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Interruption is the phenomenon I would like to consider in the context of names, dates, and signatures. Interruption is, as David Hillman and Alan Phillips note, "a fig-leaf covering the fragmentary state of things (selves, worlds, sentences)" (8). As we know, the fig-leaf has been used in iconography since the Garden of Eden to conceal provocative and/ or anxiety-producing phenomena. But I would like to consider how the fig-leaf in The Book of Zifar barely conceals-while evoking-the most provocative of issues regarding human nature, the law, social and political pressures and literary representation as well. This essay looks at the fig-leaf of interruption-the interruption of selves, of worlds, and of sentences-as a creative-and subversive-device that provokes a calculated rethinking of exemplarity in fourteenth-century Spain.
While we might think that interruptions are merely distractions from the integrity of a text, they are much more. In fact, they are integral to it because they make us reflect on the future outcome we were anticipating for the particular narrative, given our generic expectations. We have a resolution in mind that we assume will be achieved based on the selective possibilities of a given genre and its parameters (the oneiric possibilities of romance, the martial context of epic, or the sacrificial frame of saint's life). And sometimes this type of predictable, uninterrupted resolution does indeed happen. But when an interruption of our expectations occurs, the reader is confronted by an epistemological challenge. We are forced to construct meaningful new connections to account for the unexpected turn. There are interruptions that reinforce, but also interruptions that violate. My examples will be of this second type-interruptions that are subversive-in this case of the assumptions and expectations of exemplary discourse.
There are three foundational literary texts produced in the first half of fourteenth-century Iberia-The Book of Zifar (1300-1342),1 The Book of Count Lucanor (1335), and The Book of Good Love (1330, 1343). Each one of these works offers an encyclopedic array of generic environments and each exhibits programmatic-and epistemologically meaningful-interruptions that violate readerly expectations with profound consequences. The work I would like to consider here now is: The Book of the Knight Zifar, a work that Ramón Menéndez Pidal singles out as offering a "specimen of all the types of medieval fiction...