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Incorporating the Other
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15617 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1989 |
4,124 Words |
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Roger Allen
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During the fall of 1988, the world of Arabic fiction provided two surprises. Cities of Salt, the Arab novel to be published by a major commercial American publisher--Random House--appeared. The volume is a translation by Peter Theroux of the first part of a trilogy named Cities of Salt by a Saudi novelist hitherto unknown in America, Abdelrahman Munif. Then, and even more significant, the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Hence, a lot of curiosity about modern Arabic literature is being expressed these days. Here I will place Munif's work in generic and geographical focus by sketching the development of the modern Arabic novel and locating Munif within that tradition.
Arabic Literary Heritage
Contemporary Arabic literature is heir to a tradition that stretches back at least to the fifth century. Since its first surviving manifestations display a corpus of oral poetry of considerable variety and sophistication, we must presume that its origins date considerably earlier. Within this tradition we search in vain for anything that might be regarded as a precursor of the modern novel. That is not to say, of course, that early Arabic literature provides no examples of forms that were later to become aspects of the novel.
Later, in the maqama prose narrative tradition of the tenth and eleventh centuries--a tradition traced to Badi al-zaman al-Hamadhani (d. 1008)--we see the origins of the picaresque. The fictional heroes of the maqama narratives are ingenious speakers who manipulate impossible situations to their own advantage. The tradition is founded on verbal virtuosity--puns, alliteration, and other verbal devices abound. Some commentators have also tried to trace lines of influence between other Arabic prose writings of the period, such as Risalat al-ghufran (The Epistle of Forgiveness) by Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri (d. 1027) and Hayy ibn Yaqzan (the hero's name) by Ibn-Tufayl (d. 1185), and later works in European literature.
Between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Arabic-speaking world witnessed the expansion of an earlier collection of Indian, Persian, and Arabic narratives into what we know today as A Thousand and One Nights (sometimes called Arabian Nights), one of the world's greatest repositories of popular tales. This huge collection is, incidentally, just one of several compilations of Arabic popular narrative. However, while these examples of narrative from the classical tradition of Arabic literature show thematic and technical affinities with modern fiction, none of them can be clearly linked to the contemporary genre that we know as the novel.
The Arabic Novel
It can be argued that the novel takes as its topic the process of change and often reflects or advocates change. In its attention to the emergence of an urban society and the concomitant rise of a middle class, the novel is a relatively recent development in the history of literary genres--attempts to talk about "the Greek novel" and the like notwithstanding.
During the course of this century, the novel itself has seen many changes, and indeed, as I have suggested above, its very nature renders such developments almost inevitable and indeed desirable. We need only consider the influence of
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