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  • "If One Who Is Loved Is Not Present, A Letter May be Embraced Instead":Death and the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle
  • Susan M. Kim

The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle directly follows the Wonders of the East in London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv. It seems logical to expect, as do Donald Davidson and A. P. Campbell, that it should continue the interest in monsters, or the "delight in the marvelous" that characterizes the Wonders.2 The Letter's interest in the marvelous may be called into question, however, by the fact that it excludes the ending found in most other versions of the text, which describes, among other things, a variety of monsters, including beasts with lion heads and tails, griffins, and long-haired aquatic women.

Kenneth Sisam argues that the abbreviated ending, read with the increased fluency of translation in passages that focus on the figure of Alexander in his campaign, suggests that the translator's concern is with "the campaign and the general."3 Douglas Butturf extends Sisam's argument and suggests that "the Old English translator consciously decided to delete the additional 'wonders' in order to finish climactically" with a condemnation of Alexander's egotism.4 To substantiate his claim that the letter is an "exemplum on the superbia of earthly rulers," Butturf constructs a brief stylistic analysis of the text.5 He again takes his cue from Sisam, who notes that

the ideal leader of the Greeks and Romans thinks first of his army, but our English translator felt that the general should come first. When water failed in the desert (14/1) [121b, 1–2], Alexander was concerned 'first about my own necessity and that of my army,' where the Latin has 'primo de statu [End Page 33] exercitus magis quam de proprio meo sollicitus sum periculo.' And at 12/8 [120b, 9–10] he camps 'because of the intolerable thirst that afflicted myself and also all my army and (transport) animals,' but the Latin has nothing equivalent to 'myself.'6

Butturf details a number of stylistic features that mark what he sees as egotism, most clearly the grammatically unnecessary proliferation of first-person pronouns. He points out that one "stylistic feature that distinguishes the Latin Alexander from the Old English Alexander is the fact that my is always on the tip of the latter's tongue."7 Andy Orchard, similarly, compares the first-person references in the Latin and in the Old English, and notes that the repetition of first-person pronouns effects the heightened emphasis, in the Old English, on what Orchard argues is the "self-absorption of Alexander."8

The compulsiveness of the Letter's repetition of the first-person pronoun—in Orchard's count, "there are 153 first-person references in the Latin, and 481 in the Old English"9—however, may suggest more than simply egotism. Kathryn Powell has argued, for example, that the emphatic first-person narration in the Letter enables readerly identification. In Powell's argument, such readerly identification is "exploited so that the reader suffers for it, is horrified by it, and eventually gives it up, having learned not to behave as Alexander does."10 In this essay, I wish to suggest that while the Letter's compulsive repetition of the first-person pronoun may be understood to function to provide moral instruction through identification with, then dissociation from, the figure of Alexander, it also powerfully articulates the text's involvement with and anxiety about the process of identification itself, the process of saying and writing "I," the problem, that is, of human identity as it is constructed through language. In this sense, despite the abbreviated ending, the Letter perhaps develops, rather than cuts off, the "interest in monsters" central to the Wonders of the East. The version of the Wonders of the East which is bound with the Letter of Alexander is characterized by illustrations which are often aggressively interacting with their frames, or only partially framed, or, frameless, as in the illustration of the ant-dogs, and invading the textual space. Through their possessive invasion of the text, the monstrous figures in the Wonders suggest profound anxiety about boundaries—the boundaries...

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