Karin Kukkonen
Literature makes you feel and it can get you thinking too. But how do you move from signs on the page to thoughts and feelings? And why does fiction sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Karin Kukkonen, and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition and Emotions project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the coming weeks. Today's guest is Stephan Guth, Professor of Arabic literature and editor of the volume Literary Visions, which came out last year, and is an anthology of Middle Eastern literature. Thank you for joining us, Stephan. 

Stephan Guth
Happy to be here. 

Karin Kukkonen
Our topic is the question of literature in the Arab world, so to speak, and in particular you're interested in the question of the novel in that cultural environment. And of course, the novel is not a genre that's – how do you say? – native to the Arab world. It is something that came quite late historically, didn't it? 

Stephan Guth
Exactly, it's a phenomenon of the mid-19th century. It started…The first genuine Arabic novel is usually dated 1859 – 1860, or so. And in Turkish, it's maybe a little bit earlier, but almost the same time – and also in Iran. So it's a real Middle Eastern phenomenon in general, although the writers of the three main Islamic languages not necessarily had contact with each other. So it was somehow in the air that the novel came up as genre. And it has something to do with the general background, of course, that the Middle East was in at the time, where – since long already – the great empires had started to feel that they were backward in a way, as compared to Europe. And they tried to make up for this backwardness, and thought that “we have to reform ourselves”. And they started with military reforms and all kinds of administrative things – and quite early, already 18th century or so. But the main move to reform was the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We talk about the long 19th century and terms like the Arabic Nahdah, "Renaissance", are used, or in Turkish it's the Tanzimat, the "reorganisation" of the structures. And in this course many, many things happened, many reforms – and also in the field of military, of course, I mentioned it, but also in the field of education that was very important. And for this purpose also, people were sent to Europe and came in contact with European writings and people and ideas. And there was a lot that was translated – first, of course, all kinds of very practical things: Medicine, agriculture, all kinds of literature, we have there. But then also… people started to visit theatres and read novels. And they thought, okay, this may also be something that could be of use with regard to the reforms that we are envisaging for our societies. 

Karin Kukkonen
So it wasn't a sort of spontaneous thought, that someone said, oh I'm going to write a novel in Arabic or Turkish, or any of the other Middle Eastern languages. It was actually part of a much larger civilising kind of enterprise?

Stephan Guth
Exactly, in a way, it was a by-product of this desire for reforming oneself. And literature in the beginning was very much looked at as a tool, as an instrument – instrumental in helping to reform society, to bring it on the way that everybody felt was necessary. This progress – with the big word, progress  – and advancing and becoming modern, like everybody else in the leading world, the dominating world. Of course, we are talking also about a colonial situation, or quasi-colonial situation. The Ottoman Empire as such was still there, in place, but it was under economic dominance from the West. So there was this general feeling, to have to catch up with the West. 

Karin Kukkonen
And what is the particular relevance of a novel in that context? I mean, we can, I guess, quite easily imagine how you would – you know – reform the military and change the school system. I mean, that's something that happens quite often. I guess that the government decides we need to change this. But what would a novel do to make an impact like that in a society?

Stephan Guth
I think the novels – and all the other kinds of cultural production – they were read or received in the Middle East with their traditional idea of literature as a background. And here we have the keyword of an adab, which meant all kinds of… you may translate it even as a "culture, cultural knowledge", anything that could help you mastering the world was called adab, any kind of knowledge. So this adab used to be useful, on the one hand side, and entertaining on the other side. So this fitted quite well into this idea. And this was also what, for example, one of the heads of the Egyptian study mission to Paris in the early 1830s registered for the first time when he went to a theatre in Paris. He said, “okay, this may look quite like our shadow plays, but it's not as vulgar, as popular, as we used to have it on the streets. It's very useful – we can use this genre to bring our own societies… to advance our own societies”. So this was the general idea, where it fitted very well in, and it was also used in the beginning as a kind of tool, sometimes very outspoken. There is a famous Arab writer known for his historical novels, for example – but the historical novels are always introduced by a longer paragraph where he summarises the actual facts. So the novel was just this emotionalization that came in – with a love story and so on. It was just a kind of package to sell it – to sell the knowledge about Islamic history and what he thought was necessary to build the new Arab nation in an entertaining way, to help, to come into a higher civilizational level. 

Karin Kukkonen
But then, of course, I assume people read this not for the summary, but for the love stories and the emotions?

Stephan Guth
Yes, yes, definitely, definitely. I think, even today, it's very readable. 

Karin Kukkonen
Can you give us the title? 

Stephan Guth
Yes, the author is Jurji Zaydan, Lebanese, but then came to Egypt. And he wrote a whole series of novels, which quite recently have been translated into English – a number of them. They're very, very nice to read. And for us, as western readers – it would be a  somehow similar experience, as for the 19th-century Arab reader, to know about the… To learn something about Arab history. And he had a real programme, to go through the important stages of Islamic history and to cover this always with some kind of entertaining love story, that made it have a suspense. But the facts were there. 

Karin Kukkonen
And the emotions… I mean, was the only function of the emotions to – you know – make the history go down, so to speak? Like, you read the history because you just want the emotions? Because in the Western novel there was a big discussion around emotions as well. I mean, most of the early novels are love stories. But it was also a discussion about how you recognise emotions, what you do with emotions when they arise. So it was quite reflexive, almost… well, somewhere between a psychology and self-help kind of discussion. Is that something that happens in the Arab world? 

Stephan Guth
I think it's the very same in the Arab world  – and Turkish and Persian also. So, the topic of history – that I just mentioned with Jurji Zaydan – was only one aspect. The novels served to introduce all kinds of modernity: It could be how to ride a train or not to be afraid of a steam engine, or something like that. Those were very scenes – that are staged in novels – where you have representatives of the people being frightened from the sight of a locomotive, for example. Then the hero comes in – with the help of a European observer, very often – to tell people, “No, it's not like this. You don't have to be afraid”. And among these, also, are how to feel yourself vis-à-vis this modernity. And there, of course, it was a fundamental shift that went on. And really, for me, it's one of the most fundamental things that ever happened in this 19th century – that you can shift from one set of genres to another genre, that has completely different… or not completely different, but very, very different objectives. And here, I think the colonial situation played a role as a kind of... Maybe also as a kind of catalyser that brought about the need to assert oneself, both as a nation – and in the Middle East, you have the double need to assert yourself as a nation, both against the empire, the big empire which was decaying, and the European forces. And how to find a concrete way. So this adab became also a way how to learn to behave in the right way, vis-à-vis these challenges and the confrontation with modernity. And part of this modernity was also the very feelings that you were supposed to have. Or, compassion is a keyword – with your fellow human beings and humanity – was the big keyword a certain time. Progressive... 

Karin Kukkonen
So you can actually learn certain kinds of feelings?

Stephan Guth
Yeah. And here, in the Middle East – suddenly, as you mentioned – also you have a lot of love stories popping up, because this was one of the key challenges: How to behave via-à-vis a world that wants you to have, for example, love marriages, while this was not the custom until then. Of course there were love stories, but they were heroic things – nothing that would play a role in everyday life for the people, usually. But now, all of a sudden there were also an educational new class, a kind of bourgeoisie, that were coming up, who also had to find their place in society. And they also made it their mark, their own marker of modernity, to write this new type of literature. Because they thought, this is the way we can go and this is a good tool to use – because they didn't believe in the capacity of the old genres to convey these new modern notions. So you have all kinds of testings. Also, literature is like a stage to test out what can happen and how you could or should behave in certain situations.

Karin Kukkonen
So it's not only a change in the emotions or topics, but it also seems to be a change in the kind of stories that you can tell – if you set up for certain situations, and then you test… well, what are the things that are likely to happen? What are probable reactions? So this sounds as if the entire plot of Arab writing changes with these social changes. 

Stephan Guth
Yes, I think there was no word for "plot" until then, which does not mean that the traditional Arabic or Turkish fiction did not have plots – of course they had. But these plots were mostly… I would say, plots with a simple chronology where you didn't have an acting subject. You did not have this divide, between the subject here and the world on the other side – as the subject’s object. The subject used to be part of the world, and what happened, happened to the subject, not through the subject. Or, very often, even the heroes or kings or battle heroes, they are somehow either lucky or helped by God – so there's something acting through them, but they are not these acting subjects, are not subjects of history. 

Karin Kukkonen
They're not taking the action themselves. 

Stephan Guth
While now, you have real… For example this, I think, was also what made the European texts that were translated so interesting to those who translated them. One of the key texts, for example, was Robinson. Here you have the story of someone, an individual, having to master life himself in a completely new situation and environment. And it was shown how, step by step, this could be achieved – and also, that it was achievable. This idea of a reformability, changability of present, with an idea of a better future, a progress afterwards, is new. And this is why, also, the plots always contain this element of temporalisation. Where you start from a certain beginning, then you have a development and you can have a – I don't know – a climax, and another dramatization before it comes to an end. So this designing of a plot, which in fiction would resemble the real world, in a way, which was an emplotment – fictional emplotment of something that could have happened, really. This verisimilitude was something new. In traditional Middle Eastern literature, you had either fiction, which was considered completely irrelevant for reality, in a way – this was fantasy. On the other hand, you had legal texts – so this was reality. This happened, history happened, and from history we can learn. But now we have a kind of ambiguous thing, this fiction, from which we can learn. 

Karin Kukkonen
Where you use the pleasure of fantasy and the usefulness of relating it to the real world?

Stephan Guth
Of course you had had something like this in animal fables also before, where also some animals represented certain types of problems in reality – and you, as a reader or here as a listener – you had to translate it into a real situation. But these were animals and not real people that you could... This was something completely new. 

Karin Kukkonen
And that, it seems, made a big difference to these efforts of civilising?

Stephan Guth
Yeah, right. From a certain point, for example in the 1860s, theatres popped up in Beirut. And this was an emerging culture which was very popular. And also the novel began to take fuel and become very popular. Of course it's a process, where people sometimes also objected that “this is a foreign form, we cannot really find ourselves in it”. And some people, the writers themselves often had difficulties, as they had no experience with this type of writing and emplotting the world. So they... In some literary analysis of these texts, you can prove that they had different objectives, and from a certain time on, they shifted and turned, for example, more to the individual experience of love instead of reforming society and the countryside, which also could have been a topic.

Karin Kukkonen
So they try out different...? 

Stephan Guth
They tried out different ways. 

Karin Kukkonen
It's really fascinating to hear about how this Western form – sort of – has such an impact in the Arab or the Middle Eastern world. I mean, from a European perspective of course, when you hear “Arab” and “story”, you think of the Arabian Nights immediately, which at the very beginning of the 18th century had an enormous impact – first in France and then in Britain and Germany and other countries in Europe. Now, that is of course less of a cultural programme, I assume, but it's interesting to see that, also, in response to Arabian Nights, many also saw new possibilities of storytelling in the West. 

Stephan Guth
Yes, of course, the West has its own agenda, and ironically enough, this agenda is quite opposite to the agenda the writers of the east had. For them, stories like the Arabian Nights – they were popular, all too popular stories, and not really useful with regard to learning lessons and becoming modern. So for quite a long… They were also printed and translated from a more popular language into a higher level language as something entertaining. So we have printings from quite an early period in the 19th century, but this was only a kind of assertion of the national heritage, you may say. It was not… For a very long time, it was still mainly regarded as something not really precious, not really useful. It was only at a very, very much later stage that people began to discover the popularity of these popular texts.

Karin Kukkonen
I think it's really interesting, I mean – seeing it in this context raises the question: Does anyone ever learn anything in the Arabian Nights? And I don't know about you, but I'd be hard pressed to come up with an example where a character actually, I mean, as Robinson Crusoe learns lots of things. Maybe the Sultan, because he needs to learn patience. He needs to learn not to kill his wife every night. 

Stephan Guth
Yes, but this also happens somehow without himself, really, noticing…

Karin Kukkonen 
That’s very true.

Stephan Guth
… In the end, he's just like this: He has three children, and without noticing, he kept her alive. 

Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, so I guess there are… The exchange in many ways  goes both ways, doesn't it? The European novel, which I think to some extent draws on, you know, desire for fabulation, that you have in Arabian Nights, and then it goes back in a way. 

Stephan Guth
Yeah, this fabulous aspect of the plots of the Arabian nights, for example, as I said before, was regarded as merely fantastic – so nothing very useful for reforming reality – mere fantasy. It was only much later that they also were appreciated as a source of creativity and fantasy, and thinking about new future, maybe, and other worlds, utopian worlds. Of course, Shahrazad afterwards became a symbol of women saving lives through storytelling. 

Karin Kukkonen
So is this something that you can still find in contemporary literature? 

Stephan Guth
This is a a quite recent, not very recent, but from the, I would say, from the 60s–70s onwards, where the Arab world had suffered the breakdown after they lost the war against Israel in 1967. So they felt the need, again, to start from scratch. They thought that something had been wrong. Everybody had believed in a brighter future and the words… Gamal Abdel Nasser had told them,  “we are the future and we will have a bright future, and everything will be fine”. No. It wasn't the case. “Israel won the war and our territories were lost”. And the whole idea of a new revival of Arabism collapsed. So it was then, in the aftermath of the 67 war, that people started to re-evaluate and re-appreciate their own heritage – many of them at least tried to find new starting points. One of these starting points was to go back into pre-colonial times and let oneself inspire by the genres that had existed before that. And one of the most famous writers of this trend was Gamâl al-Ghitâni in Egypt. He wrote many novels in this style, that later came to be known as an Orientalizing style – in the style of an ancient Sufi, for example, or The 1001 Nights. He has a lot of these texts, and this shows, in this way, that you can be modern while using classical forms – and even the very popular forms he recurred to in some cases. 

Karin Kukkonen
And would you say that, out of that comes then, again, a way of modelling emotions, modelling compassion, for example? Or maybe it's a different kind of concept and emotion?

Stephan Guth
No, I don't think it would be much different from what we now know, because the modernisation process, or the kind of… to become like the people in the West. This process has been accomplished, I would say, to a large degree during 150 years of trying out this. So that the novel has become a very… even replaced, some people think, replaced the traditional way of expressing reality, which was poetry. And now it's the novel where you can find typical expressions. And the novel now has all kinds of stages, all kinds of... 

Karin Kukkonen
So it's free to actually explore whatever it wants, rather than follow a particular programme…?

Stephan Guth
And yeah, of course, it's one of the best ways – as in many other societies – to know more about the societies and how people feel and react in certain situations, under certain pressures… React against challenges and confrontations. 

Karin Kukkonen
So, if one wanted to find out about how people feel in the Middle Eastern world, do you have a recommendation? What kind of book one should read? 

Stephan Guth
Oh, of course there are a lot of things that are translated – it's difficult to mention one out of hundreds. I mentioned also this already, Jurji Zaydan from the 19th century. And yeah, Edvard Said, the famous author of Orientalism, he liked best the novel written by a Sudanese author from the 1960s – Tayeb Salih, The Season of Migration to the North, which really is a fantastic novel. That somehow describes the situation of the Arab intellectual, exactly at the beginning of the 60s, where you stage or show the split that goes through the – psychologically  through – the Arab men and intellectuals at the time. You have to be faithful to your own country and you can be optimistic – it was in the beginning, where Nasserism was still in its heights – but at the same time, you know that much has happened, and that the Europeans have also done a lot of wrong to you. So you feel kind of hatred and the need for revenge. And in this novel, it is expressed through a kind of double type of narrator – one from the previous generation who killed English women, in order to revenge himself for the injustice that was committed by the British against his own people. And then, the new generation that observes the older generation and is confronted with this reality. And the novel ends with a kind of drowning in denial of the young narrator, as an expression of… He does not know how to go on from here, and what to do with this heavy burden of the past. And he somehow decides not to kill himself – not too let the Nile take over – but makes some movements to reach the shore. But you don't know, really, why and what will happen, and which of the shores it was – was it the northern shore or the southern shore? – and the novel ends just with a symbol of the birds. Why this is called The Season of Migration to the North: birds migrating to the north. So you can interpret this as a general trend towards the north, but what will happen at this time, this historical time, you did not know yet. Fascinating novel. 

Karin Kukkonen
Thank you so much. 

Stephan Guth
You're welcome. 

Karin Kukkonen
Thank you for the reading recommendation, and also thank you for this wonderful conversation about everything between Arabian Nights, the first Arab novels, expeditions to Paris to go to the theatre and The Season of Migration to the North. Thanks to everyone listening to the LCE podcast. Our next episode will air in two weeks – until then.