Death in Babylon: Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient (review)

The author of this book, an associate professor of Iberian studies in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University, describes the analytical treatment in this volume as springing from "an interrelated network of specific ideas and approaches rooted at once in phenomenological philosophy, literary criticism, and classical studies . . . a work of creative synthesis." Vincent Barletta's central, substantive focus is "the expansion of Iberian [Spanish and Portuguese] empire into Muslim Africa and Asia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" as chronicled by its historians. But his methodology goes well beyond his impressive command of this literature to (1) an interpretation inspired by Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, with the famous otherness of the red-haired man, encountered at the beginning of the novella, who presages the death of Gustav von Aschenbach, (2) the "absolutely unknowable" otherness of death in the work of the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas, and (3) the centrality of the "great white trope," Alexander the Great, in the literature of Iberian expansion.

This last point is critical for Barletta: "My argument, simply put, is that Alexander was both a trope for empire and a trigger for the theorization of deeper, more immediate accounts of human being at a pivotal moment in world history. . . . To gain an adequately contextualized understanding of that moment, and what we in the twenty-first century have inherited from it (even as I write the introduction, my own country's armed forces are seeking to control areas of Afghanistan and Iraq once held by Alexander), it will be necessary to move beyond traditional modes of literary analysis and investigate the ways in which human agents have made use of written texts to shape and theorize both our social world and those structures that underlie it."

Starting from Plutarch's account of Alexander's death in Babylon in 323 BCE, Barletta first reviews classical treatment of Alexander in chapter 2, "The Stinking Corpse: Alexander, the Greeks, and the Romans." His own court historian, Callisthenes of Olynthos, was appalled by Alexander's taking on the trappings of Oriental despotism (and he was tortured to death for his honesty), but the Romans, dedicated to their own imperial designs, proved ambivalent, but only because they saw themselves as vastly improving on Alexander's ambitions and despotic methods. And it was mainly from the Roman historians that the Iberians would derive their own narratives of triumph and tragedy in their quest for the chimera of temporal immortality in the face of the horrible unknowability of death.

Empirical history about Alexander's final days in Babylon is more or less found in Plutarch's account as summarized by Barletta. His "last days . . . were for the most part a blur of drinking and bad omens" in the wake of the death of his closest companion, Hephaestion, who drank himself into oblivion after both had returned from the Punjab. Alexander's reaction to this was "beyond all reason," according to Plutarch. But such iconic status as Alexander would enjoy through the centuries was also beyond all reason in that exaggerated mythic realm reserved for many of imperialism's apologists from the Hellenic era to the seminars on the Roman Empire held in the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld as the Iraq war was planned and executed. And so, after his examination of the "stinking corpse" and its classical embellishments, Barletta moves to the three central chapters covering Iberian expansion into the African and Asian Muslim worlds.

Chapter 3, "Oblivion," deals with the Spanish and Portuguese in the Maghreb, in which we see Mann's red-haired man who dares to stare back at the cultured German protagonist in Death in Venice. In this case it is the deposed Muslim head of the Saadi kingdom of Tangier, Muhammad al-Mutawakkill, physically embracing the Portuguese monarch, Sebastiao I, who had arrived on 8 July 1578 at...