Il modello della narrativa cortese e della precettistica cavalleresca nel "Tirant lo Blanch"

Abstract

The novelty of Tirant lo Blanch lies in the fact that he overexcites and turns into chaos the elements of the chivalric romance, while working through the entire literary culture of the late Middle Ages. Proceeding from this statement, the aim of this paper is to show how the two main systems of meaning in the novel, the courtly and the knightly doctrine, function. The first section is therefore dedicated to the echoes of the courtly tradition of French origin in Catalonia. Here Tirant is notable for an almost total eradication of the fairytale that was the "avant-garde" essence of the original novel model. In the second section we compare the novel with the novela sentimental, the psychological component of which Martorell enforces. Finally, we question the manners of behavior in the novel with a view towards the corpus of chivalrous treatises that were flourishing at the time. Here, too, Tirant is conceived in opposition to the obligatory role of a "model knight", against which Martorell has developed a protagonist within the framework of human possibilities. Overall, it can be seen that the mythical qualities of knighthood are levelled out in Tirant lo Blanch. The components of almost all genres alive in contemporary literary memory are thus present, but decoupled from the components with which they have been previously associated. The result is the deformation of all possible genre constituents, which can only exist in the new genre network at the price of their defunctionalization.