The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Maria Rosa Menocal
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indirectly. It seems only logical that in the resurgent discussion of the dialectic of the sameness versus the alterity of the medieval period and its cultural relics, a discussion that tacitly recognizes the parallel and sometimes overlapping dialectic between self and other, we should more closely and explicitly reevaluate our assumptions and knowledge of the often-hidden Other—the Arab, the Semite, the Averroes—who stands silently behind Aristotle in the thirteenth century. Perhaps more to the point, we might ask in this context whether he really was so silent in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries or whether it is not instead our postrenascentist views and parlance of the period that have made him so, giving his place to others whose ancestry we find more illustrious and thus shielding ourselves from a recognition that strikes at the heart of certain beliefs about ourselves. And is the dialectic that governed the Middle Ages really or exclusively that between pagan and Christian, and between classical and modern, or is this, too, a legacy of the Renaissance view of that period and an ancillary to the colonial and postcolonial view of ourselves?
The theoretical questions of the nature of meaning, of whether it is created or received, and of the covert and self-subverting meanings of both literary and nonliterary texts, can obviously be carried out with no wider or more revolutionary a concept of the cultural and literary mores than those we already have, those explicitly canonized and triumphant in Western literary historiography. But should not the more revealing exploration of such questions be correlated with an investigation into the mores that were discarded or subsumed, damned explicitly or tacitly by the authorities of the time and the cleansing historians of later periods? Can we as medievalists afford to continue to believe that because an eleventh-century duke of Aquitaine was Christian and “European” his poetic lexicon was delimited by the official Christian and “European” ideologies of his time? Can we speak authoritatively about the repressions and subversions of his poetry if we begin by accepting as valid parameters for his universe what has emerged as legitimate and Catholic in subsequent periods of time? And are there not patent and often ironic gaps in discussions of the “anxiety of influence” that are informed only by possible influences that were and have been canonized?
Revisionism, in literary history as well as in other fields, is often unpopular. It can seem to involve the ritualized murder of cherished ancestry. This is the case no matter whether it is described in the oedipal terminology of Bloom, in the context of the notions of historical relativism and storytelling of White, or in terms that follow the concepts of discourse of Foucault.
But at this juncture it is important to clarify several issues that may make the particular literary-historical revision that I will suggest seem less dramatic and more reasonable. First, I am scarcely suggesting that the prevailing image and canon we have needs to be discarded in toto. In fact, I do not believe any segment of the canon need be discarded at all. Rather, my analysis of the ideological factors that have shaped our images leads me to believe that it is the existing canon and image that have unjustifiably discarded important figures and texts or have undervalued them or euphemized them to the point that they have lost much of the power and impact many believe they had for their contemporaries—and that in turn informed texts that we have canonized. The suggestion is not that Aquinas be removed or replaced. On the contrary, it is that we add the tradition of Averroes to it, and perhaps then begin to see the extent to which Aquinas is a response to other, Averroean texts.
In other words, I believe that the selective process of history and literary history has, in the natural course of telling the story of the victors, deprived us of an appreciation of many critical subtexts, and has in great measure eliminated or simplified and distorted beyond recognition many of the cultural forces that were catalytic in the medieval period. Thus the part of the image that I propose should be discarded is that part that has eliminated the possibility of seeing in the Andalusian world the impetus for change and that part that cannot imagine that a cultural force now seemingly alien to our own was once a part of its foundation.
My own casting of this period of cultural and literary history is itself selective, of course, and as much constrained to pick and choose facts and texts as any other. I have few delusions that it is any less a myth than those I am attempting to modify in the process, but I think it is a myth that has several advantages. The first is that it does not shy away from the concept of a mixed ancestry for western Europe that until recently has seemed largely unimaginable and insupportable. The second is that I believe that it enriches rather than impoverishes the recounting of the story we already work with, the readings of texts we have already agreed on. Thus my criticism of the existing myth is, as I have just noted, that it is insufficiently variegated to account for the medieval period and its considerably different historicopolitical circumstances, and that it is too much shaped by cultural prejudices of an era in Western ideology that although just now in its death throes in some areas is still quite powerful in the realm of literary historiography. It can perhaps now be fruitfully discarded there as well.
Notes
1. See primarily Said 1978 and some of the extended criticism and further considerations engendered by his book. Three reviews are of particular interest: Lewis 1982, whose highly negative reaction reflects much of the response of the traditional “Orientalist” academic community; Beard 1979, whose favorable reaction raises the question, among others, of the expansion of Said’s model to other areas of academic scholarship; and Brombert 1979, which is valuable because of its detachment from the Orientalist scene and the issues of general academic interest it explores. The salient points made by Said that are relevant to my discussion (and that are, incidentally, those least contradicted, even by his staunchest critics) are found in the introduction (1–28) and can be summarized as follows: that the formation of the image of the West is contrapuntal to the formation of the image of the Orient; that the dominant discourse is one of superiority “reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter” (7); that the distinction between “pure” and “political” knowledge is not an absolute and clear one and that the liberal consensus that knowledge is fundamentally apolitical “obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced” (10); that literary studies in particular have assiduously avoided discussion of the issue of political ideology shaping the structures of knowledge and have generally “avoided the effort of seriously bridging the gap between the superstructural and the base levels in textual, historical scholarship.” (13)
2. For two recent examples of collections of articles devoted to the pressing critical problems in medieval studies, see New Literary History 10 (1979) and L’esprit créateur 18 (1978) and 23 (1983).
3. Makdisi 1974 includes both his own statement about the “European awakening” and pertinent quotes from some of his predecessors (Lombard and Dawson are among the most important). For this perspective on the history of medicine specifically, see Sarton 1951, and from the point of view of the history of science in general, see Haskins 1924. Haskins 1927, the widely read and cited Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, is also revealing. Roughly the last half of the book deals with aspects of that renaissance that were explicitly Arabic-derived. In the area of the history of philosophy, few have underestimated the importance of Averroes. Even Kristeller, who is primarily concerned with the Latin tradition, makes serious concessions to the importance of the Arabic tradition: “As is well known, the Aristotelianism of the Arabs, and especially that of Averroes, exercised a powerful influence upon the Jewish thought of the later Middle Ages . . . and strongly affected the philosophy of the Christian West” (Kristeller 1961:28–29). He is nevertheless able to follow such an observation with this one: “If we want to understand the history of thought and learning in the Western Latin Middle Ages we must first of all realize that it had its foundations in Roman, not Greek, antiquity” (Kristeller 1961:29).
4. These generalizations about the attitudes among Romance medievalists are just that, generalizations, and they are hardly exempt from the enumeration of any number of exceptions. But even a cursory glance at the structures of our academic departments, the standard medieval canon, the sorts of courses that are (and are not) taught, requirements for degrees, general bibliographies, literary anthologies and literary histories, and so forth, all will confirm that as a rule such generalizations are accurate.