Memories, Dreams, and Fictions: The Liminality of Mudarra and Embedded Narratives in the Legend of the Seven Infantes of Lara

When characters interrupt a literary work by telling another narrative from their own subjective point of view, their accounts not only disrupt the general story, but they also call into question its narrative procedures and our ability to trust it. Embedded narratives bring together different voices, times, and levels of authority, and this power to connect diverse elements can shed light on other ambiguous and problematic aspects of the literary work, such as its genre or its intent. My purpose here is to analyze some of the embedded narratives that appear in two versions of the Castilian epic legend of the seven infantes of Lara, one from the late thirteenth century and the other from the mid-fourteenth century, in order to better understand the prominent liminality of its hero, Mudarra.¹ Liminality and liminal people, according to Victor Turner, “elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”² As the illegitimate son of a Castilian knight and an Andalusi woman, Mudarra is a prime example of liminality, not only because of his lineage, but because of his cultural and literary contexts. On the one hand, Mudarra is born and brought up in the Arabic-speaking world of the Caliphate of Córdoba, but he achieves his heroic status when he travels to Castile and avenges the death of his seven Christian half brothers. On the other hand, he is an obviously legendary character, who interacts with Almanzor and the count García Fernández, two famous historical figures from tenth-century Iberia. Because of this, and in a manner analogous to embedded narratives, Mudarra also exposes the ambiguities of the epic genre itself, whose interaction of historicity and fantasy has been a focus of critical interest since the end of the nineteenth century and still determines much of the discussion around the Castilian cantares de gesta.

In fact, a large part of La leyenda de los siete infantes de Lara, the 1896 monograph by Ramón Menéndez Pidal that inaugurated the modern study of the Castilian epic, focused on finding and defending the historical basis for the legend. With the purpose of proving that Castilian epics were composed at the time when their main characters lived or immediately after, Menéndez Pidal looked intently for historical places, customs, and secondary characters in the preserved cantares or their relics in later works.³ His seven-decade-long determination to compare epic narratives with verifiable history continues to be deeply influential today. As recently as 2013, Alberto Montaner was hopeful that the articles on the infantes of Lara that were included in a number of Cahiers d’études hispaniques médiévales would contribute to “la definitiva liberación del lastre historicista, que reducía el estudio posible de la leyenda a la dialéctica de fidelidad histórica y fantaseo legendario” [the definitive liberation [of the text] from the historicist burden, which restricted all possible study of the legend to the separation of historical accuracy from mythical fantasizing].⁴ Ironically, but predictably enough, the section of the journal which grouped these studies carried the title “Les sept infants de Lara: l’histoire face à la légende” [The seven infantes of Lara: history versus legend]. The discrepancy was not lost on one of the authors included in this issue, Enrique Jerez, who explained in a footnote his objection to that title: “Una obligada reflexión se impone respecto de un subtítulo (la historia frente a la leyenda) que, a nuestro juicio, incide con excesivo énfasis en la supuesta irreductibilidad (incluso en la abierta oposición) existente entre ambos conceptos, o más bien entre las realidades que designan” [It is imperative to reconsider a subtitle (history versus legend) that, in our opinion, puts too much emphasis on the alleged irreducibility (and even open opposition) between the two concepts, or rather between...