Stefan G. Meyer
The Experimental Arabic Novel: Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the Levant
New York: SUNY Press, 2000. $72.50

Reviewed by Muhammad Siddiq

This book on "the experimental Arabic novel" originated in the author's dissertation at Rutgers University. This minor fact of academic geography bears directly on a question that is becoming increasingly more urgent, namely, the proper place of Arabic literature within the larger field of literary studies at American universities. The book's subtitle, "Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the Levant," foregrounds the geographic range of the study, "the Levant," on the one hand, and loads the theoretical dice further by adding two broad conceptual categories, "postcolonial" and "modernism" to the equally broad category "experimental." To navigate a clear course through the multiple boundaries and valences of these geographic and discursive realms is by no means an easy task, much less so in a dissertation. Given the enormity and complexity of the issues to be negotiated, the author does a good job and makes a significant contribution to the scholarly research on Arabic fiction available in English. To say further that the study is highly uneven and the results not always commensurate with the promise is to detract none of the credit due the author for extensive and painstaking research, intellectual seriousness, and originality.

English is a key term here for several reasons. The first is the declared intention of the author to bring works of Arabic fiction to the attention of the English-speaking reader. For serious students of Arabic literature and Arab culture, no prospect is more enticing or desirable than this coupling of proper academic expertise with a wide circulation of Arabic literary texts among the reading public. But English is also, perhaps primarily at present, a hegemonic language that is deeply implicated in the ongoing American political and economic policies of globalization. For much of the third world, and the Arab world in particular, globalization spells Western, specifically American, domination and the "promise" of permanent dependence. If one takes seriously the highly uneven power relations between "English" and "Arabic" in the real world and the inevitable "panoptic" proliferation of this relation through the diverse domains of discourse, can one still place trust in the egalitarian efficacy of scholarship and knowledge? In simpler words apropos the question in hand: is the incorporation of Arabic literary studies in departments of English and Comparative Literature an invitation to a happy "dialogic" engagement or to a procrustean bed? Stefan Meyer is fully aware of these problematic issues and addresses some of their implications and consequences directly and forcefully in the conclusion, which, in many respects, is the best chapter in the book.

Aside from the frequent lapse into bland and lengthy paraphrases and plot summary, the book suffers from two major problems. The first concerns the declared area of its investigation, "the Levant." To the extent that the study aims to shift focus from Egypt to other parts of the Arab world in search of alternative, or at least concurrent, manifestations of modernism, it is a bold and original gesture. It is also, frankly, an overdue corrective measure. For various historical reasons, Egypt has dominated the literary and cultural scene in the Arab world far too long. As it is, however, the reality of the text disputes its formal intention. The works of several Egyptian writers loom large on the "Levantine" landscape of the book. Similarly, the exclusion of "experimental" Arabic novels by North African writers on grounds of linguistic Franchophone influence or affiliation seems entirely arbitrary given the acknowledged pervasive influence of Camus, Sartre, and other French authors on the "Levantine" writers examined in the book. Equally inexplicable is the exclusion of the Syrian writer Halim Barakat and the Palestinian feminist writer Sahar Khalifa, whose highly experimental works place them at the forefront of modernist, postcolonial writers of the "Levant." These weighty reservations notwithstanding, this book is a welcome addition to the developing body of scholarly works that view Arabic literature within a comparative, theoretical frame of reference.