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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Book Fair Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The state of the domain
In this Arabic version of Les Règles de l'art: génèse et structure du champ littéraire (Editions du Seuil, 1992), Ibrahim Fathi's lucidity and deep understanding of modern critical theory meld with the intellectual ambition and breadth of vision of the French sociologist to give us a work that is at once an exemplary and highly accessible translation, and a brilliantly original contribution to the vexed field of literary studies in Arabic.
The Rules of Art is a theoretical investigation into how the specificity of literary production is to be situated within a wider social context. According to Bourdieu, the literary universe as we know it today is in fact a creation of the 19th century, when the right to dispose of it was snatched away from the state bureaucracies and their academies. Since then, no single authority has been able to decide what should be written, or what is the canon of good taste. Instead, the search for recognition and consecration has been played out within, and through, a struggle over value in which writers, critics and editors endlessly engage.
Bourdieu's book comprises a prologue and three main parts. In the prologue, Bourdieu advances the idea that Flaubert's novel, Sentimental Education, contains within itself all the critical tools necessary for the sociological analysis of the text itself. The social domain in which the protagonist moves can be read as a model of the social domain of the author.
This example is crucial to Bourdieu's argument, because Flaubert's aesthetic project took shape just as the assertion of the autonomy of the literary domain was entering its critical phase. Describing that domain's genesis, structure and successive configurations, Bourdieu begins by showing how much Flaubert's work owes to this constitutive process. By examining the distance between the different stances adopted by the various trends, movements, schools and authors of the time, he demonstrates how Flaubert the writer is himself a product of this social space which he had helped create.
In the first part, "Three States of the Domain", Bourdieu analyses the emergence of the literary domain, its subsequent split and dualistic structure, and the eventual development of a corpus of literary symbols, what he calls "the market in symbolic goods" In the second part, the author sets out the foundations of a science of literary analysis. This he does in two chapters, the first dealing with the methodological questions involved in the task Bourdieu has set himself, the second exploring the literary author's own viewpoint. The third and last part, entitled "Understanding Understanding", deals with the historical genesis of pure aesthetics, the social emergence of the eye, and the idea of theory as constituted through the act of reading.
By drawing back the curtain to reveal the rules of art -- the logic which writers and literary institutions obey, and which expresses itself in sublimated form in their work -- Pierre Bourdieu destroys once and for all the illusion of the omnipotence of creative genius, and simultaneously lays the groundwork for a science of artistic and literary work, in which the object would be not only the material production of the work itself, but also the parallel production of its value. Yet far from crushing the creator under the weight of the social determinations this theory imposes on him, and reducing the work to the milieu in which it was born, Bourdieu's analysis instead moves towards an understanding of the specific work that artists (especially writers) must accomplish, both against these determinations and thanks to them, in order to produce themselves as creators, that is, as subjects of their own creation.
Fathi's rendition of the French original testifies to his profound understanding of the immense methodological complications involved in transposing a theoretical work grounded in modern Western culture into an Arab context. His lucid translation not only reproduces Bourdieu's meaning in flowing Arabic, but enriches and extends the range of possibilities available to Arabic critical discourse. His introduction alone is worth the cover price. Were Arab literary debate one day finally to free itself from its narrow preoccupation with such worn-out issues as the tension between authenticity and modernity, Fathi and Bourdieu could well provide a fruitful point of departure towards new, and wider horizons.
