The Problems of the Christian Narrator: Narrative Strategies in the Dauidias

In their studies to date concerning the heterogeneous tissues in the text of the Davidias, philologists have on the whole dealt with the relationship between the ancient on the one hand and the Judaeo-Christian heritage on the other. There has been no very systematic treatment to date of the problem of the relationship be-tween the Christian narrator and the Jewish story, save for the text of Miroslav Marcovich published in the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Neo-Latin Studies held in 1971 in Louvain, on whose approach, with a certain number of new examples, the present paper to a large extent relies. Marulić’s narrator in several places directly declares himself, and or can be intuited to be, a Christian. But his story, to which he will adhere in all details, is not a Christian story, which gave rise to problems in the field of narration. Jewish historiography of the kind that we find in the Old Testament string events one after the other in their natural sequence without commentary, while the Christian narrator who, in the Homeric tradition of epic narration must at the same time be an active interpreter, attempts to present these events as linked together in a whole that makes sense. Apart from the difference in the narrative conception, that is in the degree of the narrator’s activity in the Biblical text on the one hand and the epic on the other, it is a fact that the story of the Davidias is a Jewish one, and in the background of all the conduct of the figures lies a moral logic of procedures that are different from the logic of Marulić’s ideal reader or pupil, who is a Christian. In spite of David’s numerous morally dubious actions, penitence redeems him during the whole of the story, after each sin (from the Christian point of view) that he has committed. Penitence is a virtue that the Church promotes, in which there is a clearly visible trace of Marulić’s legalism, and his insistence (in the epic) on what is prescribed by law. Unlike most of the other writers of Humanist Latin epics, Marulić does not attempt to play up, rather to elide, the opposition of Jew-Christian, partially be-cause of the tropological identification of David and Christ. That is why he em-ployed a diplomat-narrator in an attempt to smooth the sometimes irreconcilable differences in worldviews and moral standards. But the problems, it would seem, were impossible to bridge; is the exceptionally lukewarm reception of the Davidias in its own time perhaps one of the consequences of this