Emotions as Engines of History

Rafał Borysławski, Alicja Bemben, Rafał Borysławski, Alicja Bemben

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000452372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Seeking to bridge the gap between various approaches to the study of emotions, this volume aims at a multidisciplinary examination of connections between emotions and history and the ways in which these connections have manifested themselves in historiography, cultural, and literary studies. The book offers a selected range of insights into the idea of emotions, affects, and emotionality as driving forces and agents of change in history. The fifteen essays it comprises probe into the emotional motives and dispositions behind both historical phenomena and the ways they were narrated.

Part I
Narrating Past Emotions

1
The Wonders of Creation

The Affective Poetics of Alterity in the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle

Jacek Olesiejko

DOI: 10.4324/9781003019015-3

The Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle is the third text in The Manuscript Cotton Vitellius XV, the so-called Beowulf manuscript, compiled in England at the beginning of the eleventh century. The text is preceded by the prose life of St. Christopher and The Wonders of the East and followed by the heroic poem Beowulf as well as the versified adaptation of a fragment of the Old Testament Book of Judith. The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle is the only Old English translation of the Latin Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem. Its subjects—the wonders of India, marvellous people and their kings, as well as human and inhuman monsters, that Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, wants to describe to his teacher Aristotle—echo the interest in the marvellous and monstrous exhibited in all the texts of the manuscript, apart from the poem Judith. This chapter, however, focuses on Alexander himself as well as his emotions of wonder and admiration that are briefly, yet explicitly, depicted in the letter. My aim is to discuss the emotion of admiration as central not only to the characterisation of Alexander in the Old English version of the letter but also to the text’s immediate cultural context, namely, the time of the unification of England and Viking raids at the turn of the millennium.

The present reading of the letter is grounded in three trends that have developed in the history of the critical attention the text has received in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—one centring on Alexander himself, the second putting more emphasis on the letter’s political and cultural background and historicising the text in the context of the late tenth- and early eleventh-century Viking invasions of Anglo-Saxon England, and the third revealing the self-conscious and metatextual character of the Old English translation of the original Latin work. Initially, readers of the Old English translation of the letter focused on Alexander as king. As Kenneth Sisam claims in his studies on the Beowulf manuscript, the Old English translator lays emphasis on Alexander’s campaign and achievements (1953, 88). Douglas Butturff claims that the letter’s account of the campaign underlines Alexander’s negative traits and observes that “the translator intended to provide by his work an exemplum on the superbia of earthly rulers; and… he did so by consistently exposing the egotism of the Macedonian potentate who was humbled by the inevitable fate of all mortals” (1970, 82). In his study on the letter, Andy Orchard supports Butturff’s view, advancing even further the argument that the letter offers an exemplum of royal pride. He identifies a number of possibly intentional solecisms on the translator’s part, which suggests that his authorial intention was to foreground Alexander’s “self-indulgent celebration of personal glory” (Orchard 1995, 135).¹

The second mentioned trend, one that brings attention to the cultural milieu of the Old English adaptation of the letter, is more contemporary. Brian McFadden argues that, in the Beowulf manuscript, the gathering of the works whose most recurrent motifs are marvels reveals that these “texts become a site for the expression of cultural anxieties about uncertain times” (2001, 93). McFadden also claims that the resurgence of the Viking incursions at the turn of the century, as well as the disruption of national unity as a result of the anti-monastic reaction in 975, provide immediate cultural and political contexts for The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle (2001, 94). In her contextualisation of the translation in the turbulent times of the Viking invasions in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, Kathryn Powell arrives at a conclusion very similar to the one reached by McFadden:

at a time when foreign aggression—in the form of the Viking incursions into England—and the ability of those in power to keep that aggression at bay was such an important issue for the English, it would have been difficult to read the works in this manuscript without reflecting on one’s own rulers and their foreign policies.

(2004, 6)

In her reading of the letter, Powell also revives Orchard’s and Butturff’s argument that the text is about Alexander and his pride to advance her own claim that the theme of rulers and their morals pervades and unifies the texts of the Beowulf manuscript (2004, 10). The presence of this theme, according to Powell, accounts for the function of marvels and monsters in these works:

The presence of monsters lends an externalised form of morality to the tales of heroic pagan warriors who are not bound by an inter-nalised moral responsibility to the Christian God. Whenever these pagan warriors become too proud or dare too much, the monstrous appears, marking out a loosely defined moral boundary that ordinary people should not excess.

(2004, 4)²

The third trend in recent criticism of the text in question refracts the critical attention back to Alexander while also strongly articulating the connection between the metatextual character of the adaptation and Alexander’s self-representation as king and conqueror. Susan Kim argues that the Old English adaptation of the letter is involved with and anxious about “the process of identification itself, the process of saying and writing ‘I,’ the problem of human identity as it is constructed through language.” She observes that this version of the letter is bound with an Old English adaption of The Wonders of the East that “is characterised by illustrations which are often aggressively interacting with their frames.” She claims that “through their possessive invasion of the text, the monstrous figures in The Wonders suggest a profound anxiety about boundaries—the boundaries of text and image, human and monstrous—and the fragility of territories marked out by those shifting boundaries” (Kim 2010, 34–35). In a more recent reading of the letter, Kate Perillo argues that the Old English adaptation of the text displays translational self-consciousness (2018, 78). She claims that “the Letter emerges as a textual space in which voices have accreted over time and through translation, layering upon and competing with one another” (2018, 78). Quoting Edward Said’s Orientalism, she also argues that the letter explores the relationship between knowledge and imperial authority. By this, she means that, as the text foregrounds its status as a translated work, it undermines Alexander’s claim that he can represent truth and engages in an examination of the power of the discourse to represent truth and otherness (2018, 78). Like Kim, Perillo examines the text in the context of the illustrations that decorate The Wonders and argues that “the violable frame of the Vitellius illustrations further imply that some aspects of those peoples and places elude the grasp of the unidentified narrator who seeks to render them knowable” (2018, 75). Kim’s and Perillo’s readings, in sum, reveal the existence of a representational interplay of geographical boundaries and the boundaries of the self in the letter.

Three ideas that emerge from the aforementioned critical readings are further explored in the present chapter, namely, 1) the conceptual overlap between the geographical boundaries and the mental boundary between the self and otherness, 2) the self-reflexive character of Alexander’s representation, and 3) the uneasy tension between personal ambition and national identity. Accordingly, in what follows, I show that The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle reveals that wondering is a performative act that affects the boundaries between the agent of wondering—Alexander—and the observed other—marvels of India. Furthermore, I argue that being exposed to wonder, and thereby facing liminality, is a process that, firstly, pushes Alexander to self-reflection and, secondly, poses a threat to the integrity of his self, which is reflected in the uneasy tension between his personal ambition and national identity.

In the opening paragraph of the letter, Alexander addresses Aristotle as his mentor. He writes to him about the wonders he has witnessed so that his teacher might add something to Alexander’s understanding of these:

[G]eþohte ic forþon to þe to writtane be þæm þeod-londe Indie on be heofenes gesetnissum ond be þæm unarimdum cynnum nædrena ond monna ond wildeora, to þon þæt hwæthwyngo to þære ongietenisse þissa niura þinga þin gelis ond gleawnis to geþeode.

[I thought on that account to write to you about the land of India and about the constellations of the firmament and about the countless varieties of snakes and humans and wild animals, so that your learning and acuity might add somewhat to the understanding of these novel things.]

(Fulk 2010, 34)

This is so because, as Alexander also writes, the novelties with which he is familiarised are difficult to understand:

Seo eorðe is to wundrienne, hwæt heo ærest oþþe godra þinga cenne, oððe eft þara yfelra, þe he þæm sceawingendum is æteowed. Heo is cennende þa ful-cuþan wildru ond wæstmas ond wecga oran ond wunderlice wyhta, þa þing eall, þæm monnum þe hit geseoð ond sceawigað, wæron uneþe to gewittane for þære missenlicnisse þara hiowa.

[The world is to be wondered at, what it first produces either of good things or in turn of bad, by which it is revealed to observers. It continually produces those well-known wild animals and plants and ores of metals and amazing creatures, all which things would be, for people who witness and observe it, difficult to understand on account of the variety of their forms.]

(Fulk 2010, 36)

Kate Perillo claims that the use of the noun ongietenisse and the verb ongitan and its derivatives is crucial in these passages as well as in the entire work.

The Old English ongitan (along with its variant angitan) means “to perceive,” often visually, along with the more abstract meaning “to understand” or “to realize,” as seen here. However, it also has other implications: the verb’s stem, gitan, means “to get, take, obtain,” and so Alfred Bammesberger explains, “the meaning ‘understand’ represents a semantic development of ‘seize.’”… In the letter, ongitan links Alexander’s desire for knowledge of India with his efforts to take “kingdom[s] into our possession” and become “king and lord of the world.”

(2018, 79, emphasis mine)

Alexander’s use of the noun ongietenisse and the verb ongitan reveals thus his motivation to master the East not only through military conquest but also discursively.

However, a more essential project behind writing the letter is, for him, to construct a mental boundary between the self and otherness that is based on the balance of power and knowledge. Alexander assures Aristotle that his account is true and evokes his teacher’s intellectual power to understand his descriptions of objects and beings found in India:

Nu ic hwæþre gehyhte ond gelyfe þæt þu þas þing ongete swa þu me ne talige owiht gelpan ond secgan be þære micelnisse ures gewinnes ond compes, forðon ic oft wiscte ond wolde þæt hyra læs wære swa gewinnfulra.

[I hope and trust that you will understand these matters in such a way that you will not assume me to be boasting at all and dwelling on the magnitude of our struggles and combat.]

(Fulk 2010, 36)

The letter shows that this world is the subject of wonder and that Alexander’s knowledge of it allows him to assume a position of agency and control of things known by merely learning about and describing them:

Hwæt, þu eac sylfa const þa gecynd mines modes, mec a gewundlice healdon þæt gemerce sooðes ond rihtes, ond ic sperlicor mid wordum sægde þonne hie mid dædum gedon wærun.

[Now, you yourself know, too, that characteristic of my mind, as a constant practice to confine myself to the bounds of truth and uprightness, and I have described things more sparingly with words than they were done with deeds.]

(Fulk 2010, 36)

Incorporating this new knowledge, Alexander simultaneously considers his mind to be circumscribed by “the bounds of truth and moral uprightness.” If this is so, in this way, he appears to delineate a symbolic boundary between his self and the East, which is to protect his textualised interiority from being adversely affected by India’s otherness; a boundary that turns out to be very difficult to maintain in the course of the narrative.

Alexander’s desire to establish both geographical and symbolic boundaries links The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle to other texts in the Beowulf manuscript in which the theme of boundary and liminality recurs in texts and images. For example, the text of The Wonders of the East is accompanied by illustrations of monsters, complete with decorative frames that separate its textual and visual matters. In the case of some illustrations, however, their frames fail to contain the image of the monster within the designated space. For example, the illumination representing a Donestre in the Beowulf manuscript shows the monster stepping out of the frame while dismembering and consuming a woman’s body (Anonymous, f103v). Much as this representation of the monster breaking outside the frames is to inspire anxiety in the mind of the viewer, other images of monsters are showcased within the frames’ boundaries to make it possible for the viewer and the reader to experience a distanced sense of wonder. Thus, it seems that the manuscript also inculcates in its audience a self-definition as a textual community that is protected by its notions of national, cultural, and geographical boundaries, just as the textual matter of the manuscript is separated from the manuscript’s monsters with frames. By analogy with the political reality of early medieval England, the other threatens to break out of its frame and trespass t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Emotions as the Engines of Change
• Part I Narrating Past Emotions
• Part II Emotive Histories, Emotional Historiographies
• Part III Emotions Shaping History
• List of Contributors
• Index