| Coming Out of Exile: Dante on the Orient(alism) Express | The American Historical Review, 105.4

Review Essays

Coming Out of Exile:
Dante on the Orient(alism) Express

KATHLEEN BIDDICK

For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma.

Edward W. Said¹

The invitation to comment as a medievalist on the impact of Edward Said's Orientalism twenty years after its publication reminded me of my exhilarating first encounter, when a colleague in eighteenth-century French history chose Said's book for our reading group. Orientalism introduced me to the different cultural and institutional ways in which Europeans constructed the Occident by assigning and hierarchizing boundaries between "East" and "West." Orientalism unmasked the process whereby "Europe" fabricated itself on a "theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe."² Its critique of imaginary racialized geographies hooked me. 1

     Said's attention to the cultural politics of representation helped me, as a budding medieval economic historian, make sense of what I perceived to be sharp contradictions between archaeology and economic history during the early 1980s. Medieval archaeologists were then busy inverting the famous "Pirenne Thesis," which credited the Islamic takeover of the Western Mediterranean in the seventh century with producing the conditions of "isolation" that guaranteed the emergence of Charlemagne and, indeed, "Europe." Archaeologists, meanwhile, were uncovering evidence for the scale and extent of the rich Abbasid trading diaspora. They argued that early medieval Europe was a mere periphery to Damascus and subsequently Baghdad. Charlemagne's capacity to control some of the peripheral nodes of this medieval world economy ensured his success. Rephrasing Henri Pirenne, these archaeologists wrote: "Without Mohammed, Charlemagne would indeed have been inconceivable."³ 2

     Resistance from medieval European economic history to this exciting remapping increasingly became the subject of my research. The representation of economic categories and their affective links with untold medieval and modern colonial histories sparked my intellectual curiosity.⁴ I became so accustomed to thinking and writing about such contradictions that the spirited reaction to my raising the question of Orientalism at a conference on "The Past and Future of Medieval Studies," sponsored by the University of Notre Dame in 1992, took me by surprise.⁵ Some participants contended that consideration of Orientalism was anachronistic and divisive to Medieval Studies. I cautioned that it was premature to "throw out" Orientalism, for that would close medievalists off from dynamic debates in history, literature, and postcolonial theories. 3

     The desire of some conference participants to "throw out" Orientalism served as the starting point to this essay. I decided to revisit their anxiety and to think through the temporalities of Orientalism, since medieval historians, in particular, seemed threatened by Said's work.⁶ As I began rereading Orientalism, it struck me that in this capacious book, which crosses the borders of many genres (poetry, travel writing, novels, anthropology, lexicography, to name a few), Said leaves the question of history writing virtually untouched. The opening words of Chapter 1, "On June 13, 1910," reduce temporality to the empty, homogeneous time of chronology. Said then seems to confuse representation (in the Orient) with history (for the Orient) when he claims that "instability suggests that history, with its disruptive detail, its currents of change, its tendency towards growth, decline, or dramatic movement, is possible in the Orient and for the Orient."⁷ Such confusion only suggests that Said did not think through Orientalism with history. 4

     Instead, Said simply invented a past tense for Orientalism in the poetry of Dante (1265–1321), which epitomized for him the stronger "articulation," the more careful "schematization," and the more dramatically "effective" moment of placing the Orient in Western imaginative geographies.⁸ The Inferno's notorious image of the riven "Maömetto" (Muhammad) poetically domesticated the violence of a riven Orientalist spatial binary of East/West: "no barrel staved-in, and missing its end-piece ever gaped as wide as the man I saw split open from chin down to the farting-place."⁹ Said memorialized Dante as an originary placeholder for an Orientalism perfectable in the "secularizing elements in eighteenth-century European culture."¹⁰ 5

     What are the implications of Said's emplotting the Middle Ages temporally as the "adolescent" stage preparatory to a fully mature, "modern," imperialist Orientalism? He is not alone in the grip of this fiction. Consider, for example, Benedict Anderson's acclaimed book Imagined Communities, which directly addresses the question of temporality as a form of knowledge. Anderson imagines a sharp break between medieval (read religious) "apprehensions of time" and Enlightenment (read technological) temporalities capable of thinking of the progress of the nation.¹¹ Medieval time, as described by Anderson, is synchronous, meaning that all events are organized around the same eschatological vanishing point; it is always, therefore, the same time in the Middle Ages until the end-time (eschaton). Anderson thus reduces the Middle Ages to a space from which the progressive, technological history of the Enlightenment nation may supersede it. Enlightenment temporality, according to Anderson, imagines time as metrological coincidence defined by calendar and clock. Said and Anderson share a concept of temporality as a spatial binary of supersession: one epoch replaces another. Supersession guarantees the tenaciously enduring and normative division of historical temporality into periods: Classical, Medieval, Early Modern, Modern, Postmodern. Said, his brilliant grasp of spatial forms of power notwithstanding, reproduced in Orientalism what Jacques Rancière has called "historiality": "The space of historiality is first a symbolic space, a surface of inscription of time as productive of meaning."¹² It is precisely this enduring way of organizing historical thought that Orientalism needed to question and failed to. Said thus renders Orientalism orientalized, caught within its historiality. 6

     How, then, to rethink the conventional temporality of Orientalism in order not to memorialize either Orientalism or the "European" Middle Ages?¹³ Put another way, how can one historicize Orientalism in order to rehistoricize medieval Europe? This essay takes the temporal form of Orientalism as its central problem and considers Said's melancholic attachment to the European Middle Ages as a form of his own Orientalism. Melancholy memorializes, and Orientalism never lets go. Europe (and Said in Orientalism) continues to imagine Islam as its (his) trauma.¹⁴ 7

Medievalists have rarely questioned the temporal representation intrinsic to Orientalism, and recent work has thus tended to reproduce and even aggravate its historiality. Some medievalists have disavowed the question of medieval Orientalisms altogether by memorializing the earlier Middle Ages as pre-Orientalist, that is, a golden age, free of the representational violence inventoried by Said.¹⁵ 8

     Take, for example, recent studies lauding Petrus Alfonsi, Raymond Lull, and Gerald of Wales as border figures. Petrus Alfonsi (a Jew educated in Islamic culture who converted to Christianity in the early twelfth century), when taken as the tolerant sign of a golden age and a border figure for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish worlds, receives praise for his fabulous Disciplina clericalis. This book of wisdom disseminated to a Christian audience moral fables culled from Arabic and Hebrew sources. Such a celebratory reading leaves unmentioned Alfonsi's vicious but learned attack on Judaism and Islam—contained in his Dialogi contra Judaeos, a treatise that outcirculated his book of wisdom.¹⁶ In this treatise, Alfonsi has to eject the intimacy of difference he embodied by using "rational" science to make fun of Talmudic interpretation. Raymond Lull, glorified as a border figure between Arabic and Provencal lyrical worlds, also exhibits contradictions upon closer scrutiny. In his admired courtly satire Blanquerna (c. 1283–1285), he advocates peaceful conversion of Muslims. By 1292, Lull had become and would remain a major advocate and tactician for armed crusades against the Muslims. His various crusading tracts are often overlooked in the desire to praise his courtly vision of missionary activity.¹⁷ Histories of tolerance (convivencia) among Christians, Muslims, and Jews are thus achieved by excluding the ambivalence and hostilities inherent between and across texts and communities.¹⁸ 9

     The aggressive constructions of intra-Christian conflict are rarely viewed as problems of Orientalism, although they drew on the vocabulary fabricated for Muslims, who marked an imaginary external limit, and Jews, who marked an imaginary internal limit, to medieval Christendom. Gerald of Wales, for example, was a cleric who accompanied Henry II on his expedition to Ireland and the author of the Topographia Hibernica (1180s). Interpreting his writings confronts medievalists with the ambivalent politics of fabricating hierarchies of Christian identities (Welsh, English, Norman, Irish) within Christendom. Medievalists yearning to imagine the Middle Ages redemptively as a golden age of non-appropriative representation appreciate as respectful his expressions of wonder at the Irish. Other medievalists have analyzed his text as a critical ethnographic turning point in the fabrication of hierarchical differences within medieval Christendom.¹⁹ His hierarchies, which ranked Christian polities according to an index of clerical reform, legitimated the Anglo-Norman conquest of the Irish and their oppression as fellow Christians. The concept of wonder takes on an ambivalent and menacing tinge. These interpretative contrasts cannot be dismissed simply as a question of the glass half-empty or half-full. Rather, these intersections of wonder with the clerical work of constructing the Irish as Christian barbarians within Christendom cleave wonder with the intimate disturbance of writing colonial representation.²⁰ 10

     Medieval economic histories have also memorialized the Mediterranean trading diaspora up to the twelfth century as a pre-Orientalist golden age of tolerant exchange. These histories concentrate on "peoples of the book" (Christians, Jews, Muslims) and reduce history to their interactions. They ignore the reliance of lucrative trade on the discursive fabrication of peoples not of the book as pagans, and therefore a safe target for the lively medieval slave trade—which was a shared economic undertaking among peoples of the book.²¹ 11

     A second response to Orientalism among medievalists concerns the modern institutionalization of Orientalism in Medieval Studies in the nineteenth-century university. Medievalists (although I have noted the virtual absence of medieval historians from these collections)²² have tended to use these studies of the "fathers of Medieval Studies" as an excuse to say, "we are not them" (our scholarship is not that of nineteenth-century imperialists). By anxiously claiming that Orientalism is, after all, a thing of the past, not of the present academy, these essay collections and conference proceedings have not fulfilled their promise of disciplinary transformation. Recent and important disciplinary syntheses such as The Making of Europe or Writing East, in fact, avoid consideration of Orientalism altogether.²³ 12

     The boom in Iberian medieval studies over the past two decades can be read as a third response to Orientalism. Based on rich archival evidence for Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations, medievalists offer detailed histories of these religious interactions as an antidote to fabricated Orientalist representations of them. Such studies are delineating the minoritarian and majoritarian questions at stake in what David Nirenberg has called "[Iberian] communities of violence."²⁴ Their chief metahistorical claim (not always announced) relies on their devotion to local context as a way of exiting from the discursive problems of representation posed by Orientalism. These studies implicitly assume that the "local" is "real" and not a discursive fabrication. They mistake knowledge about the local for local knowledge. A refusal to comprehend the discursive definitions of authorized space at work in these histories entails another reduction: the collapse of the notion of agent with subject. This metahistorical frame thus produces religious identity as a historiality, that is, an atemporal surface.²⁵ 13

     The silence around Said in these Iberian medieval histories is intriguing. Take, for example, Nirenberg's book, Communities of Violence, arguably the most ambitiously conceptualized of the recent Iberian studies. Nirenberg situates his work critically in terms of Jewish historiography; he wants to disrupt "a now almost orthodox view of the steady march of European intolerance across the centuries" through comparative study of religious identity in local context.²⁶ By defining what counts as "local," Nirenberg gains control over his historiographic object. As a counter-move to Norman Cohn, Carlo Ginzburg, and Robert Moore, Nirenberg uses the "local" as the vehicle with which to transpose the study of inter- and intra-religious violence from the irrational to the rational register. His move, however, cannot reconceptualize the problem of anti-Semitism and Orientalism, since their fabrications from the twelfth century have relied precisely on who got to draw and redraw the line between what counts as rational and what counts as irrational.²⁷ 14

     Nirenberg contrasts differences in local outcomes by reference to the state, that is, the kingdoms of France and the kingdom of Aragon. The space of the state is therefore allowed discursivity in order to authorize the local as the "real." Such a static alignment of an imagined local real on an authorized space of the state leaves unaddressed the competition among medieval institutions (notably clerical institutions) over the discursive production of the local. The nomadic tactics of inquisition, crusade (ceaselessly planned for even if unrealized in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries), mission, and mendicant preaching striated the "local" and rendered it discursive.²⁸ Dynamic medieval nationalist projects also fabricated their territorial imaginary on the discursive dissolution of local "ethnic" and hereditary ties. For instance, technological practices of inscription, such as the books of genealogies tracing and certifying purity of blood in Iberian realms, helped homogenize the territorial imaginary. 15

     Most striking, for the purposes of this analysis, are the ways in which a linear reliance on the local causes complex questions of temporality to drop out. Take, for example, Nirenberg's treatment of Catalan Holy Week riots of 1302, which he reads atemporally as paraliturgical ritual. Such a reading suppresses consideration of how these riots border temporally on the specific historical development and dissemination of the host desecration narrative in Paris around 1290. Miri Rubin has shown how the story of host desecration plotted and chained together Jews, the Eucharist, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, persecution, and pilgrimage. The narrative, which was disseminated in textual and visual modalities (manuscript illumination, stained glass, painted panels, sculpture), is as historically specific and contextual as reported riots in Catalan towns.²⁹ The "local" is never given in advance. In other words, the local is discursive (then and now). Medieval Iberian histories seem too exclusively invested in a positivist use of the local and agency to provide a theoretical alternative to the Orientalist representations.³⁰ They fail to show the gaps between their apparatus and an Orientalist apparatus of representation. 16

Is there a way of rethinking Orientalism so that medievalists stop simply reproducing its temporal problems of memorialization and periodization? The question needs to be asked not just for medievalists but also for others who take Said's arguments to heart: Why did Said foreclose critique of temporal practices in Orientalism? Let us return to Orientalism to consider these questions more closely. 17

     There is a covert figure of temporality to be found in Orientalism. It is the exile. Said's three exemplary figures of exile—Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1140), a German cleric from Saxony who emigrated to Paris, Dante, who became a philosopher and political thinker in addition to being a writer in exile from his native city, and Erich Auerbach, a renowned German-Jewish philologist and medievalist who died in 1957—are especially salient to medievalists.³¹ Said's use of the figure of exile erases the interesting corporate history of medieval exiles.³² It is through an understanding of their memorial status in Orientalism (and throughout Said's works) that medievalists could unlink the "adolescence" of the Middle Ages inherent in Said's periodization of Orientalism from the most central and powerful metaphor of his life and oeuvre, that of exile.³³ 18

     From the earliest publications of Said's academic career onward, Hugh, Dante, and Auerbach occur together.³⁴ In 1969, he and his wife, Maire, translated Auerbach's essay "Philology and Weltliteratur." Auerbach closed this essay, in which he argued that his "philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation," with the following famous words of Hugh of St. Victor: 19

It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign land (exsilium).³⁵

     A decade later in Orientalism, Said cites Auerbach when he attempts to distinguish the estrangement of European Orientalists during their field work from that of the humanistic estrangement of the exile, so valued by him. He argues that the former's sense of alienation came from the researcher's inherent sense of superiority, and he contrasts such haughtiness to the humanistic detachment exemplified by Auerbach. Why is Said so intent on making these distinctions? As an ardent believer in humanism, and also a critic of its Orientalist practices, Said faced the following dilemma in Orientalism: "yes, I know from my study of Orientalism that humanism helped to construct Orientalism, but even so humanism is innocent." Said tries to resolve such incommensurabilty by using exemplary exiles to purify humanism and to exempt it from a historic taint of collaboration. Said's notion of exile assures a vantage point on Orientalism outside the circuits of its responsibility. 20

     Throughout subsequent publications, Said continues invocations of these exemplary exiles. At the close of Culture and Imperialism (1993), his elaboration of Orientalism, Said again emphasizes exile as the motivation for his work. He returns to Hugh of St. Victor and repeats his tribute to Auerbach's exile at the University of Istanbul from 1936 to 1947. Hugh's words, Said writes, are a model "for anyone—man and woman—wishing to transcend the restraints of imperial, national or provincial limits." In his recent interview with boundary 2, Said also invoked Hugh: "I find myself, in a funny way, sort of living the way that passage describes—you know the passage I've quoted it many times—from Hugh of Saint-Victor, where the person who is a stranger everywhere is somehow at home but not loving the world too much—you know—you're moving on."³⁶ The repetition of these citations suggests that Said strongly identifies the atemporal and purified place of exile with the medieval and with mimesis. As the last citation suggests, Said "performs" Hugh of St. Victor. 21

     In his important "Reflections on Exile," Said yet again couples these two exemplary figures. Here, Said articulates exile as a deeply painful spatial problem: "much of the exile's life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule."³⁷ He strongly prefers the metaphor of exile to the concept of diaspora, which for Said includes the temporal dimension of a return, and he associates that with a history of both British Protestant Zionism and Jewish Zionism. To cut exile off from temporality, however, comes at a price. It freezes the past as lost (and therefore melancholically timeless) and denies the possibilities of the making of the past now, in the present. Exile forecloses those complex acts of mourning that move back to the future, out of Orientalism, beyond the Occidentalism of the European Middle Ages. 22

Medievalists cannot afford to "throw out" Orientalism, since, as I have shown, its temporal problems are deeply entwined with medievalisms of exile. Instead, medievalists urgently need to relink the chain of exile (Hugh, Dante, Auerbach, Said) in order to undo the Orientalism of Said's Orientalism. Such relinking has already begun at Said's memorial site of Istanbul. It is to Istanbul that European medievalists now need to turn, not to sack it, as in 1204, but rather to consider translingual practices "that do not take metropolitan European tongues as a point of departure."³⁸ 23

     A novel by Orhan Pamuk, The New Life, not only returns to the Istanbul of the 1930s encountered by Auerbach, who fled from the Nazi-controlled University of Marburg, where he as a Jew could no longer teach, it also rereads Dante, on whom Auerbach showered his critical attention. This crisscrossing of Auerbach's and Pamuk's Dante in Istanbul (then and now) sets in motion Said's atemporal notion of exile and in so doing also renders intimately contiguous "Islam-within-Europe and Europe-within-Islam," bridged by this city that straddles two continents.³⁹ At such a crossroads, the medievalist can learn to translate Dante outside of the memorializing Orientalist canon. 24

     When Auerbach arrived in Istanbul in 1936, the modernization instigated by Kemal Atatürk, who proclaimed the beginning of the secular Turkish republic in 1923, was in full swing. (October 29, 1998, marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republic of Turkey.)⁴⁰ Indeed, Auerbach's invitation to teach at the University of Istanbul is of a piece with this program. Auerbach lamented such modernization, which he viewed as destructive of traditional "Arabic" culture and as undertaken only to "beat an admired and hated Europe with its own weapons." In this crossfire of German fascism and Turkish modernization, between 1942 and 1945, Auerbach wrote his renowned book Mimesis. Auerbach's hero is Dante, whose artistry he regarded as "a well-nigh incomprehensible miracle."⁴¹ 25

     Pamuk's novel The New Life, with its meditation on Dante's Vita Nuova (1292–1294), forms a double lens that renders visible the Orientalisms of technology, temporality, and exile, which go unacknowledged in the medievalisms of Orientalism.⁴² Pamuk takes up the legacy of Turkish modernization commented on by Auerbach by tracing the afterlife of a mysterious book written by the protagonist's uncle Rifki. The latter was a railroad engineer of the cohort growing up under Atatürk's rule, a generation that now faces old age and death.⁴³ The policy to "modernize" literature haunts the library collection on which Rifki drew to write his book: "translated works of Dante, Ib'n Arabi, and Rilke from the world classic series published by the Turkish Ministry of Education and sometimes distributed free of charge to directorates, and ministries."⁴⁴ 26

     Pamuk frames the exile of the "new life" as a technological catastrophe. Rifki's mysterious book transforms its readers; they leave their families, old friends, and familiar neighborhoods and go into exile. His characters have "slipped off the tracks" upon reading the book. For several months, the protagonist, Osman, with his sometime girlfriend Janan, pass the time on interminable bus trips by watching the films played on the video monitors. Lest the reader miss the point about the importance of these technologies, Osman kills Janan's old boyfriend in a movie theater, and he himself dies in a final bus accident that ends the novel.⁴⁵ 27

     The modern mechanical and visual technologies foregrounded by Pamuk have unsettling temporal anxieties. Pamuk uses the conceit of the "still," the image frozen and photographed off moving-picture film, to map the problems of Orientalist temporality. He unfolds this temporal critique in a story of Osman's efforts to track down the source of the image of an angel printed on the wrapper of New Life Caramels. These candies, a favorite sweet of his childhood, evoke memories of his Uncle Rifki. When he finally locates their octogenarian confectioner, he learns that a special face, that of Marlene Dietrich, fondly remembered from the film The Blue Angel, inspired the candy manufacturer to print a blue angel on the wrapper. The Blue Angel, produced in both English and German versions by the Jewish-German émigré Josef von Sternberg, premiered in 1930. Auerbach might have seen the film in Germany; the fictional caramel maker saw the film in Turkey and translated the face of Dietrich into the angel adorning the wrapper. This paper angel thus becomes a kind of still of the film, a "second encounter" between modern European film technologies and modernizing under Atatürk.⁴⁶ 28

     The "still" of the blue angel returns us to the compelling problems of Orientalist temporality at stake in this essay. The still throws off the material constraints of filmic time (that is, the constraint that reels cannot go faster or slower than the motor of the projecting mechanism without losing perceptibility). It materializes a different temporal order: "the still by instituting a reading that is at once instantaneous and vertical, scorns logical time (which is only an operational time); it teaches us how to disassociate the technical constraint from what is the specific filmic and which is the 'indescribable' meaning."⁴⁷ With the blue angel, Pamuk conjures a brilliant map for rereading Dante's Vita Nuova as a technological and temporal study of exile.⁴⁸ He insists that we read Dante at the crossroads of Atatürk's Istanbul. He asks what Teodolinda Barolini asks: "How we can read Dante without undergoing conversion, becoming his disciples, his narrative believers, and his companions in exile?"⁴⁹ 29

Pamuk's novel writes the stakes of the medievalisms of Orientalism. His New Life opposes itself to the Orientalisms of Dante and Said. Pamuk insists on the analysis of technology, temporality, and representation. Medievalists can join in bringing the European Middle Ages out of exile, out of its Orientalism, with such a rereading of the destructive aspects of technologies of exile. Exile, as a guiding concept for Said, and for Dante, becomes a way of ensuring the original and of eschewing ineradicable, ambiguous contact of original with copy. Pamuk reminds us that, in its memorializing purity, exile can run the risk of becoming a dangerous way of keeping out of touch, out of time, out of history. Time, then, to turn to Dante and his technologies of exile. 30

     Dante, who wrote his Vita Nuova between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty (1292–1295), lived in a visual world, in which the media of the cultic was undergoing radical transformation.⁵⁰ A palpable and corporeally referential world of relics (bone, tooth, hair) and their complementary reliquaries, richly fabricated into shapes mimicking the body part, was transformed into the painted surface of devotional panels. Such panels had become increasingly popular in Tuscany since the Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204, which disseminated Byzantine icons and Greek artists more widely in Italy. 31

     The impact of this deterritorialization of the cultic body to the iconic painted surface can be gauged in the new Franciscan cult of St. Francis of Assisi, which developed rapidly after his canonization in 1228. The cult did not rely on relics poached from his corpse but rather on the fabrication of official icons that represented both this sainthood and its material proof in the paint itself, representing the blood of the stigmata. 32

     From around the mid-thirteenth century, Tuscan confraternities vied with each other to commission ever-larger icon panels for their religious festivals. Before Dante sat down to write his Vita Nuova, he would have seen Duccio di Buoninsegna's Madonna Rucellai (1285), commissioned by the Laudesi, a confraternity located in Santa Maria Novella. This panel (450 by 290 centimeters—larger than any young Beatrice) depicts the Madonna and Child flanked by six angels. They are garbed in richly textured fabrics floating against the fabric fields of curtains and gold leaf. Such luminous representations, based on deterritorializing the corporeal palpability of bodily relics to a painted surface, acquired the tactile powers once possessed by relics.⁵¹ 33

     I have taken the space to outline the translation of the cultic body part onto painted surfaces in order to propose that, when Dante beheld Beatrice (whom he always describes as both a face and fabric in the Vita Nuova), he perceived a "still" of the icons that increasingly surrounded him as authoritative images in his visual world. He tells the reader that when he was nine years old (1274), he witnessed an apparition. Beatrice appeared "humbly and properly dressed in a most noble color, crimson, girded and adorned in the manner that befitted her so youthful age."⁵² This vision initiates Dante into obeying the rubric "The new life begins" (incipit vita nuova) of his imagined book of memory. 34

     His famous vision in the opening pages of the Vita Nuova marks the violence of the translation at stake in these new representational technologies. Love (Amor), who appears to Dante holding in his arms a naked Beatrice loosely wrapped in red cloth, takes Dante's glowing heart and feeds it to Beatrice. At this moment of cannibalism, Beatrice performs the deterritorialization of corporeality (Dante's heart in this example). At this juncture, Dante produces for the reader his first lyric of the Vita Nuova. Dante thus writes the lyric just as a body part is in the process of becoming a representational surface.⁵³ Technology and exile come together at the close of the Vita Nuova. There he invokes the Veronica Veil, or Holy Face. This is the veil on which Christ wiped his bloody visage, only to leave a perfect impression of his face. This image is the original of the original—not made by human hands: "that blessed image that Jesus Christ left to us as an exemplum of his most beautiful countenance."⁵⁴ Dante identifies with this image, and uses it, in an important moment in the Vita Nuova, to mark exile, a "peregrini" in the broadest sense, that is, as "anyone outside one's country."⁵⁵ And so Dante fashions exile, before his political banishment from Florence became a reality. In this complex moment of the Vita Nuova, Dante chains to his vernacular lyric the notion of pilgrimage, understood as a form of exile, along with the concept of the "original," the Veronica Veil, the authorizing image for new painted surfaces, translations of corporeality into paint. 35

     The surface of the new visual technologies of thirteenth-century Tuscany thus gives birth to the artist in exile, Dante, in whose miraculous birth Western criticism has believed so long and fervently. Dante is always already in exile in the Vita Nuova. He uses exile to suspend his "contract with the future." (Consider Dante's obsessions with time, in this text in which there is no future.)⁵⁶ Just as the painted panels of the icon reterritorialized the relic onto the painted surface, Dante used exile to reterritorialize the lyric of the Vita Nuova into the epic enterprise of empire and the demise of memory in the Divine Comedy. 36

     A suspicion of murder haunts Dante's fashioning of exile in the Vita Nuova. Critics have wondered what becomes of Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's best friend and fellow poet from Chapter 30 (just after Beatrice's death) onward.⁵⁷ Guido, whom Dante as a member of the City Council of Florence and signer of the proclamation of his banishment sent into exile in 1302, is thus textually disappeared by Dante well before 1300. Why must Dante drop Guido from the Vita Nuova? The question is not irrelevant to our concerns about Orientalist temporality. 37

     Pamuk provides a compelling clue for medievalists in his New Life. Just before Osman is about to kill his rival Mehmet in the movie theater, he hesitates. He remembers that in the adventure comics he loved in his youth (and drawn by his many-talented Uncle Rifki), the protagonists, Pertev and Peter, after going through many battles, realize they have fallen in love with the same girl, yet they do not harm each other: "they sit down and solve the problem amicably." As Osman fondly recalls these negotiated endings, he wonders why he needs to kill Mehmet. For one moment of intense identification, he actually imagines Mehmet as Pertev: "Pertev had them weigh for me a kilo of the famous large white grapes grown in Viran Bag." But pace Uncle Rifki's comics, that moment of identification cannot be sustained "amicably," and Osman shoots Mehmet.⁵⁸ Likewise, Dante cannot sustain his "amicable" relation with Guido. Their linked versions of the same lyric voice (Dante and Guido), just like Pertev and Peter's linked versions of adventure, retain an ineradicable ambiguity, an intimacy, that has to die. Better exile and elision than ambivalent intimacies! 38

     An exile that shoots Mehmet in a cinema, an exile that disappears Guido in a new world of iconic representation—Osman and Dante remind us that Orientalist temporalities have to do with representational technologies whose mechanical regularities result in the "swallowing-up of contact . . . by the copy," which is "what ensures the animation of the latter, its power to straddle us."⁵⁹ 39

Fourteen years after the publication of Orientalism, Edward Said chose to come out of exile. Faced with a possibly terminal medical diagnosis, Said decided in 1992 to return to the city that he remembered fleeing as a young boy.⁶⁰ Much of his visit to Jerusalem reminded him of the "eerie finality of history." As his memoir of the visit begins, it offers little evidence of a sense of other histories open to the future. His apocalyptic tone changes, however, when he enthusiastically relates his last anecdote, a story about an invited lecture given at the Palestinian University of Bir Zeit on the West Bank. For the first time, Said accomplishes what he tells his reader he has imagined for years: "translating my type of cultural criticism into the language and concerns of Palestinian students. And that, more even than the fact of residence, could become my contribution to a Palestine that would be neither insular nor ruled by orthodoxy." After his talk, two campus Islamic leaders asked to speak to Said. Said agreed, "expecting the worst." He was "thunderstruck" when the leaders acknowledged their differences, thanked him, and invited him back to campus.⁶¹ It is at this moment that the possibility for a second encounter for Orientalism takes place, one that disrupts Said's own melancholic identifications with Hugh of St. Victor, Dante, and Auerbach. Not only has he come out of exile in this encounter with Palestinian students, he has agreed to speak to Islamic "fundamentalists" for whom he, as a "secular critic," has borne militant scorn.⁶² Said's coming out of exile in this encounter with so-called Islamic fundamentalists creates other temporal potentials and new complex spaces that belie Orientalist binaries of East/West and temporal supersession. Said's own complicated and changing relations to Orientalist critique and exile, which I have attempted to delineate in this essay, offer an invitation to medievalists to bring the European Middle Ages out of disciplinary exile and to engage complex temporalities of postcolonial histories. 40

Kathleen Biddick is a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the Gender Studies Program. She has worked on various projects in cultural studies of technology, particularly how graphic technologies come to fabricate and constitute temporalities. Her publications include The Shock of Medievalism (1998). Her book The Cut of Genealogy is forthcoming in the autumn of 2001.

Notes

A fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center (1998–1999) and its lively collegiality generously supported the work for the essay. I am indebted to Keith Baker and Susan Dunn, our director and assistant director, for their intellectual hospitality and to the following fellows for their readings and critical advice: Donald Carter, Sean Keilen, Alexander Nemerov, Ruth Nissé, Aron Rodrigue, Cynthia Steele, Jennifer Summit, and Deanne Williams. My colleagues Paul Cobb and Scott Appleby offered productive commentaries on a penultimate draft of this essay at a History Department Colloquium, November 16, 1999. The comments of Bob Franklin, Graham Hammill, Lisa Rofel, Joan Scott, and Kerry Walk, and readers of the AHR proved invaluable.
¹ I have used the 1994 edition of Edward W. Said's Orientalism (New York, 1994), which prints his afterword. I take my epigraph from p. 59. Appreciation of Orientialism abounds at this anniversary. Said is celebrated as both the modern Goethe and the father of postcolonial studies. A critical review of these retrospectives would be a study in itself. The following references offer a guide to debate: Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York, 1990); Gyan Prakash, "Orientalism Now," History and Theory 34 (1995): 119–212; Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (New York, 1997), 34–73; also the special issue of boundary 2 (Summer 1998) on Said, Paul A. Bové, ed.
² Said, Orientalism (1994), 71.
³ At this time, I was trying to join my reading of Said with recent archaeological literature and traditional paradigms of medieval "European" economic history: Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, Vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974); Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis (New York, 1983); Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York, 1989). Hodges and Whitehouse, 19.
⁴ See Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, N.C., 1998), chap. 2.
⁵ The proceedings were edited by John Van Engen, The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (Notre Dame, Ind., 1994), see 39 n. 23 regarding the debate at the conference over Orientalism.
⁶ Early criticism of Orientalism remarked on the absence of a critique of temporal forms of power. I now appreciate more acutely the relevance of this critique to Medieval Studies. Homi Bhabha has concentrated on problems of temporality in postcolonial studies, and in an early essay he commented on Said's hesitations to interrogate temporality as a form of power in Orientalism: "The Other Question," Screen 24 (1983): 18–36 (rpt. in Bhabha, The Location of Culture [London, 1994], 66–84); Bhabha has joined his concept of ambivalence with the notion of the borderline proximity, the one-in-the-other in a recent essay, "Front Lines/Border Posts," Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 431–59.
⁷ Said, Orientalism, 31, 240.
⁸ Said, Orientalism, 68–70.
⁹ The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky (New York, 1994), Canto 28, p. 294. Illustrator Michael Mazur's "map" to this canto is a haunting reminder of the violence of dividing East from West. As for Dante's redemption of "good" Muslims in Limbo (Avicenna, Averröes, Saladin), Said identified this "tolerance" as evidence of the "discriminations and refinements" of Orientalist vision, in which Islam is the "creature of the West's moral apprehension" (Orientalism, 69). On the "tolerance" of Dante's depiction of Muhammad in viewing him only as a schismatic, see James Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton, N.J., 1964), 144. Such a diagnosis neglects to see how Christianity is normalized in such a view, as hegemony from which everything "not Christian" is viewed as schism.
¹⁰ Said, Orientalism, 120.
¹¹ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. (London, 1991), 22–25.
¹² Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, Hassan Melehy, trans. (Minneapolis, Minn., 1994), 82.
¹³ For a questioning of the hegemony of the European Middle Ages, see the announcement (September 2000) for the new journal from Sage entitled The Medieval History Journal. It reads: "The historical periodization of a given society's past is being redefined the world over. Timeframes that have been frozen for many decades have been questioned in recent years and the boundaries of the 'medieval' have been expanded. The Medieval History Journal is designed as a forum for these trends and for accommodating questions, critiques and debates. It will express spatial and temporal flexibility in defining the 'medieval' in order to capture its expansive thematic domain." On the World Wide Web at www.sagepub.co.uk/, under "Journals," choose "Complete Journal Listing," and then The Medieval History Journal.
¹⁴ For a fuller discussion of the links between institutional history and trauma and the need to rethink historicism, see Biddick, Shock of Medievalism. Geraldine Heng reminds us of the historical trauma of Orientalism in her discussion of the Crusader cannibalism of massacred Muslims at the siege of Ma'arra, December 1098: Heng, "Cannibalism, the First Crusade, and the Genesis of Medieval Romance," differences 10 (Spring 1998): 98–174. Talal Asad shows the abiding trauma of Islam for Europe in his brilliant readings of the Salman Rushdie affair in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, Md., 1993), 239–306; and his analysis of European anxieties over Turkish application to join the European Community: "Representing Islam in Europe," in Cultural Encounters: Representing Otherness, Brian V. Street and Elizabeth Hallam, eds. (New York, 2000). I am grateful to my colleague Donald Carter for sharing this last reference with me.
¹⁵ These golden age histories are a version of postcolonial Orientalism, the subject of compelling commentary in Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), 136–89.
¹⁶ For different approaches to cross-cultural exchanges in the world of Petrus Alfonsi, compare Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham, N.C., 1994); John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (Gainesville, Fla., 1993); and Kathleen Biddick, "The ABC of Ptolemy: Mapping the World with the Alphabet," in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, eds. (Philadelphia, 1998), 268–94.
¹⁷ It is useful to read the representations of Lull in Menocal, Shards of Love, alongside Sylvia Schein, Fideles Crucis: The Papacy, the West, and the Recovery of the Holy Land 1274–1314 (Oxford, 1991).
¹⁸ I am relying on Bhabha, Location and Culture, and Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, 1992), for their thoughts about ambivalence. By ambivalence, I mean anxieties about the intimacy of difference and the porosity of the border purportedly defining "almost the same, but not quite."
¹⁹ The following studies can be read together for ways in which the ambivalence of Gerald is either ignored or elaborated: Caroline Walker Bynum, "Wonder," AHR 102 (February 1997): 1–27, 16; John Gillingham, "The Beginnings of English Imperialism," Journal of Historical Sociology 5 (1992): 392–409; Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223 (Oxford, 1982). The unanalyzed problems with this history of wonder appear again in amazing ways in Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998).
²⁰ It is in the space in between this escalating violence within Christendom and between Christians and Jews, Muslims, and pagans that the provocative images analyzed by Jacqueline de Weever can be even more complexly read; see Sheba's Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in Medieval French Epic (New York, 1998).
²¹ For a brilliant introduction to new ways of thinking about medieval slavery, see Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54 (1997): 103–42; see also Kathleen Biddick, "Translating the Foreskin," in Queering the Middle Ages/Historicizing Post-Modernity, Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger, eds. (Minneapolis, forthcoming).
²² For a discussion of these recent anthologies, see the introduction to Biddick, Shock of Medievalism; also Peter Monaghan, "Medievalists, Romantics No Longer, Take Stock of Their Changing Field," Chronicle of Higher Education 45 (October 30, 1998): A15–17.
²³ Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, N.J., 1993); Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing East: The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia, 1997).
²⁴ The following citations are intended only as a cursory guide to current work: Thomas E. Burman, Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050–1200 (New York, 1994); Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula 900–1500 (Cambridge, 1994); Mark D. Meyerson, The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade (Berkeley, Calif., 1991); David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1996). For a thoughtful meditation on colonial linguistic interactions, see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif., 1995).
²⁵ A succinct and cogent criticism of such historical and anthropological moves can be found in the introduction of Asad's Genealogies of Religion.
²⁶ Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 7.
²⁷ Nirenberg reads against Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (London, 1975); Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, Raymond Rosenthal, trans. (New York, 1991); Robert I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (London, 1987). See Asad, Geneaologies of Religion, for an important discussion, and inspired by this, Biddick, "ABC of Ptolemy." Also Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (New York, 1995); Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley, Calif., 1990).
²⁸ Here, it is useful to read Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a way of reimagining the nomadic space of crusade and inquisition: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis, Minn., 1987). For a discussion of graphic technologies of the Inquisition, see Kathleen Biddick, "Paper Jews: Inscription/Ethnicity/Ethnography," Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 594–99.
²⁹ Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 200–30. See Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, Conn., 1999).
³⁰ For a different strategy of collaboration between Iberian studies and modern critical theory, see Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, eds. (Durham, N.C., 1999).
³¹ Erich Auerbach, "Philology and Weltliteratur," Maire Said and Edward Said, trans., Centennial Review 13 (1969): 1–17. The essays in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, Seth Lerer, ed. (Stanford, Calif., 1996), provide an excellent starting point for the extensive bibliography on Auerbach.
³² The legal and visual history of the universitas of exiles is brought out by Randolph Starn, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 1982). He reproduces a copy (fig. 7) of the death sentence issued against Dante and fourteen others on March 10, 1302. Dante was not alone, although the manuscript illustrations of the Divine Comedy exemplify him as the solitary exile.
³³ Sara Suleri has drawn our attention to the importance of such a connection: "[T]he connection between the idioms of exile and adolescence has long haunted the literature of empire—the classic text in this mode is Lord Jim—but perhaps it is time for critical discourse to examine more rigorously the idiom of exile." Suleri, Rhetoric of English India, 184.
³⁴ Said, Orientalism, 258–60.
³⁵ The epigraph comes from Hugh of St. Victor's treatise, Didascalicon, Book 3, chap. 19. For the translation, see Jerome Taylor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor (New York, 1991), 101. Hugh composed his treatise in the late 1120s, at the abbey of St. Victor in Paris. For an important historical introduction to this Christian tradition of exile, see Gerhart B. Ladner, "Homo Viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order," Speculum 42 (1967): 233–59; for the links with Hugh's scholarly interests in cosmology as representation and his moral views on attachments to the world, see Richard Bultot, "Cosmologie et 'contemptus mundi,'" in Sapientiae Doctrina: Mélanges de théologie et de littérature médievales; Offerts à Dom Hildebrand Bascour (Leuven, 1980), 1–23.
³⁶ Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), 335; interview, boundary 2 (Summer 1998): 23.
³⁷ Said's most sustained commentary on exile can be found in "Reflections on Exile," Granta 13 (1984): 159–72, quotation at 167. He links diaspora to the idea of a redemptive homeland in "On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Salman Rushdie," rpt. in Edward W. Said, Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969–1993 (New York, 1994), 114. For an important discussion of temporality and diaspora and an emergent critique of exile, see James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 244–78; for a recent critical survey of the postcolonial use of diaspora, see Jacqueline Nassy Brown, "Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space," Cultural Anthropology 13 (1998): 291–325 (I am grateful to my colleague Lisa Rofel for this reference); Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin offer important insights into the problems of temporality within diaspora and exile in "Diaspora: Generation and the Grounds of Jewish Identity," Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 693–725.
³⁸ Liu, Translingual Practice, 27.
³⁹ For an important discussion of how the Turkish bid to enter the European Community has resulted in anxious reassertions of "Europeanness," see Talal Asad, "Representing Islam in Europe," in Street and Hallam, Cultural Encounters.
⁴⁰ See Stephen Kinzer, "Safranbolu Journal," New York Times (October 29, 1998): A4. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) became the first president of the Turkish Republic in 1923.
⁴¹ Erich Auerbach to Walter Benjamin, December 12, 1936, Karlheinz Barck, ed., "Neue Materialien," Zeitschrift für Germanistik 6 (1988): 692. In the same letter to Benjamin, Auerbach also noted the "disturbing" intimacies of Istanbul: he describes the Pera, a new suburb, as "a caricature, a mimicry of a European settlement of the nineteenth century, now in decay. There are the ghastly remains of luxury stores, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, all tongues, a grotesque society." Said's views on modernization in Cairo are interesting to compare with Auerbach. See Edward W. Said, "Cairo Recalled: Growing Up in the Cultural Crosscurrents of 1940s Egypt," House and Garden 159 (1987): 20–32. In describing the Cairo of his adolescence, Said reports he only had a rare chance to have "contact with the Cairo that was neither pharaonic, nor European." When he was able to make such contact, it was like "contact with nature." Said believes that such contact with the "latent promiscuity of this underground Cairo" is being lost by "Nasser's Arabization, Sadat's Americanization, and Mubarek's reluctant Islamization" (32). Such sentiments are close to those of the belated travelers to Egypt described by Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in an Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, N.C., 1994). Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Bern, 1946), 175; Eng. trans., Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Willard R. Trask, trans. (New York, 1953), 159.
⁴² Orhan Pamuk, The New Life [Yeni Hayat], Güneli Gün, trans. (New York, 1998); Ronald Wright, review, Times Literary Supplement (October 10, 1997): 23.
⁴³ Pamuk's own grandfather was a wealthy engineer who ran a factory and made a fortune on building the railway; see an interview with Pamuk in Publishers' Weekly 252 (December 19, 1994): 36–37.
⁴⁴ Pamuk, New Life, 256. Please note that the English translation renders Ibn'Arabi as Ib'n Arabi. Auerbach's pedagogical manual, Introduction aux études de philologie romane, written in 1943 in Istanbul and published in French (1949), serves as a partial guide to this translation project mapped out by Uncle Rifki's library. Auerbach published his famous essay on "Figura" in Istanbul in 1944 in the Neue Dantestudien: 11–71; trans. by Ralph Manheim and published in Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis, Minn., 1984), 11–78.
⁴⁵ Pamuk, New Life, 285. After shooting his friend and rival Mehmet, Osman asks himself: "why, in our language the same French loanword, makinist, designates both the person who runs films and the person who runs railway engines." Pamuk, New Life, 230. Gilles Deleuze shows the importance of the hybrid linking of these two modern technologies and the problem of the closeup and faciality in cinema in Cinema, Vol. 1: The Movement-Image (London, 1986), 101. The intersection of Pamuk and Dante helps us to problematize the historical question of appropriation of "living images" (icons) from Byzantine ateliers by Tuscan artists and the facialization of the body in thirteenth-century Tuscany; see also Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 167–91.
⁴⁶ I am using "second encounter" following Michael T. Taussig, who emphasizes the technologized colonial chain of mimesis and its crucialness to material construction of the shifting borders between "original" and "copy": Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York, 1993), 246.
⁴⁷ Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning," in Image, Music, Text, Stephen Heath, trans. (New York, 1977), 68. I am grateful to my colleague Alexander Nemerov for remarking on the relevance of another essay by Barthes, "The Face of Garbo," in Mythologies (New York, 1972). Barthes makes interesting links between her face, exile, and temporality: "the Essence [of her face] became gradually obscured, progressively veiled with dark glasses, broad hats and exiles: but it never deteriorated" (p. 57).
⁴⁸ Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta, eds. (Notre Dame, Ind., 1995); see also Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore, Md., 1988). Pamuk's reading accords with the following critical sentiments among medievalists: "medievalists need to develop a stance that will allow us to attend to Dante's narrative strategies as well as to ponder the repercussions of our blinkered praise." Sylvia Tomasch, "Judecca, Dante's Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew," in Tomasch and Gilles, Text and Territory, 264.
⁴⁹ Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, N.J., 1992), 16.
⁵⁰ My summary is based on the work of Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Edmund Jephcott, trans. (Chicago, 1994), esp. chaps. 17–18; also Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (New York, 1996).
⁵¹ For instance, the images of the Virgin painted on the walls of the civic loggia of Or San Michele, in Florence, became famous in 1292 for healing the sick.
⁵² Dante, Vita Nuova, 2.3, 46–47.
⁵³ Dante, Vita Nuova, 3.5–3.7, 50–51. Just as relics are translated onto painted panels, Dante "translates" his relics into prose in the Vita Nuova. As Barolini remarks, "the lyrics thus chosen undergo not only a passive revision in the process of being selected for inclusion, but also an active revision at the hands of the prose narrative, which bends them into a new significance consonant with the poet's 'new life' . . . The prose is the chief witness to the author's revised intentions, since through its agency poems composed as isolated love lyrics are forced into temporal sequence that places them in a predetermined and significant relation to each other." Teodolinda Barolini, Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 15.
⁵⁴ Dante, Vita Nuova, 40.1, 138–39. For the Holy Face and the Veronica Veil, see Belting, Likeness and Presence, 208–25; and Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 1993), 80–126.
⁵⁵ Dante, Vita Nuova, 40.6, 140–41.
⁵⁶ The topical index of the Cervigni and Vasta edition of the Vita Nuova conveniently indexes Dante's references to temporality under the entry "time." The image of Dante's suspension of his contract with the future comes from Harrison, Body of Beatrice, 166.
⁵⁷ The brilliant essay on the ghost of Guido Cavalcanti in Harrison, Body of Beatrice, has guided my thoughts about these intersections between Vita Nuova and New Life.
⁵⁸ Pamuk, New Life, 229.
⁵⁹ Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 22.
⁶⁰ Edward W. Said, "Palestine, Then and Now," Harper's Magazine 285 (December 1992): 47–55.
⁶¹ Said, "Palestine, Then and Now," 50, 55.
⁶² Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 239–306.

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