The Carajicomedia. The erotic urge and the deconstruction of idealist language in the Spanish renaissance

IN 1511 Hernando del Castillo, a Castilian working in Valencia in the service of the Count of Oliva, published what has become the famous Cancion.ero General. This large collection of poems, gathered by Castillo over twenty years, was arranged into nine sections, the last being a collection of burlesque poems called Obras de burlas provocantes a risas. The final section was republished separately in Valencia in 1519, with the addition of a new work entitled Carajicomedia. It was the first and the last time that the Carajicomedia saw the printing press in over three hundred years, until Luis Usoz y Rios found the only known copy of the 1519 edition at the British Museum and published it in 1840-1843 (Cancionero de Obras de Burlas Provocantes a Risa). However, the Usoz edition was very limited and it too became very rare; for all purposes we could say that the Carajicomedia, which first saw light in 1519, was not made available again until 1974 (Pablo Jauralde Pou and Juan Alfredo Bellon Cazabdn). Jose Maria Diez Borque included it in his 1977 work on Spanish erotic poetry, and three more editions of the work have since appeared, edited by Frank Dominguez (1978), Carlos Varo (1981), and Alvaro Alonso (1995). The rarity of the work is reflected in the scarcity of assessments and interpretations-very little has been written about the Carajicomedia.1 Usoz, who found the work in London, was a Spaniard who had become a Quaker and published other works by writers whom he considered Spanish religious reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He disliked the Catholic hierarchy and the Catholic faith intensely, and felt a Protestant Reformation would have cured the evils of the nation-evils that he believed were still alive and well in his lifetime. It was the elites, he maintained, who were the cause of the corruption and the vices of Spaniards; Spain was not the country of the mystical religion propounded by established propaganda, but the country of the obscenities that the Carajicomedia presented. He believed that the book had been written by a priest. While Usoz was a liberal who defended the bourgeois freedoms and rights-things he did not see in Spain-he was also a nineteenthcentury Puritan who condemned all that he thought the Carajicomedia stood for. He apparently saw nothing particularly revolutionary in the work- he seems rather to have published it as an example of the general depravity of the time, modestly abbreviating the "obscene" word in the title and every subsequent reference to Carajo (penis) to "C ." Today we can view the work free of Usoz's personal opinions. The Carajicomedia is more than an erotic or obscene work; it is carefree, playful, burlesque, and above all meant to mock and corrode official idealism and its language. Several modern readers do not see these subversive elements, although some of them do offer interesting observations. To Antonio Rodriguez-Monino (Cancionero General 1958), for example, it seems inconceivable that a work such as Carajicomedia could have been published in the early sixteenth century; he calls it merely an obscene book, and notes that it was never included in the subsequent editions of the Cancionero General. Pablo Jauralde Pou and Juan Alfredo Bellon Cazaban suggest that the Obras de burlas section that once contained it offers us a picture of fifteenth-century social conflicts, still simmering in the early sixteenth century. Jose Maria Diez Borque writes that the poems in his anthology (which includes the Carajicomedia) celebrate the raw pleasure of sex devoid of all guilt, and Frank Dominguez states that the poetry in the Obras de burlas is full of vitality, expressed in a language completely opposed to the conventional one. For him the Carajicomedia is also misogynist, as it portrays women as ugly and carnal and as desiring nothing more from men than their sexual services. However, I maintain that the Carajicomedia may take the opposite side, and may actually convey feminist attitudes: the women discard official male idealism in all its forms. …