THE HORDE (2012): before before Orientalism, the new (?) medievalism

by KARL STEEL

FIRST, celebrate the new issue of postmedieval, below.

A few nights ago, I made the mistake of watching The Horde, a 2012 film produced by the Orthodox Encyclopedia, (!), that combines the story of the fourteenth-century collapse of the Mongol empire with a hagiographical yarn of the miraculous Saint Alexius, Metropolitan of Moscow, and the blindness of Taidula, Queen Mother of the Mongols. The film earned its controversy:

[Vadim Rudakov, labeled a Golden Horde expert] came away from the first meeting feeling enthusiastic that Russia would "finally" have an accurate depiction of life under its Mongol forbearers, who are widely credited with establishing regional government, a postal system, census-taking, and military organization.

But once the script was developed, Rudakov was crestfallen. Most of his suggestions about historical accuracy had been ignored, he told RFE/RL. And the depiction of the Mongols, he said, was deeply degrading.

"Some of them were given human qualities, but the overall impression is of brutal, bloodthirsty, evil-minded, greedy people. Even the jokes they told were flat and stupid," Rudakov says. "It was all of the worst traditions of the old Soviet films about Tatar Mongols and nomads.

Reactions to this debate have been predictable: films, we’re told, can change what they like to be entertaining (or, if Google translate can be trusted, it’s actually quite accurate); authentic Russians should celebrate breaking the Mongol yoke; Russians should be proud of Russia; and something to do with whether the Ukraine as such ever existed (in comments) and whatever the comment at September 21, 2012 08:48 could possibly mean (“CIS nations are not 'Indians' as Russian Neanderthals saying, Their nations emerged Caucasians long before came Varaga. Varaga were Neanderthals, only since fifth Century BC mixing With Sam-Gad corsed tribes”).

Nuts, Turnips, Water, Blood, Bread, Watermelon

I’m particularly interested in how The Horde uses food to delineate human from subhuman. In it, the ‘good guys’, i.e., the Christians, don’t eat meat: they eat turnips, bread, and nuts and drink only water; the ‘bad guys,’ i.e., the Mongols, eat roasted meat, drink strong liquor and horseblood, and, at one point, scarf a watermelon, whose red dripping ‘flesh’ surely is meant to resemble meat. 

Early on, Jani Beg (Джанибек), just on the verge of becoming Khan, mimes taking a bite out of his dinner mate. Then he strangles his brother and declares himself Khan. Later, his mother, Taidula, convinces him to decapitate some captured Russians to save having to feed them, as otherwise they’ll have “to eat people again.” Jani Beg agrees: “it’s bad to eat people; the demon steals into your soul” a line whose initial blandness charges it with extra horror: “It’s bad to shoplift; it’s bad to jaywalk; also, while you’re at it, don’t eat people.”

click to ENLARGE

Of course, the Mongols have already eaten people; so they are, of course, a people possessed, more beast than human.

Food divisions like these would be perfectly expected had this film been written in 1240 by, say, Matthew Paris. “Thirsting after and drinking blood, and tearing the flesh of dogs and human beings,” the Mongols swarm “like locusts,” writes Matthew, joining with the 1238 Chronicle of Novgorod, whose Mongols “eat the flesh of the strong, and drink the blood of the Boyars,” and Yvo (or "Ivo") of Narbonne in 1243, where the Mongols eat their victims “like bread.” I quote all this from Kim M. Phillips’s Before Orientalism, 91, but I just as well might have plucked it from Shirin Khanmohamadi’s In Light of Another's Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages, 60.

Phillips observes that since no one else accused the Mongols of anthropophagy, it’s unlikely that they ate people with any regularity. Rather, as both Khanmohamadi and Phillips observe, these accusations are just elements of the “barbarian topos,” common since at least the classical era (key examples, here and here), the same fevered depictions of the other we’re likely to encounter anywhere (trigger alert).

Notably, the records of Mongol eating change as Christian missionaries produced better and better ethnography. When William of Rubruck writes that the Mongols have many “little creatures...which are good to eat, and which they are quite able to tell apart,” he may be a bit disgusted, but he at least has to admit they have a cuisine. And during his time among the Mongols, he himself comes to like kumis, a slightly boozy potable made from fermented mare’s milk.

Using these and other, similar texts, Khanmohamadi and Phillips each argue that the ethnography of 13th and early 14th-century Latin Christendom, at least for Central and East Asia, can’t be typified as “orientalist.” Their argument doesn’t snipe at Said; rather, as they argue, the colonial conditions Said studied simply don’t apply to this period and the relationships between these regions. Latin Christians couldn’t colonize or conquer Central Asia (as for East Asia, it was almost literally off the map). Instead, the Latin Christian writers Khanmohamadi and Phillips treat feared Mongol conquest (or hoped to convert the Mongols to ally against a common Islamic foe); they correctly thought China superior in nearly every way, in matters of culture, artistic skill, in the glory of their cities and the virtue of their women, in just about everything -- stupidly -- but food.

None of the Christian travelers in Khanmohamadi and Phillips would have produced anything like The Horde. They probably wouldn’t have portrayed Queen Taidula as the film did, as a dragon lady mastering her childish son: medieval misogyny has its own, probably less racist features. Furthermore, none would thought so highly of their own eating: none thought that Christians in general ate like the legendary Brahmans, on only roots (like turnips), nuts, and water.

For all that, the film still contains what may be the seed of a small critique of Khanmohamadi and Phillips. The film misconstrues both Mongol culture and what I know (which isn’t much) about the “contact zone” of Christian and Mongol (“Russian” and Mongol?) encounters and interchange in the 14th century. The film chooses the worst over the best medieval ethnography to portray the Mongols as lawless, uncivilized, cruel to animals, and somehow even more fleshy than Christians, because they eat little but flesh. 

Yet this portrayal isn’t quite Orientalized either. After all, the Christians in The Horde could hardly be more ignorant about the Mongols; they barely speak the language; they can only guess at Mongol history; there’s no certainty that the Mongols represent the living past of Christianity (that position, rather, was mostly reserved for the Jews, “living letters of the law”): there’s no Foucauldian Power/Knowledge at work here. What the Christians feel, primarily, is threatened by a lawless and violent enemy of civilization.

What they feel, in other words, is what “the West” feels in what may now be a post-Orientalist time, when the West longs melancholically and guiltily for its former dominance over “the East” and everywhere else, and when the West knows the East only as an implacable and incomprehensible enemy. The Horde must be read in light of Chechnya. Or at least as a kind of anti-foundation myth, where Russia, as such, emerges only when its illegitimate rulers finally collapse.

“Westerners” have come out the other side of Orientalism, not into the future it might have hoped for, but rather into the prehistory of the time before Orientalism Khanmohamadi and Phillips study. The trick for reading this present moment, perhaps, may not lie with Said, but rather with rereading, critically, Matthew Paris and his heirs, and likewise rereading texts about Gog and Magog and the “red Jews.” The heirs of medieval Christendom feel an eschatological threat again. They feel themselves embattled in their own presumed superiority without any real hope of escape, even delighting in being trapped, since, as the theological story goes, worldly suffering is the clearest evidence of who God really loves.EDIT: READ THIS FOOTNOTE FOR UPDATES¹

For more on the Mongols at this site, see this 2011 post here. See also this 2006 (!) post on meat-eating and masculinity. Elsewhere, see this superb recent post on veganism and hospitality, by Rebekah Sinclair at An und für sich; and enjoy this picture of Mongols eating, here. And for the food aversion and modern racism, see, for example, this.

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1 Noreen Giffney has written well both on the need for an engagement with the Mongols informed by theory (see here, especially) and, here, on how discourses of monstrosity and apocalypticism play out with thirteenth-century Christian depictions of the Mongols, particularly with Matthew Paris, Thomas of Spalato, The Chronicle of Novgorod, and Ivo of Narbonnes. Thanks to Michael O'Rourke for the reminder. And for a far more detailed and expert engagement with the Mongols than I can provide, listen to 2013 UCLA Conference on "The Mongols from the Margins: New Perspectives on Central Asians in World History," particularly Christopher Halperin's "No One Knew Who They Were: Russian Interaction with the Mongols." Thanks to Sharon Kinoshita for alerting me to the conference records.^↩

A City Without a Memory: Cologne Archives Collapse

by EILEEN JOY

Some time yesterday afternoon, the six-story Cologne Archives, housing documents dating as far back as the tenth century, as well as the private papers of writers such as Karl Marx, Hegel, and Heinrich Böll, and also all of the minutes taken at Cologne town council meetings since 1376, collapsed as if hit by a missile, only there was no missile, but rather, some sort of structural flaw that caused the building to start cracking and tumbling down. Most visitors, plus some construction workers on the roof, were able to get out in time, although two or three persons may be buried underneath the rubble. Ironically, the Archives contained many documents that had been recuperated from library buildings destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War, and a small nuclear bomb-proof room that had been constructed in the basement to house the most rare materials was, at the time of the building's collapse, only being used to store cleaning materials [you can read more about the story in the UK Times Online here].

Given that medievalists already always work with archives and records that are partial, damaged, and full of contextual aporia [the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, published by Columbia University Press in the early decades of the 20th century, could never be a complete record of the poetry of Anglo-Saxon England--indeed, it is quite spotty--and so many non-poetic documents that could have shed light on the social, cultural, and other circumstances of the writing of this poetry are also lost to us], the sudden disappearance, as it were, of the Cologne Archives only adds to what is already an immense loss. But what, also, of the two or three missing persons, who were likely readers in the archives that day and who lie somewhere, crushed, underneath the fractured concrete and steel and thousands and thousands of pulverized pages? One day, they were in the Archives, concerned with the frail, textual remains of the past, and in an instant, they joined those remains and even disappeared with them.

This question--or rather, this sort of question--has been much on my mind of late as I find myself lodged in a kind of hellish crevice between my struggles to finish two writing projects: one, a review essay on the status of the human for GLQ: A Journal of Gay & Lesbian Studies, in the course of which I have learned that human beings may be nothing more than the dreams and hosts of bacteria and bacterial sex [pace books by Luciani Parisi and Myra J. Hird], and yet, at the same time, if there is any hope for humanism or human rights, it will be through the recognition of shared modes of dispossession occasioned by vulnerability and grief [pace Judith Butler's Precarious Life], and the other, an abstract and detailed outline for my keynote address for Blackwell Compass's Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference in October, "Reading Beowulf in the Rubble of Grozny: Pre/modern, Post/human, and the Question of Being-Together," where, just yesterday, I was re-reading portions of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya's book about the wars in Chechnya from 1994 through 2000 and their aftermath, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya [Politkovskaya was shot to death in her apartment building's elevator in Moscow in October 2006, likely by killers hired by the Russian government, but no one has or likely will be convicted of her murder]. More specifically, I was thinking of the city of Grozny and how, after several massive air and ground bombing campaigns by the Russians in the mid-1990s and again in 1999, the city just kind of disappeared:

Ever since about 1999, when I first discovered what had been going in Chechnya, I have been kind of obsessed with the city of Grozny and its "disappearance," so to speak, as well as with the ways in which Grozny's destruction has not registered as more than a "blip" on the consciousness of the international media [ask most people, even educated people, if they know what happened in Grozny and they will look at you, like, huh?; show them the photographs, especially the ones in black and white, and ask them to guess where they are, and most answer "Dresden"], and I have returned often to this site as one way of thinking through certain questions that have to do with ruins, traumatic history, and memory. The Russian government purposefully refused to re-build the city for almost a decade as a "lesson" to the Chechen rebels and yet many Chechens [not counting the 500,000 or so displaced by the bombings who chose to migrate elsewhere, such as Georgia] continued living there in pretty much post-apocalyptic living conditions [a perfect breeding ground, too, for the suicide terrorism that soon flourished there]. More recently, Russia has rebuilt the city but at such lightning speed that the whole place looks like one of those towns that spring up overnight near Disney World in Florida:

Whether as belated doppelganger of Dresden or as postmodern manufactured metropolis-out-of-a-box, the problem of historical memory obtains, especially as lodged in all those materials objects [including buildings and sculptures, documents and corpses, human and nonhuman] buried somewhere underneath this glittering faux-topia, which nevertheless, in my mind has impressed upon it the image of its former, smashed buildings and piles of broken concrete. The question is also raised as to whose needs have more pressing precedence in such a scenario: the living, who want to get on with their lives, and in surroundings that do not beg them to mourn continually, but allow them to start over? Or the dead, once huddled together in basements during the winter siege of 1999, who left so suddenly and with no chance to leave behind the papers that would dictate their remembrance? Can human rights ever really be possible as a site of interventionist address for the living [such that, those huddled, freezing, in basements, will not be bombed], or is it only ever a form of philosophy, or history, that always arrives belatedly [much like Butler's writing on 9/11 and its immediate political aftermath], and works in the rubble? And this recalls me as well to these lines of Bruno Schulz:

"Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul. Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided, allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless and errant? Could it be that time is too narrow for all events?" [Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourlgass]