Polyphony in Spanish Sentimental Romance

The question that originated this study is a simple one: Is there polyphony in the Spanish Sentimental Romance? If polyphony is the inclusion, on the part of the author, of points of view that are not his own by means of identifying or detaching himself from the characters in order to adopt their stance or impose his on them, then we can assert-as Cesare Segre has done in "What Bakhtin Left Unsaid"-that "even though the medieval romance does not involve true polyphony, it is nonetheless possible to discover in it what is, for Bakhtin, the primary precondition for polyphony" (29). Segre is referring here to the fact that in medieval romances the author does include characters that have different names, different gender, and sometimes even apparent stylistic idiosyncrasies, all of which point to the illusion of various voices. However, Segre rules out the possibility of asserting that there is polyphony in medieval romance-a statement that is, at least in some degrees, too broad to be accepted as representative of romance as a whole. Moreover, to state that something is a precondition for polyphony is an empty statement in the sense that even an authoritarian discourse that hegemonizes every possible utterance could in theory be considered a precondition for the opening up of a discursive space-if only because polyphony requires of us that we not only know what it is, but also what is not.1 I intend to demonstrate how it is possible to speak of actually existing polyphony, at least in the Spanish Sentimental Romance.2 In this process the first task was to isolate moments throughout the different narrative operations in a text in which the relationship between voices in the text becomes problematic. That is, moments in a text where the boundaries of the different voices are blurred to the point that it becomes difficult to speak of distinct uttering personalities. secondly, and equally important, it became necessary to pay heed to considerations that go beyond the formal3 aspects of a particular work. By this I mean the kind of consideration involved in determining the underlying ground on which a narrative sets to work, information that may or may not be provided by the text in a positive and stable form.IIMimesis and diegesis: these operations are particularly important in determining the relationships between narrative voice and character's voice, a relationship that is perhaps better understood in terms of the word Distance.4 The dynamics of distance were probably addressed for the first time in book III of Plato's Republic. It is well known that Plato contrasts two narrative modes, according to whether the poet "himself is the speaker and does not even attempt to suggest to us that anyone but himself is speaking" (cited in Genette 162), or whether, on the other hand, the poet "delivers a speech as if he were someone else" (as if he were such-and-such a character), what Plato calls imitation, or mimesis. To demonstrate the difference, Plato rewrites as diegesis the end of the scene between Chryses and the Achaeans, a scene Homer had treated as mimesis-or, as direct speech in the style of drama.In Grisel y Mirabella, where the "auctor" allows the characters to speak and then recounts what took place in the dialogue, we have a similar process of rewriting. When Grisel and Mirabella are debating over who had been the "causa de amor" we have mimesis:Responde Grisel: Esto es, sin mas apurar Ia verdad, que yo fui del cometido error y segun las demasiadas cautelas que yo busque, para haber tan grande victoria, Io que nunca se hizo ni dijo, yo Io supe decir y hacer. [ . . . ] Y como esta senora fue el cabo de todas las exelencias del mundo, [ . . . ] hobe de facer cosas que en pensamiento precedian a las que Jasan hizo en la victoria del Villocino de Oro. [ . . . ]Dice Mirabella: Grisel no penseis que por fermosas razones ni saberlo bien decir vuestras palabras puedan mas que la verdad. Pues conocido es ser mas deshonesto el oir a las mujeres, que el recuestar a los hombres. …