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4 Geography and Genealogy in The Wars of Alexander
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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4 Geography and Genealogy in The Wars ofAlexander BoTH St. Erkenwald AND Sir Gawain and the Green Knight stage confrontations with mysterious figures interpolated into insular history.1 The poems revive them to work toward historic transitions: the conversion of Britain into a Christian polity united under the bishop's merciful order or the possible coming of age of Arthur's youthful court, its transformation from a clique ofgamesters into a true fellowship ofknights in the crowning era of British history. The next two chapters, on The War.r ofAlexander and The Siege ofJerusalem, also describe pivotal historic transitions but on even larger scales: the construction of new empires through confrontations with their predecessors. However, the predecessors in both The War.r of Alexander and The Siege of]erusalem are not native; they are enticingly and terrifYingly exotic. The War.r ofAlexander presents its hero with a myriad of powerful oriental predecessors led by Alexander's secret and secretive father, Anectanabus, an Egyptian king who is also a sorcerer, astrologer, healer, midwife, prophet, god-impersonator, and trickster. The orientalized Jews in The Siege ofJerusalem mount battle towers on the backs of elephants , and in one source, the Legenda Aurea, when one character admits he lives in Jerusalem, another replies: "Thou art from the land of sorcerers . . . and therefore must possess the secret of healing?'2 In the poem itself, Jerusalem yields its conquerors both miraculous healing and miraculous wealth. It becomes not simply a city but a career. In both poems, it is not inherent cultural difference that differentiates the two worlds of east and west but rather the violent disjuncture of conquest itself.3 In these poems, Jews, Egyptians, Saracens, and even Old Romans die not simply for their usury, past crimes, or reliance on false philosophies but because they are too closely related to the emergent Christian or chivalric world orders that their deaths will invigorate. These poems stage the destruction of these predecessors as a means of claiming rightful inheritance oftheir power. They are thus driven by seemingly contradictory impulses; they mingle reverence for the past with its obliteration . This obsession with oriental predecessors intimately and intractably 112 Chapter 4 perplexes the troubled ideologies of western, Christian, masculine, and chivalric sovereignty. It shows them to have sprung from precisely those origins they are most anxious to alienate even as they seek to appropriate, cleanse, and flex the authority of their inheritance. Both poems begin with a world of subtly interconnected empires and work violently to efface those connections, polarizing the world into two mythological realms: the Occident and the Orient, which they seek to realize as conqueror and the conquered. They maneuver in ways that invoke much later orientalisms but also invite us to rescrutinize later orientalisms' methodological strategies because late medieval constructions of east and west before European hegemony were necessarily more multiple, complex, and flagrantly imaginary than they later became.4 Within the poems, the "eastern" figures are generally opposed by characters who emerge through their conflict as in some way (and often ambiguously) proto-European, either through religion, ideology, or chivalric practice. To the emergent empires of each poem, the orientalized cultures are made to represent a rich history of wealth and knowledge that their western descendants and destroyers cannot by themselves generate but which the poems attemptoften problematically-to render for appropriation. The logic of their strategies has been described by Mary Louise Pratt (in a study of imperialism) and Naomi Schor (in a discussion of feminists Beauvoir and Irigaray) as "othering."5 This process takes a series ofcomplicated , elusive, and flexible relationships and it coagulates them into two unequal agents facing each other across a rift. Ofthese agents, one is familiar and self-like and is provisionally collected and unified by the fabricated gulfofdifference, through which it can further elaborate, perform, and extend itself. Its self-unifying and self-universalizing strategies are energized by a binary logic of presence and absence, agency and passivity, knowing subject and object of knowledge, that always ensures it the upper hand. Edward Said makes this radical division between self and Oriental other a precondition for the exercise ofan imperialist "will to knowledge" through which the other culture's constructed distance, difference, and potential resistance can be subjected to study, elaborated only as other, and controlled in an epistemological imperialism that keeps pace with actual colonialism in a sinister pas de deux.6 Schor more succinctly suggests that "othering involves attributing to the objectified other a difference...