- Anointing with Rubble:Ruins in the Lebanese War Novel
The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
—William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech
Because it occupies its place, because it hence decks itself out in the sacred power of horror, literature may also involve not an ultimate resistance to but an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisis of the Word.
—Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Warfare today is arguably a structural feature of the contemporary world, an institution as necessary to the geopolitical status quo as education, health care, and commerce. Since it is most often invisible or acceptable to those who can do something about it, those who cannot must learn to survive it without yielding to despair or cynicism and to create conditions for renewal in the event of a postwar. Literature can be a principal part of such an effort.
This essay is the third in a series devoted to a clutch of Lebanese war novels that formulate a response to ongoing war from within a humanist framework.1 These novels were written in the context of a worldwide paradigm shift that began in the late 1970s as cold war lurched into ethnic-sectarian struggle. When the Lebanese civil war officially broke out in 1975, the conflict looked a lot like one of the numerous proxy wars that hitched local animosities to the East-West ideological struggle.2 Within a year, however, the cart began pulling the horse as ethnic-sectarian struggle preempted secular and cold war imperatives. The changeover heralded similar secular-to-sectarian recodings elsewhere: Iran in 1979; Afghanistan in the 1980s; Algeria, Yugoslavia, and Israel-Palestine in the 1990s; the post-9/11 United States (largely, but not wholly, projected offshore); and now perhaps Iraq and numerous other nations. In wartime Lebanon, the rapid shift from a secular-ideological war to an atavistic feud between Christians and Muslims dampened the sense of commitment in those who had imagined that the cause of martyrdom should, ideally, be for the same cause from one day to the next. In literature, social [End Page 50] chaos punctured the myth of progress and along with it realist literature predicated on a knowable world. After a half century of serving the Arab cause, realism in the Arabic novel became an overnight anachronism, and from its grip emerged the Lebanese war novel.3
I have previously noted the affiliations between this aesthetic and that associated with Western humanism, but it is also the product of some significant disaffiliations.4 Perhaps due to most of these writers having some background in leftist causes, their rejection of programmatic politics does not automatically entail an embrace of Western liberal humanism.5 They remain skeptical of a West that has given the Arab world much in terms of science, education, and culture but has also delivered stunning setbacks, the dispossession of Palestine being only the most salient example.6 The social and political crisis in the Arab world means that in turning away from social realism, these writers do not easily fall into self-absorption or fantasy. History and commitment are abiding features of Lebanese war and postwar novels, yet the disjunction between skepticism and commitment puts the writers in a bind: how can the world be unknowable yet intelligently changed?7 Their solution was to retool modernist technique to stress the ideological preconditions for renewal without providing a blueprint. The result is a remarkably sustained case for a new notion of human dignity, a concept that may sound like anything from self-evident to self-deluded depending on one's attitude toward humanism, yet it is precisely here that this literature calves off from the post–World War II Western tradition. Compare, for example, the final lines of Samuel Beckett's Molloy: "It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining."8 Such epistemological uncertainty also characterizes Lebanese war novels, but Beckett draws the logical antihumanist conclusion: "He said, life is...