ميسلون هادي والدكتور نجم عبدالله كاظم موقع الكاتبة العراقية ميسلون هادي و الدكتور نجم عبدالله كاظم
The Western Influences on Iraqi Novel
An Introduction
Dr. Najim A. Kadhim
This essay is surfaced as a result of two factors, the first is its writer’s concern; and the second is the moving of scholars’ interest, studies and practical criticism from exclusively national literatures to so-called global literature and international literary relations. For this reason, I am presenting here a short comparative essay which might be seen as introduction to the influential process taken place between Iraqi novel and American and Western novel in general. The essay departs, in its deep roots, from the fact that the influences of Western literatures in general, and the American in specific exist in the modern Arabic literature.
In the early Fifties, a scholar said:
The close and permanent contact between the Arab World and the West since the end of the eightieth century makes a new era in the history and civilization of the Arabs. How and where this contact took place, and whether it exercised any influence on the appearance development and form of the modern short story are questions which remain to be answered. (Abdel-Majid, p51)
If such questions were logical at the time they were made, naturally, they are not any more. The Western literary influence exercised on the appearance and development of so many new genres and artistic forms in the Arab World in the second half of the ninetieth century and in the whole of the following century has been unquestionable for quite a long time. Here we will try to go as swiftly as we can through the stages of this cultural and literary history and accordingly the history of Arabic novel.
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In the modern age, the Arab World began its major contact with the West in the late eighteenth century. This contact was gradually furthered in the following decades. As one of the two parts of this contact was developed and the other was still underdeveloped, it was natural that the first, the West, would certainly have various influences on the other, which was the Arab World. That meant, in some of its many levels, the Arab would imitate the Western civilization and cultures among which were the artistic and literary genres. By this factor of imitation, fiction writing in the Arab World began to be practiced, firstly as experiments, and that was in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and then gradually developed in the following decades. From imitating the Western ways of writing for quite some time, fiction writing soon became an original Arabic writing. The rise of Arabic fiction, short story and novel, is then inanimately recognized by Arab scholars and critics in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq during the first and second decades of the twentieth century. Many other Arab countries followed the same path sooner or later. Almost one whole century of Arabic fiction, though, was always influenced by the Western fiction. The Arabic novel in all the Arab countries, in all its forms and manifestations shows this influence of Western novels. The Iraqi novel, for its part, received the Western influences during its developing and transitional stages. These influences, which were positively received and maturely exploited by the Iraqi writers, are obvious in what may be reckoned as shifting phases in the novelistic march.
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Apart from Jalal Khalid, which is considered by scholars and critics as the first real attempt to be done by an Iraqi to write a novel, we can mention only two others written between the two world wars, published in 1939. They are Dr. Ibrahim of Dhu al-Nun Ayyub, and the stupendous work of its time Majnunan of Abdulhaq Fadhil. Examining the novelistic attempts of this first period of the marsh of Iraqi novel and fiction in general, we find that there were two main trends: Realism and Romanticism. However, these two main trends were frequently combined, with a domination of the former in some works and the latter in others. Perhaps the domination of the realism is due to the wide reading by some of the Iraqi writers of the Russian and French realistic works, while the main reason for the predominance of romanticism in other Iraqi writers’ works is the influence of the Arabic romance and the romantic works of Jubran, al-Manfaluti and al-Mazini and the translated Western romances and novels, especially Gothes’s Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers, Lamartine’s Raphael and Dumas’s La Dame aux Camelias. Conversely, in the two tendencies the major subjects of the novel concentrate on social matters and secondly on political matters. Most Arabic and translated fiction by the Iraqis echoed that social content demonstrated by Arabic and translated fiction read by the Iraqis.
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In the next two decades, the forties and fifties, and the very early sixties we find only a few novelistic attempts. The earliest of them and perhaps the only one that one can consider as a serious attempt was Al-Yad wa al-Ardh wa al-Ma’-1948- written by Dhu al-Nun Ayyub. Yet it was written with the naive political realism known throughout all of the writer’s work. Ayyub, however, and other writers of fiction who wrote with the same naive political realism were, again, influenced by the continuing popularity of Goethe, Dumas, Lamartine, and al-Manfaluti and other Arab writers.
As the sixties were marked by conflict, depression and fear, works of fiction dealing with the frustration appeared during that decade and in the early seventies were collectively known as “the writings of the sixties,” while the writers were known as (the Generation of the Sixties). Those writings were mostly coloured by individual experiences, frustrations, experimentalism, and leaning towards no specific ideology, other than being influenced by modern trends of Western literature, especially French. Concerning the influence of the Western novels on the Iraqi novel, we must mention one of the major factors for the advanced artistic achievement of the generation of the fifties, including that we have seen in the long fiction, that is their wide reading of modern Western fiction. It was evidently being artistically exploited by them in writing these long fictions as much as the distinguished short stories of which the generation is known.
Going back again over fiction writing of the forties, fifties and early sixties in general and apart from the main types, subjects, and tendencies, we can observe individual attempts to write in other fashions and about other subjects. These other fashions and subjects, however, are not important, except for the existential trend known to the Iraqis through some of works of Sartre, Wilson, Kafka and others which appeared clearly in the short story and left some of their marks on the long fiction of the fifties such as al-Tikarli’s Al-Wajh Al-Akhar, a phenomenon which would increase in the sixties and early seventies.
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Moving to the last decades we are concerned with, three things that one must mention. The first is the continuation of the generally good march of the novel. The second thing is the phenomenon of war literature, which appeared as a response to the Iraq-Iran war 1980-1988, giving us dozens of novels. The third and last important thing to be mentioned about the eighties is the continuation and variety of the Western influences on the Iraqi novel as much as on Arabic novel.
Talking about the predominant influence of the Western literatures in the whole last period of the second half of the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, one important point to be mentioned is that the predominant role which had been occupied by French literature in the period of the 1920s to 1940s was increasingly taken over by English and American literatures, while Russian literature kept its place. That; however, does not mean that French literature was not widely read any more. The French novel was merely second or third behind the English and the American. The Following foreign names became well known by the Arab readers and literati: Sartre, Camus, Dickens, Austen, Joyce, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Gorki and Kafka. In terms of tendencies and trends, Realism, Existentialism, and Stream of Consciousness are predominant. The shadows of those novelists and tendencies can easily be seen in many Arabic novels and short stories, in all Arab countries. Interviewing the main Iraqi novelists,(See: Kadhim, Fi Al-Adab al-Muqaran, p45-69), and reading their comments and writings show us that they are not, in their readings and their influences much deferent from the other Arab novelists. By interviewing and writing to Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman, Fu’ad al-Tikarli, Abdulrahman Majid al-Rubay’i and other Iraqi writers and by examining their responses, I have found out that among the most widely read Western writers in Iraq were the Russians Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy; the English Woolf, Joyce and Lawrence; and the Americans Faulkner, Steinbeck, Caldwell, and Hemingway.
