Cities in Rhetoric and Narrative

June 23, 2006

Recently I read an article by Michael Cooperson that is worth reflecting upon, entitled "Baghdad in Rhetoric and Narrative", in Muqarnas 13 (1996), 99-113. The article advances two interconnected points: first, that people experienced Baghdad through specific literary tropes; second, that the actual urban reality of Baghdad influenced the literature that came from there. I guess it is no surprise that I like this kind of argument since my dissertation represents a variation on it..

What does it mean for someone to experience Baghdad through specific literary tropes? Cooperson begins with a quite clear example. He notes Ibn Jubayr coming into Baghdad in 1184 and complaining:

This ancient city, though it still serves as the Abbasid capital, has lost much of its distinctive character and retains only its famous name. Compared to what it once was—before it fell victim to recurrent misfortunes and repeated calamities—the city resembles a vanished encampment or a passing phantom. [99]

Thus Ibn Jubayr complains.. but the real misfortune will come when in about 70 years when the Mongols invade and sack Baghdad. Ibn Jubayr actually offers us a portrait of Baghdad from a time when it is still relatively intact and flourishing. But "flourishing" was not the rhetorical trope through which this city was experienced.

Cooperson goes on to note the various layers of disappointment in written responses to Baghdad. Ibn Battuta in 1326 really had something to complain about.. but even that point was a heyday compared to what would happen when Timur came through the area about 70 years later. And when we move forward in time we find a poem by Abu Tammam, living in the early 9th century, who makes essentially the same complaint. Cooperson asks: "If a poet could mourn the city within fifty years of its founding, exactly when was the golden age the travelers refer to?" (99).

For Cooperson this represents one of four major topoi that governed the responses to Baghdad. What I dislike about the word "topoi" is the idea that these represent strictly literary or bookish responses to a place. As if this was a rhetorical tradition which writers could more or less separate from their lived personal experience. I like to talk about narratives and metaphors because then I know we are talking about something lodged in the human mind.. a part of the human cognitive response to place. Writers happen to be our best testimony to that cognitive response since they are dealers in words, and words are social tools for building up meaning.

Why stop at Baghdad? What seems exciting to me about this case study is that understanding something about medieval Baghdad also tells us something about contemporary London and classical Athens. Cities collect important narratives and metaphors.. like magnets collect iron—it is not something they try to do, it just happens. Nobody experiences these places free from associations.. I get frustrated with the lack of interest in drawing larger conclusions about humans and their habits of meaning construction.

The second point for Cooperson is the migration of social phenomena—not social details, but larger patterns—into literary works. This is the flip-side of the last argument. If "tropes" can work their way into actual experience, then perhaps actual experience can work its way into literary representations. Considering both of these sides, our conclusion should be that material culture and cognitive processes are constantly intertwining and influencing each other.. a situation which always reminds me of Coleridge and his description of the imagination and its work upon reality: it is like a water-spider. It pushes forward on its own impetus, but then lets itself drift backward with the flow. This constant back-and-forth between the cognitive and the material marks human experience. And I hope it marks this blog.