Carajicomedia: Parody and Satire in Early Modern Spain by Frank A. Domínguez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Carajicomedia: Parody and Satire in Early Modern Spain by Frank A. Domínguez E. Michael Gerli Frank A. Domínguez, Carajicomedia: Parody and Satire in Early Modern Spain. With an edition and translation of the text. Támesis, 2015. 585 pp. The anonymous Carajicomedia, first published in the Cancionero de obras provocantes a risa (1519), is one of Castilian literature's lewdest and most salacious works of poetry. Its aggressive obscenity is only matched by the uncompromising force of its 117 stanzas of dodecasyllabic lines of arte mayor that deliberately parody the solemnity of Juan de Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna (1444) as it was glossed in Hernán Núñez de Guzmán's annotated edition of Mena's work known as Las Trezientas (1499, 1505). The result is a sustained contracfactum of the latter, which had sought to recuperate Mena's Laberinto as a prophetic work of the Spanish empire at the height of the reign of the Catholic Kings. It is doubtless because of its uninhibited obscenity that scholarly interest in the Carajicomedia and the equally bawdy Pleyto del manto (Cancionero general, [End Page 529] Valencia, 1514; republished in the Cancionero de obras provocantes a risa) has with rare exceptions been limited, usually receiving mention only in footnotes as an inconvenient philological curiosity. Despite its scandalous content and bawdy interest, the Carajicomedia is a complex work of sustained satirical genius which comprises some of the best literary parody and social satire of early peninsular letters, just as it is anchored in a distinct historical moment. Divided into two poems attributed to a pair of mock religious authors, Fray Bugeo de Montesino (a malicious caricature of the historical Fray Ambrosio de Montesino) to whom stanzas 1–92 are attributed, and Fray Juan de Hempudia, supposed creator of Stanzas 93–117 (Hempudia is a transparent sendup of the famed preacher from Valladolid, Fray Juan de Ampudia, whose name in the text doubtless puns in low register on the word impudica), the Carajicomedia riffs mercilessly off of Mena's Laberinto and its glosses as ostentatiously annotated by Núñez. As it does so, it improvises the woes and recent events in the life of the hoary Fajardo, an aged aristocrat whose sexual impotency plagues him in old age. Fajardo is likely a not-too-concealed evocation of one of several Diegos of the Fajardo clan, known to have been closely linked to the patents on prostitution in Málaga and Granada ceded to an ancestor, Alonso Fajardo, "el Africano," late in the fifteenth century by Fernando and Isabel. After an invocation that strictly echoes Mena's summons of King Juan II ("Al muy impotente : carajo profundo / de Diego Fajardo: de todos ahuelo"), the character Fajardo in the Carajicomedia is visited by the Goddess Luxuria, who materializes in the form of La Zamorana, a famous old whore. He appeals to her for a tonic to resuscitate his lost virility and, his wish granted, he is whisked off to Valladolid, where María de Vellasco, another old prostitute, seeks to help him recuperate his potency with some heavy massaging. Grasping Fajardo by his penis, María leads him to Valladolid's municipal brothel, where Fajardo experiences a vision of thirty-five realm-renowned hookers who belong to the Orders of Venus and the Moon lustfully practicing their trade. Although they embody but a small segment of the two thousand harlots Fajardo has "known" in his lifetime, the explicit, unvarnished portrayal of their activities is meant to revitalize Fajardo's carnal powers, just as their pseudonyms enticingly raise transparent connections to historical personages elicited in each stanza's accompanying commentary redacted in prose. By means of the humorous glosses that complement the verse, in conjunction with contemporary accounts like Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal's Memorial o registro breve, we can deduce that Fajardo is likely a stand-in for the agèd Fernando de Aragón, and that María de Vellasco is the thinly veiled literary avatar of María de Velasco, the principal lady in waiting to Germaine de Foix (Fernando's second wife), who in 1513 was involved in administering a potion to restore the old monarch...