The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Maria Rosa Menocal

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СКАЧАТЬ (Sánchez-Albornoz 1979:264). He sees her work, in fact, as the result of her “natural devoción . . . hacia los hombres y las empresas de su raza” (Sánchez-Albornoz 1979:259). This unmistakable allusion to her Jewish background is more than casual or incidental anti-Semitism, and that is why I have adduced it here. It is a reflection of the extent to which scholars who do work on the medieval European Semitic traditions, both Arabic and Hebrew, have been no more exempt from the prejudices of cultural ideology than the medievalist community as a whole. It would be fallacious to assume that those whose work is devoted to the study of those traditions necessarily have any more positive an attitude toward the object of their study than those who reflect the prejudices of our cultural ideology in their unwillingness to recognize the existence of those texts and cultural traditions in the first place. Most important, the reader should know that such attitudes are neither obsolete relics nor views restricted to Spaniards obsessed with the Semitic elements of their own past. The reader who glances at any of the issues of the last several years of the journal Al-Andalus (before its demise and rebirth as Al-Qanṭara), at García Gómez’s prologue to the second edition of Las jarchas romances de la serie árabe, or at his lecture on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Escuela de estudios árabes de Madrid, can hardly come away with the impression that either acute territorialism or thinly veiled prejudice are things of the past in this field. Not only would one find there articles by a certain Angel Ramírez Calvente (whose identity is otherwise unknown, so this is probably a nom de plume) embodying a less-than-professional attack on Samuel Stern, who is Jewish, but also from García Gómez himself, paterfamilias of Hispano-Arabic literary studies, invectives clearly directed at Monroe, who is dealt with as an innominato. Dismissals of those who are simply “norteamericanos,” “anfibios,” “pseudo-especialistas,” or “ajenos . . . a nuestra familia” stake out the boundary lines quite clearly—and they should serve as a warning that an attempt to cross them would not be welcome, or even tolerable.

      The most recently published polemics between Jones and Hitchcock on one side and Armistead and Monroe on the other serve to show, among other things, the extent to which Jones rejects arguments made by Armistead and Monroe simply because neither are bona fide Arabists according to his definition of the term (see Jones 1980, 1981, and 1983; Hitchcock 1984; Armistead 1982 and 1986; Monroe 1982; and Armistead and Monroe 1983 and 1985). Consequently Jones considers Armistead and Monroe incapable of understanding why the kharjas can only be understood as part of the classical Arabic tradition (and by Arabic classicists). Leaving aside for the moment the substance of the argument, Jones’s approach is reminiscent of the kind of argument Sánchez-Albornoz makes when Jones questions Armistead’s competence in dealing with an Arabic text (“I have a problem,” Jones states, “which Professor Armistead possibly does not share. . . . On principle I do not work on the Arabic texts on the basis of translations” [1983:51]). It is not difficult to understand, when reading Jones’s works, that it all boils down to the belief that the lines that have been drawn between the Arabist’s domain and the Romance scholar’s domain are appropriate ones and that hybridization is unhealthy and produces bad scholarship (even, ironically, when one is dealing with clearly hybrid poetry.) Moreover, there is here an intellectual condescension that evokes memories of Sánchez-Albornoz’s attitude toward Lida’s “meddling.” This is manifest in comments such as that cited above but even more so in Jones’s adducing the authority of “most Arabs and Arabists” to back his views, although his principal cited sources for the view that the poetry is a part of the classical Arabic tradition exclusively could hardly be considered authoritative or up-to-date on the subject of Hispano-Arabic poetry: Nicholson 1907, and Watt and Cachia 1965 (the latter of which devotes all of eight pages to the poetry of Spain but includes a paragraph-long rebuttal of the work of the major historian and critic of Andalusian poetry, Pérès.) The fact that Pérès and Monroe are the two scholars who have devoted the most attention specifically to Hispano-Arabic Andalusian poetry (Pérès 1953 and Monroe 1974 being the essential handbooks on the subject) apparently counts for less than being a mainstream Arabist who has not altered his views by attempting to understand that poetry in terms of al-Andalus as a hybrid society and in the context of Romance as well as Arabic traditions. And Jones’s condescension is such that, even in citing Watt and Cachia, he fails to cite their full opinions, as expressed in the concluding paragraph of those twelve pages: “So it was that in Spain, alone among Muslim lands, the vigorous spirit of the common people breached the wall of convention erected by the classicists” (Watt and Cachia 1965:121).

      In a different sphere, it is revealing to note that the most hostile attacks on Gittes’s 1983 article on “The Canterbury Tales and the Arabic Frame Tradition” are by individuals who take her to task for incomplete and faulty knowledge when she speaks of the Arabic tradition. These letters are, in fact, primarily concerned with the accuracy of sources in pre-Arabic traditions, which Gittes has identified using the handful of sources accessible to a nonspecialist and which, in any case, as she points out, are not directly relevant to the fate of the narrative tradition within Europe.

      6. Since Aristotle, the notion that ideology affects all historical writing has been an important feature of the criticism of historiography and discussions of the inherent problems in distinguishing between history and poetry. For a recent exchange and discussion of the effect of ideology on literary studies and the effect it is currently having on the profession (though in general terms rather than on the medieval sphere specifically), see Said 1983, Fish 1983, and Bate 1983. Other recent contributions to the subject are Said 1982 and especially White 1982. White makes a series of observations that are particularly pertinent to our study: Hegel “was convinced . . . that you could learn a great deal, of both practical and theoretical worth, from the study of the study of history. And one of the things you learn from the study of the study of history is that such study is never innocent, ideologically or otherwise, whether launched from the political perspective of the Left, Right, or Center” (White 1982:137).

      7. Ellis 1974 gives a succinct view of the application of structuralism to medieval studies and maintains that the only difference is that of learning a different language, which is just like learning any foreign language (of which one need learn only the synchronic state and need not know any of its history). Two of the most striking and revealing cases of the pitfalls of this approach are found in Guiraud 1971 and 1978. Guiraud’s first study of the etymological structures of trobar is explicitly synchronic, but the author is hardly free either from the problems of the enigmatic history of the word or, more significantly, from what diachronic studies of that history have told him. In fact, at a certain juncture he faces the fact that his synchronic analysis of what the word means is somewhat at odds with the range of possibilities provided by the diachronic studies he is aware of, and these exclude Ribera’s proposal. In his reworking of this material in the later publication, Guiraud takes into account the possible Arabic etyma for Provençal joi and jovens in Chapter 6. (This is Denomy’s proposal [Denomy 1949], but clearly Guiraud is only familiar with Lazar’s 1964 presentation of that material.) However, still unfamiliar in 1978 with the suggested Arabic derivation of trobar, he is elusive about the problem of the apparent disjunction between synchronic and diachronic analyses, and following on the heels of his presentation of the case of jovens, this seems all the more ironic. It is also a very explicit case of how illusory it is to attempt to separate the two areas of study so neatly. For further discussion of this general issue, see note 26 below, and for different perspectives on the dehistoricization of medieval texts and studies of them, see Bloomfield 1979 and Nichols 1983. Jauss 1979 and Calin 1983 tackle the problem from the perspective of the “otherness” of the medieval period and its dialectical relationship with the modern one.

      8. It is revealing to take Petrarch, as many scholars do, as one of the first explicit advocates of such an analysis of history. His role as one of the first humanists has been discussed by many, and his views on the primacy of classical studies, on the darkness of the Dark Ages, and on that entire constellation of notions are widely known and cited. It is revealing to note, and this is less often referred to, that such views were accompanied by quite virulent anti-Arabism. For a presentation and analysis of this phenomenon, see Gabrieli 1977. Hays 1968 is also helpful for understanding the relative modernity СКАЧАТЬ