New World Carolingian literature

"There are but three matters," says a poet, "that none should be without: the matters of France, of Britain, and of great Rome." That poet may not even be born in Andalusada, and I can't assume that the three matters are going to arise the same way, coming as they do at least two generations after the point of divergence. For the sake of the discussion, I'm going to assume that the chansons de geste do in fact turn out rather similarly; if that assumption changes, expect this post to be invalidated with a later one.

Up until the 19th century (or so says Wikipedia), the Carolingian cycle was as familiar as Arthurian legend is to us now. (Part of why it's become less so is because in the Anglophone world a lot of writers have revisited the Arthurian mythos in the 150 years.) In Andalusada, where the large area we call "the United States of America" is an officially Hispanophone Gallo-Moorish state and the Anglophone world is correspondingly a fair bit smaller, that equality is still going to be real.

And in the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia, a country that I'm benchmarking as 55% Muslim/35% various sorts of Christians/a generous 10% other, where that familiarity is going to cause problems and create a solution.

To be specific, the Carolingian cycles were written by Frenchmen living under a French king, who had free rein to demonize the Saracens and Moors and to celebrate crusading. The UCNA, pretty much unique in the world, has a significant French minority living under a Moorish government. That kind of rhetoric isn't going to fly - or, more importantly, to sell.

So what's a writer to do?

On deuterocanon, and why to write it

Some places in Spain still celebrate mock battles between moros y cristianos, to commemorate the victories of the Reconquista. Some places in Mexico celebrate the same, but in a rather different way: the Mexicans identify the Christians with the conquistadors, which makes the good-and-bad dynamics of the performance very ambiguous.

This, for lack of a better term, is what I'm going to call "deuterocanon." (I'm not running on a hell of a lot of sleep here, so if there is a better term, please bear with me.) A literary deuterocanon is the popularizations, the reinterpretations, the revisionist writing - all the work that people read about a given literary canon that isn't properly part of it.

The bigger rewrite: the Farrellite Doon de Mayence

The Geste de Doon de Mayence (I have no idea how "Doon" is pronounced, except that it's apparently a two-syllable word) is the third of the Carolingian literary cycles: an endless cycle of feudal revolts against the king, all of which end in defeat and repentance. Where reworking the Chanson de Roland is a relatively simple matter of humanizing the Saracen characters, the Andalusian Doon is going to be a radical reworking of the canon, and it's going to happen for explicitly political ends.

The simple fact of the matter is that France-Outremer is going to read the Geste de Doon differently from a French audience. For many of them, their ancestors actually did fight in a feudal revolt against the king, which ended in defeat. It's why they're living in New Andalusia at all, and family traditions have never let them forget it.

This is a work in progress. It will be expanded upon. (6/30/2012)