Ficciones legales: Ensayos sobre ley, retórica y narración (review)

This volume brings together thirteen essays from two seminars directed by Carmen Rabell at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, on the origins of literary theory and on legal discourse in the medieval, Renaissance, and baroque novella. In a brief introduction, Rabell discusses the relatively recent field of ‘literature and law’. Analogous to the response to psychoanalytical approaches to literature, studies of this type are more apt to interest, impress, and convince literary scholars than legal scholars or, for that matter, practising lawyers, and it must be mentioned that ‘legal’ is generally used here in a very general sense. Professor Rabell has engaged her students and inspired them to explore significant topics.

The collection is divided into four parts.

In the first part, which deals with tragedy, Emmanuel Ramírez Nieves argues that Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is not only political in scope but also a study of power and its limits, a study of tyranny in ideological and semantic terms. Examining the array of discourses – political, ceremonial, and forensic – in the play, Ramírez Nieves demonstrates that Oedipus’s faith in his judgement and in his own invincibility gives him a false sense of security that both symbolizes and condemns any mindset that will not allow for inconsistencies in life and in interpretation. When Oedipus doubts Tiresias, he shows a lack of interpretive skills that will lead to his downfall. This essay underscores what will be a common denominator in the collection: the question of forms of argumentation from legal and literary perspectives. Manuel Aponte Marrero points out that Euripides Medea does not have an Aristotelian ending in catharsis; rather than inducing fear and pity, the play awakens horror and indignation in the spectator. Medea offers a detestable protagonist, but her actions are affected by the representation of men as exploiters and opportunists, that is, by a subtext that compromises the absolute quality of evil. From a legal stance, then, men give Medea a defence. Ana Méndez Oliver, writing on Orbecche, by the Cinquecento playwright and theorist Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio, emphasizes how Giraldi Cinthio acknowledges and deviates from the precepts of classical antiquity to produce what could be called a dramatic hybrid, which incorporates contemporary politics and theology (for example, secret and politically motivated marriages, to be dealt with by the Council of Trent) into the structure of the play.

Through a focus on variations of a particular narrative thread, the story of Griselda, the second section deals with off-centre, ‘ungovernable’ subjects – women and subalterns – and the ways in which texts that span centuries (from Marie de France to Geoffrey Chaucer to Juan de Timoneda) may adopt a spirit of transgression that goes against the severe conservatism of the times and places in which they were produced, or they may reinscribe the work of their predecessors. Francisco Luttecke contends that Chaucer’s version, ‘The Oxford Scholar’s Tale’, is the most radical, a comprehensive attack on the feudal order. Carmen Rabell looks at Timoneda and the Spanish adaptation of the Italian novella to suggest that, rather than slavishly imitating the Italian models, El patrañuelo fabricates ‘legal fictions’ that simultaneously foster the post-Tridentine imperative of validating the doctrine of free will and articulate a ‘social imaginary’ that will accommodate class structure and stratification within the context of the Counter-Reformation.

The third section intensifies the focus on evolving social and political stances through three essays on versions of the Romeo and Juliet story by Matteo Bandello, Marguerite de Navarre, and Juan Pérez de Montalbán. Naturally, the norms of marriage, questions of control, and the female body remain in the dialogue, as does the interplay of moral codes and conduct. As Rabell observes, there is often a tension between the professed exemplarity of narrative and the content proper. Her analysis of Diego Ágreda y Vargas’s ‘Aurelio y Alexandra’, from his Novelas morales of 1620, alludes...