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(MIS)READING THE LIBRO DE BUEN AMOR: EXEMPLARY AMBIGUITY AND 

AMBIGUOUS EXEMPLA

ANTHONY J. CáRDENAS-ROTUNNO

IAN Michael counts thirty-five popular tales in the Libro de buen amor(LBA)  calculating  that  they  comprise more  than  twenty  percent  of  theentire  text  (177).1 Regarding  early  works,  Northrup  Frye  adds  that“[n]early every work of art  in the past had a social function in its owntime, a function which was often not primarily an aesthetic function atall”  (344)  and  adds  that  “[o]ne  of  the  tasks  of  criticism  is  that  of  therecovery of  function, not of course  the  restoration of an original  func-tion, which is out of the question, but the recreation of function in a newcontext” (345). Given the didactic intent of the LBA, combined with itspatent  ambiguity,  along  with  the  inherent  polysemy  of  language  ofwhich Juan Ruiz was eminently aware  (Read 240), his employment ofanecdotes  to  impart  life  lessons with a  salvific  intent creates a  literarytension  begging  resolution. This  study  examines  the  exemplum  of  the“Ass and the Lapdog” not only by Juan Ruiz, but also by the contempo-raneous Libro del cauallero Zifar (Zifar; c. 1301), and the later Esopeteystoriado (Esopete; 1488) to recover its social function to the extent thatthese three witnesses permit and to recreate a function in a new context.Examining how this tale fits within the frame text and observing differ-ences between the versions enable surmising what the didactic functionsof  these versions may have been. Doing  this permits viewing how  the

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1 In the first note, Michael explains his preference for the term “popular tale” overothers. I have used the other terms – fable, exemplum, etc. – for the sake of variety butin Michael’s sense of “popular tale” without “restrictive or unsatisfactory connotations”(Michael 177).

Ruizian version  includes a dimension lacking in  the other  two,  turninghis version into a “bawdy fabliau” (Vasvari 13). In line with Frye’s sug-gestion, a second appraisal of this tale from a postmodern view, specifi-cally  from  a  psychoanalytic  one,  however,  offers  another  perspectivewhich  leads not only  to  “the  recreation of  function  in  a new context,”but also, perhaps, to a pleasure of the text, not an original pleasure of apostlapsarian, medieval audience who heard or  read  the  story, but cer-tainly to one of a postlapsarian, postmodern audience. 

When Terry Eagleton  examines  the  nature  of  literature  in  order  todetermine what it is, he concludes that just as “it will not do to see liter-ature as an ‘objective’, descriptive category, neither will it do to say thatliterature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature” (16).Literature goes beyond “private taste” in that the value judgments whichdetermine literature are grounded in social  ideologies by which certaingroups maintain power over others (Eagleton 16). The medieval Spanishanecdote  examined  here  manifests  a  social  ideology  in  which  naturallaw held that “[e]verything has its right place, its home, the region thatsuits it, and, if not forcibly restrained, moves thither by a sort of hominginstinct” (Lewis 92).

The Aesopic tale known as “The ass and the lapdog” – the source forthe Medieval fable examined here (Lecoy 114; Holmer 59; Vasvari 15) –offers  a  fairly  unambiguous moral, which  to  a  twentieth-century  audi-ence,  especially  in  the  “land  of  the  free  and  the  home  of  the  brave”where the “sky is the limit,” may not be as palatable as it may have beento a Medieval audience with its particular Weltanschauung. Viewing thetale through a psychoanalytic lens, however, allows the unpalatable or atleast  the  less  acceptable  to  become  more  so,  and  the  little  valued  toacquire greater value as well. 

The fable,  in itself uncomplicated, may be reduced to its bare essen-tials as follows: an ass sees a lapdog frolicking with its owner. Consider-ing itself to be of greater utility than the dog, the ass too tries to frolic withits  owner  only  to  end up being  rejected  and beaten. The  accompanyingmoral  in  all  three  versions  – Zifar, LBA,  and Esopete –,  in  one way  oranother, alludes to the idea that what pertains to one, may not pertainto another. People should keep their natural place. In the LBA, however,the fable and its moral acquire nuances that invite detailed consideration.

Although the Esopete’s rendition has no frame within which to fit, ittoo is fairly straightforward: 1) the owner praises and prizes the dog; 2)

4 ROMANCE NOTES

the donkey denigrates the dog calling it “pequeño” and “inmundo” (38);3) emphasis falls on the donkey’s considering itself better than the dog:“soy mejor que ella et para mas cosas e officios. Mejor soy que la perri-lla et asi podre mejor viuir et alcançar mayor honrra” (38); 4) the donkeyexits its stable and runs to the master “rrebuznando et echando pernadas& coçes. E saltando sobre el, pone las manos & patas sobre los ombrosdel  señor  et  con  la  lengua  a manera  dela  perrilla  començo  a  lamber”(38);2 5) it fatigues the owner with its weight and dirties his clothes withmud and dust; 6) the owner’s family comes and “le dan palos & açotesal asno” (38) and break its ribs and other parts (“miembros”); 7) beforereturning  it  to  the  stable where  they  leave  it well  tied  (38). The moralappears  in  two places. At  the beginning  it  admonishes  that one shouldnot “dexar su officio proprio” and at the end of the tale it explains that“lo que la naturaleza no le da nin dispone non puede alguno fazer lige-ramente.  Et  assi  el  necio,  pensando  que  complace,  faze  desplazer  &deseruicio” (38; emphasis added). In this way it reflects the other “fairlyinsipid version” (Vasvari 16) found in Zifar. Circumstances here whichprovoke  this  intercalation  occur  when  Zifar  has  just  arrived  at  a  her-mitage  seeking  and  receiving  refuge.  A  character  named  Ribaldodecides  that  he  should  like  to  test Zifar with  harsh words  to  see whatreaction  this  vituperation  produces.  The  hermit  warns  Ribaldo  that  itmay be better not to attempt the test lest “te contesca commo contesçio avn asno con su señor” (109). The story then follows the above summarywith the subsequent details: 1) One day donkey was in his stable “muyfolgado,  e  auia  dias  que  non  trabajaua”  (109);  2)  the  narrator  informsthat  the  donkey  brought  the master  his wood  and  “las  cosas  que  eranmester  para  su  casa”  (109);  3)  the  donkey  realizes  that  he  serves  themaster more “que aquel caramiello, que non fazia al sy non comer e fol-gar” (109); 4) the donkey approaches his master thus: “desatose e fuesepara  su  señor,  corriendo  delante  del,  alçando  las  coçes,  e  pusole  lasmanos  sobre  la  cabeça de guisa quel  ferio mal”  (109); 5)  the master’sservants “dieronle palancadas al asno fasta que lo dexaron por muerto”(110), which leads to the conclusion and moral 6) “e fue grant derecho,ca ninguno non se deue mas atreuer de quanto la natura le da. Onde dizeel proberbio que lo que la natura niega, ninguno lo deue cometer” (110;

(MIS)READING THE LIBRO DE BUEN AMOR 5

2 This licking of the master by the donkey, by itself, lacks the sexual charge found inthe LBA version.

emphasis added). This restrictive advice tends to conflict with ideas heldby modern readers at  the beginning of  the third millennium, especiallyas  inheritors of such  long-held notions as “Manifest Destiny” and “thesky is the limit.” In Zifar,  the hermit is simply advising Ribaldo not tooverstep his bounds, the same moral as in the 1488 Esopete.

The LBA incorporates  the  fable  under  the  following guise:  the  go-between Trotaconventos has been attempting to win over the nun doñaGaroça for the Archpriest and offers the tale as a way to ingratiate her-self to the nun whom she has found at mass and whom she approachessaying: “¡Yuy, yuy! [ . . . ] ¡señora, qué negra ledanía! / En aqueste roídovos  fallo  cada  día.  .  .  .”  (1396cd). To  counter  this  “ledanía  negra”  or“dreary  litany”  as  Raymond  Willis  translates  (376),  the  go-betweenproffers an entertaining tale: “‘Señora, dezirvos he un juguete; / non mecontesca  convusco  como  al  asno  con  el  branchete  /  que  él  vio  con  suseñora  jugar  en  el  tapete:  /  dirévos  la  fablilla  si me dierdes  un  risete”(1400). The fable in the hag’s mouth acquires subtleties beyond those ofthe Zifar and the Esopete.3 First, the owner is a mistress and not a mas-ter; 2)  the activities of  the dog receive considerable emphasis  (the dogwith tongue and lips kisses her hands; it barks and wags its tail; it standson its hind legs [1401, 1402a]); 3) everyone delights in and has pleasurewith the dog and feeds it (1402bc); 4) the donkey realizes it brings woodand flour; 5) its approach is especially significant owing to an elementof sexuality not present in Zifar or in Esopete:4 “Salió bien rebuznandode  su  establía;  /  como  garañón  loco  el  necio  tal  venía;  /  retoçando  efaziendo mucha  de  caçorría  /  fuése  para  el  estrado  do  la  dueña  seía”(1405).  Four  key  words  in  this  description  –  rebuznando,  garañón,retoçar, and caçorría – combined accentuate this. Sebastián de Covarru-bias  provides  graphic  definitions  for  only  the  latter  three  as  rebuznarfails  to appear as a lemma in his dictionary. Yet under asno, he extollsthe  laudable  characteristics  of  the  donkey  “salvo  quando  rebuzna queaquel  rato  es  insufrible”  (156;  emphasis  added).5 Garañón is  “el  asno

6 ROMANCE NOTES

3 Vasvari (20 ff) spectacularly treats the sexual innuendo saturating the description ofthe dog and its behavior in the Ruizian text.

4 Gustaf Holmer and Louise M. Haywood (85-90) also treat the sexual aspects of thisexemplum.

5 T.H.White associates the ass’s braying with the vernal equinox (83). Rowland con-nects “ass” and lust (23-24); also see Cárdenas. Celestina, trying to persuade Pármeno tocollaborate with her and Sempronio, concludes that when it comes down to raw, physical 

que echan a  las yeguas o el cavallo que cubre las borricas, y cada unodéstos a la hembra de su especie” (628). Retoçar is “[m]overse descom-puestamente con alegría y contento, por hazer  fiesta y  lisongear a otrapersona, como lo haze el perrico quando viene de fuera su señora o sudueño” adding that “[r]etoçar las moças, es pellizcarlas o tocarlas ligera-mente  con  la  mano”  (908).6 The  noun  caçorría does  not  appear  inCovarrubias but is morphologically related to the adjectival form caçu-rras as explained in a long quote he takes from Alfonso X’s Partida II,Title  4,  Law  4  “Cómo  el  rey  se  debe  guardar  que  no  diga  palabrasdesconvenientes” (23). Covarrubias then elaborates: 

palabras caçurlas son las que no se pueden pronunciar sin vergüença del que las dize ydel que las oye, como nombrar el miembro genital de uno y de otro sexo y otros vocablossemejantes, que los villanos suelen hazer la salva. Por este término (hablando con perdónde  su merced  y  de  sus  barbas  honradas)  dixéronse  palabras  caçurras,  de  caço,  que  enlengua toscana vale genitale membrum virile, y desta palabra se llamaron todas las demásdescompuestas caçurras; o  se dixeron caçurras, quasi cacurras, de caco~, cachos,  cosamala. Caçurro, el hombre torpe. (258)

The donkey, to continue with the story, 6) then places “both forefeet onher shoulders” (Willis 378) – frontally “covering” her in a way; 7) the textemphasizes what happens to the instruments used to drive off the beast:“diéronle muchos palos con piedras e con maços / fasta que ya los palosse fezieron pedaços” (1406cd);  finally, 8)  the moral  is similar: “lo queDios e natura an vedado e negado / de lo faazer el cuerdo no deve serosado”  (1407cd;  emphasis  added),  concluding  in  1408  that  the  fool,thinking he pleases, in fact displeases. 

Like the other two versions, this one mentions the limits set by Godand nature and as in Zifar the fable is used to admonish against speakinginappropriately. Ian Michael views it as illustrating “the folly of uselesspersistence”  (210). Trotaconventos  uses  the  fable  to  amuse  the  nun,  asort of captatio benevolentiae, in which  she hopes not  to  speak out of

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sex “mejor [lo] fazen los asnos en el prado” (Act I, 174). The Mexicanism “como burroen primavera” connects both notions of lust and spring (Academia Mexicana 118). 

6 Celestina uses this verb when in Act VII she couples Pármeno and Areúsa and indi-cates that their “besar y retozar” cause her “dentera” (296) which figuratively is “envy”but can also mean a physical “tingling” in the mouth. Covarrubias states that “cáusase decomer cosas agrias, y por cierta alusión de  las cosas que vemos comer a otros y no  lasprovamos” (471).

turn as she next resumes the conversation where the two had left off pre-viously and wishes to discover what decision the nun has reached. 

In all three versions, a notion that modern readers can readily valueis  that  a  fool,  attempting  to please or  not,  can  and often does,  in  fact,displease.  Indubitably,  the  greater  the  perceived  distance  between  fooland self, the greater the valuation of this assessment.

Another turn of this concept appears in all three versions and holdsthat what nature (natura/naturaleza) has denied, one should not attempt.This “nature” has been defined by Thomas Aquinas as “ratio cuiusdamartis,  scilicet divinae,  indita rebus,  qua ipsae res moventur ad finemdeterminatum – ‘the law of a certain activity, namely of the divine activ-ity,  inherent  in  things, whereby  things are moved  toward a determinedend’” (Green 98), the natural “law” as already described by C. S. Lewisabove. It is “Natura Naturans, which is God” (Green 75). The formula-tion  of  a  divinely  ordained  universe  with  a  place  for  everything  andeverything in its place,  if espoused by moderns, seldom pertains to theordo universi. Certainly, infringements on what one considers as inher-ent and  inalienable  rights do not  sit well within a modern milieu. Andthe right to do what one pleases when one so pleases is one highly val-ued in today’s society. For this reason moderns may chafe at the portionof  the moral of  the  fable of  the  ass  and  the  lapdog which  admonishesstaying in one’s place.

There are, nevertheless, ways to view the perspective using the lensof  contemporary critical  theory  that  can create  a new  function  for  thismoral.  Using  a  Lacanian  approach  to  the  fable  is  one  way  that  evenaffords a certain jouissance to the fable.7

In  this  view,  the  donkey observes  an  intimacy between  the  lapdogand its owner. The presence of intimacy between dog and master makespainfully  obvious  the  lack  of  such  closeness  between  ass  and master.The donkey longs to participate in that oneness with the master. In thisway,  the donkey  longs  to  recapture  the same dyadic unity a child pos-sesses with  its mother  as  seen  in Lacan’s  imaginary  in which “objectsceaselessly  reflect  themselves  in each other  in a  sealed circuit,  and noreal differences or divisions are yet apparent. It is a world of plenitude,with  no  lacks  or  exclusions  of  any  kind”  (Eagleton  166).  For  Joseph

8 ROMANCE NOTES

7 In what follows, I rely heavily on Terry Eagleton (165-71).

Campbell  this would be tantamount to the bliss of the “Garden of Par-adise, where  there  is  no  time,  and where men  and women  don’t  evenknow that they are different from each other” (48), a veritable Garden ofEden, “a metaphor for that innocence that is innocent of time, innocentof opposites” (50). This is the land of milk and honey, indeed, the landof fullness.  It  is  the stage anteceding  the Symbolic which  is character-ized by metaphor, by replacement, not by the plenitude of presence butby  lack,  by  absence,  the  same kind of  absence  the donkey  feels. Mal-colm Bowie writes: “The Imaginary is the order of mirror-images, iden-tifications and reciprocities. It  is  the dimension of experience in whichthe individual seeks not simply to placate the Other but to dissolve hisotherness by becoming his counterpart” (92). 

If  a  Medieval  ideology  of  things  seeking  their  preordained  place,like water seeking its level, fails to find favor in a (post)modern ambi-ence,  perhaps understanding  a  text  from a Lacanian perspective mightmake it more acceptable. Bowie explains that “the Other takes languageas its field of action” (83). One argues, then, that the Other and Symbol-ic go hand in hand in contributing to  the demise of fullness and to  thebirth of lack. To obliterate the Other, this signifier of absence in order toexperience plenitude, the ass tries to erase the separation by physicallyapproaching the Other, by placing its hooves on the master/mistress, bybecoming one with it, much like an infant with its mother, in the imagi-nary. In the LBA perhaps, the added dimension of sexuality is essentiallyphallic – garañón and caçorría from Italian cazzo, Covarrubias’s “caço,que en lengua toscana vale genitale membrum virile.” In the LBA then,the donkey is already coming from the symbolic as its behavior suggestsits awareness of difference, of the Other, of lack. Bowie explains that forLacan

the phallus is again the primitive structure from which penis and clitoris are in due coursefashioned. And  in Lacan’s  doctrine  it  is  the  undifferentiated  afterlife,  in  the  Symbolic,that  the male  and  female  organs  together  enjoy  [.  .  .]  the  phallus  is  again  a  primitivestructure, but by now it has been elevated from anatomy to a universal semantics. Sexlessit once was, and now, after passing for a time through the human body and creating sexu-al difference on the way, sexless it has again become. (128)

Because the ass rejects his postlapsarian state in which he is consignedper force to duality, binariness, the ass merits punishment. This donkeydenial parallels another binary opposite to Adam and Eve who merited

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punishment for foregoing their unity, giving up the Mirror stage for theSymbolic,  for  seeking  absence,  the  establishment  of  the Other.  In  theGarden of Eden, Adam and Eve are still  in  the  imaginary:  they do notwork; they do not hunger; they experience only plenitude. But by choos-ing of  the  tree  of  the  knowledge of Good  and Evil,  hence,  the  tree  ofbinary opposites,  they enter  the realm of  the symbolic and reap expul-sion. The ass attempts to recover what Adam and Eve have lost, a returnto  the  Promised  Land,  the  land  of  fullness,  of milk  and  honey. Theserealities – Good and Evil, fullness and lack – by their oppositeness forma seam, the interstice of bliss (Barthes 6-9). 

As  Vincent  Leitch’s  maintains,  “[t]here  can  never  be  ‘correct’  or‘objective’ readings, only less or more energetic, interesting, careful, orpleasurable misreadings”  (59). This perspective provided by a psycho-analytical lens allows the story of ass and lapdog to become more inter-esting and pleasurable than it would as a reflection of natural law. Thispleasurable  misreading  has  been  one  of  the  goals  of  this  analysisthrough “the recreation of function in a new context” (Frye 345) for thetale of  the ass and lapdog as found in  the  three Medieval Spanish ver-sions here considered.

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO, ALBUqUERqUE

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