ORIENTALISM IN THE "STRASSBURGER ALEXANDER"

Abstract

The Strassburger Alexander (SA), the second recension of Pfaffe Lambrecht's Alexanderroman, is one of the earHest Middle High German texts to focus on cross-cultural interaction within a framework that combines military conquest with geographical exploration.1 Whilst the first recension, the Vorauer Alexander (c.1160), breaks off after Alexander's defeat of Darius, the SA (c.1170-85) continues the story of how Alexander and his army progress through the Orient. After defeating Darius' ally Porus, Alexander faces little military resistance and instead experiences a series of unsettling and ambivalent encounters with the unfamiliar: girls who grow on flower-stalks, men who abjure war, a queen who outsmarts him, and numerous monstrous creatures unknown in the West. Although Alexander emerges physically unscathed in every case, these encounters serve to relativize the importance and appropriateness of his achievements, at least in the eyes of the audience. The final episode, involving his abortive and slightly embarrassing attempt to conquer Paradise, triggers a formal lesson in humility and a period of moral improvement during his final years.The aim of this article is to apply the concept of Orientalism, originally promulgated by Edward Said,2 to highlight the ways in which Alexander fuses military force with more academic or experimental approaches in an attempt to 'manage' the Orient. The combination of military and intellectual conquest is central to Said's concept. Accordingly, although his analysis relates primarily to the post-Enlightenment period, he attaches seminal importance to the figure of Alexander, who combined military, exploratory, and taxonomic activities in the Orient.3 In the decades since 1978, Said's original framework has, of course, been challenged, refined, and expanded in various ways, not least in relation to medieval literature (and often in relation to the medieval Alexander).4 As this article will seek to show, emphasis on the intertwining of academic and colonist/ imperialist interests is particularly pertinent for the SA.The article will examine the ways in which encounters with Eastern exotica are used as a basis for exploring the nature and limits of humanity. After an overview of the teratological inventory of the SA, the focus will be on a comparative discussion of a single short episode (lines 4909/5359-4960/5410). This episode presents Alexander's encounter with a hybrid being - a man with porcine features. This pig-man resists capture even though cornered by Alexander's soldiers. When Alexander places a beautiful girl in front of the pigman, he snatches her and attempts to carry her off to the woods, presumably to violate her. The soldiers rescue her and Alexander has the pig-man burnt to death. Whilst many other Alexander texts contain variations of this episode, the SA is unique in its presentation of Alexander's motivation for treating the pig-man in this way: Alexander is shown to engage in a deliberate experiment to probe the sexual responses, and hence the humanity, of the pig-man. This in turn is implicitly linked to Alexander's own difficulties with sexuality and mortality.5 Overall, the episode is handled in such a way as to generate a sense of moral unease mostly absent from other versions of the same material.To some extent, Orientalism is endemic in medieval writing. Whilst some courdy romances operate with home-grown monsters populating the woods and wildernesses immediately adjacent to the Arthurian court,6 most texts conceive the Other as geographically remote and, notwithstanding a certain interest in the Adantic and the Arctic,7 as living specifically in the East. This Orient of the medieval imagination clearly contains fantastical features, particularly as one progresses beyond the Levant, and is characterized by a certain geographical haziness - for example, insofar as it contains black and Moorish populations more accurately associated with Africa.8 Nonetheless, an awareness of biblical geography (and, increasingly, of locations affected by crusades) means that the medieval Orient never becomes so vague a concept that it merely becomes synonymous with 'far away', nor does it normally constitute a mythical otherworld or heterotopia. …