Download PDF | Jerold C. Frakes - Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany (The New Middle Ages) -Palgrave Macmillan (2011).
253 Pages
PREFACE
his book takes as its objects of literary analysis Hrotsvit von the Ludus de Antichristo, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epics Parzival and Willehalm, and several lyrics by Walther , Gandersheim’s “Pelagius,’ von der Vogelweide. That is, works by medieval Germany’s most important dramatist (Hrotsvit),' its most important epic poet (Wolfram), and its most important lyricist (Walther).
Their work is here linked through the focus on their representation of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations, a topic of burning relevance in the texts’ tenth, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and indeed even now in the twenty-first century. The discourse of the Muslim Other is a focal topic that has received much attention from a broad range of medievalists in a variety of subfields in recent decades, although there has surprisingly been little focus by medievalists in German studies.
As will become clear in the course of this study, prevailing tendencies in recent research on the medieval European discourses of the Muslim Other (generally focused on England, France, and Spain) prove inadequate in accounting for the representation of Islam in medieval Germany, demonstrating clearly that in what is sometimes (now rarely) mistakenly imagined as a single discursive mode of representing the Muslim Other or even a single linear developmental tradition of that discourse during the European Middle Ages, there is in fact little uniformity. It is precisely this “local” diversity within a larger and generally cohesive discursive corpus that is the focus here. The study attempts to add a missing (medieval German) piece to the puzzle.
Several basic issues need to be clarified at the outset. We live in a time when there are many cultures and large segments of the population— by no means all—that advocate and aspire to some practice of tolerance of racial, cultural, and religious difference. In some places the state itself is conceived as a secular guarantor of such practices. Those who share such ecumenical practices customarily react with disappointment if not outrage when confronted with intolerance of such difference. While limited exceptional status might be granted to court society in Friedrich II’s Hohenstaufen Sicily and to some periods and locales in pre-Almohadic Muslim Spain, such tolerance quite simply did not exist in the cultures and period treated by this book, except perhaps as the undocumented practice of unknown individuals.
There was no secular state per se to be found: cuius regio eius religio [the ruler’s religion is the state’s religion],” and the ruler was conceived as the defender of the faith—whichever one that happened to be. Even those medieval thinkers and writers who are sometimes credited by modern scholars as “progressive” were not so by any modern standards. To expect that of them and to be disappointed or outraged when they fail to satisfy our expectations says more about us than it does about them. At the same time, however, there is obviously no reason for students and scholars of earlier historical periods simply and tacitly to ignore or condone the denigration, physical abuse, cultural erasure, or outright slaughter of individuals or entire communities because of their actual or perceived racial, cultural, or religious differences, as has routinely happened in many times and places, including the European Middle Ages.
I seem then to advocate as a proper response to such practices neither moral outrage nor relativistic indifference. What is one then to think, to take a pertinent medieval German example, of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s depiction of a caricatured Islam, in which Muhammad is among the Muslim gods worshipped in the form of wooden idols; Muslim knights are almost without exception black-skinned or have horn-like carapaces instead of skin; a Muslim queen’s black skin fills her chivalric Christian champion alternately with physical disgust and disfiguring lust; the offspring of mixed Christian-Muslim marriages are black-and-white striped or spotted; Muslim knights are of a nobility unsurpassed—even by Christian knights—except for the fact that at the very moment of their deaths they are snatched directly into Hell either by Satan’s demons or indeed by their own gods.
The cultural, religious, and racial bigotry inherent in such commonplaces of western European Christian views of Muslims during the high Middle Ages is both obvious and familiar, since so many clichés have in one form or another survived in modern modes of bigotry. Do we have no right to be outraged? Why is our outrage justified when our contemporaries voice, mutatis mutandis, similar idiocies about Muslims (or Inuits, Hindus, Blacks, or Jews), but not when Wolfram does so? Is it really simply a matter of chronology: could Wolfram not have known anything about, and thus not be held responsible for his errors concerning, Muslims? In fact the Qur’an was available in a (contentious) Latin paraphrase even before Wolfram’s lifetime, by which time there had already been a century of contact between Crusaders and Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean littoral and more than four centuries of Christian-Muslim contact in Iberia. Many thousands of Crusaders who had had direct and long-term contact with individual Muslims and their communities had returned to their central and northwestern European homelands and some of them could have pointed out to Wolfram that, for instance, unlike his literary Muslims, actual Muslims were not all black-skinned and there was not a single idolator among them.
But we in fact know nothing about Wolfram’s experience with “actual Islam,” and even if we did, we know that then as now bigotry rarely responds to empirical evidence, and we must view Wolfram’s bigotry not as his own invention but rather, in its cultural context, as a single reiteration of a recurring mode of Euro-Christian responses to the Other, in this case the Muslim Other. In fact it would be useful even at this point to acknowledge that the supposed discrepancy assumed in the previous sentence—between the literary Muslim and the actual Muslim—skews the issue, for, as is treated at some length in chapter two and taken as a fundamental principle of the remaining analysis, it is not after all a matter of Wolfram “getting it wrong” in making his Muslim characters black and idolatrous: his representation of Muslims is not an inaccurate misrepresentation of “actual” Muslims, but rather ultimately a representation, image, and invention that had a life of its own beyond any corroborative value of “actual” Muslims as guarantors of accuracy.
Such an “established pattern” of verbal behavior, which some decades ago Edward Said, following Michel Foucault, termed a discourse, was indeed a long-term mode of thinking, writing, and conceiving of the Muslim Other that we find in a variety of related forms—-so it may initially seem—almost wherever we look in medieval European texts: in Crusader sermons, in courtly romance, in political lyric, geographical treatises, and maps, in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Byzantium, and so on.
We must, however, guard against reenacting the same forcible straightjacketing of those practicioners of this discourse that Said found in the Muslim Other as conceived by Europeans: while the basic components of the medieval discourse of the Muslim Other from various periods, locales, and textual genres are recurringly familiar, they neither are in fact always the same, nor do the same words used in different temporal, geographical, and textual contexts necessarily mean the same things. As with most cultural phenomena, the constructed Muslim Other, that is, the discourse of the Muslim Other, in medieval Christendom is complex; when we consider its thousands of iterations from Iceland to Armenia, from Novgorod to Portugal, over the course of almost a millennium, perhaps we would be tempted to say that the discourse of the Muslim Other is not just maddeningly complex, but even hopelessly confused.
While such issues have undergone extensive examination in recent decades especially in medieval English and French studies, the medieval literature of the German-speaking lands has thus far not been comprehensively studied, although much serious work—on which this study builds— has in fact already been done. The present study seeks to contribute to that larger ongoing interrogation of German materials. It is intended neither to draw up a list of images of medieval Christian bigotry directed against Muslims, which would at most simply tempt the “enlightened” among us to be outraged, nor to enable any facile identification of the bigotry of that period with that of our own. While such discourses of the deformed and defamed Other have been employed to justify a broad range of concrete actions in the world, including military, political, diplomatic, propagandistic, and missionizing projects, those actions and their contexts are not the same from century to century and state to state.
It is those local contextualizations of this evolving discourse in an ever-changing geopolitical and intellectual mosaic that is ultimately the point, for it is at those specific sites that practical appeal is made to the discourse and that the discourse then, dialectically, functions to “explain” and justify the praxis. It is at that juncture that twenty-first century politics connects—through multiply refracted offsets—intellectually, politically, and practically to the medieval period and its modes of representing Muslims as the ultimate Other.
The issues treated in this study are for obvious reasons relevant to contemporary political discussions and geopolitical events, and are thus sensitive, for many, even explosive. Whenever the post- and anticolonialist rhetoric directed against Crusaders and their anti-Muslim ideological descendents—whether in the following pages or in contemporary discussions—threatens to become too strident or self-righteous, however, we would do well to remember that only four centuries before the Crusaders began their centuries-long depredations in Muslim territories in the eastern Mediterranean, the Arab conquest itself swept north out of the Arabian peninsula, east into Mesopotamia and Persia, west across north Africa, and then north into Spain and Portugal, subduing all cultures and ethnicities in its path and turning all GUSI) Jal ahl ul-kitab [people of the book] (especially Christian and Jews) who did not convert to Islam, into «9 dhimmi, that is, tolerated and tax-paying religious aliens.
At the time of the Muslim conquest, statistically most of the conquered territories west of the historical Parthian/Persian culture—Syro-Palestine, Asia Minor, and north Africa from Egypt to the west—were peopled predominantly by a multi-cultural mosaic of Christians. While the Arab conquest did not have as its purpose or method the eradication of conquered peoples, and it was in many if not most places the case that the language and culture of the administration immediately after the conquest was the same as before the conquest, there is likewise no question but that gradual and sometimes not so gradual Islamization and linguistic Arabization was the rule. For instance, in St. Augustine’s Hippo, west of Carthage, Christianity was the dominant religion and Latin the language of high culture (while cities were still bilingual in Latin and Punic, and Berber still dominated the countryside) in the centuries before the late seventh-century conquest, while Islam and Arabic systematically and inevitably took over those functions within generations of the conquest (although Berber has persisted up to the present in many areas).
In the course of the century or two following the sweeping Islamic conquest, most Christians in this vast territory, which comprised essentially the extent of the non-European Roman Empire (at its peak), directly converted to Islam or, less directly, in the course of a lifetime simply experienced the withering of their own religious devotion as their community of believers disappeared so that their own offspring in the next generation converted almost by default. The foundational churches of Christian practice around the eastern Mediterranean littoral, dating from the earliest period of the establishment of the religion, withered— even if they were not militantly, actively, and deliberately eradicated—or reduced to vestigial remnants. Language, religion, and cultural traditions were radically transformed and in many cases extinguished—not overnight, of course, but within a relatively brief span of time nonetheless.
Obviously, as just indicated, the Muslim conquest did not explode onto uninhabited territory, but rather moved north, east, and west into territories that had at one time or another been components of the Byzantine, Persian/Parthian, Roman, Medean, Macedonian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician, and Egyptian empires. The Muslim conquest was thus not the first imperial conquest of these territories, nor were the Crusades the last imperial conquest attempted there. One must keep this longer view of successive waves of conquest and colonization in mind when treating the Crusades as an example of a premodern military conquest and colonization motivated at least in part by religious doctrine. Joshua Prawer has indeed astutely noted that since Christians viewed the Holy Lands as their own to be ruled and possessed: “In the eyes of the West, to use a very modern expression, the Crusade was actually a movement of decolonization!””?
The common tendency to tally scores in contests of “whose cultural annihilation was worse?” in the history of colonialism is either naive or disingenuously in the service of contemporary political projects. It is nonetheless salutary to keep in mind that in the centuries immediately following the rise of Islam, historical Muslim culture was no less militaristic and colonialist than were the Crusaders some time later—or than had been the Romans, Assyrians, and so on, some time earlier. The Muslim conquest was, however—and this is of essential historical and ethical importance—in most respects also clearly and demonstrably less bigoted and certainly less destructive of life, lives, and local cultures, certainly than was the Crusader project. The primary distinction of enduring historical value between the Muslim conquest and the Crusades was, however, ultimately that Muslim colonialization was/has been vastly more enduring.
But while that is the background hum of the present analysis, it is in fact the subject for a different book, not the present one, which is instead indirectly concerned with that later European attempt to conquer Muslim territories in Syro-Palestine and elsewhere through the Crusades, and most directly with the discourse of the Muslim Other that arose in, around, and out of that conflict, specifically in a single subset of European literature of the period: the literature of medieval Germany. The analysis and acknowledgment of racial and religious bigotry does not constitute nor is it intended as a condemnation of Christian or German culture; furthermore, it is neither a defense of Islam, nor yet an apology for the colonial ventures of either party. It is instead a study of literary and political discourse, in which there is, one might hope, significance not just for the period of time under scrutiny—although that would be enough in itself—but also for other times and places where similar (never identical) conditions obtain. While I make no pretense of objectivity, I likewise have no interest in arguing a propagandistic case.
As will become clear in the course of the study, the medieval European discourses of the Muslim Other are by no means irrelevant or without connection to the corresponding twenty-first century discourses. There is much to be learned from the constructions of those medieval discourses, and not just by medievalists.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project has had a long gestation period, during which a number of other book projects on quite different topics were completed; it has been largely reconceived twice along the way. It was twice supported by Alexander von Humboldt fellowships at the Freie Universitat Berlin, under the sponsorship of Professor Dr. Ekkehart Krippendorff (Politologie 1993) and Professor Dr. Peter Schafer (Judaistik 1997-1998), to both of whom I again tender my sincere thanks. Various versions of several chapters have formed the basis of lectures at UCLA, Boston University, BoSazici Universitesi (Istanbul), Princeton University, Ohio State University, and conference papers at the German Studies Association (New Orleans) and the Modern Language Association Convention (Chicago). Critiques, discussions, and conversations that grew out of those presentations have been of inestimable aid in rethinking the argument over the course of a number of years.
An early version of part of chapter four appeared in the Liberman Festschrift: Germanic Studies in Honor of Anatoly Liberman, ed. Kurt Gustav Goblirsch et al. (Odense: Odense University Press, 1997), 119-33. Paul Kaplan (SUNY Purchase) provided an informed and very welcome reading and critique of chapter four during a mutual sojourn in Venice as NEH fellows in 2006. A conversation with Sue Houchins (Bates College) about essential issues having to do with this project has been ongoing for fifteen years. I trust that the book’s appearance will not end that conversation, but rather open it to a larger group of participants including the many colleagues whose scholarly work has educated me on these issues over the course of many years.
CHAPTER 1
LUDUS AS PRELUDE
Brian de Palma’s flawed but bitingly insightful film Redacted (2006),
based in part on an actual rape/murder in Al-Mahmidtya (Iraq) in 2006 by five U.S. Army soldiers, takes as its subject the war in Iraq, the media representation of the war in Iraq, various modalities of representation in multiple types of media, and ultimately the problem of representation in general. The video footage shot by the character Angel Salazar, a U.S. soldier whose squad staffs a checkpoint in Samarra’, Iraq (which he aspires to use in his application to film school after his tour of duty), purports to be “authentic,” providing the viewer with the “real” story, the Truth of the war in Iraq, based on “actual events.” He claims that his film will not be a “Hollywood action flick” and will have no “adrenalin-pumping soundtrack, no logical narrative to help make sense of it. Basically here, shit happens,” he maintains. Later he claims about his film: “...this is about the truth, bro. This is about what’s goin’ down.
This is about the truth, 24/7. This camera, it never lies.” Angel and his comrades are the Hollywood caricatures of melting-pot stereotypes that have become standard in U.S.-made war films, most of whose names telegraph their narrative or even moral function: Angel as uneducated but ambitious, interested and engaged would-be cultural commentator on mainstream culture from the perspective of his own marginalized ethnic position (“that poor Latino film-maker that did not get into U.S.C.”); the “intellectual” Gabe Blix who reads books while off-duty and whose masculinity is, as a direct consequence, incessantly questioned by his bullying macho comrades (he is, for instance, identified in the opening scene by the nickname “Don’t-ask-don’t-tell”); the no-nonsense master sergeant, James Sweet (once called Sweetness);' the conflicted and concerned Lawyer McCoy, who despite his best efforts, is unable to commit to moral action in an immoral environment; and the rural bigots, Rush and Flake (often called “Snowflake”), whose racism dialectically is ormed by and re-forms their interactions both on the base and beyond. Basal-level bigotry defines the squad’s interactions with Iraqis (but not just with them), whom they generally refer to as “hajis,”* “ sand niggers,” “Johnny fuckin’ Jihad,” “motherfuckin’ rag-heads,” and “midget Ah Babas” (Iraqi children).
They are also directly or indirectly compared to “cockroaches,” “dark chocolate” (sexualized women), and “weeds.” The essentializing of racial identity as determinative of (all) human interaction enables the culminating action in which several members of the squad participate at various levels of responsibility in various components of the serial rape of Farah, a fourteen-year-old Iraqi schoolgirl, and then the murder and burning of her and her family.
Angel’s “documentary” footage purports to provide the viewer with a direct view of the “reality” of the war in Iraq, as opposed to the multiple other media sequences of, for instance, the biased distortions in the soldiers’ home-made videos from YouTube, the officially sanctioned narrative of an onsite French documentary news crew, and the propaganda of al-Qaida videos, that are interspersed throughout de Palma’s film. But, of course, there is nothing remotely “documentary” or “authentic” about the footage attributed to Angel, which is simply one part of the film shot by de Palma, just as, to state the obvious, the actors who play the roles of the caricatured squad members are not actual U.S. soldiers. As the screen-text disclaimer that opens the film indicates,
This film is entirely fiction, inspired by an incident widely reported to have occurred in Iraq. While some of the events here depicted may resemble those of the reported incident, the characters are entirely fictional, and their words and actions should not be confused with those of real persons.
Then the words of the screen-text begin to be marked through, as if with a black pen (“fiction” / “may” / “some of” / “fictional” / “confused”) thus at first subtly and then not so subtly changing the meaning of the text, even as it is still before us, before all meaning is lost in the disjointed jumble. Eventually all the words are elided except for the scattered letters of the title, which are assembled into the word “Redacted,” after which the sound of a typewriter accompanies the letter-by-letter appearance of a new onscreen text: “visually documents imagined events before, during and after a 2006 rape and murder in Samarra.” Hardly has this troublingly ambiguous disclaimer made us aware of the represented nature of what will follow, before various types of evidence begin to appear that further complicate our initial conception of the whole, toying with our notions of the authentic.
Salazar’s view of his responsibility and involvement is initially naive, particularly in his insistence that his film will present the truth and that the camera “never lies,” to which McCoy immediately replies with the cliché that the truth will be the first casualty of the war. Much later, just before entering Farah’s family’s house and recording on video Flake’s offhand confession to having killed her family in another room of the house (thus explaining the gunshots audible off camera) and the rape of Farah, Salazar claims to McCoy that he is “a fly on the wall,” simply recording what happens. McCoy responds that he is a “jackal rippin’ meat off a fuckin’ carcass.” Later in the video of his psychological counseling session, Salazar admits to the counselor: “just “cause you're watching it doesn’t mean you’re not a part of it.... That’s what everyone does. They just watch, and they do nothing.” A week later, however, he smilingly reports on camera (in a message intended for his mother) that he has some great footage that will “really” show what is happening in Iraq. He is then interrupted midsentence by his own on-camera abduction from the checkpoint itself.
The whole is thus a politically edgy film made for commercial release and based on fictionalized media reports. Besides Salazar’s footage, de Palma’s film includes, as noted above, a broad range of footage purportedly from other sources: YouTube videos from the Web sites “Just a Soldier’s Wife” (posted by McCoy’s wife, Judy) and “The Get Out of Iraq Campaign”; the local “ATV” news from Samarra’; embedded journalist video footage (also from an ATV reporter); the quasi-CNN reports of “CEN” (Central European News) newscasts; a French news documentary entitled “Barrage” [checkpoint]; a Web site of the insurgent group 43-4) lags Suhada’ ul-hurrtyya [martyrs of freedom]; a surveillance camera inside the camp gate; night-vision video shot by helmet-mounted video cameras of soldiers on patrol outside of camp; an online video chat; Army video of investigative interviews, Army video of a psychological counseling session; Rush and Flake’s later self-interview using Salazar’s camera; a home-movie video of McCoy’s welcome home party.
They are all also fictional and were made specifically for inclusion in this film, that is, they are simply fictive segments of de Palma’s production. Even the photographic sequence added as a postscript to the film, explicitly identified onscreen as “Collateral Damage—Actual Photographs from the Iraq War” includes “fictional” photographs: at least one of them—of the pregnant woman shot by the squad at the checkpoint—is obviously a still from an earlier scene in Redacted itself, while another is a photograph of the character Farah, the raped, murdered, and burned Iraqi girl, on the floor of her house, in the room where she had been set afire (recognizable from a scene from the film)—a shot that is otherwise not itself in the film.
The viewer is repeatedly lashed with the question of what is “real” in the course of viewing this conflictual multimedia collage that constitutes Redacted. The wooden dialogue and amateurish acting of the cast (the film was shot in two weeks with a total budget of five million dollars), the macabre and romanticized “human interest” emplotting of the anti-American “story” filmed by French documentary crew, the recurring lack of prop continuity from one shot to the next—on all levels, the “authenticity” or “reality” of what the viewer sees is undermined or altogether denied: we recognize the “distortions” of the French TV news documentary (which is presented in Redacted in French, which for most of the film’s audience presumably requires the added distorting filter of the included subtitles), the suhada’ ul-hurriyya propaganda videos, the narrow and personal propagandistic “slant” of the YouTube videos, but are less likely to acknowledge, at least on a conscious and ongoing, moment-to-moment basis, Angel’s film as redacted, despite the fact that in an early filmed “interview” with Blix, he interrupts and engages in an (unsuccessful) attempt at some low-level directorial shaping of the scene and Blix’s monotone delivery.
The viewer is nonetheless well enough trained to yearn somehow for it to be “real,” even though it is obvious that it is ultimately not Angel’s film at all, but de Palma’s, and that Angel, whose character dies in mid-film, is deeply involved in issues that are far beyond his ability to comprehend. As viewers we are in fact well trained and seek to decode the images, to filter out and resolve contradictions, to reevaluate the whole continuously, based on updated interpretative data, to insist on the integral comprehensibility of the hopelessly and very obviously fictive (fictionalized, fabricated, fraudulent) material that passes before our eyes. In this troubling and traumatizing film, de Palma offers another instance of the recurring cinematic insistence on one of the key issues in film-making and film-viewing: content is necessarily always a provisional construct. There can never be an identity of representation and represented; representation by definition is not the thing represented and can thus never be either authentic or inauthentic (false) with respect to das Ding an sich. Representation rather creates a new object, a new interpretandum, a new Authentic that is at best a refraction of the reality of which it is a representation.
To a critic who claimed never to have seen a woman who looked like the one represented in one of Matisse’s paintings, the artist allegedly retorted: it is not a woman; it is a painting.? De Palma’s Redacted is not the war in Iraq; it is a film that problematizes that war, every war, media discourse, racism, film-making technique, and the sociology of class in/ and the military. What it actually has to do with the actual war in Iraq is unclear and must ever remain so: does it get everything about the details of military checkpoints laughably wrong, as some Internet blogs have claimed (e.g., gun placement at checkpoints; the kind of verbal interaction plausible or even imaginable between officers and enlisted men, between soldiers and Iraqis, and among soldiers themselves), but still give a credible depiction of essential political issues, that is, sacrificing smaller truths for a larger Truth? What authority can decide such a complex issue?
To say that the relationship of the representation to the concrete reality ultimately represented is complex and never transparent is merely to state the banal, for this issue has motivated much if not most literary theory of most schools of thought during the past half century, proceeding initially in large part from Ferdinand de Saussure’s disquisitions on the signifié and signifiant.t The milieu of Redacted in the massive East-West conflict of our time, and the fundamental geopolitical issues at the root of the film are indeed precisely those problematized by Edward Said thirty years ago in Orientalism, which has in the intervening decades spawned cottage industries in some narrow sectors of academe.* Whether or not Brian de Palma knows Said’s work, his film gets at the heart of the issue that Said, making explicit use of terminology and analytical modes borrowed from Michel Foucault, so insistently and compellingly brought to an academic audience a generation ago.° In their own ways, Foucault, Said, and indeed de Palma deal with representations as cultural products of received discourse more than as replicas, mirrors, of simulacra of das Ding an sich, that is, as the results of inherited modes of narration and characterization, to give two examples from the realm of literary study, and inherited conceptions of national identity, religious valuation, relations with outsiders, to give three examples from the realm of political study. That is, they are dealing with discourse—established modes of talking/writing/thinking about particular things or issues, not with those things or issues themselves.
If the topic is the war in Iraq, then from the beginning of the invasion of Iraq up to the summer of 2010, those who follow media coverage in collateral English have seen a parade of terms such as “shock and awe, damage, and “al-Qaida in Mesopotamia” that have become part of the discourse rendition,” “draw down,” “surge,” “tribal/sectarian violence,” of war and especially this war, to which “haji” and “sand nigger,” noted above (neither of which was invented in this war), would necessarily also have to be added. The discourse of such an international geopolitical conflict is, like all language use, in a constant state of evolution but at any given moment consists of inherited systems of grammar, syntax, and lexicon, which also encompass embedded cultural values. Some users of the discourse are aware of the existence of such racial epithets as the last items in the list above, but do not use the epithet themselves, substituting other words instead, such as “Iraqi,” “local,” “terrorist,” or even “insurgent,” each of which obviously has different meanings and affiliations within the larger semantic field.
This discourse of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as a subsystem of language use, determines what can be said about the subject. To take an illustrative example, in addition to its common meaning as a “religious school associated with a mosque,” the Arabic word 4+1)44 madrasa, is also simply the standard unmarked word for any and every “school,” which can be combined with a variety of other modifiers to designate elementary school, middle school, secondary school, boarding school, school of thought, school for the handicapped, private school, agricultural school, vocational school’—all of them Uy!+« madaris [schools] and some of them as “fundamentalist” as, for instance, any random Catholic elementary school in Chicago or welder’s school in Seattle, some more so, some less so. If, however, most school children and other students at all levels and in all disciplines in Arabicspeaking countries and Arabic-influenced cultures attend a madrasa, and if that term has been integrated into the discourse of the East-West conflict as meaning “fundamentalist Islamic school” or even “terrorist training facility,’ then the political and propagandistic implications of the term’s (mis)use are obvious. Significant also is the fact that the term obviously belongs to an elevated level of discourse when used in Engish: its use implies that one knows if not the Arabic language itself then at least more than the average non-Muslim Western citizen knows about Islamic culture, and thus its very use commands the respect accorded an expert, which then extends the range of the discourse.
The representation of the focal crime in Redacted is multiple: Salazar’s camera shows what seems to be a rape, although nothing that would constitute clear visual evidence (and require an X-rating) is visible. While the recording apparatus registers the sound of shots off camera, and Flake immediately appears and claims to have killed the other members of the family, the camera itself does not “witness” the shooting. Then Salazar leaves the house and thus his camera does not record the murder of Farah and burning of her corpse reported later in other sources. After this “eyewitness” record, the crime and/or evidence of the crime are represented multiple other times: ATV reports via an interview with Farah’s father (who was, at the time of the crime, not at home but rather in U.S. military custody; thus his “testimony” can also only be second- or third-hand) on the crime; Salazar reports to an army official about his own psychological state, which could well be a response to involvement in a crime; McCoy reports very generally on the crime in an online video chat with his father; Salazar cheerfully records a message to his mother that he has important video of an event about which he cannot now give explicit details; ATV reports the case again in introducing the suhadd’ ul-hurriyya video, where the crime is again described, here as prelude to Salazar’s onscreen decapitation; on the Web site “The Get Out of Iraq Campaign,” a hooded man (McCoy) with an electronically distorted voice reports the general details of the crime; McCoy is interviewed by army investigators (who badger him and refuse to countenance his claim that a crime took place, since he was outside Farah’s house at the time of the alleged crime’s occurrence and thus directly witnessed nothing); CEN reports the charges in the case (including a video tour of the house and the smoke-blackened walls and blood-stained floors and an identity-card photograph of Flake); an indictment page of black-pen censored charges appears onscreen before the Army investigative interviews with Rush and Flake who report little if anything about the crime; on the home video recording of his welcome home party in a bar, McCoy agonizingly reports the crime in the most detail yet (except for the CEN report), at the end of which his guests in the bar spontaneously erupt in applause for McCoy whom they explicitly identify as a “war hero.”
The film ends without the textual epilogue that constitutes resolution in many such films. That is, the viewer is not informed about what takes place in the future, that is, whether the fictional soldiers were brought to trial and ifso, what verdicts were reached. Instead, the film ends with the photographs of “Collateral Damage,” mentioned above. De Palma thus again refuses to provide any closure that might be construed as an answer, refuses to decode the multiplicity of types of “eye-witness” evidence and provide the viewer with the Truth that Salazar naively imagines is inherent in visually recorded evidence. All that remains to the viewer is the representations, visual and verbal, multiple, conflicting, confusing, without definitive meaning. This is not to suggest that de Palma opts for a denial of responsibility or a denial that the truth can be known or that it is necessarily only “relative.” Instead the film insists that the truth is not simple, not often directly accessible, or the inevitable outcome of documentable and certifiable evidence, but is equally insistent that the truth is directly connected to moral action no matter how immoral the situation. Representation of the truth is not that truth but a distinct entity that may or may not relate to that truth.
Those readers puzzled by the inclusion of these ruminations on de Palma’s film on the U.S. invasion of Iraq in a book that otherwise focuses on the discourses of the Muslim Other in medieval Germany deserve some clarification, for this brief analysis is indeed vitally relevant, although perhaps not for reasons that might initially seem pertinent. It is not intended as an attempt (superficial or otherwise) to make a book about the distant and alien world of medieval literature “relevant” to twenty-first century readers. In fact, it is quite clear that de Palma’s East and West in general and the United States and Iraq in particular are not strictly parallel to any of the conflictual antagonists of the medieval Crusades and related ChristianMuslim conflicts. The medieval Crusades are not the twenty-first century “crusade,” whether constructed by one side or the other. Those who wish us to imagine that the Western anti-Muslim crusade began in the Middle Ages and has continued in the same mode unabated since that time—whether construed as a good or a bad thing—only distract us from the fact that most aspects of those Crusades and the present conflict are quite different. The inclusion of this brief consideration of de Palma’s film should then function here first of all to remind us of those differences, even as we grapple with the cluster of pestering issues about why we are so easily misled into thinking of them as somehow the same.
A more essential and very concrete point needs to be made here, as well, however: the ruminations on de Palma’s film also make explicitly clear that, not surprisingly, the modes of (ideological) representation employed by modern political film-makers and medieval authors are quite different indeed, and ultimately, that is the motivation for the inclusion of the chapter. Unlike de Palma, medieval authors only very rarely and even then, I think, inadvertently, engage in the kind of selfconscious questioning of the connection between experience and representation that is of primary relevance to (de Palma and) us in the present project. The film also makes obvious the troubled process of representation in the confrontation between the East and the West, specifically with Western military forays into Islamic territories. Made aware of our tentative and approximative abilities to come to terms with the modes of representations, then we come to a consideration of the medieval (especially medieval German) representations of an East-West conflict ofa different order. De Palma’s work does not derive from that medieval literary tradition, nor do the specifics of his filmic vision prepare us for the quite different aesthetics of, for instance, Wolfram von Eschenbach. Instead, this brief working through of de Palma’s film makes us insistently aware of our own constructions of “reality” out of the fragments of represented experience with which the film-maker or medieval author provide us.
De Palma does not provide us with a model that we will find in Hrotsvit, Wolfram, or Walther, nor provide us a mode of interpreting them. Instead, his insistent focus on modes of representation and the moral consequences of representation lays bare the necessity for us to monitor not the medieval texts themselves, but rather our own reading of those (and any other) texts and to pay constant attention to the mechanisms of our own construction of their “reality” out of the evidence that they present to us as twenty-first century readers. De Palma attempts to interrogate any and every assumption concerning the modes of visual representation as if identifiably “objective” or “subjective,” while Hrotsvit, Wolfram, and Walther not only make no such attempts but would even seem, we might speculate, unlikely to comprehend such distinctions and the larger issues behind them. My brief consideration of de Palma here then suggests that the absence of such overt concerns in the medieval texts does not constitute evidence of the ultimate absence of the issues themselves.
To give but a single illustrative example of the problem at issue, the fact that Wolfram does not question the legitimacy of his depiction of Feirefiz—the offspring of a Christian father and a Muslim mother—as black-and-white striped does not give us license to imagine that that depiction is culturally or morally insignificant or irrelevant, or that we are thus relieved of any responsibility to interrogate that depiction and the larger system of representation in which it figures. The fact that he does not question that mode of representation is indeed part of the issue that should, indeed must, concern us. A de Palma-like interrogation of any and all modes of representation at various levels of cultural authority is then the point at issue for us as readers.
It is also for that reason that I so thoroughly excavate the scholarly interpretations of my predecessors, with many of whom I quite disagree—not to castigate them for having been born a century or even a few decades before the political and scholarly interests of the twenty-first century could condition their sensibilities, but rather to allow us to reflect on how such interests are always at work (on us, too). This “insight” is not news; but we do nonetheless need constantly to be reminded of it in the various fields and subfields in which we work. In the context of the study of the discourses of the Muslim Other in medieval Germany, de Palma’s film is thus of burning relevance not as a parallel to any medieval author’s practice or as supposed evidence for any identity of medieval and modern conception of Muslims, but as a spur to our mode of inquiry into issues of the representation of Muslims.
From these deliberately still only partially theorized ruminations on issues of contemporary modes of representation as problematized by de Palma’s Redacted, the next chapter moves directly to an attempt to theorize the possibility of representing the cultural Other, especially in the focal issue of the present study: the Muslim Other in medieval Christian literature (especially in medieval Germany).
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