Kinship and Polity in the Poema de Mio Cid by Michael Harney (review)

Book Reviews95 debates. The final section of the volume, "Not a Conclusion: A Conversation," makes one wish that the responses of the twelve essayists to each other's work had been included in full as a final way of showing the restructuring process going on in the expansive field of composition. DRIEK ZIRINSKY Boise State University MICHAEL HARNEY. Kinship and Polity in the Poema de Mio Cid. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993. 285 p. Jtiinship and Polity in the Poema de Mio Cid might open a reconsideration of Castilian political culture of the Late Middle Ages. It is a study of the poem's socio-political language. Through the use of sociological, anthropological , and economic interpretations, the author examines the relations between a "primitive" legacy and a "modern" impulse in the political transformation of feudal Castile. Harney states that his intention is to "outline a social reading of the poem" (14). He does so extensively to reach, in my view, a polemical conclusion: the poem advances an ideology that opposes the emerging "states" (196), and it "reveals its author, and presumably , its original audience, to be conservative—even reactionary—in their support of idealized asymmetrical political and economic relationships" (229). After reading Harney's analysis one feels that his enviable effort to grasp important connections between social, judiciary, and political institutions, on the one hand, and the structure of the poem's plot, on the other hand, is not at all matched by the reductionism of the conclusion. This study teaches so much about the richness and complexity of both the text and its context that its conclusion—which merely reiterates the views of traditional literary historiography—is a disappointment. Central to this historiography has been the view that the Poema de Mio Cid and, by extension, Castilian culture , were expressions of a unique drive against "modernization" since modernization was associated with a cultural process alien to Spanish roots. Traditional historiography has refused to see what Harney correctly recognizes : "cultural multiplicity must constantly be borne in mind in the case of an epic whose Christian hero sports a Semitic nickname and whose personages derive from at least three distinct ethnicities and a dozen regional cultures" (157). In this context, the "ideological" position of the text becomes a matter of discussion. The study brings to light the conflicts between a social structure based in kinship (bilateral legitimation and reproduction) and one based in agnation (patrilinial domination) as they are reflected in Cid's story. Questions of solidarity , political means of submission, the place of wealth in leadership, the clan-centered dimension of marriage, the symbolic and legal status of punishment , and friendship are all treated with textual rigor and with aware- 96Rocky Mountain Review ness of the institutional and discursive spheres of literary production. A masterful analysis of the episode with Cid's daughters establishes that the women "are perceived to be the primary vectors of agnatic ambition for the Cid and his family" (54). In other words, the study convincingly argues that Cid's intentions are to reach a higher socio-economic level and that the text itself attempts to defend those intentions. If this is so, if the epic recognizes a social struggle between Cid's clan and the Infantes of Carrion (members of a higher social status who appear to defend and to promote a modern domination), in what way is the text reactionary ? Harney argues that it is the intention of Cid's political and ideological performance to attack the modern features of Castilian society and, in turn, to ideally recreate traditional, Old-fashioned notions of community . While such a stance might be sincere, and even naïve (as Harney acknowledges ), it is not necessarily reactionary. At the most, this position may be labelled as destined to fail if, and only if, we assume a lineal and smoothly conceived modernization ofSpain. Harney accurately observes that the "epic masterpiece of Spanish literature is pre-Spanish in its origin" (198). Cid is a Castilian issue that became a Spanish hero due to the monologic and exclusionary tendencies of the modern Spanish State. It is pre-Spanish not necessarily because it defends a pre-modern conception of society, but...