Holy Wandering: The Worlding of the Alexander Romance (original) (raw)

Holy Wandering

Even truth ( α˙λη˙θεια)\dot{\alpha} \lambda \dot{\eta} \theta \varepsilon \iota \alpha), it seems, is smashed together
from elements of different sorts ( τ\tau oĩ α˙λλως\dot{\alpha} \lambda \lambda \omega \varsigma ouryeкqoтŋ̌oӨ α\alpha ); for the divine transport of being ( θεiα\theta \varepsilon i \alpha toũ ōvtos qoọa) is, I surmise, called by this name because it is a holy wandering ( θεiαα˙α˙η)\theta \varepsilon i \alpha \dot{\alpha} \dot{\alpha} \eta).

• Plato

Romance, observes Patricia Parker, “is . . . a form that simultaneously quests for and postpones a particular end, objective, or object.” The title of her study, Inescapable Romance, refers us to Wallace Stevens, whose “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (1949) calls “the search for reality” an “inescapable” and “endlessly elaborating” romance: in its striving to behold “[n]othing that is not there,” to capture an ens “free from images and change,” desire, Stevens warrants, “prolongs its adventure” and “through the intricate evasions of as” traverses “the heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed for lands.” “An Ordinary Evening”, in company with Aristotle, calls this quest for “being qua being” metaphysics, a project that the poem mounts seriously and pursues with historical precision: taking its point of departure from Plato’s foundational distinction between “that which is” (tò ōv) and “things as they appear” (tȧ qoavó μεvα\mu \varepsilon v \alpha ), “An Ordinary Evening” passes through Descartes’ “perpetual meditation . . . of the self,” to devolve upon the Kantian problematic that Stevens elsewhere calls “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.” That “An Ordinary Evening” should concern itself so centrally with metaphysics occurs within the English Romantic tradition as nothing novel. Wordsworth linked poetry directly to “the years that bring the philosophic mind,” and by 1802 Coleridge had already erected this connection into principle: “A great Poet,” Coleridge wrote, “must be, implicitè if not explicitè, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence . . . ; but he must have it by Tact.” “An Ordinary Evening” plays out Coleridge’s high purpose but corrects the English master on one point: in championing metaphysics as an undertaking “severe as any science,” as work which “after years [can] still [be] read with admiration,” the Biographia Literaria takes as its foil the Romance, which Coleridge disparages as a mere "daint[y] of

the day [that] can be [read] but once." For Stevens, however, these two enterprises fall together, and herein lies “An Ordinary Evening”'s principal literary provocation: that metaphysics, at least in certain of its chief particulars, constitutes what Stevens calls a “romanza out of the black shepherd’s isle,” that is, the errancy of mind that Baudelaire describes in his allegorical “Voyage à Cythère”. Jacques Derrida, who approached this problematic from a somewhat different point of view, came in fact to parallel conclusions. Best known in this connection is his characterization of Aristotelian metaphysics as a mythologie blanche, that is, the tropological framework that has historically enabled “white” European thought. The most insistent insight of “An Ordinary Evening”, then, is neither the Viconian thesis that “the whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate,” nor its Nietzchean inflection “that the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life,” but rather that, in its essentials, our metaphysics-our mythologie blanche-coincides generically with what West European poets since the twelfth century CE have called “romance.”

Far from static, however, metaphysics evolves through a historical unfolding. G. W. F. Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, as reconstructed by Karl Michelet in volumes 13-15 of Hegels Werke (1833-36), have-from Eduard Zeller (1844-52) to Bertrand Russell (1945) to Anthony Kenny (2013)-formed the basis of all ensuing histories of Western philosophy, even in the case of writers who, more often that one might wish, have never read them. In mapping this history, Hegel based his lectures on two fundamental propositions. First, he stressed that “philosophy arose among the Greeks” and, as it developed thereafter, it staked its ground primarily “on European soil.” Second, Hegel pointed out that this philosophical tradition was integrally coherent: “the succession of philosophic systems,” he insisted, “is not due to chance, but represents the necessary progression of stages in the evolution of the science . . . Particular philosophies are [neither] fashionable theories of the time, . . . nor casual eruptions here and there, but [constitute in series] an intellectual, rational, forward advance.” Accordingly, Hegel’s Lectures distinguish three “necessary stages” in this evolution:
A. Archaic and Classical Greece (6th - 4th c. BCE). With Thales begins “the withdrawal [of consciousness] from sensuous perception . . . into the unifying domain of thought.” Out of the manifold of things,

Presocratic thinkers searched for the single principle ( α˙ϱχη˙\dot{\alpha} \varrho \chi \dot{\eta} )—water, air, number, mind-which constituted their actual essence. This, in turn, prepared the way for Plato who, flouting phenomena entirely, theorized a suprasensuous world of actuating forms (i δεε˙αl\delta \varepsilon \dot{\varepsilon} \alpha \mathrm{l} ), occasioned by transcendent Unity ( ParseError: KaTeX parse error: Expected 'EOF', got '̀' at position 8: \tau o ̲̀ ~ \varepsilon … ), which he identified with the divine ( ParseError: KaTeX parse error: Expected 'EOF', got '̀' at position 8: \tau o ̲̀ ~ \theta \vare…. This progression culminates in Aristotle, whose crowning philosophical achievement was not only to differentiate matter from form, essence from accident, the moved from that which primally moves: at the acme of Greek thinking, Aristotle actually comes to think “the thought of thought”.
B. The “long” Hellenistic period (3rd c. BCE - 14th c. CE). This comprises the entrenchment of Aristotle’s metaphysics, in which all of Aristotle’s terms and distinctions are tested and played out: in effect, therefore, “[philosophy] did not develop further.” Rather, Aristotle’s speculative vigor splintered into the early Hellenistic schools whose antithetical positions remained dialectically disposed through the interplay between the universal (Stoicism), the particular (Epicureanism), and their mutual negation (Skepticism). At Rome, Plotinus attempted to negotiate this dialectic in a more synthetic manner, postulating an emanation of the One through Intelligence into Matter, and a correlative return from diversity to unity via the Mind. Moreover, through Plotinus and his students, Aristotelian ideas came to play a significant role in the formation of Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and Islam, the three great metaphysical systems of the later Hellenistic era. Islamic philosophy, in particular, sparked the exhaustive Aristotelianism of Medieval Europe, which pushed the master’s teachings to their limits: Aristotle Schoolman wound up mired in excessive subtleties wandering, as Hegel puts it, “among combinations of categories that were groundless.”
C. Early modern Europe (15th c-18th c. CE). The decisive break in the history of philosophy comes as the negation of the preceding Aristotelian tradition. From Aristotle on, metaphysics had been principally preoccupied with that which lies “beyond” phenomena-that is, with “transcendence.” Now, however, thought “abandons the content of what lies beyond,” and turns instead “to the finite and worldly as such,” to that which lies immediately before us. So René Descartes “begins with the ‘I’ as the indubitably certain, since it presents itself as immediately apparent within me.” This determi-

nation placed philosophy on a wholly different footing insofar as what supplied the matter for such individuated thought was experience itself. Thus, in its final phase, philosophy unfolds as a dialectic between rationalism and empiricism, an interplay that culminates in the critical writings of Kant. With this metacritical turn, metaphysics, Hegel notes, “seems to have reached its [appointed] goal.” Metaphysics “is now closed (beschlossen), . . . and a new epoch has arisen in the world.”

This astonishing synthesis of the philosophical tradition offers two points that bear stressing in this context. First, contrary to its own pretentions, metaphysics, Hegel shows, is not a universal enterprise, but is rather temporally as well as geographically restricted: its floruit is 700 BCE to 1800 CE (twenty-five centuries), and the principal sites of its production remain within the boundaries of the Roman Empire at its height.

Secondly, Hegel demonstrates that Aristotle constitutes the lynchpin of this entire ideational system, a cynosure that, to the discerning eye, makes the tripartite division of the history of philosophy ultimately misleading. Rather than the first of three disparate eras, the inaugural period of philosophic thinking turns out to be a kind of Grecian prologue, which instantiates the much lengthier and more cosmopolitan era of high metaphysics. Here the coordinates of speculative thinking remain relatively stable over a vast territorial expanse-the Levant, North Africa, and Europe-for more than a millennium and a half. To this zenith of the metaphysical tradition, then, the final period constitutes a type of epilogue or denouement, localized this time in northwest Europe, in which the claims of Aristotelian philosophy are gradually dismantled. Rather than positioning Plato and Aristotle, then, as the telos of Greek thinking, we should see them as the innovators of an entirely new epoch: the long, diverse, and polyethnic period that Hegel’s student J. G. Droysen called the Hellenistic era, that period between the fourth century BCE and the fourteenth century CE which, on any reckoning, must constitute the core of Occidental thinking, culture, and tradition.

Hellenistic metaphysics did not develop in a vacuum, but flourished within the framework of the great Mediterranean tributary empires: Persia, Macedon, Rome, Byzantium, the Caliphates, the Seljuk Turks, and Holy Roman Europe. Each of these empires was built upon the infrastructure of the others, so

that despite changes in provincial, military, and fiscal organization, they not only covered roughly the same territories, but shared certain structural features in common-a complex that we might usefully refer to as the Levantine-Mediterranean tributary state. Beginning with Persia, each of these empires integrated economies that had formerly been local into tributary systems on a world scale. Extending Marx and Engels’ analyses of such large-scale tributary operations, Samir Amin makes two related points. First, he notes: "The tribute-paying mode of production is marked by the separation of society into two constituent classes: the peasantry, organized into communities, and the ruling class, which monopolizes the functions of the society’s political organization and exacts tribute (not in commodity form) from the rural communities. Thus Darius I, after 519 BCE, reorganized the inherited tripartite sociopolitical system of the Pārsā into the two-tiered imperial structure that became the regional model for subsequent tributary states. At the local level, individual cities, countries, federations, and allied peoples (e.g., Scythians) retained their own traditional forms of government, religion, custom, and coin. Without attempting to homogenize them, geographically proximate peoples were then organized into twenty distinct provinces ( xx ša θra−\theta r a- ), so that a single satrapy might include populations as diverse as Thracians, Phrygians, Paphlagonians, Maryandinians, and Syrians. Each of these administrative districts was in turn overseen by a “protector” (xša ParseError: KaTeX parse error: Expected 'EOF', got '̄' at position 16: \theta r a-p a ̲̄ v a n- ) who reported directly to administrative Persian nobles and, ultimately, to the “Leader of leaders” (xšāya θ\theta iya xšāya θ\theta iyānām), that is, to the Great King. Tribute, in kind, coin, or manpower, comprised both a complex set of levies, fixed by the central government ad hoc, as well as gifts determined by the communities themselves. These the local populations collected according to their custom, then bestowed them upon the satrap who, in turn, passed on the revenues expected by the king. Other, less regulated, forms duty went to the satrap himself, who might have very different relations with the different communities under his care. None of the surviving evidence suggests that the central Persian government returned anything directly to the subject territories as investment for future economic growth. The crown did, however, redistribute revenue throughout the empire to build bridges, maintain passable roads, oversee the post, regularize measures and tolls, and secure military protection-all of which facilitated communication between diffused populations and fostered transimperial trade.

Even in the short run, Darius’ administrative reforms enabled a relatively integrated politico-economic system which brings us to Samir Amin’s second point: “Characteristic of this [tribute-paying] mode is the contradiction between the continued existence of the community and the negation of the community by the state.” Darius represents this dialectic concretely in the inscriptions erected at Persepolis which memorialize his reign. On the one hand, golden tablets from the apadana portray his kingdom fantasmatically as an integrated space, vouchsafed to him by the one high Iranian god, radiating symmetrically around his capital and held together by his transroyal power. At same time, however, stone blocks set into the terrace’s enclosure wall describe this geographic space as filled by an openended series of discrete peoples without integral connection or territorial hierarchization. Darius’ imperium, then, sustained itself through two mutually contradictory political impulses: on the one hand, a unified state (xšaça) within whose boundaries all local particularities were resolved into a homogenous imperial space; on the other, an eclectic agglomeration of alien communities (dahyāva), which persisted as irregular, arbitrary, and potentially refractory components of an always henceforward untotalized empire. What Persian tributary circulation set into play, then, was a simultaneous grounding and destabilizing engagement between the state and its subject populations which accordingly produced, in a myriad of forms, loyalisms that coincided with resistance.

Early Greek philosophy arose along the coast of Asia Minor at a time when such city-states as Miletus (the home of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) and Ephesus (where Heraclitus worked) formed part of the Persian satrapy of Yaunā, and hence paid regular tribute to the Great King. Particularly important for the diffusion of Ionian ideas, moreover, was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae-another Iranian dependency-who came with Xerxes’ army to Athens in 480 BCE, where over the next thirty years he so impressed his character on the whole course of future philosophical investigation that fourthcentury writers looked back on him as the very type of the theoretic man. Contemporaries whom he may have met there include Protagoras and Democritus, both of Abdera, a city-state then part of Persian Skudra, as well as Diogenes of Apollonia, a town likewise administered as part of the province that Darius refers to as “Those who are beside the sea.” Plato was held to have studied during his formative years in the Persian satrapy of Egypt (Mudrāya), while Aristotle, after leaving the Academy, spent his first period

of independence working in the Persian tributary states of Lesbos and Macedon. It should come as no surprise, then, that “Greek” philosophy should have an integral connection with the political economy of Persia. Insofar, moreover, as this economic-philosophic circuit remained much the same with the Macedonian conquest of Iran and the coming of Rome, it is not too much to say that Hellenistic metaphysicswhether pagan, Mazdean, Christian, Jewish, or Islamic - constituted the dominant ideology of the Levan-tine-Mediterranean tributary state. All such “philosophical” questions as the integration of perceptual diversity into concepts and categories of the mind; the search for the essence of diverse phenomena within a single overriding principle or α˙ϱχη\dot{\alpha} \varrho \chi \eta (“origin”/“sovereignty”); the relationship of particular to universal, accident to essence, part to whole; the transcendental attempt to bridge the gap between the manifold of things and the One that allows for their existence-all such topics can be understood as so many attempts to conceptualize the peculiar structural characteristics of the tributary mode of production, in particular the anomalous fit between individual, community, satrapy, and empire in its simultaneous affirmation and negation of dependent polities.

If we look for the most popular and widespread literary work of the long Hellenistic period - that is, the “supreme fiction” of the Levantine-Mediterranean tributary state and its attendant ideology of metaphysics-it does not turn out to be the Bible, the Aeneid, or the Qur’än: rather, it is the Alexander Romance, a vast network of texts that survives in several dozen languages and an untotaled number of redactions, no two manuscripts of which turn out to be the same, and none of which can claim to be original or definitive in form. The makeup and continuous (re)composition of the work, as it passed from language to language and culture to culture, is attested from the third century BCE through the fourteenth century CE, across a geographical expanse that ranges from India to Spain and Ethiopia to Iceland - that is, precisely the geographic coordinates of the Levantine-Mediterranean tributary state. Significantly, it was not the historical Alexander that fueled the imaginations of the diverse peoples across Eurasia and North Africa, but rather his fictional deeds and fabulous adventures as worked and reworked in what Stevens calls this “endlessly elaborating” romance. While historical treatments of Alexander’s life give us the “facts” of the man’s career, what the romance captures is the overall significance of Alexander’s deeds as triangulated between political economy and metaphysics: just as the

Levantine-Mediterranean tributary state produces metaphysics as its dominant ideology, so the genre of romance reveals the complicity between the two. Not for nothing, then, the earliest extant versions of the Life and Deeds of Alexander issue from the moment when Aristotle’s pupil refuses to pay Macedon’s regular tribute to the Persian king in order to embark instead on integrating the world as a whole into one overarching tributary state. As the narrative ensues, Alexander’s expedition is both a military venture and an unending metaphysical pursuit, such that the composition of the text raises all of the same problems that we find both in Aristotelian philosophy and the make-up of the tributary state: part vs. whole, identity vs. difference, accident vs. essence, the One vs. the many, and so forth.

Working with the Alexander Romance requires readers to forgo all fantasies of totalization. The corpus remains far too unwieldy for any single individual to control all of it in its entirety, and even if one did master every language necessary to read all extant redactions in the original-which would include תנח, תאמרו, and תעשבוּשׂוּשׂ - no one knows just how many manuscripts survive. Accordingly, scholars have generally adopted one of three approaches. Richard Stoneman’s Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend (2007) covers a good portion of the published corpus adventure by adventure, while Faustina Doufikar-Aerts’ Alexander Magnus Arabicus (2010) provides “a complete survey and classification of [the Arabic] tradition.” Others focus on a single manuscript, such as Wout van Bekkum’s edition of ms. Héb. 671.5 BN (1994). Holy Wandering, by contrast, adopts a more capacious agenda: (1) the book considers the phenomenon of the Alexander Romance as a whole as it relates both to the political economy of the Levan-tine-Mediterranean tributary state and to its ruling ideology of metaphysics, with particular attention to critical strategies for working with “text networks” of this sort; (2) the book outlines the basic compositional principles that govern any possible redaction of the Romance, whatever the language or cultural contexts of the work maybe (e.g., pastiche, syllepsis); and (3) each chapter offers a close reading of one version, focusing in particular on the rhetorical and thematic mechanisms that allow the Romance to cross cultural lines. The table of contents runs as follows:

Introduction: Mapping the Alexander Romance [Text networks and hyperlinks]

1. Razing Thebes

[Greek recension β\beta - decentering Hellenic culture]
2. Guardians of Chaos
[Coptic recension — syllepsis]
3. Sikandar and the Idea of Īrān
[Iranian recension (Shāhnāmeh) —tributary states]
4. Dhu 'l Qarnayn in Timbuktu
[Arabic recension (Abū ‘Abd al-Malik) — Neoplatonism]
5. Orient Express
[French recension (Alexandre de Bernay) — part/whole]
6. Alexander’s Trip to Paradise
[Judeo-Latin recension (Iter ad paradisum) — allegory]
Conclusion: The Face of Porus
[World literature: core/periphery; history of the novel]

In addition, each chapter of Holy Wandering discusses episodes from other versions of the Romance that do not necessarily constitute the principal focus of that section-e.g., Hebrew, Turkish, Mongolian, Syriac, Ethiopic, Malay, Slavic, Pahlavi, etc. Drafts of the Introduction, the Conclusion, as well as chapters 1, 2, 3, and 5 have already been completed, several published or in press as self-standing essays. My goal is to finalize the manuscript by fall of 2016 and submit the complete manuscript at that point for publication.