The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Maria Rosa Menocal

views are succinct, if extreme: “Without Islam, who can guess what our destiny might have been? Without Islam, Spain would have followed the same paths as France, Germany and England; and to judge from what we have achieved over the centuries in spite of Islam, perhaps we would have marched at their head” (translation, Monroe 1970:257). While few other cultural or literary historians have been as vigorous and frank as he, it is difficult to dispute the prevalence and strength of some variety of this argument.¹⁹ This and its many other companion pieces and like opinions reveal once more the firmness of the Europeanist view that the true Europe and Europeanness are not Arabic- or Jewish-influenced. What at first glance is a formative component is more accurately a deforming component in terms of the rest of Europe, the real Europe. In Sánchez-Albornoz’s view (and that of numerous others), Spain’s defects—its not being up to the standards of France, England, and Germany—are a result of the misfortune of having been de-Europeanized by Semitic influences. But is this really substantially different from the premise of those literary historians who appear to be writing the history of a country they present as fully a part of the Western tradition, one in which the existence of Muslims and Jews and their cultures might never be guessed by the innocent reader?²⁰ Do not both views express, in different styles, the same premises, that is, that Semiticised Spain is less than the rest of Europe and that Spain with those elements blotted out would be part of the European tradition? For other Europeanists, most of whom naturally enough take their cues on matters Hispanic from Hispanists, the result has often been that characterized by the notion of Spain’s “cultural belatedness” vis-à-vis the rest of Europe.²¹

      Even so, one must know that the question of the effect of the Arab sojourn in Spain is hardly a matter of vital importance to most medievalists. Sánchez-Albornoz’s preoccupation with the subject is a result of his being a Spaniard, not the natural result of being a Hispanist or a medievalist. Most Hispanists and medievalists begin their study of medieval literature with the first texts in Romance and assume Latin, conceivably even Greek, to be the necessary classical languages to be learned. Hebrew and Arabic are normally considered superfluous. Even in the wake of the “discovery” of the Mozarabic kharjas nearly forty years ago, when a considerable number of Spanish medievalists actually teach these Romance refrains of classical Arabic and Hebrew poems, only a distinct minority of scholars and teachers read them or present them as part of the full poems (written in one or the other of the two classical Semitic languages) of which they are, in fact, a part.²²

      Knowledge of this body of poetry and the expected subsequent awareness of the world from which it came apparently has not affected the traditional canon of Romance literary history. There is no sign of the imminent appearance on required reading lists of Ibn Quzmān, Jehudah ben-Ezra, Maimonides, or Averroes. The signs abound that even in the period after the discovery of the kharjas which was once heralded as the beginning of a “new spring” for European lyric studies,²³ only a relative handful of the details of our story have been altered or expanded, few or none of its basic premises have been modified, and its vitality is hardly diminished. Anthologies of medieval European lyric can still be published with a paltry section entitled “Arabic and Other Nonmainstream Poetry,” and it may be comprised solely of a fragment of Ibn Ḥazm’s Dove’s Neck-Ring, which would be as if in the section on Provençal lyric there were but a fragment of Andreas Capellanus’s treatise.²⁴ Prominent cutting-edge journals in literary studies can still devote entire issues to the crossroads at which medieval literary studies find themselves and include not the slightest hint that one of the problems to be addressed is that of the cultural biases and boundaries that delimit the field itself, despite the many indications of the inadequacy of the canon and its parameters that have surfaced in the last forty years.²⁵

      The crossroads, turning points, or moments of crisis that medieval literary studies have faced, and faced up to, in recent years have overwhelmingly been those concerning methods of literary criticism. The choice is most simply presented as being that between the formalist criticism of scholars such as Zumthor and the classicist criticism best exemplified by the still-authoritative work of Curtius. What all this has increasingly boiled down to is the question of whether medieval literary studies, once the vanguard of the discipline of modern literary studies, will remain largely a bastion of old-fashioned, philological, historicizing study, which is increasingly removed from the critical and theoretical avant-garde. Either of the two possible answers to this question raises eyebrows and threatens those parties who have a vested interest in the dominance of one approach or another.

      So far, neither answer has implied any necessary reevaluation of the very bases of our definition of the medieval period, its literature, or its salient cultural features and parameters. The compromise between the two extremes, stated both elegantly and succinctly by Poirion, is to see (and therefore presumably to analyze) the literary text as being “situated at the point of connection between the imaginary and the ideological” (Poirion 1979:406). The most reasonable critic, therefore, rejects both the dehistoricization of formalist criticism (and many of its progeny) and the devaluation of the essential literary or imaginative properties of texts, which is peculiar both to very traditional philological studies and to some contemporary new critical analysis.

      But the most reasonable critic, of whatever critical stripe, might also wish to question and reevaluate his or her most basic concept of the fundamental historicocultural characteristics of the period, because such a concept ultimately affects in innumerable ways the results of the application of any method. The strength of the model or image with which we start out is paramount; at a minimum, it defines what is and is not possible, what a word or image that we “know” or “recognize” is likely to mean, or not to mean. This is self-evident if the approach used is one of the several classicist variations, since at least one of the principal objectives of such a study is archaeological, to find and establish the historicocultural backdrop of the text at hand. This linguistic, literary, and cultural backdrop informs both the questions asked and the answers given. It determines the probable meaning and origin of a word in the twelfth century, a given author’s presumed use of Aquinas or a Bernardine sermon, and the kind of assumptions we make about the relationships between a text and its society. But, as I noted earlier in this chapter, the impact of our model, this background, is scarcely less at the other end of the critical spectrum, in formalist studies.²⁶

      In both cases such premises are fundamental determinants, and yet, paradoxically, it seems they are also the premises we have least frequently questioned or examined. But, given the many studies that suggest that they may be inadequate, are these not rightly among those most deserving of scrutiny, justification, and validation? One knows, or believes it to be a fair assumption, that an eleventh-century word did not denote “airplane” or “tomato,” or “relativity” in the Einsteinian sense of the word. But how have we determined, and is it a reasonable determination, that it is more or less likely that the word gazel used in Provençal could have meant what it did for speakers of Hispano-Arabic? How can we still be so certain of our assumption that the basic reading list for a budding medievalist should include Aquinas and Augustine but not Ibn Ḥazm or Avicenna? How revolutionary or revealing can the deconstruction of medieval texts be if the series of social and ideological mores or norms presumably being covertly subverted in such texts have themselves not been carefully scrutinized? The ideologically bound strictures and limits of our “common knowledge” and even “common sense” are not easily bypassed. As Stanley Fish has noted (in a discussion that was hardly concerned with the role of Arabs in medieval Europe):

      I argue that whatever account we have of a work or a period or of the entire canon is an account that is possible or intelligible only within the assumptions embodied in current professional practice. Rather than standing independently of our efforts, works, periods, and canons have the shape they do precisely because of our efforts, and therefore no act of literary criticism, no matter how minimally “descriptive” can be said to “bypass” the network that enables it. (Fish 1983:357)

      But even more engaging than the fact that our paradigms govern us faute de mieux should be the recognition that many of the most widely discussed critical problems of literary history and even theory, particularly as applied to medieval studies, dovetail well with an explicit exploration and reevaluation of the images we hold of the medieval period