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Shards of Love
Exile and the Origins of the Lyric
By María Rosa Menocal Duke University Press
Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8185-3
CHAPTER 1
THE HORSE LATITUDES
It is in fact the conquest of America that heralds and establishes our present identity; even if every date that permits us to separate any two periods is arbitrary, none is more suitable, in order to mark the beginning of the modern era, than the year 1492, the year Columbus crosses the Atlantic Ocean. We are all direct descendants of Columbus, it is with him that our genealogy begins, insofar as the word beginning has a meaning....
Tzvetan Todorov
The Conquest of America
1
When the still sea conspires an armor
And her sullen and aborted
Currents breed tiny monsters,
True sailing is dead.
Awkward instant
And the first animal is jettisoned,
Legs furiously pumping
Their stiff green gallop,
And their heads bob up
Poise
Delicate
Pause
Consent
In mute nostril agony
Carefully refined
And sealed over
James Douglas Morrison
"The Horse Latitudes"
These are the first days of August 1492. If we go down to the docks in the great Spanish port of Cádiz we are overwhelmed, barely able to find a square inch on which to stand, scarcely able to glimpse the ships amassed in the harbor. The throngs of people are unbearable, particularly in the damp summer heat, and worst of all are the tears, the wailing, the ritual prayers, all those noises and smells and sights of departures. This is the day, the hour, the place, of a leave-taking more grievous and painful than that of death itself, an exodus inscribed in all the sacred texts, anticipated and repeated. For the Jews of Sefarad, what Christian nomenclature calls Spain, this is the last day in that most beloved of homelands, the one that had almost made them forget that it, too, was but a place of exile, a temporary home in a diaspora.
But the second diaspora did come, and the second day of August had been set, months before, in March, as its permanent marker. Indeed, the doubly poignant story, revealing the profound sense of redoubled history of the Jews on the eve of this diaspora, is that while the original Edict of Expulsion called for the final day in Spain to be exactly three months later—which would have meant the 31st of July—the visionary rabbis who had access to Ferdinand and Isabella pleaded for a slight but crucial change of date. It was thus that Isaac Abravanel (whose son Judah, eminent Neoplatonist author of the Dialoghi d'Amore, would live out his exile in Italy, known as Leone Ebreo), playing his final cards as influential courtier with the Christian monarchs, had the date reset to the 2nd of August. In the liturgical calendar this was the 9th of Ab, the anniversary of the Destruction of the Temple. With kabbalistic precision, then, the diaspora of 1492 would mimic the first Diaspora, and the tears for Sefarad would be indistinguishable from those for the first Temple. Exile on Diaspora. And, during that summer, all roads led to the sea, to ports such as Cádiz, to the desperately overbooked ships, and they were filled with the sounds of exile, that mingling of the vernacular sorrow of the women and the children with the liturgical chanting of the men.
But only one among the thousands of trips launched that summer, all begun on that same 2nd of August, would be remembered as that perfect marker of a rip in the fabric of world history, the one we commemorated at school every year, as children, the one whose centrality our own children now continue to commemorate, even as they question its "value." For, to lay yet a third anniversary onto the commingled exile and diaspora, it was on the same day—but from the inferior port of Palos because Cádiz, the natural first choice, was far too overcrowded with the "Jew-bearing ships"—that Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The scandalous suggestion has been made that Columbus himself was the most conspicuous of the exiles that day, one of the conversos, those converted Jews usually readily identified by their excessive devotions, their fanatical and public enactments, of the banal and ritualized pieties of Christianity. But what matters, for the recounting of that exodus, is not as much Columbus's profoundly enigmatic personal history—and whether he "really" was or not—as it is our ability to understand the intimate ties that do, in fact, bind the narration of the two seemingly opposite kinds of voyages to each other. What is conspicuous in the standard narrations, even those of 1992 that indulged in all manner of supposed soul-searching, is that the two are divorced to such an extent that it is only the suggestion that Columbus might have been one of the Jews himself that calls our attention to what we then call the "coincidence": the voyages of exile and the voyage of discovery begin at the same hour, in the same place. In all other versions it is no more than a coincidence, an odd coincidence, and it is not the role of our histories, literary or otherwise, to account for coincidence. The word itself, for which we can sometimes substitute something like synchronicity, suggests exactly that it lies outside our purview: an intersection that would be highly meaningful—if only it were not so fantastic and obviously meaningless, impervious to rational exegesis.
At the heart of our repression of this synchronism, of this meaningful layering of histories, of this knowledge that it is the very day, the precise day, that Columbus leaves Spain that is the beginning of the second diaspora—itself the most mournful of commemorations of the first Diaspora—is the simple fact that "Columbus" himself is the first to look away and ignore. In that most enduringly canonical of biographies of Columbus, Samuel Eliot Morison notes with clear and considerable puzzlement in his tone that Columbus completely ignores the remarkable scene of the expulsion of the Jews that was not only the event of the season, and all around him, but which obviously complicated and even directly compromised his own obsessive mission. But Morison, and most other tellers of the story, are mesmerized by Columbus's gaze—and we have all looked away with him; we pretend not to see the others on the docks that day, although out of the corner of one eye, the scene is explosive and central and shapes everything Columbus does, beginning with the long-sought approval of the trip, granted only, conspicuously, in the aftermath of both the expulsion decree and the taking of Granada, that last outpost of Muslim Spain. (Indeed, into the first fistful of coincidences we must now begin to stuff others. It is at the beginning of that fateful year, on January 2 of that same 1492, that the closure of al-Andalus, of a certain kind of medieval Spain, is finally consummated, and from that will follow, as if written, the forced conversions and then expulsions of the Muslims; and with an irony few have noticed, the first grammar of Castilian is published, while the exact date of the expulsion is being bravely renegotiated. But that subject leads down other paths, so let us not yet walk away from the first and the sharpest of the overlaps.) If the very possibility of Columbus's voyage cannot be imagined, at its origins, without the expulsion of the Jews, no less telling and compromised are most of the small, at times dirty and painful, details, and least of all the biggest of the details. In the rerouting from Cádiz to Palos, Columbus lost not only the better port as such but the far better market for experienced seamen. Most sailors that August were already engaged for the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of trips into exile by the Jews during those months between March and August.
Morison the historian is thus right to be baffled by Columbus's stark avoidance of the subject since even—perhaps especially—the profoundly obsessed Columbus could not have failed to be deeply affected. But Morison ends up following in Columbus's path precisely because the extant memory of the famous trip, the one we take for Columbus's own, is in fact the one famously rewritten by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Indeed, if there is a marked rip in the fabric of history in 1492—as Todorov, mimicking Foucault, claims in the passage at the outset—it is certainly visible in this erasure and rewriting, this palimpsest. In stark and simple terms, Columbus's irregular vernacular, the rough-edged language of a man of many tongues, is smoothed over and cleaned up. Months after the publication of the first grammar of a European vernacular (this also a clear marker of that shift, of "modernity" and "genealogy," as Todorov might have it), Bartolomé de las Casas, whose own history of the Conquest (Historia de las Indias) would play a crucial role, to this day, in shaping our perceptions of those stunning events—simply rewrote Columbus's narration of that first trip. If the fabric is torn, Las Casas is speaking the new language, this new language of a Nation—and what he has overwritten—corrected—is the language that came before. In miniature and exemplary form the transformation of Columbus embodied in that rewritten story—and let us not forget the essential and irreducible fact that it is the story of the voyage—is a perfect example of the sort of palimpsest a medievalist is likely to face when she contemplates the diminishment and regularization of the medieval world that took place in what we have come to call the "Renaissance." This crucial fact of historiography affects all branches of history, no doubt, and it certainly affects literary history, that point so effectively signaled by the events of 1492 of turning the page from premodern to modern. The turning of the page to where the narration is grammatical. The turning of the page to where the Kabbalah of the 9th of Ab is written out and seems preposterous, and where Columbus can no longer see the Jews, wailing, on the docks.
It is one of those clichés with immense power behind it that the whole idea of the Renaissance, beginning with the very name, acquires meaning, first of all, through contradistinction to a medieval past whose various deaths require various rebirths. As Thomas Greene has so lucidly put it: "The ubiquitous imagery of disinterment, resurrection, and renascence needed a death and burial to justify itself; without the myth of medieval entombment, its imagery, which is to say its self-understanding, had no force. The creation of this myth was not a superficial occurrence. It expressed a belief in change and loss, change from the immediate past and loss of a remote, prestigious past that might nonetheless be resuscitated." If there is one simple thing that can be said about both popular and scholarly views on this period without fear of contradiction, it is that the medieval period is always something not modern, never a part of modernity. And that is perceived as being true regardless of the specific point of comparison. The easiest and thus most deeply ingrained emblems of "modernity" make the point readily: "1492," Petrarch (who serves with uncommon regularity, at least in some of his various personae, as "first modern man"), and even the classical cultures that diachronically precede the medieval period. Todorov's statement might provoke a request for some fine point of clarification but hardly a direct contradiction. In the inventory we easily perceive what Petrarch himself was at pains to show throughout his long career; the unpardonable sin of the long period that precedes him is that it separates him from the wonderful story of the development of culture in Greece and its trip to Rome. We scarcely add much to his version of the story since, as is the case with Las Casas and the grammar of the recounting of what Spain was like in August 1492, he has given us the very language with which we tell the story.
What becomes the "modern," almost without further explanation, is thus some version of the unbroken story line, the grammatical text, the totalizing, comprehensive, and comprehensible narrative. This accounts for how the period before the Middle Ages is a part of the modernity that will pick up again with the second age of modern man. Petrarch—as he himself tells us—is the first explorer, and after 1492 all civilized men are heirs to the superb act of memory he performed to set the stage, to clear the rubble. Again, Greene's work on "Imitation and Discovery" sheds telling light when he reminds us how deeply and dangerously the humanist enterprise was rooted in the "effort to exchange one recent past for another, distant one." In the end, of course, the success of the enterprise was astonishing, and our own most powerful narrative of history is very much an heir of the Renaissance. And, in one of the most extraordinary acts of rhetorical legerdemain, it is a form of both perceiving and telling history that so brilliantly insists on its own absolute value and veracity that we forget that it too is a product of its own history—and of historical contingencies that required it to uphold absolute and transcendent truth.
The enormous power inherent in this kind of claim to truth is (obviously) that it arrogates universality and makes contingency, even certain notions of history itself, seem without value. We can see its strong pull in the irony that the most fundamental and successful revisions of our view of the medieval period have been those which have fully embraced that Renaissance concept of the smooth narration; this is the sort of thing a scholar like Charles Homer Haskins wanted to show—rightly, from one perspective—that the "rebirth" actually takes place much earlier (thus the famous "Renaissance of the Twelfth Century"), that Aristotle was brilliantly commented on in the eleventh century, and so forth. Obviously, this sort of work, which is how medievalists—myself among them—have generally tried to rehabilitate the period to which they tie themselves, is deeply compromised in that same narration; we are bringing to bear the same rules of grammar to texts that the grammarians had said were ungrammatical. In the area of literary studies, at least, what is remarkable about scholarship is the degree to which it is still—ever increasingly, I think— responding to Petrarch's accusations of estrangement from the master narrative by simply saying it ain't so: we are part of that master narrative, we did know the classics (and thus medievalists, notoriously, are the only group of scholars outside classical studies required to know Latin), our values were not so different, and so on. The ironic poignancy, in Albert Ascoli's felicitous articulation, is that "the values and practices of the dominant contemporary medievalist scholarship are directly descended from an early modern humanist movement which arose in polemical opposition to what its advocates already took to be the ahistorical procedures of their medieval predescessors...."
Few have ever asked what fundamental (and thus unspoken) values were at stake in that great Petrarchan horror at the medieval past (and its extension in the master narrative that has followed) and whether we wish to share, and thus perpetuate, those values. When we accept the definitions of all sorts of value (from grammaticality, say, to how much of the classics we ought to know) as defined by the "Renaissance," then the medieval period, above all, is found lacking. And in this acceptance of the transcendent value of the paradigm that the Renaissance takes on as its own paradigmatic mantle—although it should be understood as a paradigm rather than as a "reality" or the "real" Renaissance—the modernist (the postmedievalist) and the medievalist are like two sides of the same narrative coin, one unthinkingly accepting the grimness of the Middle Ages, the other saying it really wasn't grim, both of them equally accepting the largely unspoken standards for what constitutes darkness. Everyone, after all, wants to be part of the Master Narrative.
In this context the Las Casas rewriting of the original Columbine text must be viewed as an exemplary act. What is wanted is a coherent narration in a language with a codified grammar, a smooth trip across the Atlantic; what is thrown overboard in this kind of narration—the success of which is everywhere visible—is still believed by many people to have been darkness, ignorance, superstition, and chanting. But let us ask instead what the voices are that go unheard; let us talk instead of the sailor's accents and songs, of all they shared with the other ships that left on the 2nd of August. Indeed, let us tell the story from an aesthetic posture that is not horrified by cacophony (as Petrarch was, and as Bembo would be, and as medievalists will be). Let us instead take pleasure from fragments and the riotous pluralities and often-chaotic poetics that made much of the medieval world so resistant to that smooth narrative. In fact (and this too carries almost unbearable poignancy), Petrarch himself is, famously, the most divided of men; his fear of the violence and the ruptures of different kinds of chaos lives in querulous intimacy with his fascination with that same apocalyptic threat. And then he writes those wonderful love songs in a vernacular. He is Columbus and Las Casas, but we have let the Las Casas tell us how to read the Columbus.
But Columbus's voyage was far from seamless. Partway out, things slowed down, inevitably. We have the starkest and loveliest of terms for the doldrums—and it is an expression that is said to come from Columbus's times—"The Horse Latitudes": "either of two belts or regions in the neighborhood of 30 degrees North and 30 degrees South latitude characterized by high pressure, calm and light baffling winds." The etymology, which smacks of delicious apocryphalness, is that they were so named when sailors—the captains, of course—trying to make it across the Atlantic, desperately stuck in these sailing ruts, began throwing everything overboard to lighten the ship and restore movement. Even the precious horses—horses that you imagine you may need desperately when you finally get there—even those horses had to be thrown overboard. This is the superstitious sacrifice that takes place on the high seas; we jettison those powerful and scary beasts to get the winds blowing again. And we propitiate those who are superstitious about the story of the trip in the same way: we pretend the Jews were not sailing that same day; we throw out the mongrel vernaculars that were overwritten in standard grammars; we anguish over Petrarch's claim, which we know to be both ironically and poignantly untrue, that he gave up writing love poetry when he was no longer a young man.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shards of Love by María Rosa Menocal. Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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