The Presence of a Text: The Poema del Cid

Abstract

Nobody believes the claim made in our epigraph. Even if the speaker's assertions were trivial, and especially if they were not, each listener's interpretation was inevitably different from all others, depending on cultural baggage, tacit presuppositions, vagaries of common sense, experience, intelligence, perceptions of group interaction during performance-on factors innumerable and often imponderable. Yet it is most important for a presenter working before a group to achieve a consensus regarding at least some aspects of the content or the form of his presentation. Without it he loses group acceptance and fails as a performer. An aid to success is the adept integration of ritualistic elements into the presentation. Doing, even if only symbolic, does not err in the way words can err, and the familiarity of ritual, defined as repetition of acts and words in a given kind of place, and on a particular kind of occasion, by an authorized or self-authorized person, carries an audience along.' A further effective mode of narrative presentation is to depict the characters of the tale-gods or epic heroes especially-as themselves acting ritualistically. In this mode the