The Questions that Remain: Conjectures on Cultivating a Relationship to the Published Book

By Maha AbdelMegeed

The moment an intellectual work is published announces the beginning of its public life as a (relatively) completed self-standing utterance, a whole drawing its parts onto itself. At the same time, it marks the end of a (long) gestative process when the parts were in-flux, held together—however hazily—by the author’s in-progress drafts. While the author’s relationship to their work in-progress is fluid with murky boundaries between what is intended and what is actually there, situating an author in position to their published work is just as tricky. Whenever I am asked to write or speak about my recently published first monograph Literary Optics: Staging the Collective in the Nahda (SUP, 2024), I take it as an invitation to cultivate a relationship to the work anew.

To cultivate a relationship to Literary Optics, situating myself from it as the relatively self-standing utterance I hope it has become, I must confront a problem of time. The meaning of the book does not rest primarily with me depending on the intentions I set for it as much as it now ultimately lies with the future. The latter names a complex process of interactions between readers (these might include me) and the work, mediated by their respective positionalities within mostly academic networks of production, circulation, and consumption (including advertising and promotion). And so, I am forced to defer to others and to the future even as I acknowledge that an author’s access to these networks is key, if not a condition of possibility, for a work’s minting as a self-standing object and its continuing success as such an entity. On the other hand, if I were to try and engage Literary Optics by reflecting on the forces and questions composing the book, then, I would have to conclude that in the most profound sense they are already in the book. Therefore, they can be accessed by its readers whose interactions with it contribute to shaping meaning for others in the future.

What I can speak to, however, is another kind of future whereby Literary Optics is approached less as the self-standing object of the preceding paragraphs and more as a single instantiation of broader questions whose trajectory is transformed by their initial iteration in the book. The coming paragraphs try to sketch patterns of questions transformed. They are neither exactly the repristinating of my originary questions nor are they a repetition of the book’s main idea—though they include some aspects of the two. Rather, my offering is the slowly burgeoning transformation of questions, and the relationship to Literary Optics I cultivate, here, is punctuated by transformation: of me as a thinker, and of the questions shaping the book.

At its core, Literary Optics is a thick description of the form of a cluster of Arabic texts from the late 19^th century, seminal to the emergence of modern Arabic literature. These include works by Francis Marrash (1835-1873), ‘Ali Mubarak (1823-1893), ‘Abdullah al-Nadim (1834/4-1896), Muhammad al-Muwaylihi (1858-1930), and Hassan Husni al-Tuwayrani (1850-1897) amongst others. While these works are often read as critical for the rise of modern Arabic literature, performing an important transition from pre-modern to modern practices, their form has not attracted much analysis beyond cursory reiterations of the truism that form stages an encounter between modern European forms and “traditional” Arabic ones. The book begins from the aftermaths of dismantling this truism, revealing it to be an analytically void statement. Yet, Literary Optics does not foreground a critique of this truism and its underpinning assumptions as much as it engages in the labor of doing things otherwise. This is both a decision and a fortuitous accident of time.

The book is born from a grappling with the gap between the overriding critique of what are typically referred to as old orientalist and nationalist approaches to Arabic literature and the persistence of the readings offered by these now derided approaches. Relevant to the study of modern Arabic literature are the critiques of the way in which the “nahda” (19^th-early 20^th centuries, Arab Enlightenment) ostensibly precipitated a sense of its utter remove from its immediate past. Nonetheless, we continue to study works from that period in isolation from preceding literary moments. Similarly, the important critique of the so-called old approaches has not overwritten the spatial reading of the form of 19^th century Arabic texts (as a site indexing the encounter between modern European forms and traditional Arabic forms). To my mind, these are two dimensions of a shared challenge that in the book I describe as the cartographic imaginary of modernity, but that in this space of cultivating a relationship to the book anew I can reframe as the impasse between a critique of narratives that does not translate into a reckoning with our contemporary analytic habits, and their institutional housing, that produce them as discipline. Thick description is in this book is a way of thinking through these deep-rooted disciplinary analytic habits, sketching out alternative maneuvers at the level of form. And so, while I distilled the core of the book, in the previous paragraph, as a thick description, it is also at heart a non-linear conceptual history that opens up a synchronic form by taking stock of the textual and historical moments it is weaved through in a confrontation with its contemporary. Much of this move is premised on an attention not to circulation as a self-churning machine and explanatory framework, but the social arena within which action is possible and constrained. The move is equally undergirded by a rigorous distinction between “authenticity” and agency; two concepts that seem to be problematically and routinely confused in the study of modernity in Arabic.

At the end of Literary Optics, I stake that nahda is not just a period of time or an intellectual and literary movement, but it is also a position in the contemporary that reproduces an ahistorical vision of modernity in Arabic played out as an identitarian predicament; it is a search for an impossible balance between an authentic identity and responsiveness to the demands of the contemporary. The book confronts the spatialization of the form of 19^th century texts in Arabic as one critical node where this predicament gains facticity by being implanted as a constituent of our object of knowledge, and therefore, as a challenge that persists even if one does not subscribe to these culturalist visions—which I have distilled above, but that clearly play out in a variety of nuances. Thinking from the position of this other future I inhabit now, and from within my concerns with the approaches to the literary of what is often described as the “post-classical” period where “nahda” also plays a key role—often as the villain—I contemplate the way in which the replay of nahda as the originary moment of our contemporary practices elides not just our own responsibility but it also sidelines the contemporary structures of knowledge production. It would then seem like Jurji Zaydan (1861-1914) and his friends are more responsible for our analytic habits than say the scholarly institutional apparatus that uphold and propagate these analytic habits as the crux of disciplinary training and the pillars of what it means to be a scholarly expert. Is our critique of other older narratives an offering of “new” answers to old questions, or a redrawing of the field that exists today. This question has stayed with me, and I often think about the complex temporality of knowledge production, and its infrastructure, and the ways in which they constitute objects of disciplinary knowledge.

Other questions have also stayed with me, and they seem to be both moving me in different directions and coming together to draw a shared horizon. Throughout the book, flickers of discussions of authorial voice peek through and I have found myself engaged in mini explorations since then of the typologies of authorial voices available in Arabic repertoires. I have been particularly drawn to authorial voices in comedy and the generative tensions between self-mockery and constructions of authority. At a seeming remove from this, I found myself keen on further studying conceptions of language in Arabic: if the book sketches its version of analytic habits by taking conceptual language in Arabic seriously, opening them up to non-linear historical processes by converging agents, then, in what way is that—or should it be—connected to conceptions of language in Arabic? And in as much as I think about the infrastructure of knowledge production and how it can draw the limits of our questions, I also think about their forms: with what forms can one offer from the present the historical textures and their rhythms?

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About the Author

Maha AbdelMegeed is an Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature. She graduated from SOAS, the University of London in 2017 with a Ph.D. in Arabic Literature from the department of Near and Middle East Studies. She has since completed a Post-doc in Berlin at the Forum Transregionale Studien, EUME. Her current research focuses on imploding al-nahda as a projected originary point of modern Arabic narrative ideology, as well as on the changing conceptions of Arabic language from the mid 18th century till the early decades of the 20th century.

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Citation: Maha AbdelMegeed, The Questions that Remain: Conjectures on Cultivating a Relationship to the Published Book, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 27.08.2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/1278x

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