Socialist Realism in the Language of Ḍād: A Literary Identity for Syria, a Test-Case for World Literature

Abstract

Socialist Realism in the Language of Ḍād:A Literary Identity for Syria, a Test-Case for World Literature Daniel Behar (bio) As of late, two studies by Yoav Di Capua and Alexa Firat have thrown light on the reception of Socialist Realism in the Arab world with an emphasis on Syrian literature. Both use literary and intellectual history to place Socialist Realist thinking in a varied landscape of Arab meta-literary discourse in the 20th century. Building on their work, this article takes a comparative literary approach by setting the theoretical positions against Arabic literary texts classified as Socialist Realist and providing an overview of the dilemmas arising from reading Socialist Realism as World Literature. By World Literature, I heuristically mean texts that circulate outside their context of origin and that may gain or lose in translation (Damrosch). For this panoramic perspective, I rely on the work of Katerina Clark who has limned the outlines of a Kremlin-centered idea of internationalist World literature. The article is divided in three parts. The overview discusses the emergence of Arab Socialist Realism in the framework of a Second-World universal of literature. It elaborates on the interaction between meta-literary discourse and actual compositional models employed in Socialist Realism's cross-national transit. The first part investigates the first stage of development as manifested in the Syrian literary field. This period of literary history is defined by the Syrian critic Ḥannā ʿAbbūd as "the golden age of [End Page 379] socialist realism" (Firat, "Cultural Battles" 158). In this stage I posit a fruitful tension between the theoretical level where a desire for identity with the Soviet model is expressed and the grounds of writing where an urgency is felt to lend aesthetic dignity to local realities and enhance the professional role of the Syrian creative writer as autonomous. The second part addresses a second iteration of Socialist Realism characterized by a more seasoned ability to duplicate the Soviet model. This ability is explained by changing political circumstances and specific cultural institutions that introduced isomorphic resemblances between Syria and the Soviet state. On the cultural side, it is ascribed to a sharpened global awareness of Leninism, Maoism, and Marxist aesthetics, but also to a gained sense of territorial identity within Syria. Under these conditions, a unique corpus of Euphrates literature emerged that included the first genuine production novel in Arabic: Fāris Zarzūr's Āna lahu an yanṣāʿa (Time for Him to Yield, 1980). I set this novel against rival fictional accounts of the Euphrates Dam construction and suggest why the mutual imbrication of socialism and the Baʿthist state heightened the stakes of the genre. The tracks of Socialist Realism in Syria are partially covered because prominent features associated with its poetics have blended indistinguishably with the discourse of iltizām, a polyvalent literary idea laden with a wide range of meanings. Essentially a transculturation of Jean Paul Sartre's notion of engagement, it is an ethos of writerly commitment to the national liberation cause as envisioned by a group of prominent Arab writers.1 It gained currency in the decolonizing period for blending the ascendant Pan-Arab nationalism with existentialist individualism inspired by Sartre's post-war writings. The most powerful utopian strain in the Arab twentieth century was, as Robyn Creswell has suggested, that of political unification of the Arabs under one rule (75–6). Various Arab polities were engaged in fervent contest to become the standard bearer of Arabism; and the utopian tendencies of Socialist Realism got caught up in the mix of the dominant nationalist utopias. This produced some unintended consequences for both Socialist Realism and triumphalist discourses of Arabness, which persisted all throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The difficulty of tracking the vagaries of iltizām is that while the term continued to circulate well into the 1980s and 1990s, its meanings have [End Page 380] shifted over time. In the 1950s, it boosted cultural authenticity under threat of assimilation into internationalist socialist literature, on the one hand, and pure artistic autonomy on the other. In these beginnings, the colossal scale of literary ideas originating in Moscow appeared daunting and enhanced...