Love’s Double Cross: Language Play as Structure in the Libro De Buen Amor

LOVE'S DOUBLE CROSS; LANGUAGE PLAY AS STRUCTURE IN THE LIBRa DE BUEN AMOR JAMES F. BURKE The Libra de buen arnor is the masterpiece of the Spanish Middle Ages. This rollicking, witty, satirical book, which purports to teach about the good love of things beyond this earth, manages to convey extremely well the temptations and vicissitudes concerned with that variety found in the present. It has charmed and fascinated readers both Spanish and foreign since the fourteenth century. A number of critics have sensed a kind of spiritual similarity between Juan Ruiz and Chaucer and it has been recently pointed out that the English poet might even have known the Libro de buen amor.' Two major critical problems have preoccupied scholars attempting to explicate the work. The first involves the poet's intentions, whether he was seriously hoping to teach about the 'good love' of Christ or whether he really was presenting no more than a boisterous amalgam of goliardic poems. The second problem concerns the book's apparent lack of structure. The only unifying element in the work appears to be the autobiographical person of Juan Ruiz. As even this thread is not present in many sections, some critics have suggested that basically the Libra de buen amor is no more than a cancionero, a collection of poems and episodes related in some way to Juan Ruiz's love experience.' My contention in this paper is that the Libra de buen amOT possesses a basic unity which is founded upon linguistic association. One principal theme, that of the irony of man's existence, and a number of related secondary ideas are subsumed under a structure of wordplay and verbal connections. The anatomy of the book is molded upon a pattern similar to the interlace design which E. Vinaver and John Leyerle have seen as informing many medieval works.' The thread which guides the Theseuslike reader-listener through the book involves similar sounds and recurring motifs often linked together. As the studies of both Vinaver and Leyerle indicate, it is not easy for the modem reader to understand and appreciate the complex associative patterns which appear to permeate medieval works constructed along these lines. The visual interlaces so frequently found in the art of the period UTQ, Volume XLlII, Number 3, Spring 1974 232 JAMES F. BURKE may be comprehended simply as a decorative way of filling space. To use these designs as more than mere analogy when discussing literature would seem to suggest that a reason, practical or symbolic, lay behind the artist's work and that by extension some purpose existed for the writer who imitated these patterns. The interlace design is a graphic one and the psychology of graphics has not been well investigated. It is obvious, however, that the inventor of the graphic sign hopes that his symbol catches, concretizes, and in some way makes more comprehensible a meaning or group of meanings to the viewer. J.E. Cirlot in his discussion of graphicS (which seems to be by far the best available) emphasizes that every individual and every culture have a kind of 'rhythm' deriving from biological as well as environmental factors.' Style and personality are the surface reRections of such rhythms in the individual while art, among other things, echoes that of the group. Medieval man believed that the Fall had plunged him into the spiritual bondage of the Egypt of this world. God bound him with his power and man alone was unable to free himself. The ancient themes of entanglement and devouring and their more specific derivative symbols such as the net, the snare, the bow, and the labyrinth rise in the Middle Ages to hold a place of central importance in iconography. Perhaps the restless movement of the interlace in art and its literary counterpart may be the rhythmic, graphic expression of this cluster of ideas and symbols, always important to mankind, but particularly active in medieval culture. The tension created as the individual body or soul struggles against his confinement and writhes in his metaphysical chains is translated into the serpentine Row of the entwining lines and figures. Certainly in the Libro de huen arnor, concomitant with the idea...