misdeeds. I no longer expect a reward, since making love to you gave me ecstasyand satisfaction. The man who has been to bed withyou has achieved a recognizable victory, for in a climax achieved withyou the man who is lost is won. Since my reason consentsto it, I consent to my downfall, expecting no reward, for making love to you gave me ecstasyand 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[thatoperates] at twolevels at once" (p. 54). Its referenrealityis suddenly beyond dispute. to a fifteenth-century tiality are beginningto discoverthe referentialOther scholarlyefforts textswhich had previouslyseemed to ityof other Spanish literary (and, difficult existin a vacuum. Don Luis de G6ngora's extremely for a long time,impenetrable)masterpiece,the major poem called elucidated for modern readers in 1927 by was finally Las soledades, Damaso Alonso. Since then readers have expended the great effortsstillneeded to unravel the syntaxand the sense of the poem (even with the aid of Don Damaso's pony) only to feel defrauded by the apparent pointlessnessof the whole work. They have admired the ingenuityand the beauty of particularpassages, while wondering what it all added up to. It is to two Marxist critics, indebted thatwe are finally and John Beverley,26 RobertJammes25 for an understanding of some of the historical and ideological ramificationsof this complex and engaging poem. Las soledades, left unfinishedbecause of the poet's despair, expresses the shatteringof the hope that,in a societymade rottenby corruptionand power, man might be able to live without concessions, compromises, or expectations: it is a wonderfuldeclaration of desengano. The poem is a product of the social, political,and economic conditions in Spain at the beginningof the seventeenthcentury. a too has alwaysbeen enigmatic;and its interpretation, Celestina matter of speculation. Is it, as June Hall Martin would have it, simplya parody of what befalls an anachronisticcourtlylover?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?28Is it,as Americo Castro and Stephen Gilman maintain, a moving expression of the anguish experienced by its author, a Catholic man ofJewishextractionlivingin an ever more intolerant the the lifeof the nobility, reflectfaithfully Spain?29Does Celestina
25 Etudes sur l'oeuvre de Don Luis de G6ngoray Argote(Bordeaux: Feret, pogtique 1967). 26 Aspectsof G6ngora's "Soledades" (Amsterdam-Philadelphia:John Benjamins, 1979), and "Introducci6n" to his edition of Soledades(Madrid: Catedra, 1979). Lover(London: ParodyoftheCourtly Calistoand the 27 Love'sFools: Aucassin, Troilus, Tamesis, 1972). 28 "La Cglestine" selonFernandode Rojas (Paris: Didier, 1961). 29 Americo Castro, "La Celestina" (Ma(castasy casticismos) literaria comocontienda drid: Revista de Occidente, 1965); Stephen Gilman, The Spain ofFernandode Rojas: Press, 1972). and Social Landscape(Princeton: PrincetonUniversity The Intellectual
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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 illustratesforcefully the deterioration of the master-manrelationship.30 In the high Middle Ages thishad been a relationshipof mutual trustand respect: the servant,or criado,had been, as the Spanish word implies, "raised" in the master'shousehold and treated as a son. By 1499, when Celestina was firstpublished, the relationshiphad become one of insecurity, in which the master bought with money the servicesof an often untrustworthy hired hand. Once again, a text loath to surrender its mysteries has been shown to referto a clearlydefined historicalcircumstance. It seems fair to conclude from the evidence I have presented that much of Spanish literature from the Middle Ages to the presentconsistsof textswhich are referential but at the same time philologicallyundecidable in the strictest sense. Of course, when most poststructuralists writeabout the indeterminacy of texts, both literaryand nonliterary texts,theyhave in mind somethingquite different from the philological indeterminacy that I have been illustrating.For these poststructuralists, in the denotaeverything tion and connotationof words belongs to a shortperiod of history and to the linguisticsystemin which theywere used. Since all uttered words forman idiolect,manypoststructuralists maintainthat 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 itselffrom the circumstances of its production, and is freed to be possessed by each reader withhis or her own linguistic system, his or her own historical period, and his or her own particularbrand of culture. The meanings-if any-attached to the textare 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 textsgenerated in an earlier period. With or withoutthe 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 firstchapter of Don Quixote, Cervantes introduces us to the village hidalgo who is to
30El mundo socialde "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 tellsus 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 seventeenthcentury.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, presentlittledifficulty. Others need some explanation if we are to get the full flavor of thisparticularsquire's way of life. For example, fromthe recitalof meals we learn that everySaturday our hero ate somethingcalled "duelos y quebrantos" (literally,"sufferingsand [heart]breaks"). Here Cervantes is naming a dish whose ingredientsare no longer known, and whose name, long lost from the Spanish language, sounds as historically exotic as thatof the more recentEnglish dish "bubble-and-squeak." Philologists have labored long trying to identify "duelos y quebrantos," withoutmuch success until one of them made an intertextual observation.3lIn 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 sufferingand breaking are combined. In it the poet expresses the displeasure he feelsbecause he can findnothingto buy at the butcher'sshop but salt pork. He ends his shortpoem: no hallando, por misduelos, con que mi hambre matar, hanmehechoquebrantar la jura de misahuelos. (Not finding,for mysufferings, /anythingto satisfy my hunger,/I was made to break/ the oath of my ancestors.)Duelos y quebrantos must be, then, a dish whose name conveysthe lingeringrevulsion felt by Jews converted to Christianity, and their descendants, at having to eat foodstuffs proscribedbyJewishlaw. Alonso Quijano el Bueno ate pork products of some kind on everyJewishsabbath. 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, "Duelosy quebrantos, Once Again," RomN, 20 (1980), 413-17.
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Why, then, does our hidalgo seek to allay his neighbors' suspicions? The likelihood presented by this small detail is that the hidalgo who was to become Don Quixote is being subtlyintroduced to us as a covertNew Christian,who, if his secretbecomes publicly in thatracist disabilities statutory known,runs the riskof incurring It is a probability thatreaders need to momentof Spanish history. bear in mind as they go on to read about Don Quixote's adventures and misadventures.Some lost meaning of the textand some have been retrievedby philologicaland historof its referentiality ical means. The factis that all serious readers of Don Quixote need the footnotessupplied by philological research if they are to understand as much as possible of this complex text.Extending this principlefromthe 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 thatit does make a difference."32 Up to thispoint,myapology for philologyhas been a defense of its capacityto elucidate a textratherthan of itscapacityto criticize one. In deference to the criticaldiscourse of the day, I have been texts."In consideringphilologyas an instruto "literary referring I ment of criticism, prefer to use an even older term, one with different connotations,the word "poem." If a textmay be indeterminate, a poem is a perceived work of art, in verse or prose, to which readers or listenersrespond with pleasure or distaste,delightor revulsion,love or hate. How, then,are philologiststo control and express theirreactionsto poems? In the first place, theymusthave acquired a vastexperience with poetryof all kinds and in more than one language. This supposes that a lot of reading and a lot of meditationhave been done. And musthave acquired a greatdeal of learningin-to also philologists advert again to the Royal Spanish Academy's definition"grammar, rhetoric,history..., antiquities ..., [and] all other branches of knowledge." With this preparation,it becomes neces32 "The Stability ed. Mario J. Text, oftheLiterary of LiteraryMeaning," in Identity of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 241. In Valdes and Owen Miller (Toronto: University his essay (pp. 231-45) Martinez Bonati has shown how Cervantes' presentationof his protagonistin chapter 1 evokes him not only for "a common, quick-minded contemporary"but also for "a reader of the perennial creations of the classics." of literature?"(p. 236). And he asks: "Is this duplicityof appeal not constitutive
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for philologiststo select a method for approaching a particsatry ular 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 veryeminentphilologist:"Good sense is the critic's only guide. Good sense is what indicates to the critic the reading method that the work itselfsuggests and whose dictate he must obey withoutsuperimposingon the textcategoriesfromoutside 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). Stillusing, and stillappropriating,the words of this distinguishedphilologist, . . . no method can replacethefundamental sympathy thatthecritic feelsforhis fieldof study;philology is the loveof works in a written And if a critic's particular language. methodsmustbe applicableto in all languages, works written forthecriticism to be convincing, it is at leastat the necessary that, moment whenhe is commenting on a poem, he shouldlovethat languageand that poem morethananything else in theworld.After hiscold professional all,beneath thecritic rationality, is not an automaton but a sentient humanbeing,withhis or a robot, and impulses momentary contradictions (pp. 127-28). This philologist'slove for the poem has an almost eroticintensity. Translated from the Italian, the words I have been citingare the last publicly uttered ones of a man who by his presence graced Gilman Hall for over twentyyears. Recentlycalled by Fernando he was Leo Spitzer, Laizaro Carreter "el honor de la filologia,"34 whose published criticismstands the test of time, and whose last utteranceis as alive and meaningfultoday as it was when he made it in 1960. On thismemorableoccasion, at theJohns Hopkins Uniit is fitting to do homage to this"honor of philology." versity, Some unforgettable scholarsadorned the Departmentof literary Romance Languages when I was privileged to work at this great University:Henry CarringtonLancaster,Emile Malakis, Pedro Sa33 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 en Furi6 under the title"Desarrollo de un metodo," in Leo Spitzer,Estilo y estructura la literatura ed. Francisco Rico, introducci6nde Fernando LAzaro Carreter espafzola, (Barcelona: Editorial Critica, 1980), pp. 33-60. 34 The titleof LAzaro's intoduction(see note 33) is "Leo Spitzer (1887-1960) o el honor de la filologia"(p. 8).
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BRUCE W. WARDROPPER
Nathan linas, Charles Singleton,Georges Poulet,Jean Starobinski, Edelman, Anna Granville Hatcher, and ... Leo Spitzer. They were all, in theirseveral ways,great human beings as well as great the Department was of criticism philologists.What an institution then! And, as I hope some of myearlier allusions have made clear, what a splendid Department, united or (as now) divided, it has been since and stillis!
Duke University

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An Apology for Philology Author(s): Bruce W. Wardropper Source: MLN, Vol. 102, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar.

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