Summary
In “Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction After 1948”, the fifth essay in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, the scene is the unit of composition of Arabic prose and drama and is itself contemporaneity in its most problematic form: a contested space the writer fills with language struggling to maintain a presence (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.70-71).
Details
- If the unit of composition is the scene, and not the period (prologue, middle, end, in the Aristotelian sense), then the connection between scenes is tenuous; there is a tendency to episodism, and the repetition of scenes, as if the rhythmic succession of scenes can become a substitute for quasi-organic continuity (PDF p.70).
- Entrances and appearances play the role of ontological affirmation; absences and exits seem to threaten extinction or a quasi death. To be in a scene is to displace extinction, to substitute life for the void; the very act of telling, narrating, uttering, guarantees actuality (PDF p.70).
- The emphasis on scenes is intensified, and made more urgent, after 1948: the scene does not merely reflect the crisis; rather, the scene is contemporaneity in its most problematic and even rarified form (PDF p.71).
- In Ghassan Kanafani’s Rijal fil shams the scene turns from a novelistic device into a provocation: the Palestinian must make the present, which is not an imaginative luxury but a literal existential necessity (PDF p.73).
- After 1967 the scene was transformed from a theatrical one into an arena of fairly immediate gladiatorial struggle, and the relations between spectator and action were variously redefined (PDF p.75-76).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Ghassan Kanafani, Nakba