Structural Problems
Mena’s allegorical structure is complex, and may fail to make sense to a modern reader. Upon close analysis, we see that he does not follow the structural blueprint of wheels and circles that he outlines at the beginning of the work (Deyermond). Because his main concern is not the allegory of Fortune, but the political meaning of his work, he allows several structural problems to remain in the poem. First, his notion of three wheels (past, present and future) conflicts with the very metaphor of the Wheel of Fortune – that is, a wheel that represents past, present and future in the different points of its rotation. Providence explains that narrator will see the wheel of the present in motion (symbolic of the unfinished nature of the present lives) – in fact, the wheel is presented as stationary. A second problem is that the wheel in fact does not include characters from the present, but rather from the recent past. Of all the Laberinto’s characters, only the narrator, Juan II and Álvaro de Luna were alive at the time of composition. Political prudence led Mena to fill his wheel of the present with figures from the recent past, thus avoiding a backlash from offended power-brokers. Undoubtedly the greatest inconsistency is that the Wheels turn out not to symbolize the blindness of Fortune at all; instead they represent the reward for virtuous action and the punishment for vice. They show not an unpredictable and changing system (Fortune) but its opposite, a well-defined and permanent moral structure. Thus the work, originally presented as a discussion of Fortune, avoids the topic all together. Finally, the Ptolemaic rings and the Wheels of Fortune cannot be combined in a way that makes visual or conceptual sense (Deyermond). By the final circle, Mena ignores his established structure and replaces it with praise for Álvaro de Luna. While perhaps not a flaw, it is certainly worth mentioning that the Laberinto actually contains no labyrinth. Fortune’s abode is presented as a house, and as we have seen, it contains not a labyrinth, but rather three wheels and their rings. Scholars generally agree that the “labyrinth” is a reference to the political situation of Castile at the time (full of intrigue, difficult to navigate), but the work itself is silent on this point.
Read more about this topic: Laberinto De Fortuna
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