Postcolonial Fiction and Sacred Scripture

Rewriting the Divine?

Sura Qadiri

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781907975813
• eBook ISBN: 9781351191616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Francophone writers from North Africa and the Middle East often choose to write within a sacred context, sometimes engaging directly with Islamist rhetoric. Novelists like Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco), Assia Djebar (Algeria) and Amin Maalouf (Lebanon) revisit scripture as a way to convey nuances which they believe have been stamped out by monolithic religious world-views. For them, fiction offers a way to break away from limited exegetical horizons, but to remain within the faith. Others, though, would go further, moving away from all religious practice, not just the excessively political or violent. Tunisian writers Abdelwahab Meddeb and Fethi Benslama propose that all literature is of its very nature outside of religion, and that its proliferation will ultimately lead to a secular society. Qadiri explores this wide spectrum of approaches, not only by draw comparison with metropolitan French thought, but also to assess its potential impact at a time of radical change in the Islamic world. Sura Qadiri is a research associate in the French Department, University of Cambridge."

Chapter 1
Body, Text, Excess

Introduction

This chapter compares and contrasts notions of the divine and of its place in human activity presented in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Abdelwahab Meddeb. It focuses in particular on their designation of writing as a site for encountering the divine. Nancy explicitly reworks the divine into human life as a gap or interstice that always frustrates attempts at maintaining a cohesive understanding of human experience. It is a space of excess of which one remains aware when attempting to render experience into language, always leaving the impression that there is something beyond the expressible. Meddeb offers no explicit qualification of the divine in his work, beyond endorsing marginal intellectual Muslim movements from history that have advocated separating God from his revealed text. The effect of this is to make God so withdrawn from the human realm as to have no continuing influence on human activity through the sacred text. Instead, Meddeb highlights a need for excessive human rituals and behaviours that are dictated by bodily rhythms, and that connect communities to narratives of the past, including those contained in sacred scripture. In this way, communities maintain identities that are vernacular and fluid. For Meddeb there is no divine, only excess. The term designates to some extent a space or gap in meaning akin to that described by Nancy, but more importantly in Meddeb’s work, it is represented as a necessary characteristic of human behaviour, which finds release in excessive rituals and artistic expression.

In contrast to traditional monotheistic notions of inscription, which propose sacred scripture as a textual site for encountering the divine, Meddeb and Nancy place the emphasis on writing as a means of encountering excess. Whilst the sacred text is divinely inspired, writing is the product of human experience. Both Meddeb and Nancy place the importance of the rhythms and logic of the human body in writing, and so language becomes the site of encounter between body, text, and the excess that stands beyond and between them. These ideas are played out in Nancy’s highly personal semi-literary account of his heart transplant L’Intrus, and Meddeb’s novel Talismano. I will suggest that, to a great extent, the overlap between the ideas of Meddeb and Nancy demonstrate novel ways of extending European philosophical approaches to Islam.

A Transposition of the Divine in Nancy’s thinking

Nancy rethinks the substance of the divine and its relationship to the world by subverting the concept of Incarnation. He challenges the more traditional view of Incarnation as the encasing of an otherworldly divine in human flesh, in opposition to the widely accepted doctrine of hypostatic union.¹ Instead, Nancy moves away from a monotheistic logic of enclosure, inscription, and internalization of the divine towards one of ‘dis-enclosure’,² externalization, and what he terms ‘ex-scription’, or ‘writing-out’. Nancy builds his argument on the Pauline doctrine of Kenosis, a Greek term meaning ‘emptying out’, which opposes itself to the notion of hypostatic union and to which only a minority of Christians adhere. The controversial doctrine proposes that in becoming flesh, Jesus had to forego certain divine attributes, for example those of omnipresence and omnipotence, which means that the incarnation did not involve the bringing together of divinity in its otherworldly form with human flesh. Nancy takes the logic of Kenosis even further, by suggesting that incarnation involves not only the emptying out of certain divine attributes, but the complete self-emptying of divine substance. That is to say that, through incarnation, God does not enter flesh, but disappears into that flesh, and therefore ceases to become divinity, leaving an empty space in the dimension of the divine which, for Nancy, becomes divinity itself. In this way, Christian monotheism marks the end of divine presence. God is ‘le dieu dont l’absence fait proprement la divinité, ou le dieu dont le vide-de divinité est proprement la vérité’ [a god whose absence in itself creates divinity, or a god whose void-of-divinity is the truth],³ and Kenosis is the ‘devenir-vide de Dieu, ou son “se vider de soi”’[emptying out of God, or his ‘emptying-himself-out-of-himself’].⁴

For Nancy, the divine is the empty residual space left behind in the act of withdrawal. This divine space of excess is not part of an ‘arrière monde’ [worlds-behind-the-world],⁵ a higher world, a celestial realm outside worldly time and matter which guarantees meaning in the world, and which is tethered to a dogmatic control of spiritual life. It is part of a ‘dehors du monde’ [outside of the world],⁶ a space that exceeds the world, but that is within it, even though it remains beyond reach. Language and the body offer openings onto this space, and are not repositories of it. Nancy uses the term ‘ex-scription’⁷ for writing that skirts the limits between bodily existence, language, and the divine. The term clearly opposes itself to the traditional monotheistic concept of inscription, which transmits the idea that divine essence is contained within sacred scripture. For Nancy, monotheism is at its very heart characterized by a logic of void, trace, vestige, and absence:

le monothéisme, dans son principe, défait le théisme, c’est-à-dire la présence de la puissance qui assemble le monde et assure son sens. Il rend donc absolument problématique le nom de “dieu” — il le rend non-signifiant — et surtout, il lui retire tout pouvoir d’assurance.

[In its principle, monotheism undoes theism, that is to say, the presence of the power that assembles the world and assures this sense. It thus renders absolutely problematic the name god — it renders it nonsignifying — and above all, it withdraws all powers of assurance from it.]⁸

Monotheism is a constant negotiation of the void that is left by a withdrawn God. It is the impossibility of making sense of absence and withdrawal. The very name ‘dieu’ becomes a non-signifier, or a signifier of nothing. Nancy’s understanding of monotheism transforms the invisible divine from a guarantor of order and meaning in the world through its twinning with a higher realm that carries the promise of order and meaning to all worldly occurrences. Instead, the space of the divine offers nothing more than its own emptiness. This emptiness can be intuited, and is often signalled in the act of writing, but can never be adequately reduced to any discursive worldly logic. Nancy characterizes this space of excess as one of ‘aréalité’ [‘areality’],⁹ the term signifying its presence within the world, in opposition to traditional monotheistic belief in the divine’s ethereality, which carries connotations of the celestial and transcendent.

L’Intrus

Although not a work of fiction, Nancy’s essay, which reflects on a heart transplant he had undergone ten years before, offers a personal account that is not quite fully steeped in theoretical language and that possesses a semi-literary quality. Most notably, the tone of the piece is not consistently theoretical, betraying the infiltration of an emotional and bodily response to the experience, for which Nancy struggles to find an adequate idiom and register. Nancy reflects in the essay on what it is that ultimately constitutes or characterizes the self. He reflects on the seat of subjectivity, asking how, if the heart is both physically and symbolically at the core of identity, one is able to live on as oneself with the heart of another. This question resolves itself not by ultimately locating or underpinning a seat for the self in place of the heart, but by suggesting the ways in which physical experience and language are both incomplete and defy cohesion, and that neither proposes an alternative single focal point from which the self emanates. Their incompleteness gestures towards or opens onto the excess that neither can encapsulate. It also demonstrates their inability to encapsulate one another. Nancy uses bodily rhythms in language that echo the rhythms of his experience. Yet his constant slippage between a multiplicity of idioms, all of which are applicable, but not fully appropriate, suggests he struggles to find the register that fits his experience comfortably. Moreover, the space of excess evoked by language and the experience of the body is shaped to some extent by these, since it can only be glimpsed through them.

The text straddles two key registers. The first of these is a theoretical register conveying distance and abstraction, reflecting on the difficulties in defining what is ‘propre’ [own] and what is ‘étranger’ [foreign] in a transplant situation. The other voice in the text is an autobiographical one, offering the memoir of a sighing transplant veteran, struggling to encompass the enormity of his experience. Interjections like ‘quel étrange moi!’ [‘What a strange self!]¹⁰ doubly express theoretical and personal sentiment. Moreover, the text is full of almost absent-minded slippages and distractions. Discussing the fact that his transplant depends on so many chance contextual factors (the fact that a suitable heart should become available, that his survival should be deemed important by others, that dying aged only fifty in this particular age should be considered ‘scandaleux’ [scandalous]¹¹ where it would have been acceptable in the past), Nancy’s narrative voice continually ponders his choice of vocabulary: ‘que signifie “survivre”? est-ce d’ailleurs un terme approprié? […] Pourquoi le mot “scandaleux” peut-il me venir aujourd’hui dans ce contexte?’ [What does it mean ‘to survive’? Is it even a suitable term? […] Why today does the word ‘scandalous’ come to mind in this context?]¹² There is something of an absent-mindedness and disorientation about this, betraying the bewildering effect of the transplant. Nancy’s constant reflection on his choice of language also suggests the ways in which language can be ill-fitting, generating false allusions. He muses, for example, on the way in which his experience of transplant highlights a problem with the use of the personal pronoun ‘je’. This seems to allude falsely to a subject that is cohesive and internally consistent. It remains, nonetheless, unavoidable:

j’ai (qui, ‘je’? C’est précisément la question, la vieille question: quelle est ce sujet de l’énonciation, toujours étranger au sujet de son énoncé, dont il est forcément l’intrus et pourtant forcément le moteur, l’embrayeur et le cœur).

[I have — Who — this ‘I’ is precisely the question, the old question: what is the enunciating subject? Always foreign to the subject of its own utterance; necessarily intruding upon it, yet ineluctably its motor, shifter or heart.]¹³

Nancy’s assertion underpins a disparity between bodily experience and language, despite their mutual interdependence. His language, however, incorporates strategies for expressing the fragmentation of subjectivity that undermines the cohesive ness of the ‘je’. For example, Susan Hanson¹⁴ comments on the wide use of connectives in the essay such as ‘donc’, ‘mais’, and ‘pourtant’ — thus, but, however. The abundance of these seems to generate a forced sense of cohesiveness that mimics the act of bodily synthesizing and suturing that takes place during an organ transplant. Nancy’s language thus works to undermine any illusion of cohesiveness in a way that matches his bodily experience of fragmentation.

In addition, Nancy’s constant slippage between idioms suggests that language not only reflects the experiences of the body, but that it stumbles upon an area of excess that marks it with a sense of incompletion or inadequacy. For example, Nancy notes that he is told: ‘“votre cœur était programmé pour durer jusqu’à cinquante ans”’ [‘your heart has been programmed to last to the age of fifty’]¹⁵ and responds with the following reflection: ‘mais quel est ce programme dont je ne peux faire ni destin ni providence? Ce n’est qu’une courte séquence programmatique dans une absence générale de programme’ [But what programme is this from which I can fashion neither providence nor fate? No more than a short programmatic sequence in a general absence of programming].¹⁶ The use of the participle ‘programmé’ is, of course, borrowed from modern technological discourse to explain an organic phenomenon. The use of the passive, however, where it would have been fine in a technological context that assumes a human mind is responsible for an action, becomes problematic when talking about a human heart. Whilst the notion of programming suggests a large degree of control, Nancy has no control over the ‘destin’ and the ‘providence’ of his heart. His team of medical carers has only the potential ability to repair it. They are not the ones who have ‘programmed’ it in the first instance. The terms ‘destin’ and ‘providence’ are clearly borrowed from a religious vocabulary, and stand out in relation to the notion of a programmed heart, whilst the notion of an ‘absence générale de programme’ suggests the inadequacy of both technological and religious registers when it comes to talking about the duration of a body, and thus the duration of a life. And whilst the length of a life is determined by the length of the duration of a body, ‘life’ is not located in the body:

Quelle est cette vie ‘propre’ qu’il s’agit de ‘sauver’? Il s’avère donc au moins que cette propriété ne réside en rien dans ‘mon’ corps. Elle n’est située nulle part, ni dans cette organe dont la réputati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Body, Text, Excess
• 2 Withdrawn Divine I: The Blank Book in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable and Amin Maalouf’s Le Périple de Baldassare
• 3 Withdrawn Divine II: Vanishing Bodies and Empty Space in Georges Perec’s La Disparition and Assia Djebar’s La Disparition de la langue française
• 4 Divine Senses of Place: Mecca versus Madina
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index