Mapping the Literary: A Spatial Reading of Hilal Chouman’s Kāna Ghadan

المؤلفون

  • المؤلف

  • Farah Z. Aridi

الكلمات المفتاحية:

Spatial Literary Studies، Spatiality، Textuality، Literary Map، Hilal Chouman

الملخص

This study highlights the significance of space as a narrative component capable of opening up a text to various possibilities. As such, the text is treated as a critical roadmap capable of producing meaning and knowledge. This study leans on spatial literary studies, with an emphasis on the relationality of spatiality and textuality, to offer a spatial reading of Hilal Chouman’s Kāna Ghadan . A reconsideration of the concepts of spatiality and textuality is paramount, particularly amidst the recent conjectures in spatial-literary studies, which focus on the specificity of the Arab experience. It presents a literary geography, based on Chouman’s literary map, specific to the experience of Beirut. This geography is not only shaped by how the protagonists see or understand the city, but also by how they experience and practice it on a daily basis. This practice and the way they converse about Beirut reflect a socio-spatial imaginary that challenges dominant narratives about the city.

المراجع

  1. Gayatri Chakravotry Spivak, “Megacity,” Grey Room , no. 1 (2000), pp. 8-25.
  2. An interest in the concept of social space has emerged among some Arab writers relying on the Kantian concept of place, while many others have been influenced by the works of French Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre, as well as Robert Ezra Park and Gaston Bachelard. Idris Maqbul studied the city and place from a sociolinguistic perspective. See: Idris Maqbul, al-Insān, al-ʿUmrān, wa-l-Lisān: Risāla fī Tadahwur al-Ansāq fī al-Madīna al-ʿArabiyya (Doha/Beirut: ACRPS, 2020).
  3. Hilal Chouman, Kāna Ghadan (Beirut: Dār al-Sāqī, 2017).
  4. Robert Tally Jr., Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013); Barney Ward & Santa Arias (eds.), The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009); Robert Tally Jr., Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Kevin R. McNamara (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to The City in Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Adam Hansen, “Introduction: Narrating Cities,” Journal of Narrative Theory , vol. 39, no. 3 (2009), pp. 271-279; Yasin al-Naṣir, Madkhal Ilā al-Naqd al-Makānī: al-Khiṭāb - al-Ḥudūd - al-Maʾlafa - al-Tafaḍḍī – al-Mawḍaʿa – al-Mābayn – al-Masāfa – al-Istiʿāra – al-Kafāʾa (Damascus: Dār Nīnawā, 2015); Ali Abd al-Rauf, Mudun al-ʿArab fī Riwāyātihim (Cairo: Madārāt li-l-Abḥāth wa-l-Nashr, 2017).
  5. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space , Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans.) (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1991).
  6. Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life: The One-Volume Edition (London: Verso Books, 2014); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language , A. M. Sheridan Smith (trans.) (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
  7. Vernon W. Cisney & Nicole Morar (eds.), Biopower: Foucault and Beyond (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016).
  8. Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
  9. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 2005).
  10. See: Ash Amin & Nigel Thrift, Cities: Rethinking the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Ash Amin & Nigel Thrift, Seeing Like a City (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
  11. Abdelfattah Kilito, al-Adab wa-l-Gharāba (Milano: Al-Mutawassiṭ Books, 2022).
  12. Verena Andermatt Conley, Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State, and World-Space in French Cultural Theory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012).
  13. Edward Said, “Introduction: Secular Criticism,” in: Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
  14. In The Production of Space , Lefebvre discusses in detail how this imaginary accompanies a conscious spatial practice capable of reading spatio- political laws and producing knowledge.
  15. Work, or what Lefebvre calls œuvre , goes beyond being a material product and a production process to include a creative element. This production process relies on the intellectual and critical capital of its creator, and their ability to employ it in the creative moment. It is also a process subject to influence, impact, and change. Therefore, we can constantly rethink and alter it to suit the requirements of our daily lives and the demands of living in a given place. This idea in Lefebvre’s works constituted a starting point for another idea that he later expanded upon, namely, the right to the city.
  16. Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
  17. Abd al-Rauf, p. 55.
  18. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reinsertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).
  19. Michele de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984).
  20. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2005); Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso Books, 2013); Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in: Christopher Prendegast (ed.), Debating World Literature (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 148-162.
  21. For more details on these two perspectives, see: Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Kilito; Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in: Prendegast (ed.), pp. 148-62; Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology , Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.) (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
  22. De Certeau, p. 102.
  23. Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life.
  24. The experience of space is viewed here as going beyond merely inhabiting a space in the sense of being in place and staying, to poetic, embodied and political considerations. For more on this topic, see: Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , Albert Hofstadter (trans.) (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1981); Jeff Malpas, Rethinking Dwelling: Heidegger, Place, Architecture (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021); Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , Brian Massumi (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space , Maria Jolas (trans.), Richard Kearney (intro.), Mark Z. Danielewski (foreword) (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).
  25. Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London: Routledge, 1997).
  26. Soja, Postmodern Geographies.
  27. Robert Young, “Contemporary Literary Theory: Its Necessity and Impossibility,” The Newest Criticisms , vol. 9, no. 3 (1982), pp. 165-173; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981); Mikhail Bakhtin et al., Modern Genre Theory (London: Routledge, 2016); Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature , Anna Bostock (trans.) (London: The Merlin Press, 1971); Paul Dawson & Maria Mäkelä (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory (New York: Routledge, 2022); Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: An Overview (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023); Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson & Peter Brooker (eds.), A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 2016).
  28. Setha Low, “Embodied Space(s): Anthropological Theories of Body, Space, and Culture,” Space & Culture , vol. 6, no. 1 (2003), pp. 9-18; de Certeau.
  29. Abd al-Rauf, p. 56.
  30. For more on textual components that fall outside the text yet produce it, see: Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation , Jane E. Lewin (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method , Jane E. Lewin (trans.) (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980); Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art , Leon S. Roudiez (ed.), Homas Gora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (trans.) (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1969).
  31. Abd al-Rauf, p. 19.
  32. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre touches on the relationality between body and place.
  33. For more on social and political organizations, including spatial policies, see: ibid., as well as: Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 330-336; S. Susan, “The Place of Space in Social and Cultural Theory,” in: A. Elliott (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 337-357; Edward Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic,” Annals of the Association of the American Geographers , vol. 70, no. 2 (1980), pp. 207-225; Edward Soja, The Political Organization of Space (Washington: The Association of American Geographers, 1971).
  34. The following works offer helpful discussions of the right to the city: David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” Debates and Developments: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , vol. 27, no. 4 (2003), pp. 939-941; Robert Park & Ernest W. Burgess, The City (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019); Phil Hubbard, The City (London: Routledge, 2018); Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities , Eleonore Kofman & Elizabeth Lebas (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life.
  35. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”
  36. Abdelrahman Munif & Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, ʿĀlam bilā Kharāʾiṭ (Beirut: Dār Al-Tanwīr, Arab Institute for Research & Publishing, 2018).
  37. Kilito discusses “horizon of expectation” (ufuq al-intiẓār), which is a type of intellectual readiness on the part of the reader, formed by their knowledge of literary genres, their requirements, conditions and structures, on which they rely as a pillar of the map that will guide their reading. See: Kilito, p. 31.
  38. Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2004).
  39. Tally Jr., Spatiality , p. 54.
  40. For more on literary geography, the literary map, and the reciprocal relationship between writer and reader, see: Tally Jr., Spatiality ; Tally Jr. (ed.), Geocritical Explorations ; Robert Tally Jr. (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (New York: Routledge, 2017); Robert Tally Jr., Literary Cartographies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Salah Saleh, Qaḍāyā al-Makān al-Riwāʾī fī al-Adab al-Muʿāṣir (Cairo: Sharqiyāt Publishing House, 1997).
  41. Najib Hourani, “Transnational Pathways and Political-Economic Power: Globalization and the Lebanese Civil War,” Geopolitics , vol. 15, no. 2 (2010), pp. 290-311.
  42. Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon , 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2012); Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005); Theodor Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation , John Richardson (trans.) (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015); Samir Khalaf, Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj (Beirut: Saqi, 2006); Aseel Sawalha, Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010); Hiba Bou Akar, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (California: Stanford University Press, 2018); Ghenwa Hayek, Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015); Yasmine Khayyat, War Remains: Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2023).
  43. When translating Bachelards’s The Poetics of Space to Arabic, Ghalib Halasa rendered its title as Jamāliyyāt al-Makān [The Esthetics of Space], which in my view is inaccurate. Poetics are a subcategory of Esthetics; however, the terms cannot be used synonymously.
  44. Bachelard, p. 33.
  45. Abd al-Rauf, p. 32.
  46. Chouman, p. 133.
  47. Vernon W. Cisney & Nicole Morar (eds.), Biopower: Foucault and Beyond (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016); Thomas Lemke, The Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialists (New York: New York University Press, 2021); Hubert L. Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1986).
  48. Chouman, p. 214.
  49. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , Alan Sheridan (trans.) (London: Penguin Books, 1991); Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-76 , David Macey (trans.) (London: Penguin Books, 1997); Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge , vol. 1, Robert Hurley (trans.) (London: Penguin Books, 1976).
  50. The word “walker” is not used here in the sense of flâneur due to the two words’ differing contexts and experiences. The concept of “walker” is approached in this study in keeping with the experiences of Reem and Khalid in the city of Beirut, a city in the Global South, in a country with its own experience, extending over periods of wars, violence, and class struggles and contradictions. Neither Reem nor Khalid have class privileges that make them part of the elite, which is reflected in their spatial experience. For more information on flâneur , see: de Certeau; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project , Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (trans.) (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999); Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A Short History of Walking (London: Granta Books, 2014); Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016).
  51. de Certeau, p. 100.
  52. See: Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in: Edward Said, Reflections on Exile & Other Literary and Cultural Essays (New York: Granta, 2000), pp. 173-197.
  53. Chouman, pp. 167-168.
  54. de Certeau, p. 100.
  55. For more on textuality, see: Hugh Silverman, “What is Textuality? Part II,” Phenomenology + Pedagogy , vol. 4, no. 2 (1986), pp. 54-61.
  56. For more detail on text/textuality as social practice, see: Julia Kristeva, Revolution in the Poetic Language , Margaret Waller (trans.), Leon S. Roudiez (intro.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 208-213; Jameson, The Political Unconscious , pp. 17-102.
  57. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life.
  58. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), p. 63.
Cover of العدد 17, Almuntaqa

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2024-05-01

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