Foreword

IN THE REALM OF MEMORY

What we call memory today is therefore not memory but already

history. The so-called rekindling of memory is actually its final flicker
as it is consumed by history’s themes. The need for memory is a need
for history.
Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, p. 8

The modern imagining of nation on a geographical site is necessarily twi(n)-

ned with an impulse to rewrite history in a way that gives the modern
nation roots in the immemorial past. History is, as Pierre Nora shows us
in his stupendous project on the reconstruction of the French past, Realms
of Memory, a matter of tinkering with collective memory that inevitably
crystallises on a place, a locus, or, in modern times, the site of nation.1 ‘The
association of the words lieu and mémoire in French proved to have pro-
found connotations – historical, intellectual emotional, and largely uncon-
scious (the effect was something like that of the English word “roots”)’,
Nora explains, ‘These connotations arise in part from the specific role that
memory played in the construction of the French idea of the nation and in
part from recent changes in the attitude of the French toward their national
past’.2 What Nora says of the French reconstruction of the past that would
be consumed as national history and the ensuing ambivalence towards both
the past and the nation in France is true of the Arab mobilisation of the
past in the construction of Arab national history. The ambivalence towards
the past and the nation accentuates even more the need for history, or the
necessity to tinker with memory, especially when the nation and the present
are often seen as born out of a problematic cultural encounter between East
and West.
The Arabic novel, which shares with the Arab nation its cross-cultural
genealogy, has aligned itself with the nation, partaking in imagining,

OUYANG 9780748655694 PRINT.indd v 11/12/2012 16:28

 vi Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel

building and allegorising the nation, and modernising Arabic culture and
literature at the same time. It does so by rooting both the nation and novel in
the past, often mobilising the language of the past to write about the present,
and saturating the novel’s textual landscape with a profound longing for the
past and, more importantly, for the future that has yet to take proper and
desirable shape. Interrogation of the past is synonymous with the search
for future. There is, however, a dear price to be paid for always resorting
to the past, to the language of the past, to express the desire for the future
and map the trajectory of modernisation of both the Arab nation and Arabic
novel. In the story of the triangulated relationship of nation-state, moder-
nity and tradition the Arabic novel that ‘employs the Arab cultural heritage’
tells is another story of the dialectics of past and present, which is in turn
shaped by its own search for a unique identity and indigenous roots, and
driven by its own impulse to tell stories and write histories. The purpose is
to let the Arabic novel tell its stories, to look at the ways in which it tells
the stories and the consequences of its narrative strategies in the produc-
tion of meaning, to trace the formulation of its aesthetics at the intersection
between past and present in its nostalgia for both past and future and, more
importantly, to track the history of the nation and novel it writes.
My reading of the Arabic novel is inspired by my work on pre-modern
Arabic narrative and storytelling. I was writing an article on Sīrat ʿUmar
al-Nuʿmān, a mini epic cycle inserted into the Arabian Nights in the nine-
teenth century, when the disparity between the abundant presence of love
stories with happy endings in pre-modern Arabic storytelling and their
poignant absence in modern Arabic fiction suddenly became significant in
the understanding of the function of the cycle of love stories in the Sīra.
ʿUmar al-Nuʿmān, like a great majority of the Arabic novel, details the rise,
fall and rise again of a nation, in this case defined by the kingly genealogy of
the family of ʿUmar al-Nuʿmān. The continuity of this genealogy depends
to a great extent on the propriety, and therefore legitimacy, of the royal
marriages. The love stories are in effect discourses, in a metaphorical sort
of way, on the fate of the nation. This destiny is written by the members of
the family forming the nucleus of the nation in their conduct while in love:
the nation rises when propriety in matters of love is observed, and falls
when this propriety is violated, when legitimacy becomes questionable.
When the love story observes all the requirements of propriety, the nation
coheres. The love stories pervasive in the Arabic novel in contrast are about
frustrated desires, disappointed hopes, broken promises, betrayals of confi-
dence and tragic destinies. From a comparative perspective they read like a

OUYANG 9780748655694 PRINT.indd vi 11/12/2012 16:28

 Foreword vii

statement on the Arabic novel as well as modern Arab nation-states, which

have been grappling with issues of legitimacy. At another level, the story
of the Arabic novel that employs heritage is that of, among other things, the
love affair with the nation-state. Its love for the nation-state is, however,
haunted by the nation-state’s problematic relationship with modernity and
tradition, which bespeaks its anxiety about its own genealogy. With the
West ‘playing in the dark’, nation-state and modernity become ‘improper’
strangers, or illegitimate partners to tradition and the novel, and tradition
becomes the ‘proper’, or complete, stranger to nation-state, modernity and
the novel. Any kind of liaison is by definition potentially alienating and of
questionable legitimacy.
The love stories underpinning the politics of the Arabic novel are, upon
close scrutiny, reincarnations of Arabic poetics of love, not only inherent
in pre-modern Arabic storytelling but also in classical and modern Arabic
poetry, which are expressive of the aesthetics, ethics and politics of writing
in Arab culture past and present. The Arabic novel deploys familiar tropes
of love pervasive in Arabic poetry and storytelling – love, desire, nostalgia,
and madness – to tell stories of Arab aspirations for the nation and moder-
nity and disappointment in the state and modernisation from two different
but interlacing perspectives locatable in the dialectics between past and
present. It looks at the past through the prism of the present in its imagining
of political community and will to the modern, but sees the present through
the eye of the past in its allegorisation of the nation-state and interroga-
tion of modernisation and the role of tradition in the process, all the while
telling the story of its own search for form. The idea of this book, Politics of
Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel, and its companion volume, Poetics of Love
in the Arabic Novel, is informed by the alternative visions and differing dia-
lectics of past and present, as well as the division of labour among familiar
tropes of love inherent in the Arabic novel’s expression of its longing for
form, its discourses on the triangulated nation, modernity and tradition, and
the history it writes for the Arab nation and the Arabic novel.
I have examined in Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel how the present
mobilises the past in the processes of nation-building and modernisation
in the narratives focalised on the two tropes of love and desire. Taking my
point for departure as the site on which changing notions of space play out
the dialectics of past and present, I looked at the ways the Arabic novel
takes shape while giving shape to the present in the form of territorialising
the nation-state; investigated the Arabic novel’s expressions of its anxiety
over the incomplete project of the nation-state at present as resembling

OUYANG 9780748655694 PRINT.indd vii 11/12/2012 16:28

 viii Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel

that of unrequited love; and scrutinised the Arabic novel’s expressions of

the desire for modernity, and the ways it intervenes in and mediates the
discourses (in the Foucauldian sense of the word) on modernisation that
are driven by the intersection between two impulses, one to decolonise and
the other to modernise. I ended with a close look at the nostalgic impulse in
the Arabic novel that engages in allegorising the nation and unravelling its
possession by the past. I want now to pick up from where I left off and turn
my attention to the redeployment of the tropes of nostalgia and madness in
the Arabic novel.
This volume, Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel, is in three parts.
It continues the interrogation of the Arabic novel’s discourses on nation-
state, modernity and tradition, this time with focus on its view of the present
through the prism of the past. It begins by looking at the ways it nostalgi-
cally revives tradition, argues with it and rewrites it, then inserts it as an
important component of the equation that will lead to an Arab modernity.
It then assesses the transformation of the past into a burden when nation-
building and modernisation come face to face with insurmountable political
realities. Part I, in two chapters, seeks the shape of Arabic cultural and liter-
ary heritage in the Arabic novel. Chapter 1 uncovers precursors veiled by
the intertextual maze created in and by the Arabic novel and makes mani-
fest the national allegory disguised as discourses on the past. Chapter 2 then
exposes nostalgia as a paradoxical force that simultaneously constructs and
deconstructs tradition, which (dis)appears in the Arabic novel’s discourses
on modernity. The road to Arab modernity is, moreover, paved with thorns,
and its success is not guaranteed, especially in the present circumstances
(of rampant corruption and political oppression in the Arab world, the
unresolved occupation of the territories of Palestine, and the raging Islamic
fundamentalist strife). The real or perceived absence of a modern nation-
state as a ‘home’ where Arabs could settle and grow roots becomes a source
of trouble, in fact, a cause of madness. Part II, also in two chapters, then
explores the trope of love madness in the Arabic novel, and what that says
about the past, present and future of the nation-state. While Chapter 3 sees
madness as expressive of the hegemony of ideology, Chapter 4 locates the
will to resist and unravel the semiotics of this very hegemony in madness.
The book ends with Part III, again in two chapters, on the Arabic novel’s
preoccupation with narrativising the nation and narrating history, here, of
both the nation and the novel. Chapter 5 locates the historical impulse of the
Arabic novel in its will to interrogate the past in order to write the future,
creating in the process a new understanding of both the past and present.

OUYANG 9780748655694 PRINT.indd viii 11/12/2012 16:28

 Foreword ix

Chapter 6 then shows how it tells the (hi)story of the nation-state as well as
the Arabic novel from an entirely new perspective.
My ultimate purpose, however, is to provide close readings of a number
of the Arabic novels that make tradition and argument with the past their
central preoccupation. These novels restore tradition to the discourses on
the nation-state, and intervene in the debates about modernity and heritage.
Their intervention in these discourses problematises and complicates our
understanding of notions of modernity and the role of tradition in moderni-
sation especially in the Arab world. My task, as I see it, is archaeological:
to unearth as many layers as possible embedded in the texts and to let loose
the stories they tell, to let as many genies as possible out of the bottle that
is literary history. My choice of texts is necessarily informed by the story I
wish to tell about the Arabic novel, as well as my taste. There is, it seems,
no escaping the hegemony of personal taste, especially where quality of
writing is concerned. Needless to say, I have chosen only the novels I like
and understand. I console myself with the realisation that my work is a
step towards a better understanding of the Arabic novel and the culture
that produced it and that I can only tell part of, not the whole of the story.
I hope other like-minded scholars will pick up where I leave off, in terms
of both approach and scope, and improve the quality of scholarship in the
field (Arabic) and discipline (literary studies) that have thus far captivated
my attention.

NOTES
1. Pierre Nora, ‘From Lieux de mémoire to Realms of Memory’, Preface to the
English language edn, Realms of Memory: the Construction of the French Past,
I. Conflicts and Divisions, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, NY: Columbia
University Press), p. xv.
2. Ibid. pp. xv–xvi.

OUYANG 9780748655694 PRINT.indd ix 11/12/2012 16:28