Tag Archives: subaltern

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature – Franco Moretti

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The bourgeois was always, as Franco Moretti puts it, “an enigmatic creature, idealistic and worldly,” and the form that best mapped out the boundaries and the gray compromises between these poles of bourgeois identity was the realist novel. In The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, Moretti shows how the novel as form served as the capacious and adaptable home within which the bourgeois could both assert and camouflage itself.

With the passing of the last remnants of feudal society, bourgeois culture had the difficult job of asserting its specificity while finding a language through which to speak for the whole social order.

His method is to track the significance of particular keywords, and the texture of particular kinds of grammatical form

Long before the pioneering sociologist Max Weber identified “instrumental reason” as a key characteristic of bourgeois culture, Defoe created a syntax for it. Robinson’s labors are nothing if not efficient. What is useful is beautiful on the island of bourgeois thought, and what is both beautiful and useful is without waste. The world is nothing but a set of potential tools and resources. “The creation of a culture of work,” Moretti claims, “has been, arguably, the greatest symbolic achievement of the bourgeoisie as a class.”

The bourgeois self sees a world of particular things as if they were put there to be the raw materials of the work of accumulation

“[F]illers rationalize the novelistic universe,” Moretti writes, “turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.” This is the world that Marx describes, in Capital Volume 1, as appearing as an “immense accumulation of commodities.” The creeping welter of filler, present in Defore, will reach its apogee in Flaubert. It is the bourgeois novel’s one great narrative invention

In the novel, subjectivity decreases and objectivity increases. Description becomes analytic rather than romantic, induction rather than ornament. Or so it appears. Moretti: “description as a form was not neutral at all: its effect was to inscribe the present so deeply into the past that alternatives became simply unimaginable.” This is the novel’s conservative side. While the bourgeois in the economic sphere is a demiurge of industry and accumulation, in the political and cultural sphere he stands, above all, for the solidity and persistence of all things.

Adjectives like “hard,” “fresh,” “sharp,” or “dry” express a judgment without a judge, the author having retreated behind the screen of her or his putatively neutral prose. This, for Moretti, is the real significance of the bourgeois novel’s free indirect discourse, that strange point of view characteristic of the novel, which hovers close to a character but is not identical to it: “It is as if the world were declaring its meaning all by itself

The bourgeois realist novel went through three phases: ascendant, hegemonic, and a third, where it falls apart. The boom in the novel corresponds to the aftermath of the French Revolution; its decline to the rise of imperialism, and the emergence of social questions that — with rare exceptions, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — it was not able to encompass. The novel then split into two parallel streams. On the one hand, the genre novel, which presses on into uncharted territory, addressing a mass audience on themes the realist novel had only touched on: class struggle, the death of God, the industrial revolution, the colonial other. On the other, the modernist novel, from Joyce to Platonov, plays out a series of variations on the formal properties inherent in the novel as form, while at the same time trying to speak to the shock of the historical event which now outstrips the speed and scope of the trauma of the French Revolution

 

The Abyss of Representation – George Hartley

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Citation

Contents

 

  1. Representation and the Abyss of Subjectivity 1

 

  1. Presentation beyond Representation: Kant and the Limits of Discursive Understanding 22

 

  1. The Speculative Proposition: Hegel and the Drama of Presentation 53

 

  1. Marx’s Key Concept? Althusser and the Darstellung Question 84

 

  1. Figuration and the Sublime Logic of the Real: Jameson’s Libidinal Apparatuses 127

 

  1. The Theater of Figural Space 182

 

  1. Can the Symptom Speak? Hegemony and the Problem of Cultural Representation 235

 

Author

Context

Thesis

 

Hartley describes how modern theory from Kant through Lacan attempts to come to terms with the sublime limits of representation and how ideas developed with the Marxist tradition—such as Marx’s theory of value, Althusser’s theory of structural causality, or Zizek’s theory of ideological enjoyment—can be seen as variants of the sublime object. Representation, he argues, is ultimately a political problem. Whether that problem be a Marxist representation of global capitalism, a deconstructive representation of subaltern women, or a Chicano self-representation opposing Anglo-American images of Mexican Americans, it is only through this grappling with the negative, Hartley explains, that a Marxist theory of postmodernism can begin to address the challenges of global capitalism and resurgent imperialism.

 

Methodology

 

Endless pages of talking

 

Key Terms

 

Hegel’s Absolute Negativity

 

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

  1. Representation and the Abyss of Subjectivity

 

-The abyss is not a problem of the subject, as the result of the subjects limited capacity for knowledge Beyond sensory experience, but the very ground of the subject: this paradox of a grounding Abyss means nothing more than that the subject is this space of inclination ability as such, the problem residing rather on the side of substance.

-Clear is no  ideology/ representation  without the category of the subject:  the category of the subject is constituentive of all ideologies, But the category of the subject is constituent of of all ideologies insofar as all ideologies has the function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects.

– subjectification/ interpolation is nothing but the attempt to cover over the traumatic recognition of the abyss of subjectivity as such.  this confrontation with the traumatic thing is the subject as such. interpolation, on the other hand, is the exact attempt to avoid this confrontation.

– the job of idealogy criticism is to identify the position in the other that functions as the desire that the hysteric desires to please.

 

  1. Kant

– if one agrees with Jameson that the sublime object for us in this post modern age is no longer nature but the vast network of global capital this in no way changes the fundamental structure of the experience of the sublime as Kant outlines it in the critique of judgment. Kant Conte says judgment is a bridge that spans the abyss between the real and the sensible.

– kant’s conception of the negativity of the symbol never the last prepares the way for hagel’s project of dialectical negation. What is presented in the symbol is symbolism is a mode of thinking the limits of thinking itself of the negative relationship between discursive understanding and its own discursive limits.

– because of the limits of discourse language can never give a pure representation of super sensible objects it’s symbolic presentations always carry and excessive element within them an unintelligible thing at the heart of the presentation of the supersensible that prevents language from ever becoming a closed symbolic system.

 

  1. Hegel

– Speculative language is not some foreign word from above that captures in itself the imported means to convey because hegel’s theory of language denies any such immediacy. The sign must be emptied out, become some stupid contingent and meaningless thing devoid of any associations with a particular image or intuition and through the radical negativity of it stupidity embody the point of articulation of the subject. Speculative language is ordinary language only more so. Our ordinary language is more than sufficient to provide us with an adequate presentation of the drama of the speculative.

 

  1. Althusser and the Darstellung Question

 

If we are to analyze economic or social or any illogical phenomena in terms of the mode of production with which they operate then we must construct a concept capable of conveying the type of causality at work in the whole.

– the task facing readers of marks Althusser implies is to purify the Marxist text of its pre-scientific metaphors its Figures it’s vorstellungin its dependence on representation.

-Three Notions of Darstellung operating here at once:

-Kant’s concept of versinlichung with its emphasis on the flushing out of the concept.

– the Hegelian sense of scientific method the motive Exposition adequate to the nature of the dialectic

– A sense that I have yet to explore and Althusser points to above the Marxist sense of the presentation of value in commodity production that has a relationship to but cannot be reduced to Consciousness which must rather be seen as an objective historical structural effect.

-The question at stake here is an epistemological 1 concerning our ability to read the structural determinations of the value relation or relation that appears in a mystified form in a society based on commodity production. The key is to see this mystification, however, not as a problem of our ability to see, of our consciousness, of our any law gical shortcomings, of our failure to see what lies before us and is simply hidden beneath a mystifying exterior but to see this mystification instead as a structural effect, and effect of the very structure of commodity production itself. Fetishism is an objective effect of the structure of the value of relation in commodity production, not a subjective illusion or shortcoming. We cannot correct this problem then by learning to see what is there before us but hidden from our view. We must instead learn to read the absences existing in the very fullness of our vision.

– Darstellung then is the presentation in the form of value- by way of the value form- of abstract human labor as it is materialized in the body of the commodity.  The relative form is nothing but the impossible identity of value to itself the void of its own inadequacy. Value must become something other, it must become the value thing that exists apart from its own value being.

– value cannot present itself in this opposition between exchange value and use value because it is not a property specific to the single commodity what a social relationship articulated through the whole commodity structure of which the single commodity is only one part. This structural causality can only operate because of the exceptional one, the commodity excluded from the structure of values. Existence of the structure can only be presented by an element excluded from itself.

– we have arrived at Marxist description of structural causality through the concept of presentation. Value is the effect of structure in that the structure presents itself, through the elaboration of the value form, as the articulation of homogeneous human labor power.

 

  1. Jameson’s Libidinal Apparatus

 

-The political unconscious is the picture developed their of some collective Unity of Consciousness. Only a collected Unity- weather that of a particular class, the proletariat, or of its organ of Consciousness, the Revolutionary party- can achieve the transparency required for the subject- here a collective social political subject- to be fully conscious of its determination by class and be able to square the circle of an illogical conditioning by sheer Lucidity and The Taking of thought. (PU 283)

-The political unconscious is not much concerned with the conditions of possibility of such Lucidity but rather with the mechanisms whereby we attempt to square the circle of 80 illogical limitation by projecting a world in which our actions and values would at an a seemingly Timeless and natural legitimacy, a process of wish-fulfillment that Jameson models on Freud’s development of that Concept in the interpretation of Dreams: figuration. If we are to become aware of class the classes already must be in some sense perceptible as such but this requirements can be fulfilled only when the social conditions of our daily lives had developed the point at which underline class structures become representable in tangible form.

–” the relationship between Class Consciousness and figurability in other words demand something more basic than abstract knowledge and implies a mode of experience that is more visceral and existential than the abstract certainties of economics and Marxian social science.”

-This visceral and existential motive experience is the demesne of culture where the classes have to take on the function of characters. In other words at the most basic level class Consciousness is always allegorical each class achieving figure ability to the extent to which it can represent it unconsciously through ART narrative and other idiot logical Productions as a character with its own particular qualities and personality. Figuration then is essentially a mode of allegorical personification.

– all interpretation is it base allegorical various interpretive models functioning not so much as theories per se but rather as unconscious structures and so many afterimages and secondary effects of a given historical mode of figuration. all allegorical methods are unconscious attempts to articulate a system for representing history.

– The political  unconscious it should be remembered is ultimately the process of a figurative meditation on the destiny of community.

Historical –  the ideology of form as a matrix of symbolic messages related to different coexisting modes of production

Social-  The ideologeme as a unit in class discourse

political – Individual cultural object as a symbolic Act.
– figuration is necessary because the process of cultural revolution is not a positive empirically available event but rather a structural limitation on how we perceive ourselves and our relationship to the larger social totality that determines us.

– this search for ways of seeing whether conscious or unconscious is the process of cognitive mapping by which we obtained the figures necessary for locating ourselves in history.

– allegorical criticism does not so much interpret a given subject matter through the terms of another Master narrative- where interpretation is seen as the unearthing of some deeper meaning below the surface- as rewrites that subject matter in terms of a different code. Allegory is a process of diversion and reinvestment: the initial terms are diverted from their surface function into the service of other idiot logical functions in reinvested by what we have called the political unconscious.

– this process is not internal to me as an individual but is made possible by the objective figural apparatus available to me. In this way the text draws the real into its own texture as its imminent subtext but not as something external orange extrinsic to the text but something born within and vehicle ated by the text itself interiorized in it’s very fabric in order to provide the stuff on the raw material on which the textual operation must work.

– the literary work or cultural object brings into being that very situation to which it is also a reaction. it articulates its own situation and texture Eliza’s it there by encouraging and perpetuating the illusion that the situation itself did not exist before it that there is nothing but a text.

– ideologies is not something internal to individual consciousness what is an external effect of certain social practices that are displayed by staged by condensed in libidinal apparatuses.

-” it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the real in lacan. It is simply history itself”

– Lacanian split subject : The acquisition of language functions as a kind of primary repression, a repression of the imaginary logic of identification, which constitutes the subject as a divided, mediated by language because the subject can never coincide with the signifier that represents it. But binary logic of the imaginary is broken up by the introduction of this mediating third, the other, the unconscious, language itself.

– History is not a text not a narrative but an absent cause it is inaccessible to us except in textural form.

– language manages to carry the real within itself as its own intrinsic or imminent subtext.

– the literary work or cultural object brings into being that situation to which it is also add one in the same time or reaction.

– the difference between the sublime object for Kant and that for Hegel is that the sublime object for Kant is simply the phenomenal object that stretches are representative faculties beyond their limits while the sublime object for Hagel is the obscene embodiment of the nothing Beyond representation the embodiment of radical negativity. We experience the sublime when we come into contact with the miserable object through its it’s very wretchedness embodies this negativity.

– what unites the three levels is the concept of contradiction: at the first level the text functions as a symbolic act that seeks a figural resolution to some Unthinkable social contradiction. At the second level text functions as an ideologeme an utterance in the larger dialogue between contradictory class discourses and at the third level of the text functions as the ideological sedimentation at the level of form or genre itself of the larger process of cultural revolution, the ongoing contradictory process in which historical classes vie for hegemony.

– we cannot simply identify class types in novels because such a position treats class identification as an inert given line and tact outside the text where as the task is to show the textual reflection as constituent of the value of this outside as an allegorical process that produces alternatives to empirical history by emptying them of their finality Andrey orchestrating them in terms of some master fantasy structure of Phantasm.

– the real, this absent cause, which is fundamentally unrepresentable and non-narrative and detectable only in its effects, can be disclosed only by desire itself, whose wish-fulfilling mechanisms are the instruments through which this resistance surface must be scanned.

 

  1. Spivak

 

-A desire to touch the everyday. She does not desire to know what they think or to grasp their consciousness. The everyday and Consciousness operate according to different critical itineraries.

– is after a certain Poetics, a certain mode of putting together of a continuous seeming self for everyday life. This self which only seems continuous but has to seem as such for everyday functioning has been put together for such a seeming despite the chance Inus that may be reined in in the necessary production of this continuity.

The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985 – Samah Selim

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Citation

  • Selim, Samah, and Inc NetLibrary. The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985. RoutledgeCurzon, New York, 2004.

Contents

  • Introduction: the peasant and modern narrative in Egypt
  • 1 The garrulous peasant: Ya‘qub Sannu‘, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and the construction of the fallah in early drama and dialogue
  • 2 Novels and nations
  • 3 Foundations: pastoral and anti-pastoral
  • 4 The politics of reality: realism, neo-realism and the village novel
  • 5 The Land
  • 6 The exiled son
  • 7 The storyteller

Author

Samah Selim is an Egyptian scholar and translator of Arabic literature.[1] She studied English literature at Barnard College, and obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 1997. At present she is an associate professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She has also taught at Columbia, Princeton and Aix-en-Provence universities.

Selim is the author of The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985 (2004). She won the 2009 Banipal Prize for her translation of Yahya Taher Abdullah‘s The Collar and the Bracelet.

 

Context

Thesis

 

The book locates questions of languages, genre, textuality and canonicity within a historical and theoretical framework that foregrounds the emergence of modern nationalism in Egypt. The ways in which the cultural discourses produced by twentieth century Egyptian nationalism created a space for both a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic politics of language, class and place that inscribed a bifurcated narrative and social geography, are examined. The book argues that the rupture between the village and the city contained in the Egyptian nationalism discourse is reproduced as a narrative dislocation that has continued to characterize and shape the Egyptian novel in general and the village novel in particular. Reading the village novel in Egypt as a dynamic intertext that constructs modernity in a local historical and political context rather than rehearsing a simple repetition of dominant European literary-critical paradigms, this book offers a new approach to the construction of modern Arabic literary history as well as to theoretical questions related to the structure and role of the novel as a worldly narrative genre.

Methodology

 

Periodizing the role of the village as an object of ideological projection during different periods of 20th century Egyptian history: Nahda standarization, early nationalism, the hayday of socialist realism, and the new sensibility.

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

 

very good book, but focuses on individual authors along with a stulted idea of the structure of feeling, without talking barely at all about the literary community, and the way these ideological projections were collectively formed.

 

 

In 1925, Mahmud Taymur called for the writing of narrative dialogue exclusively in the vernacular, ‘the natural language of the speaker’, but two years later, he renounced this position in favor of a return to a unified ‘literary Arabic’ throughout the text.40 Taymur was eager to gain admittance to the Arabic Language Academy, which did not accept authors who wrote in the colloquial.41 Writers continued to debate this issue throughout the 1920s, but it was eventually the ‘third’ or vernacularized standard Arabic described by Sabry Hafez above that emerged as the dominant language of narrative and particularly, narrative dialogue. Some writers however continued to use colloquial for dialogue – Tawfiq al-Hakim and the great writers of the mid-century social realist school, like Yusuf Idris and ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, for example – but these were, for the most part, in the minority, and the significance of their inscription of narrative diglossia will be discussed in later chapters.

Language is a central strategy through which the post-1952 village novel attempts to render the realities of peasant life, whether by directly inscribing ungrammatical vernacular peasant voices or by deploying a variety of rural narrative languages – such as the languages of Sufi tradition or of folk ballad – within the text. Again, this is a political as well as a formal strategy that underlines the necessary relationship between language and representation. The radical re-presentation of the village required an equally radical language that would break with the old forms and literally recreate the village and the peasant in ways that more truly reflected a contemporary historical dynamic. In 1952, The Land accomplished just that. The novel shattered the romantic idiom of the nahdawi novelists, producing a dizzying and unprecedented universe of insurgent peasant voices and drawing the portrait of a revolution in the making. By 1969, however, Sharqawi’s village could no longer adequately represent the complicated experience of a new historical reality, one in which the very meaning of words like nation, tradition, truth and liberation were being scrutinized and interrogated by a new generation of writers and by society at large.”

“The committed realists rejected the autobiographical mode of the Egyptian novel. In their fiction, the dominance of the narrative subject is muted, dismantled or altogether discarded. Some favored a straightforward third-person narration that completely erased all reference to the authorial voice, while foregrounding the voices and languages of the subaltern. Naguib Mahfouz and Fathi Ghanem used multiple narration as a means of de-centering narrative authority. Where a first-person narrator exists in the fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s, his voice is framed, interrogated and finally marginalized by the voices of other characters. Ghanem’s 1957 novel The Mountain is a good example of this strategy. The narrator is literally forced to give way to other narrators who proceed to tell their own story in terms which push him into the painful revelation of his own liminality. Echoing al-Hakim’s The Maze of Justice, the model of the narrator in The Mountain is a government inspector who travels to a remote southern village to investigate a criminal complaint against its impoverished inhabitants. In this model, the disciplinary protocols of bureaucratic investigation (tahqiq) act as a metaphor for the conventional process of narration itself. The narrator’s questions and his attempts to reconstruct events lead nowhere. He is only able to solve the mystery when he gives up the reins of his own narrative authority and allows the villagers’ stories to capture his imagination and his empathy. In the end, fragile and disillusioned, but nonetheless drawing a new strength from the encounter, he returns to Cairo with an empty dossier and resigns from his post. The Land employs a similar strategy in relation to its first-person narrator, who simply disappears halfway through the text. The novel begins and ends in the conventional autobiographical mode, making explicit reference to its canonical predecessors (Zaynab, Ibrahim the Writer and The Days), while framing a story and a cast of characters that spill over the conventional narrative boundaries marked by the genre. As in The Mountain, the narrator finally re-enters the text, chastened and transformed by the revelation of his own marginality in a world he had thought to master. Committed realism formally re-introduced narrative dialogia into the Arabic novel as part of a deliberate political strategy. In the 1920s, the New School writers had attempted to stabilize linguistic usage in both narration and dialogue through syntactic and lexical simplification and standardization. The narrative phrase was stripped of the ornate rhetorical devices associated with neo-classical prose and the romantic lexicon, and brought closer to the syntax of everyday speech. The more problematic inscription of dialogue was rendered through an abbreviated and standardized colloquial or, more commonly, through the use of the compromise third language, later perfected and canonized by Naguib Mahfouz in his pre-trilogy novels. With the advent of the new realist aesthetic in the 1950s, narrative language again emerged as a flashpoint in contemporary literary debate. Sharqawi had quarreled with Taha Husayn in 1953 over his extended use of the colloquial for dialogue in The Land. Husayn had accused Sharqawi and his contemporaries of neglecting the Arabic language and of making a mockery of its literary canon.27 Sharqawi, Yusuf Idris and Nu‘man ‘Ashur among others insisted on writing dialogue in the vernacular, claiming it as an artistic imperative and an essential tool for the realistic representation of character. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the new fiction was precisely its skillful and largely unprecedented elaboration of extended dialogue as a central narrative axis. One only need compare Zaynab to The Land or al-Mazini’s Ibrahim the Writer to Idris’ The Fair-Skinned Girl or Ghanem’s Those Days to note the huge difference in the emphasis placed by the two generations on the importance of narrative dialogue. Moreover, this difference did not simply mark a process of technical development in the Egyptian novel over the course of thirty-odd years. Rather, it underlines the essentially political relationship between narrative form and social ideology. The insistence of committed realist writers on the necessity of faithfully reproducing a variety of social speech in their fiction was a political as well as a technical strategy. It was no longer adequate to directly narrate the character of a peasant or an urban lumpen, or to represent his or her voice as a muted extension of the narrator’s own voice. The new fiction deliberately set out to liberate the voice of the subaltern from the tyranny of the bourgeois text, in both its romantic and conventional realist versions. In this fiction, narrative language is consciously deployed as a central dynamic in the variegated and contested social terrain called ‘reality’. The contrapuntal subaltern languages created by Ya‘qub Sannu‘ and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim reappear in the writing of the committed realists, both in dialogue and in the narrative languages of popular orality. In their fiction, the highbrow classical language of the romantic subject and the correct modern fusha of the Mahfouzian phrase rub shoulders and correspond with a whole range of ungrammatical and non-canonical voices and generic languages. In formal terms, then, an example of great mid-century committed realism like The Land belongs to a modern literary genealogy inaugurated by Muwaylihi’s Hadith ‘Isa Ibn Hisham and Haqqi’s The Maiden of Dinshaway rather than the novelistic canon of the first half of the century, beginning with Zaynab.”

MLA (Modern Language Assoc.)

Selim, Samah. The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985. Routledge, 2004.

Notes

 

  • Introduction: the peasant and modern narrative in Egypt

Fallah originally seen in 19th century as romanticized emblem of the nation

Foil to the problematization of the modern subject

Fallah pre-nahda featured in shadow-plays, al-Shirbini’s work, linguisticlly hybrid popular narratives (1001), also Fallah character in the Maqama of al-Muwaylihi’s Hadithh Isa Ibn Hisham, maqama prone to dialogism

relationship between language and representation played out in the village, diglossia heightened ideological effect of colloquial speech.

folk narrativity is constructed in dialectical opposition to the language of the modern subject

The novel as a history of a dialogue and a conflict between classes, discourses, and ideologies

  • 1 The garrulous peasant: Ya‘qub Sannu‘, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and the construction of the fallah in early drama and dialogue

Abdallah al-Nadim and Ya’qub Sannu’ (d. 1912), both Urabists, while touting nationalist cause, foregrounded a class-specific representation of the coarse, earthly peasant.

Nadim wrote in a combination of registersm broad range of contrapuntal voices, linguistic play as parodic tool. (wrote a series of didactic essays and dialogues)

Nahda experimentation with old genres like maqama and new genres like journalistic essays and novels went hand in hand with conscious effort to reform literary Arabic.

Early 20th century school called the madrasa al-haditha committed to linguistic compromise, some like yusuf idris and sharqawi continued to write in the colliquial

writing of narrative proper in dialogue were luwis awad’s “mudhakkarat talib bi’thah and bayram al-tunisi’s al-sayyid was miratuh fi bariz

Sannu and Nadim’s parodic colliquial voice continued in the character of the fallah.

Chatterjee nation attempts to create united identity  through sanitization of dissonant cultures and voices, disciplinary project

 

  • 2 Novels and nations

-artistic novel emerges when national bourgeois intelligentsia begins self-consciously to articulate role as exclusive political and cultural vanguard.

New School journal was (al-fajr), and big advocate was Mahmud Taymur, Isa Ubayd.

Attempt to create pharonic fallah authenticity (salama musa and ibrahim al-Masri)

-peasant simultaneously seen as noble authentic source of Egyptian nation, but also flea-ridden and ignorant.

Egyptian novel constantly in tension between alienated modern subject and the collectivity of the rural hinterland.

  • 3 Foundations: pastoral and anti-pastoral

Zaynab (1913) foundational vilage text then Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s the maiden of Dinshaway (1906) (account of british massacre) and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s county prosecutor (1937) are counter-texts which illuminate and strip the neurotic national romance presented.

Zaynab the peasant’s voices are erased where as in country prosecutor they challange canonical language and authority.

Zaynab offers original inscription of autonomous narrative subject AND offers complete pastoral image of countryside. (Rousseau natural man)

-minimal dialogue attempts to mimic syntax of colliquial speech but erases all traces of ungrammattical vernacular usage.

Hakim’s peasants in country prosecutor speak in parodic colliquial register (court interrogation), used comically, but also a folk critique of hegemonic disourse.

 

  • 4 The politics of reality: realism, neo-realism and the village novel

Both committed realism and neo-realism are essentially political interventions into reality, ow what Stephen Heath has called “the space of discourse” within which cultural ideologies repeat themselves, i.e. difference lies not in mechanics of representation as it does its politics. It is through shared space, and not through particular political pedagogy, that modern fiction mounts its challenge to hegemony.

 

list of social realist novels

 

struggle against oppression

The Land – Abd al-Rahman Al-Sharqawi (1952)

Al-rihlah – Fikri Al-Khuli (1987)

Al-Awbash – Khayri Shalabi (1978)

 

individual struggle for self-knowledge

 

Seven days of man (1969)

east of the palms (1985) – Baha Tahir

 

through prism of sexuality

 

the band and the bracelet (1975) – Yahya al-Tahir Abdallah

Al haram – Yusuf Idris (1959)

 

1958 Ministry of Culture founds Center for popular folk art, no less than 22 village novels between 1952 and 1970.

Corporatist structure of Nasserism depended on reificiation of Egyptian countryside.

 

Mid-century revolutionary period writers and critics

critics:

Mahmud Amin al-Alim, Ali al-Ra’i (committed realism)

Luwis Awad (free verse and colliquial)

 

theatre:

Alfred Faraj, Nu’man ‘Ashur, Sa’d al-Din Wahbah

 

Fiction:

Yusuf Idris

Fathi Ghanim

Sharqawi

 

Larger literary iconoclasm

Iraqi poets Nazik al-Mala’ika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab

al-Adab in Lebanon.

 

Lots of specific stuff on New Realism you should go back and have pg. 139-151

critical terrorism (Ghali Shukri) of ossified left literary establishment (Egypt: portrait of a President)

 

Neo-realist village novel (yusuf al-qa’id, khayri shalabi, abd al-fatah al-jamal) challenge middle class image of fallah.

 

  • 5 The Land

expells bourgeois subject from the text and challenges the language of authority

  • 6 The exiled son

Seven Days of Man (Abd al-Hakim Qasim) and East of the Palms (Baha Tahir) double alientation from organic collectivity and technological modernity

  • 7 The storyteller

band and the bracelet – Yahya al-Tahir Abdallah – omniscient prophetic narrator simultaneously panoramic and intimate vantage point.

 

Conclusion

 

Village novel has repeated a powerful opposition between epistemologically and geographically defined modes of narration – linear pragmatic disciplinary vs. circular, affinitive, subaltern.

The Postcolonial Unconscious – Neil Lazarus

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Eurocentrism emerges on

this conceptualisation as an untranscendable horizon governing thought –

its forms, contents, modalities, and presuppositions so deeply and insidi-

ously layered and patterned that they cannot be circumvented, only

deconstructed

 

Subaltern practice cannot signify

‘as itself’ across the divide that separates social elites from those who are

not elite. It is, indeed, precisely the irreducible gap between popular

practice and its (misrecognising) construal in elite discourse that the term

‘subalternity’ designates on Spivak’s usage of it. The subaltern is the object

of discourse, never the subject. Whatever is represented as ‘subaltern’ has

always-already been made over: not only translated, but traduced; not

only appropriated, but expropriated

 

It is noteworthy that Ghosh does not provide us unmediated access, in

The Hungry Tide, to Fokir’s own thoughts. This obviously allows us to

dwell a little longer on the idea that there is an incommensurability –

radical alterity – between elite and subaltern cultures, value systems and

ways of seeing. Subaltern consciousness is figured consistently as inscrut-

able; irrecoverable by and inaccessible to any of the novel’s elite characters,

it is also left unrecovered and unaccessed by the novel itself.

But I wonder whether the narrative, formal, and affective dimensions

of The Hungry Tide do not cut against and in the end undermine this idea

of incommensurability, and of the theoretical anti-humanism that under-

lies it. Ghosh’s self-conscious use here, as elsewhere in his work, of

sentimentality and sensationalism (the novel’s very title is significant in

this respect), of romance and narrative suspense, all point us in a quite

different direction, towards the idea not of ‘fundamental alienness’ but

of deep-seated affinity and community, across and athwart the social

division of labour.59