Posts Tagged ‘literature’
What are your positions and opinions on Literature/Culture?
A review of the positions of Antoun Saadi for the new struggle of ideas in the Syria Nation
من كتاب الصراع الفكري في الأدب السوري
طريق الأدب السوري
بهذا الاتجاه الجديد يمكن أن يترافق الأدب والحياة، فيكون لنا أدب جديد لحياة جديدة، فيها فهم جديد للوجود الإنساني وقضاياه التي نجد فيها الفرد والمجتمع وعلاقاتهما ومُثُلهما العليا كما تراها النظرة الجديدة الأصلية إلى الحياة والكون والفن. إن الأدب الصحيح يجب أن يكون الواسطة المثلى لنقل الفكر والشعور الجديدين، الصادرين عن النظرة الجديدة، إلى إحساس المجموع وإدراكه، وإلى سمع العالم وبصره فيصير أدبًا قوميًّا وعالميًّا ، لأنه يرفع الأمة إلى مستوى النظرة الجديدة، ويضيء طريقها إليه، ويحمل، في الوقت عينه، ثروة نفسية أصلية في الفكر والشعور وألوانهما إلى العالم.
لا يمكن أن ينهض الأدب عندنا، ولا أن يصير لنا أدب عالميٌّ يسترعي اهتمام العالم، وتكون له قيمة عالمية باقية، إلا بهذه الطريقة، ولنفترض أنه يمكن إنشاء أدب جديد، أو إحداث «تجديد» في الأدب، من غير هذا الاتصال الوثيق بينه وبين النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، فما هي الغاية أو الفائدة منه وهو شيء غريب بعيد عن نفس الجماعة وقضاياها الفكرية والشعورية، أو عن قضايا الإنسانية، كما تمثل ضمن حياة الجماعة المعينة وحيز فكرها وشعورها، في أرقى ما يمكن أن يصل إليه هذان العاملان النفسيان؟
إن الأدب الذي له قيمة في حياة الأمة، وفي العالم، هو الأدب الذي يُعنى بقضايا الفكر والشعور الكبرى، في نظرة إلى الحياة والكون والفن عالية أصلية، ممتازة، لها خصائص شخصيتها. فإذا نشأت هذه النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن أَوْجَدَتْ فهمًا جديدًا للقضايا الإنسانية، كقضية الفرد والمجتمع، وقضية الحرية، وقضية الواجب، وقضية النظام، وقضية القوة، وقضية الحق وغيرها. وبعض هذه القضايا يكون قديمًا فيتجدد بحصول النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة، وبعضها ينشأ بنشوء هذه النظرة. فالحرية، مثلًا، كانت تُفْهَمُ قبل النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة في أشكال واعتقادات لا وضوح ولا صلاح لها في النظرة الجديدة، فلما جاءت النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، التي نشأت بسببها الحركة السورية القومية الاجتماعية، وقرنت الحرية بالواجب والنظام والقوة، وفَصَّلَت الحرية ضمن المجتمع وتجاه المجتمعات الأخرى هذا التفصيل الواضح الظاهر في تعاليمها، نشأت قضية جديدة للحرية ذات عناصر جديدة يبيِّنها فهم جديد، يتناول أشكال الحياة كما تراها النهضة القومية الاجتماعية، وفعل الحرية وشأنها ضمن هذه الأشكال.
والحب كان قضية شهوات جسدية ملتهبة، لها شكل مادي يظهر في العيون الرامية سهامًا، وفي خمر الرضاب، وفي ارتجاف الضلاع، وتَثَنِّي القدود، فصار قضية جمال الحياة كلها، واشتراك النفوس في هذا الجمال. عُرِضَ علي، مرة، سجل أمثال وأقوال، فرأيت فيه قولًا مفاده أن الصداقة أجمل ما في الحياة، فكتبت في صفحة منه: «الصداقة هي تعزية الحياة، أما الحب فهو الدافع نحو المثال الأعلى.» ومهما يكن من أمر رأيي في الصداقة، فرأيي في الحب يدخل في قضية الحب الجديدة، فالمثال الأعلى هو ما تراه نظرة إلى الحياة والكون والفن واضحة، معينة، والحب الواعي هذه النظرة يتجه دائمًا نحو مثالها الأعلى، ويرمي إلى الاقتراب منه، في كل اختلاجة من اختلاجاته. إن قضية كون الوصال غاية المطالب العليا النفسية هي قضية قد ماتت للنظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، وحلت محلها قضية كون الحب اتحاد فكر وشعور، واشتراك نفوس في فهم جمال الحياة، وتحقيق مطالبها العليا.
لقد نشأت نظرة إلى الحياة والكون والفن جديدة في سورية، ونتج عنها مجرى حياة جديد لتيارات النفس السورية، التي كانت مكبوتة ومحجوزة. فهل يتنبه لهذه الحقيقة أدباء سورية، وخصوصًا شعراؤها، ويُلَبُّون هاتف الدعوة، ويشتركون في رفع الشعب السوري إلى مستوى النظرة الجديدة ومُثُلها العليا، ويوجِدون هذا الأدب الغني بالقضايا الفكرية والشعورية، التي كانت كامنة في باطن نفسيتنا، حتى ظهرت في النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة؟
لا شك عندي في أن هذا ما يحدث الآن عند جميع الأدباء، الذين اتصلوا بالنظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، وفهموا قضاياها الكبرى في الحقوق والسياسة والاقتصاد والاجتماع، وفي الأخلاق والمناقب والمثل العليا، وإني موقن بأن هذا ما سيحدث لجميع الناشئين على اتصال وامتزاج بهذه النظرة المحيية، ولكني أشك في أمر الأدباء الذين نشئوا قبل ظهور النظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة، وظلوا بعيدين عن مراميها وقضاياها الكبرى، وغير متصلين بمجرى الحياة الجديد، الذي وَلَّدَتْهُ هذه النظرة، أو الذين، مع إحساسهم بمجرى الحياة الجديد، لم يجدوا في نفوسهم قوًى كافية لنقلهم من حيز نظرة إلى حيز نظرة أخرى، ومن اتجاه مجرًى إلى اتجاه مجرى آخر.
بعض العلل المانعة لهؤلاء الأدباء من الأخذ بالنظرة الجديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، واضحٌ في النزعة الفردية التي دللت عليها في كتاب السيد يوسف المعلوف إلى نسيبه الشاعر، شفيق معلوف، إذ يقول له: «اعتن في مؤلفاتك المقبلة أن تكون مبتكرًا فيما تنزع إليه، سواء كان بالفكر أو بالعمل، وأن تكون مقلَّدًا لا مقلِّدًا في سائر أعمالك؛ لأن على هذه القاعدة الأساسية تتوقف شهرة المرء في الحياة.» وقد بينتُ في صدر الدرس غلط هذا التفكير الذي يجعل الشهرة الشخصية غاية الفكر والعمل في الحياة. وأَزِيدُ هنا أن العمل بهذه «القاعدة الأساسية» التي وضعها عم الشاعر المذكور يئول إلى هدم الحقائق الأساسية التي يجب أن تكون بُغْيَةَ كل تفكير تعميري وكل شعور حي، جميل، لأنه متى صار كل نابه يسعى ليكون مقلدًا، فكم تكون التفرقة والفوضى عظيمتين بين المتزاحمين على «الابتكار» بقصد الشهرة والاستعلاء على زملائهم، الذين يصيرون أندادًا؟ ألا يبلغ بهم التزاحم والمناقضة حد العداوة والبغضاء والحسد المستورة بظواهر شفافة من الرياء والتدجيل في المظاهر والمطالب؟
قلت في ما تقدم: إن شفيق معلوف قَبِلَ القاعدة الفردية التي وضعها عمه، ولكنه لم يتقيد بها كل التقيد؛ لأنه احتاج إلى تبرير مجاراته سواه في شعره فقال: «ولئن طرقت بابًا ولجه سواي فهل في كل ما تتناوله القرائح ما يطرق الناس بابه؟» وقلت أيضًا إن شفيق معلوف كاد يصل، من هذه الناحية، إلى طَرْق باب ينفتح عن أفق تنبلج فيه أنوار فجر تفكير أصلي جديد، ولا يقصر إلا خطوة، أو قفزة واحدة ليلج هذا الباب. فما هي هذه الخطوة أو القفزة، وكيف تكون؟
سبق لي القول: إن الخطوة المطلوبة تفصل بين عالمين، وقد تحتاج لعكاز؛ ذلك لأنها تنقل صاحبها من نفسية إلى نفسية، ومن نظرة إلى نظرة، فيصير لها عالم جديد بأشكاله وألوانه وغاياته ومُثُله. الخطوة أو القفزة المطلوبة تكون باستعمال جميع القوى النفسية لِرُقِيِّ عالم النزعة الفردية والغايات المادية، وترك جعل حب إبراز الشهرة الفردية غاية أخيرة للفرد، والقفز إلى عالم ابتغاء الحقيقة الأساسية الكبرى، التي يستقر عليها الفكر، ويطمئن إليها الشعور، واتباعها حين توجد، سواء أوجدت بالاهتداء الذاتي أم بهدي هاد، هي حقيقة الفرد والمجتمع، وحقيقة النفسية السامية التي انتصرت على قيود المادية المجلجلة في الحضيض، وحلقت إلى السماء — السماء، التي لا تخلو من ألم وعذاب، ولكن ألمها وعذابها ليسا من أجل الشهوة المتلظية في المهج، بل من أجل ما هو أسمى من ذلك بكثير — من أجل ما لو أُطفئ لظى الشهوة الجسدية، وقضت النزعة البيولوجية وطرها لَظَلَّ لظاه يلذع النفوس ويعذبها حتى تجد له تحقيقًا — من أجل خذل الأقبح والأسفل والأرذل والأذل، ورفع الأجمل والأسمى والأنبل والأعز، فلا تكون هنالك اختلاجات حب إلا ضمن دائرة هذا الوعي، الذي يرفع قيمة الإنسانية طبقات جوية فوق القناعة براحة النزعة البيولوجية ذات الارتباط المادي، الغافلة عن المطالب النفسية الجميلة في نظرة شاملة الحياة والكون والفن.
القاعدة الذهبية، التي لا يصلح غيرها للنهوض بالحياة والأدب، هي هذه القاعدة: طلب الحقيقة الأساسية الكبرى لحياة أَجْوَدَ في عالم أجمل وقيم أعلى. لا فرق بين أن تكون هذه الحقيقة ابتكارك، أو ابتكاري، أو ابتكارَ غيرك وغيري، ولا فرق بين أن يكون بزوغ هذه الحقيقة من شخص وجيه اجتماعيًّا ذي مال ونفوذ، وأن يكون انبثاقها من فرد هو واحد من الناس؛ لأن الغرض يجب أن يكون الحقيقة الأساسية المذكورة، وليس الاتجاه السلبي الذي تقرره الرغائب الفردية، الخصوصية، الاستبدادية.
وقد قرب شفيق معلوف كثيرًا من هذه القاعدة في جوابه إلى عمه، ولكنه وقف خطوة دونها، فإذا هو خطاها تم له هذا الانتقال الفاصل من عالم إلى عالم، واستغنى عن نصائح عمه، التي تحتاج لغربلة متكررة، وعن إرشادات أمين الريحاني الغامضة، الخاوية، التائهة، وعن تَخَبُّط الأدباء السوريين والمصريين في «التجديد» وكيف يكون.
أعتقد أن لشفيق معلوف هذا الاستعداد العقلي-الروحي، لإدراك القاعدة المذكورة آنفًا، والغاية النفسية التي يقوم عليها أدب خالد. فهو قد وقف قريبًا جدًّا من هذا الإدراك الذي وقف معظم شعراء سورية ومصر وأدبائهما بعيدين جدًّا عنه. وهو الإدراك الوحيد الذي يمكن أن يجد مستقرًّا في النفوس وفي الأجيال. وكان اقتراب شفيق معلوف واضحًا في قوله: «إذ ليس الشاعر، في عرفي، من ضج له الجيل الواحد، حتى إذا تبدلت الأوضاع واختلفت الأحوال تناسته من بعده الأجيال.» وهذه منزلة لا يمكن بلوغها إلا بالاتصال بنظرة جديدة إلى الحياة والكون والفن، مشتملة على حقيقة أساسية صالحة لإنشاء عالم جديد من الفكر والشعور، إذا لم يكن هو العالم الأخير، الأسمى على الإطلاق، عند المشككين، فهو عالم فوق العوالم الماضية، ودرجة لا بد منها لاطراد ارتقاء الإنسانية النفسي؛ ولذلك هو عالم خالد، لأن ما سيأتي بعده في الآباد البعيدة سيصدر عنه ويثبت نفسه عليه، أو، على الأقل، ستكون النفوس التي ارتقت إلى هذا العالم الجديد مستعدة لاقتبال عالم أَجَدَّ، إذا كشفت مخبآت الأبد إنه سيكون ممكنًا إحداث ذلك العالم، الذي لا يمكننا، الآن وإلى أمد بعيد، تصور موجباته وحقائقه وقضاياه، ولكننا نتصور، بموجب مبدأ الاستمرار والاطراد الفلسفي، الذي أضعه نصب عيني في فهمي الوجود الإنساني، أنه لا بد من أن يكون ذا اتصال وثيق بعالم نظرتنا الجديدة وحقائقه وقضاياه، كما أننا نرى، بموجب هذه النظرة، أن عالمها ليس شيئًا حادثًا من غير أصل، بل شيئًا غير ممكن بدون أصل جوهريٍّ تتصل حقائقه بحقائقه، فتكون الحقائق الجديدة صادرة عن الحقائق الأصلية القديمة بفهم جديد للحياة وقضاياها والكون وإمكانياته والفن ومراميه.
ها قد بلغتُ غايةَ ما أردت توجيه فكر أدباء سورية وشعورهم إليه، في هذا الدرس المستعجل المقاطع مرارًا عديدة في سياقه، ورجائي إليهم أن لا يظنوا أن ما دفعني إليه هو محبة سبقهم إلى «الابتكار» أو رغبة في أن أكون «مقلدًا». إن ما دفعني إليه هو محبة الحقيقة الأساسية، التي وصل إليها تفكيري ودرسي، وأوصلني إليها فهمي، الذي أنا مديون به كله لأمتي وحقيقتها النفسية، وشعرت بالواجب يدعوني لوضعها أمام مفكِّري أمتي وأدبائها، وأمام أمتي بأجمعها، من أجل ما هو أبقى وأفضل وأسمى لحقيقة الأمة، وهي حقيقة تساعد كل مفكر وأديب على تثبيت شخصيته ضمنها والبقاء فيها، وتمكن الأمة من أن يكون لها أدب عالمي تبقى فيه شخصيتها وتخلد.
انطون سعادة
Is writing/literature the best path for reaching wisdom? Any criteria for selecting geniuses in literature?
Posted on: January 5, 2021
Are there any Geniuses of Language and Literature? Part 2
Posted on April 16, 2013
In a previous post I asked this question:
Is it possible to meaningfully categorize and classify masterpieces in literature?
It is possible to collect data on the many ways people retrieve, read, or extract sections of masterpieces, and run a statistical package to “cluster” groups of masterpieces under fictitious categories.
Like considering geographic origin, time period, and field of each “genius,” correlated with visits to the respective Wikipedia page and connection to related historical figures…
The question will remain: “How meaningful this process is, and does it make any sense for the avid readers?”
It is our nature to classify, even organize human species. We are all basically pseudo-scientists: Scientists main hobby and work is to classify everything.
Classifying masterpieces in literature is a futile exercise, though “academics” cannot help it: It is their livelihood, particularity teachers of literature.
In the next post, I’ll demonstrate the futility of classifying masterpieces in literature.
For the time being, here is an alternative for classifying literature in values., though Not including modern literature that actually represent world transformation and changes in human rights perspective.
For the time being, here is a striking example of an alternative way to a taxonomy in literature:
Maria Popova published “History’s 100 Geniuses of Language and Literature, Visualized“
“Genius, in its writings, is our best path for reaching wisdom … the true use of literature for life.”
“Genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly,” Victorian novelist Amelia E. Barr reflected in her 9 rules for success.
What is genius?
In their latest project, Italian visualization wizard Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who have previously given us a timeline of the future based on famous fiction, a visual history of the Nobel Prize, and a visualization of global brain drain inspired by Mondrian — explore the anatomy of genius, based on Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (public library) by literary Harold Bloom.
Bloom use of the Sefirot image — the 10 emanations of the Kabbalah or (quality/appreciation) — to organize the taxonomy of the 100 geniuses of language.
Bloom identifies, from Shakespeare to Stendhal to Lewis Carroll to Ralph Ellison, the visualization that depicts the geographic origin, time period, and field of each “genius,” correlated with visits to the respective Wikipedia page and connection to related historical figures.
Bloom writes:
All genius, in my judgment, is idiosyncratic and grandly arbitrary, and ultimately stands alone … My placement of the hundred geniuses is hardly one that fixes them in place, since all the Sefirot are images constantly in motion, and any creative spirit must move through all of them, in many labyrinths and transformations. …
Since the 10 Sefirot form a system in constant motion, all of my hundred persons could be illuminated almost equally well by the other nine Sefirot, beyond the one where I group them, and I intend this book to be a kind of mosaic-in-perpetual-movement.
Appearing here is an exclusive English-language version of a forthcoming spread in Italian literary supplement La Lettura.
{Click image to enlarge)
At the heart of Bloom’s ambitious taxonomy is a concern with the very nature of genius:
What is the relationship of fresh genius to a founding authority?
At this time, starting the twenty-first century, I would say:
‘Why, none, none at all.’ Our confusions about canonical standards for genius are now institutionalized confusions, so that all judgments as to the distinction between talent and genius are at the mercy of the media, and obey cultural politics and its vagaries.
Echoing Virginia Woolf’s counsel on the art of reading, Bloom argues for cultivating an individual sensibility of genius-appreciation:
Literary genius, difficult to define, depends upon deep reading for its verification. The reader learns to identify with what she or he feels is a greatness that can be joined to the self, without violating the self’s integrity….
Genius, in its writings, is our best path for reaching wisdom, which I believe to be the true use of literature for life.
Note: Part 1 on https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/masterpieces-in-literature-since-when-part-1/
“Escaping Beirut”, the Elizabeth Taylor of cities, and An Unnecessary Woman
Posted on: April 28, 2014
“Escaping Beirut”, the Elizabeth Taylor of cities, and An Unnecessary Woman
In a passage of the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine’s first novel Koolaids (1998), one character says:
I fucking hate the Lebanese. I hate them. They are so fucked up. They think they are so great, and for what reason?
Has there been a single artist of note? A scientist, an athlete? They are so proud of [Lebanese novelist Khalil] Gibran. Probably the most overrated writer in history. I don’t think any Lebanese has ever read him. If they had, they would keep their mouth fucking shut.…
The happiest day in my life was when I got my American citizenship and was able to tear up my Lebanese passport. That was great. Then I got to hate Americans.…
I tried so hard to rid myself of anything Lebanese. I hate everything Lebanese. But I never could. It seeps through my entire being. The harder I tried, the more it showed up in the unlikeliest of places. But I never gave up.
Many of the funniest moments in Alameddine’s work—and he is essentially a comic writer—revolve around the difficulties of trying to escape the past.
The heroes of his fiction are all misfits of one sort or another. They rebel against what they take to be the tyrannical conventions of Lebanese society—its patriarchy, its sexual norms, its sectarianism.
In most of Alameddine’s novels this revolt takes the form of flight to America, what one character calls an escape “from the land of conformism to the land of individualism.” (Alameddine is from a prominent Lebanese Druze family and has lived much of his life in San Francisco.)
Looming behind these singular stories is the larger history of dislocation caused by the civil war, when many Lebanese—the ones who could—left. In America, Alameddine’s characters discover that the pleasures of individualism often turn out to be empty, and their host country’s foreign policy, particularly its support for Israel, is a constant irritant. So their emigration is only ever partial; the old world haunts all their attempts at reinvention.
In Alameddine’s new novel, An Unnecessary Woman, the narrator, Aaliya Saleh, is a septuagenarian literary translator who has stayed in Beirut—“the Elizabeth Taylor of cities,” as she calls it, “insane, beautiful, tacky, falling apart.”
But Aaliya does not feel at home in her native city. For most of the novel, she walks through her neighborhood in West Beirut, remembering how it used to be, before “the virulent cancer we call concrete spread throughout the capital, devouring every living surface.” She recalls past lovers and favorite books, as well as the bitterness of her family life.
In Aaliya’s case, estrangement from her relatives and from the city she lives in has led to an internal emigration. “I slipped into art to escape life,” she tells us. “I sneaked off into literature.”
When not wandering Beirut’s streets, she remains in her apartment, communing with tutelary spirits—every New Year, she lights two candles for Walter Benjamin. In her old age she has become more and more devoted to her art and the pleasures of her own mind, a latter-day version of modernist mandarins from Valéry’s Monsieur Teste to Canetti’s Professor Kien. Aaliya’s name, as she likes to remind us, means “above,” or “the one on high.”
Aaliya is a childless divorcee in a country where social life revolves around the family. But the deeper source of alienation is her “blind lust for the written word.” Her day job is at an independent bookstore with no clientele.
And as a translator, Aaliya is not just a reader, but a reader in extremis. Her tastes run to what we now call “world literature”: W.G. Sebald, José Saramago, Javier Marías, and Danilo Kiš (she works from the French or English versions). This is a lonely passion. “Literature in the Arab world, in and of itself, isn’t sought after,” she informs us. “Literature in translation? Translation of a translation? Why bother.” Aaliya has translated 37 books into Arabic; none have been published. She’s never bothered to try.
Aaliya is not a very convincing translator. With no hope of publishing her work, she claims to be driven only by her esteem for the great writers and the joy she takes in the activity itself. This is already a little sentimental, but her description of her work is simply implausible:
My translating is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure pleasure. Gabriel blows his golden trumpet, ambrosial fragrance fills the air sublime, and gods descend from Olympus to dance—most heavenly this peak of ecstasy.
Whatever she’s doing, it isn’t translating. Not because the job is joyless, but because its satisfactions come from the experience of obstacles faced and overcome, or skillfully finessed.
In Aaliya’s account, it is one moment of bliss after another. This is typical of her relation to literature in general. An Unnecessary Woman is a kind of commonplace book, stuffed with citations from Aaliya’s favorite novels and poems. Everything that happens to her provokes a literary reminiscence: an unwelcome neighbor makes her think of Sartre (“Hell is other people”), which makes her think of Vallejo (“the torment of Hell is noise”); feeling lonely makes her think of Camus (“the weight of days is dreadful”); Beiruti garbage collectors are so many Sisyphuses.
We get it: this lady has read a lot of books. But in fact Aaliya is less a devotee of literature than a gourmand. She “salivates” over the “beautiful sentences” of Claudio Magris; Marguerite Yourcenar’s versions of Cavafy are “like champagne.” (Constance Garnett’s translations of Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, are “milky tea.”)
Reading a good book for the first time is “as sumptuous as the first sip of orange juice that breaks the fast in Ramadan.” And it isn’t just literature: “When I first heard Wagner, Messiaen, or Ligeti, the noise was unbearable, but like a child with her first sip of wine, I recognized something that I could love with practice.”
Most of the time, however, Aaliya’s devotion to literature is taken seriously. Her passion for translation is the prime source of the novel’s claim on its readers’ sympathies. The loneliness of this passion—and therefore the strength of our sympathies—is heightened by the idea, which Alameddine insists on, that Aaliya is pursuing her vocation in a cultural desert.
“I understood from the beginning that what I do isn’t publishable. There’s never been a market for it, and I doubt there ever will be.” In the same spirit, when Aaliya steals some titles from the bookstore where she works, she is doing a public service:
Had I not ordered some of these books, they would never have landed on Lebanese soil. For crying out loud, do you think anyone else in Lebanon has a copy of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood? And I am picking just one book off the top of my head. Lampedusa’s The Leopard? I don’t think anyone else in this country has a book by Novalis.
In passages like this, Aaliya becomes a more problematic narrator than Alameddine seems to intend. She is soliciting our sympathies—the sympathies of non-Lebanese readers, who are clearly the novel’s intended audience—by flattering our prejudices. For in reality, Beirut is no literary desert.
Beirut is the publishing hub of the Middle East and has been for a long time. Bookishness is central to Lebanon’s self-conception, as the response to the recent burning of a bookstore in Tripoli attests. Nor is it hostile to literary translation. To the contrary. In the late Fifties and Sixties, when Aaliya would have been in her mid-twenties, Beirut was home to the best literary magazines in Arabic, which were full of translated fiction and verse.
Perhaps the most influential of these journals was Shi‘r ((She3er, Poetry), a modernist quarterly modeled on Harriet Monroe’s little magazine of the same name. Between 1957 and 1964, Shi‘r published translations of Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Paul Valéry, Saint-John Perse, Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Yves Bonnefoy, Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, Salvatore Quasimodo, Rainer Maria Rilke, and many others. The magazine’s chief critic was Khalida Said, wife of the Syrio-Lebanese poet Adonis.
Other journals during the same period translated leftist intellectuals such as Sartre, Nâzım Hikmet, Paul Éluard, Pablo Neruda, and Louis Aragon. Somebody may even have had a copy of Lampedusa.
Is it conceivable Aaliya would have no knowledge of this history? She tells us she started translating at the age of twenty-two, in 1959, just as the Beiruti rage for translation was in full swing. Most literary magazines were published in Hamra, Aaliya’s own West Beirut neighborhood.
And they were published by her kind of people—cosmopolitan misfits, some of whom, like the poets and critics of Shi‘r, argued for a version of artistic autonomy that mirrors Aaliya’s own. Maybe it is conceivable she would know nothing of all this; maybe Aaliya is simply a recluse whose greatest pleasure happens to come from translating literary fiction. Maybe, but then her rhetorical question about Nightwood sounds less like a cry of anguish than ignorant snobbery. And the thirty-seven moldering manuscripts, whose fate turns out to be central to the plot, seem less like a rare and precious archive than a monumental quirk.
Alameddine’s own relation to the Lebanese literary history is similarly fraught. He belongs, and yet he does not want to. Alameddine’s recurring focus on the experience of emigration, the opportunities of self-creation offered by leaving home, his interest in questions of language and identity, and his mixing of Arab and European forms—all this places him squarely within the Levantine tradition of mahjar literature (mahjar is Arabic for “the place of emigration”).
This is a tradition that begins in the late 19th century and includes contemporary writers such as the novelist Rawi Hage and the playwright Wajdi Mouawad. The best-known and by far the best-selling member of this group is Gibran, though in the United States he tends to be viewed as a New Age parabolist of indeterminate origin rather than as a specifically Arab writer.
Alameddine, of course, wants nothing to do with this inheritance—for him, Gibran is “the most overrated writer in history”—and his way of telling stories stages its own kind of revolt.
Each of Alameddine’s first three novels upsets realist conventions in its own way.
Koolaids flits back and forth between wartime Beirut and San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s; it is a montage of voices and stories, a form Alameddine credits to Jean Said Makdisi’s memoir, Beirut Fragments (1990), though Elias Khoury’s pioneering novel of the civil war, The Little Mountain (1977), is probably the ultimate source for this technique.
Alameddine’s second novel, I, the Devine (2001), is narrated by a Beiruti Druze woman who struggles to maintain stable relationships after emigrating to the US; it is told in the form of first chapters—the narrator keeps trying and failing and trying again to write her memoir.
In The Hakawati, (2008), Alameddine borrows from the fabulist Arabic oral tradition to construct an interlocking series of tales framed by the story of a Lebanese man who returns from Los Angeles to keep vigil at his father’s deathbed.
One motive for this style of storytelling may be the fractured state of Lebanon, whose social landscape often seems to lack any common ground. “What if I told you that life has no unity?” says a character in Koolaids. “It is a series of nonlinear vignettes leading nowhere.” But it is also a way to resist, without entirely foregoing, the realist commonplaces of class, religion, and locality. Alameddine doesn’t want his characters to be defined by their sectarian identities any more than they do. It is this tussle between the claims of home and the attractions of flight that run through his fiction.
This is nicely suggested in a vignette from Koolaids. One of the book’s protagonists is a Lebanese abstract painter living in San Francisco (Alameddine was a successful painter before he turned to writing). A countryman is shown one of the canvases, which consists of irregular yellow rectangles, and becomes puzzled when a salesmen calls it abstract art. “But they are the sides of our houses,” the Lebanese man says. “That’s how the stones look back home. Exactly that yellow color.” The painter wants to escape into the purity of form but his content remains stubbornly local. Likewise, in I, the Divine the expatriate narrator speaks for many characters when she complains to a friend,
Here I am, the black sheep of the family, yet I’m still part of it. I tried separating from the family all my life, only to find out it’s not possible, not in my family. So I become the black sheep without any of the advantages of being one.
You can never go home, but you can’t entirely leave it, either.
An Unnecessary Woman marks a departure from the style and themes of this earlier work.
The story is told from a single point of view and, aside from a few flashbacks, it proceeds in straightforward fashion. And yet Aaliya is no more at ease in in Beirut than the characters who actually leave. This may reflect a common feeling among Beirutis that the city rebuilt after the civil war is a bewilderingly different place from the pre-war version. But it also comes from Aaliya’s sense that Lebanon is a deeply parochial country, which she can only escape by reading Sebald and Saramago. “Literature is my sandbox,” Aaliya explains early in the novel. “In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble.”
The most convincing passages in Alameddine’s novels, however, are not his paeans to literature but those moments when he represents his characters at their worst.
Koolaids includes a playlet featuring two upper-class Lebanese women meeting in a café in Paris to gossip about their friends: “The Ballan girl is incredibly ugly. I can’t imagine what [her husband] saw in her.” “As ugly as the Bandoura girl?” “No, my dear, that one is really ugly. This one is close, though.” “That one was so ugly. I couldn’t believe she found a husband.” “Money, dear, money. Daddy has money.” This goes on for ten pages; the whole thing is wicked and pitch-perfect.
Another memorable episode occurs forty pages into An Unnecessary Woman. Aaliya tells the story of Ahmad, a bookish young Palestinian who once helped her at the store and sought her reading recommendations. As soon as the war starts, he joins a militia and quickly rises through the ranks. Rumors suggest he has become an expert torturer. Now Aaliya wants him to get her a gun. Her apartment was burgled—the city is slipping into anarchy—and she needs it for self-defense. She meets Ahmad at his well-appointed apartment and finds a very different man from the one who helped her stock the shelves:
“Slacks pressed and tailored, the white shirt fitted and expensive, the face smiling and clean-shaven.” Aaliya, on the other hand, hasn’t showered in many days—running water has become a luxury—and wears a pink tracksuit with sequined swirls. Ahmad says he will give her a gun (and a hot shower) in return for sex. She agrees.
During intercourse, on her hands and knees, Aaliya feels Ahmad’s fingers squeezing spots on her lower back and suddenly realizes that he is removing her blackheads. He apologizes, “It had been unconscious. He couldn’t see a blackhead on his own skin without removing it and didn’t realize he was doing the same with me. I asked him not to stop.” Here is moral capitulation, erotic pleasure, vanity, and surprising tenderness—fiction that matches the complexity of history. All the rest is literature.
Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman is published by Grove Press.
Are TED talks lying to you? Creativity is the attribute of a class? And why did I hear all these predictable stories before?
Posted on: October 29, 2013
Are TED talks lying to you? And why did I hear all these predictable stories before?
The writer had a problem. Books he read and people he knew had been warning him that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a sort of creativity doldrums.
Economic growth was slackening. The Internet revolution was less awesome than we had anticipated, and the forward march of innovation, once a cultural constant, had slowed to a crawl.
Thomas Frank posted on Salon this OCT 13, 2013:
TED talks are lying to you
One of the few fields in which we generated lots of novelties — financial engineering — had come back to bite us.
And in other departments, we actually seemed to be going backward. You could no longer take a supersonic airliner across the Atlantic, for example, and sending astronauts to the moon had become either fiscally insupportable or just passé.
Jessica Pare and Jon Hamm in “Mad Men” (Credit: AMC/Michael Yarish/amc)
And yet the troubled writer also knew that there had been, over these same years, fantastic growth in our creativity promoting sector. There were TED talks on how to be a creative person.
There were “Innovation Jams” at which IBM employees brainstormed collectively over a global hookup, and “Thinking Out of the Box” desktop sculptures for sale at Sam’s Club.
There were creativity consultants you could hire, and cities that had spent billions reworking neighborhoods into arts-friendly districts where rule-bending whimsicality was a thing to be celebrated. If you listened to certain people, creativity was the story of our time, from the halls of MIT to the incubators of Silicon Valley.
The literature on the subject was vast. Authors included management gurus, forever exhorting us to slay the conventional; urban theorists, with their celebrations of zesty togetherness; pop psychologists, giving the world step-by-step instructions on how to unleash the inner Miles Davis.
Most prominent, perhaps, were the science writers, with their endless tales of creative success and their dissection of the brains that made it all possible.
It was to one of these last that our puzzled correspondent now decided to turn.
He procured a copy of “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” the 2012 bestseller by the ex-wunderkind Jonah Lehrer, whose résumé includes a Rhodes scholarship, a tour of duty at The New Yorker and two previous books about neuroscience and decision-making. (There was also a scandal concerning some made-up quotes in “Imagine,” but our correspondent was determined to tiptoe around that.)
Settling into a hot bath — well known for its power to trigger outside-the-box thoughts — he opened his mind to the young master
Anecdote after heroic anecdote unfolded, many of them beginning with some variation on Lehrer’s very first phrase: “Procter and Gamble had a problem.” What followed, as creative minds did their nonlinear thing, were epiphanies and solutions.
Our correspondent read about the invention of the Swiffer. He learned how Bob Dylan achieved his great breakthrough and wrote that one song of his that they still play on the radio from time to time. He found out that there was a company called 3M that invented masking tape, the Post-it note and other useful items. He read about the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and about the glories of Pixar.
And that’s when it hit the correspondent: He had heard these things before.
Each story seemed to develop in an entirely predictable fashion. He suspected that in the Dylan section, Lehrer would talk about “Like a Rolling Stone,” and that’s exactly what happened. When it came to the 3M section, he waited for Lehrer to dwell on the invention of the Post-it note — and there it was.
Had our correspondent developed the gift of foresight? No.
He really had heard these stories before. Spend a few moments on Google and you will find that the tale of how Procter & Gamble developed the Swiffer is a staple of marketing literature. Bob Dylan is endlessly cited in discussions of innovation, and you can read about the struggles surrounding the release of “Like a Rolling Stone” in textbooks like “The Fundamentals of Marketing” (2007).
As for 3M, the decades-long standing ovation for the company’s creativity can be traced all the way back to “In Search of Excellence” (1982), one of the most influential business books of all time. In fact, 3M’s accidental invention of the Post-it note is such a business-school chestnut that the ignorance of those who don’t know the tale is a joke in the 1997 movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”
These realizations took only a millisecond.
What our correspondent also understood, sitting there in his basement bathtub, was that the literature of creativity was a genre of surpassing banality. Every book he read seemed to boast the same shopworn anecdotes and the same canonical heroes.
If the authors are presenting themselves as experts on innovation, they will tell us about Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, Dylan, Warhol, the Beatles.
If they are celebrating their own innovations, they will compare them to the oft-rejected masterpieces of Impressionism — that ultimate combination of rebellion and placid pastel bullshit that decorates the walls of hotel lobbies from Pittsburgh to Pyongyang.
Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves.
Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all tell us, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on it. And by dint of careful study and the hardest science — by, say, sliding a jazz pianist’s head into an MRI machine — we can crack the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power.
That was the ultimate lesson. That’s where the music, the theology, the physics and the ethereal water lilies were meant to direct us.
Our correspondent could think of no books that tried to work the equation the other way around — holding up the invention of air conditioning or Velcro as a model for a jazz trumpeter trying to work out his solo.
And why was this worth noticing?
Well, for one thing, because we’re talking about the literature of creativity, for Pete’s sake. If there is a non-fiction genre from which you have a right to expect clever prose and uncanny insight, it should be this one. So why is it so utterly consumed by formula and repetition?
What our correspondent realized, in that flash of bathtub-generated insight, was that this literature isn’t about creativity in the first place. While it reiterates a handful of well-known tales — the favorite pop stars, the favorite artists, the favorite branding successes — it routinely ignores other creative milestones that loom large in the history of human civilization.
After all, some of the most consistent innovators of the modern era have also been among its biggest monsters. He thought back, in particular, to the diabolical creativity of Nazi Germany, which was the first country to use ballistic missiles, jet fighter planes, assault rifles and countless other weapons.
And yet nobody wanted to add Peenemünde, where the Germans developed the V-2 rocket during the 1940s, to the glorious list of creative hothouses that includes Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Belle Époque Paris and latter-day Austin, Texas.
How much easier to tell us, one more time, how jazz bands work, how someone came up with the idea for the Slinky, or what shade of paint, when applied to the walls of your office, is most conducive to originality.
But as any creativity expert can tell you “no insight is an island entire of itself“.
New epiphanies build on previous epiphanies, and to understand the vision that washed over our writer in the present day, we must revisit an earlier flash of insight, one that takes us back about a decade, to the year 2002. This time our future correspondent was relaxing in a different bathtub, on Chicago’s South Side, where the trains passed by in an all-day din of clanks and squeaks. While he soaked, he was reading the latest book about creativity: Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class.”
Creativity was now the most valuable quality of all, ran Florida’s argument, “the decisive source of competitive advantage.” This made creative people into society’s “dominant class” — and companies that wished to harness their power would need to follow them wherever they went.
Therefore cities and states were obliged to reconfigure themselves as havens for people of nonconformist tastes, who would then generate civic coolness via art zones, music scenes, and truckloads of authenticity. The author even invented a “Bohemian Index,” which, he claimed, revealed a strong correlation between the presence of artists and economic growth.
Every element of Florida’s argument infuriated our future correspondent. Was he suggesting planned bohemias? Built by governments? To attract businesses?
It all seemed like a comic exercise in human gullibility. As it happened, our correspondent in those days spent nearly all his time with the kinds of people who fit Richard Florida’s definition of the creative class: writers, musicians, and intellectuals. And Florida seemed to be suggesting that such people were valuable mainly for their contribution to a countercultural pantomime that lured or inspired business executives.
What was really sick-making, though, was Florida’s easy assumption that creativity was a thing our society valued. Our correspondent had been hearing this all his life, since his childhood in the creativity-worshipping 1970s. He had even believed it once, in the way other generations had believed in the beneficence of government or the blessings of Providence.
And yet Richard’s creative friends, when considered as a group, were obviously on their way down, not up. The institutions that made their lives possible — chiefly newspapers, magazines, universities and record labels — were then entering a period of disastrous decline. The creative world as he knew it was not flowering, but dying.
When he considered his creative friends as individuals, the literature of creativity began to seem even worse — more like a straight-up insult. Our writer-to-be was old enough to know that, for all its reverential talk about the rebel and the box breaker, society had no interest in new ideas at all unless they reinforced favorite theories or could be monetized in some obvious way.
The method of every triumphant intellectual movement had been to quash dissent and cordon off truly inventive voices. This was simply how debate was conducted. Authors rejoiced at the discrediting of their rivals (as poor Jonah Lehrer would find in 2012).
Academic professions excluded those who didn’t toe the party line. Leftist cliques excommunicated one another. Liberals ignored any suggestion that didn’t encourage or vindicate their move to the center. Conservatives seemed to be at war with the very idea of human intelligence. And business thinkers were the worst of all, with their perennial conviction that criticism of any kind would lead straight to slumps and stock market crashes.
Or so our literal-minded correspondent thought back in 2002.
Later on, after much trial and error, he would understand that there really had been something deeply insightful about Richard Florida’s book. This was the idea that creativity was the attribute of a class — which class Florida identified not only with intellectuals and artists but also with a broad swath of the professional-managerial stratum.
It would take years for our stumbling innovator to realize this. And then, he finally got it all at once. The reason these many optimistic books seemed to have so little to do with the downward-spiraling lives of actual creative workers is that they weren’t really about those people in the first place.
No. The literature of creativity was something completely different. Everything he had noticed so far was a clue: the banality, the familiar examples, the failure to appreciate what was actually happening to creative people in the present time.
This was not science, despite the technological gloss applied by writers like Jonah Lehrer. It was a literature of superstition, in which everything always worked out and the good guys always triumphed and the right inventions always came along in the nick of time.
In Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” (2010), the creative epiphany itself becomes a kind of heroic character, helping out clueless humanity wherever necessary:
Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.
And what was the true object of this superstitious stuff?
A final clue came from “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” (1996), in which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges that, far from being an act of individual inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.”
Innovation exists only when the correctly credentialed hive-mind agrees that it does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.” What determines “creativity is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise”.
Consider the narrative daisy chain that makes up the literature of creativity. It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of us — members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well.
What your correspondent realized, relaxing there in his tub one day, was that the real subject of this literature was the professional-managerial audience itself, whose members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk.
And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue.
Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.
An edited version of this essay originally appeared in Harper’s magazine
Thomas Frank’s most recent book is “Pity the Billionaire.” He is also the author of “One Market Under God” and the founding editor of “The Baffler” magazine.
Adonis Diaries 