Why George? Hagiographic Elements in Matute’s Primera memoria
Since its publication in 1960, Ana María Matute’s novel, Primera memoria, has earned substantial amounts of scholarship and a place in the canon as it pertains to Spanish Peninsular literature of the twentieth century. Its continued relevance has much to do with its discursive and thematic richness, fruitfully explored by readers. Primera memoria takes place on the island of Mallorca during the first months of the Spanish Civil War. Among other topics, its fourteen-year-old narrator, Matia, alludes to class tensions, youthful rivalries, feelings of estrangement, her love of fairy tales, mysterious adults, the conversos known as chuetas, expectations for girls, and unsettling violence. Studies of the text have examined it principally as a bildungsroman and a political allegory, centering on aspects such as Biblical motifs, symbols, archetypes, myths, female adolescent development and so on. One prominent element, however, has not received sustained attention—the legend of St. George, both as set forth in medieval hagiography and as manifested in folk customs. The present article seeks to pursue this line of inquiry: in view of the enigmatic character named Jorge de Son Mayor and the repeated references to San Jorge at the local church: how does parsing the saint’s tradition inflect and enrich our readings of Matute’s book? In other words, why George?
XV.—The Legend of Saint George; Its Development Into a Roman d'Aventure
It is a well known fact that the ground-work of the story of Saint George as told by Richard Johnson in his Seven Champions of Christendom is represented by the Old French, or better the Early English, story of Sir Beves of Hamtoun. The object of this article is to determine the history of the fusion of the two traditions. When Saint George had become the champion of the English knights during the third crusade, the official sanction being given at Oxford in 1222, it is not difficult to understand why the story of his life should have passed into a new phase of its development. Before the crusades only the legend of his martyrdom was known in Western Europe. There, however, he had always been represented as a warrior, ‘miles egregius,’ and now during these expeditions he became the battle saint, whose timely aid brings victory to the Christian armies.
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":