Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric.

• Author: Meisami, Julie Scott

While Shards of Love deals mainly with European literary history, the issues it raises - of how narratives of literary history have been, and might be, written - concern all of us who study literature (and not least the literatures of the Middle East). The "master narrative" of European literature begins, as does the book (part I, "The Horse Latitudes"), on that fateful day of 2nd August 1492 when the Jews of Spain began their second Diaspora and Columbus launched the voyage which "would be remembered as that perfect marker of a rip in the fabric of world history" (p. 4). From this point on, "the literature and culture of the Jews and the Muslims ... are fully exiled from the narrative of 'European literary history'" (p. 23), which will jettison everything that does not fit - beginning with the Middle (now, the Dark) Ages, as "modernity" defines itself as everything that is not medieval, going on to efface pluralities of language and culture that threaten fragmentation and chaos - as it proceeds "towards pristine Castilian, or pure Italian, or perfect French" (p. 13), the languages of nations and of states.

How can we resist the temptations of this smooth, false narrative? We might begin by substituting for the "objectivizing" stance by which we distance ourselves from the past the "synchronic" medieval historiographic mode "that intimately molds the relationship between self and text, self and history," in an effort both to "reconceive our own relationships to earlier texts and culture as part of our fundamental personal and present histories" and to restore "the radical presentness of the medieval past just beneath our consciousness" (pp. 17-18), to acknowledge the pluralism lost to our communal memory, purged from the master narrative just as its representatives were expelled from their European homelands.

There is no better example of "the havoc wreaked on our communal memory" than the muwashshahat, those songs that "invent new Romance and Arabic and Hebrew poetics in one swoop," in which "we hear a calliope of languages and voices," of registers and genders, playing out "the paradoxes of love" (pp. 24-25). Carved up by specialist philologies, dismissed as not very "good" poetry (ungrammatical, mongrel, popular), their very existence violates the assumptions of the master narrative. The muwashshahat share important affinities with other marginalized, hybrid literary phenomena: the Baroque poetry of a Spanish Gongora, the modern poems of a Cuban Nicolas Guillen; this hybridity prompts Menocal to argue "that medieval culture is postmodern" (p. 37), in ways mapped out here and in the ensuing chapters.

Menocal distinguishes, correctly I think, between the early Middle Ages (tenth-thirteenth centuries), marked by a general tolerance of pluralism, and the later (fourteenth-fifteenth...