The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Maria Rosa Menocal

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 of our concept of what constitutes Europe.

      9. The debunking of the myth of the darkness of the Middle Ages is certainly best exemplified by Haskins 1927, but Pernoud 1977 indicates that many of those views have never been completely eradicated, and why in her view they ought to be. Among general literary historians there is surprisingly often a notion of the primitivism of the medievals relative to the modern period, and prominent critics (see Bloom 1973) can still regard everything before the Renaissance as antediluvian. Even among medievalists, similar views are not unknown. Zumthor (1975), to take one example, is able to characterize the period and its men as incapable of autobiographical writing. A recent nonacademic perspective on the surge of interest in medieval studies and what this implies for our general perceptions of the period is Murphy 1984. See also Jauss 1979 and Calin 1983.

      10. For a succinct history and extensive bibliography of the development of these views as reflected in scholarship dealing with troubadour lyrics, see Boase 1976.

      11. Prévost (1972:18), inspired by Althusser, notes that people “use” ideology, but “sont également produits et mis en mouvement par l’idéologie, par ce qui fonctionne comme un véritable inconscient culturel” (emphasis mine). Evidence of the institutionalization of these general views surrounds us. General anthologies of European medieval literature do not, as a matter of course, include examples of literature written in Arabic or Hebrew, nor do they even, in many cases, acknowledge or discuss its existence as part of the general historical background. Courses on medieval literature, with few exceptions, perform the same excision. Even the very definition of what is “Spanish” literature that is implicit in the structure of courses and histories and anthologies of the literature systematically excludes what was written in Arabic and Hebrew at the same time as what was written in the Romance vernaculars. The definition of a Hispanist has rarely included knowledge of Islamic Spain from any but a rudimentary fronterizo point of view. In the often daunting inventory of languages deemed necessary tools for a medievalist, Arabic rarely figures. The respective bodies of literature are shelved in different sections of our libraries, are studied by different scholars, and are taught in different departments, even though in some cases they may come from the same place and time. A familiarity with the works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch is considered necessary for the truly competent French or Spanish medievalist, but even rudimentary information on the translations of Arabic and Hebrew works commissioned by Frederick II or of the Arabic poetry dedicated to his grandfather Roger is rare even in an Italian medievalist. Augustine and Aquinas are de rigueur; Averroes and Maimonides are obscure figures at best. To argue that there are and have been exceptions to such rules would hardly contradict the validity of this