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.