Novel and Nation in the Muslim World

Literary Contributions and National Identities

Daniella Kuzmanovic,Elisabeth Özdalga

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137477583
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring the relationship between fiction and nation formation in the Muslim world through 12 unique studies from Azerbaijan, Libya, Iran, Algeria, and Yemen, amongst others, this book shows how fiction reflects and relates the complex entanglements of nation, religion, and modernity in the process of political and cultural identity formation.

1

The End of Literary Narratives?

Gregory Jusdanis

We have known for a long time that the relationship between literature and nationalism is a symbiotic one, the one reinforcing the other. Nationalism gave literature purpose and literature endowed nationalism with form. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine the one without the other. If each mode of political organization expresses and is expressed by its own technology, we can say that nationalism was a textual affair. Obviously, this does not mean that books brought about the nation. We do not want to reduce a social, political, and cultural movement to a technology. What we mean is that the mode of disseminating ideas on the nation was originally textual. By the same token, we can argue that the national age amassed diverse texts into one body and called it “literature.” While epics, lyrics, drama, satire, and novels had been fashioned for centuries, only the nation grouped them together for the first time and granted them a shared mission.

Nationalism, in short, emerged in the age of print and was made possible by this technology, which enabled rebels and intellectuals to reproduce information about unfair taxation, colonial oppression, or lack of political representation and disseminate it quickly.¹ Nationalism was so textually textured, it would be hard to conceive the emergence of nation-states in the late eighteenth and especially in the nineteenth centuries without the efficiencies provided by the printing press. Literature itself was also made possible by print. By “literature” I mean a collection of writing, usually considered non-instrumental (i.e. useless), contained within the institution of art, and encompassing texts from Homer’s epics to the latest avant-garde experimentations. Literature is vastly different from what existed before modernity. In earlier ages, for instance, we had poetry, tragedy, romance, but no literature per se as an amalgamation of aesthetic writing, differentiated from functional texts such as newspapers, how-to manuals, legal documents, and political tracts. It appeared and was made possible by the efficacies of print that allowed for easy reproduction and that gave the impression of a single author, unchanging text, and original voice.

These two unlikely discourses, nationalism and literature, one utilitarian and the other unusable, appeared at roughly the same time, mutually supportive, like two friends. A sign of modernity, they promoted modernization in turn, giving rise for the first time in the history of the world to nation-states, nationalities, literature, and national literature. Nationalism and literature both embodied and expressed a new time–space, culture–politics continuum. Although partly a geographical, partly a political, and partly a cultural concept, the nation represented a leap into the future, a capture of time. In the nation, literature itself acquired a temporal dimension, expressing the time period of the community, while also representing the new territorial entity. Literature was conscripted to tell a story of a new political and topographical venture, to heighten the emotional and imaginative potential of the state. Generally, national literature signifies this new institution written in the or a language of the nation and containing the literary texts (novels, poems, short stories) that supposedly replicate national reality and differentiate this reality from that of its neighbors.

Of course, the contradictions of the nation began to poke through the cover of national literature immediately. Very few nations were bound by one language, and fewer still had the ethnic, racial, or religious homogeneity that nationalist ideology advocated. And on top of it, literature did not reflect national identity like the surface of a lake mirroring surrounding mountains. Nevertheless, national literature began to acquire a certain materiality. Each country aspired to a literary canon, much in the way that it desired a flag, an army, a bureaucracy, and a legal system. But literature was somehow different from the rest. Unlike the other accouterments of the nation, literature had by definition no function. This seemingly paradoxical situation shows the unsung powers of culture, namely that an unserviceable body of texts came to be recognized as an essential feature of the new political reality – the nation-state. A non-utilitarian mode of textuality acquired the effect of utility.

Readers began to recognize the boundaries and characteristics of this new entity. It was there, a discursive formation, supported by the education system from the primary to the post-secondary level, the press, the publishing business, bookstores, and a host of readers. They have accepted this reality for over 200 years. Indeed, at the universities of many countries, literary departments are still organized along the boundaries of national literature. So we have departments of French, German, and English literatures. It is ironic that, with all the talk about globalization, these departments still stand. It is doubly ironic that Comparative Literature, the discipline that arose in the latter nineteenth century to compensate for the compartmentalization of literary studies, is in crisis, while these departments prevail. Indeed, there have been many accounts in the last ten years mourning the demise of Comparative Literature. And World Literature has risen in its place, with the intent of making up for the deficiencies of its predecessor (Jusdanis 2003; Spivak 2003).²

This only goes to show how tenacious the hold of the idea of national literature has been. What makes this grip perplexing is that literature has not been national in the way that nationalist ideology would have hoped – if by that we mean that literature underwrote nationalist identity or that it mirrored the face of the nation. Literature may indeed have been used in the press or in the schools to maintain and promote a nationalist ideology among readers or pupils. But the majority of literary texts never embraced this political agenda. Indeed, these texts actually showed a nation divided, insecure, and pulled in opposite directions.

Let me provide some examples from Greece. Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857) is now hailed as the national bard of Greece. Indeed, his “Ode to Liberty” has been designated as the national anthem. His oeuvre is now hailed as supremely Greek, expressing the soul of the nation. But what seems now for Greek readers the most representative national text was originally a contradictory project patched together loosely by a poet of divided national and linguistic loyalties. For instance, Solomos was born on the Ionian island of Zakynthos, then a Venetian possession soon to be acquired by Great Britain. His mother tongue was Italian rather than Greek. Indeed, he spent ten years studying in Italy and when he returned to his home he had to relearn Greek almost as a foreign language. His first verses were written in Italian and translated into the national language of his country. And his great works, such as the ethereal poem “Free and Besieged,” is suffused with German idealist philosophy made to speak demotic Greek in ballad form. The poem, however, is a failure in that it is fragmentary: Solomos, romantic poet that he was, could never complete and give it the ideal aesthetic form he desired. Nevertheless, we have to consider it national not only because of the weight of history, but also because it is written in the Greek language and indeed came to define Greek literary idiom in the way Dante is said to have done with Italian or Goethe with German.

We see a similar process at work in the canonization of Georgios Vizyenos (1849–96), now regarded, along with Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851–1911), as the father of the Greek short story. Indeed, the Greek short story as a literary genre goes back to these two authors.³ But to what extent is Vizyenos’s masterpiece “Moscóv-Selím” national? To start, its protagonist is not Greek at all, something the author himself recognizes in the preamble to the story, which he separates from the actual narration and addresses directly in the second person to the protagonist himself, Moscóv-Selím. The speaker confesses that he regrets having met him, because Moscóv-Selím has given the author “grief to drink” and “his doleful, trembling voice echoes plaintively in” his ear. But note the alarm he feels about national misunderstandings:

I don’t doubt that the fanatics of your race will curse the memory of a “believer” because he opened the sanctuary of his heart to the unholy eyes of an infidel. I fear that the fanatics of my own race⁴ will reproach a Greek author because he did not conceal your virtue, or did not substitute a Christian hero in his account.

(Vizyenos 1988: 187)

He, the Greek author, inaugurating the short story as literary genre, chose a Muslim as his protagonist. Yet he fears that members of the two respective communities will castigate the Muslim and the Christian for entering into a bond of friendship.

Who was Moscóv-Selím? And why did the author write a story about him that could have had a hostile reception among his Greek readership? He is a fascinating case of someone who tramples the boundaries of gender, religion, and ethnicity. Born to an aristocratic Muslim family in Istanbul in the early nineteenth century, Moscóv-Selím is kept in the harem by his mother until his adolescence, an experience that heightens his sense of empathy for people different than him. Although as a young man he fights valiantly for the sultan in Bosnia-Herzegovina and later the Crimean War, he is never recognized by his father and is mistreated by the state. Finally, a prisoner of war in Russia, he receives comfort and support from a Russian family with whom he is billeted. Indeed, this is one of the first times he is treated kindly by anybody other than by his mother and wife. As a result, he comes to identify culturally with his Russian hosts and, when he returns to the Ottoman territories, dresses and acts like a Russian, hence the double name, Moscóv-Selím, which expresses his tug-of-war identity. In short, he hardly constitutes the type of national character one would expect in the foundational text to a literary genre of the new institution of literature. He not only is an enemy of the nation, but also exhibits signs of someone who transcends the borders of any nation, wishing to identify with neither. Indeed, the character of Moscóv-Selím exists for no other reason than to undermine the very idea of a fixed national identity, of love for the nation, of racial ontology. He is post-national before the birth of that term.

We find this also in Constantine Cavafy, probably the most famous Greek poet and one of the most celebrated of the twentieth century. To most readers outside Greece, he seems to represent modern Greek literature. But to contemporaneous Greeks, Cavafy seemed neither Greek nor his poems literary. For example, Cavafy spent most of his time in Alexandria and considered himself a member of the diaspora rather than a Greek citizen. His seemed pedestrian to mainland and mainstream readers, who were accustomed to flowery, national verses. Overall, his subject matter was also disturbing to these readers, as Cavafy chose unpopular themes. Rather than referring to the glories of ancient Greece, for instance, he wrote about epochs of decline, such as the Hellenistic period, the time of late antiquity, and of the Byzantine Empire. The individuals populating the poems set in antiquity were not “biologically” Greek, but actually boasted of their racial mixing. Furthermore, he spoke frankly of homosexual love. Finally and most scandalously, rather than writing in the demotic, the national language, he broke ranks with critics and poets in Greece by employing the more learned register (Katharevousa) alongside more ancient forms of the Greek language. So in reading Cavafy, readers found themselves riding in a train bearing the entire Greek linguistic tradition.

In all three cases, the authors are national and international at the same time. Or rather, they are national because they are transnational. It can’t be otherwise. All three devour external sources, but, as the Brazilian critic Haroldo de Campos notes, without submitting to them, but rather by appropriating them and giving them a different value and direction (2007: 160).⁵ They exemplify the tension writers have always found themselves in between the individual and the universal. We can say this of other traditions. Let us look at three classic American novels of the nineteenth century. While Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn deals with the American experience, it expresses it in the idiom of a poor white boy and a runaway slave rather than in standard English. At the same time, it subjects the institution of slavery to criticism for its inhumanity. So does Harriet Beecher Stowe’s astonishingly popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin that many people credit with having contributed to the anti-slave movement. Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick begins in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and takes place on an American whaling ship manned mostly by American sailors. But this novel contains the whole world within itself, departing from the American experience, yet not being possible without it. It is national because its ambitions were transnational.

What we have then, to cite de Campos again, is not an ontological nationalism but a differential one, a dialogic movement from inside to outside and vice versa. This interchange gives national literature its paradoxical nature, in that it is “there” and “not there” at the same time. It exists as a collection of texts bound to a particular nation, but it is not representative of that nation, not in the way that nation believes. This is why we can say that national literature has had a social effect without itself necessarily containing a material reality, the useless being put to utilitarian purposes.

* * *

If national literature, like the two twin concepts it comprises – nationalism and literature – is a nineteenth-century concept, what future does it have today in the fluid world of the Internet? Have we arrived at a post-national, post-literary universe? This is a profound question that obviously can have no definitive answer. Indeed, any answer will have to be very speculative. But at the moment I would like to say, probably not. But before traveling into the future, let me turn to the past. To understand whether the nation-state could survive, we should try to grasp what it offered its adherents in the first place.

Why did people latch on to the doctrine of nationalism? Why did people begin to live in nation-states and why do they continue to do so? In the past, we were not able to consider these questions because of our automatic reflex to denounce the evils of nationalism and to gloat over its failures. But in my research, I discovered that nationalism, rather than being a slide into an antediluvian hell, actually represented a step toward a brighter future. I came to see nationalism as a product of modernity that encouraged people to step into the new and threatening realm of modernization. It was part of the eternal give and take between the individual and the universal, the present and the tradition, the local and globalization that has always characterized human societies. Nationalism represents a modern interpretation of this ancient dialectic.

And what message does this dynamic announce to people? It assured them that they could step into the weird and frightening world of modernity, knowing that their inherited ways of life would be shielded from disappearance. Partha Chaterjee rightly argues that in a colonial situation, people divide their life less into the private and the public than into the spiritual and the material. While people grant to the colonial power superiority in the instrumental realm (trade, armaments, bureaucracy, goods), they carve out the realm of indigenous identities over which they stake their sovereignty. The colonial power, in other words, is kept out of this domain, which serves as a unifying force before and after independence (Chatterjee 1986, 1993).

Nationalism isolated culture for attention, culture both in its anthropological permutation as way of life and aesthetic signification as art. It granted this domain a material force by using it both as a stepping stone toward modernization and as an explanation for social change. Unlike either liberal or Marxist...