Al-Ahram Weekly | Books supplement

Tashazi Al-Zaman fil Riwaya Al-Haditha (The Fragmentation of Time in the Modern Novel), Amina Rashid, Cairo: GEBO, 1998. pp194

This is a book about time, about literature, and about the endless manifestations of the former in the latter. "The novel is extent [mada ] and extension [imtidad ]," Amina Rashid explains at the outset of this concise, uncluttered and lucid essay. "What separates it from other genres... is its distinctive treatment of time... And it seems that the time hypothesis has conditioned the genre... from the birth of the novel through all its subsequent developments and transformations."

But how does time condition the operation of the words making up a narrative text (one that progresses within a specific spacio-temporal "extent" and through a particular kind of spacio-temporal "extension")? How does the modern novel, seen here as a genre separate from and different to the conventional or traditional novel, come to create "an essential domain of knowledge... so that reading and dealing with novels seems to me similar to contemplating time and knowing it better"? Not through the straightjacket of linear, chronological progression, Rashid answers. Rather, time as it pertains to the modern novel can be cast in two interrelated moulds, which can be articulated in the form of questions: "What is the role played by time in the aesthetics of the modern novel? And, in the context of comparative studies, is there a difference between novels that emerged in a modern industrial society, where the concept of time has radically changed, and ones which emerged in the Third World, where different concepts of time are juxtaposed within the same society?" The questions are in turn formulated as methodological objectives to be pursued: "the relation between temporal composition and the vision of the writer"; and "the relation between the time of narration and the historical time of the exterior framework".

Like much contemporary criticism, Rashid's writing is at once interdisciplinary and self-contained. Her struggle to distill an epistemology of time based entirely on "novelistic knowledge", to use Milan Kundera's famous dictum, is placed in the broader context of Western epistemological endeavour. At the beginning she quotes Saint Augustine in connection with the discrepancy between the universal, measurable time of science and astrology, and the subjective time of human experience. In at least one of its manifestations, time is known only through the experience of time; it exists in memory or not at all. "For [Henri] Bergson, as is the case with Heideggerian philosophy, there is an existential time specific to human beings which is not identical with the time of astronomy, the time of exterior existence, the time of the clock..." This is why modern novels have yielded better answers to the dilemma of time than has philosophy. Although she chooses three short novels to demonstrate her point (Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, 1924; Son'allah Ibrahim's The Smell of It, 1966; and Marguerite Duras's The Lover, 1984), Rashid substantiates her claim by pointing out that this latter concept of time informed such pillars of modernism as the works of Joyce, Proust and Thomas Mann, particularly in their major novels. The arguments which follow could be made independently of the texts chosen by Rashid, yet the fact that all three texts are accessible modern novels, whose depth of vision incurs no cost on their readability, is in itself revealing. They are consistent with her definition of the novel as a genre whose distinctive characteristic is its treatment of time (not length or character development). They provide interesting approaches to her two initial questions and an appropriate framework in which to pursue answers to them.

However what establishes Rashid's originality, besides her eclecticism, is that her book is delightfully free of both the over-elaborate expostulations of many contemporary Arab critics and the fashionable non-substance that often passes for "post-modernism". Her prose is limpid, her analyses precise, her comparative approach refreshingly level-headed. Although independent and profoundly modernist, her gaze never strays too far from the book she is reading. Rashid largely employs the methodology of Mikhail Bakhtin, but the vision she espouses -- her specific concern with the post-colonial situation -- is very much her own. And the fact that she constantly supplies clear definitions for the terms she uses prevents the terminology from becoming an obstacle. Following the Bakhtinian formula, Rashid's book is divided into three chapters. The first two deal with l'architectonique and la composition of the three novels, i.e., respectively, their basic principles of aesthetic construction, and the organisation/arrangement of techniques and effects which makes such construction possible. The third chapter, on the other hand, deals with historical context. Throughout the book, passages from the novels (in both their original language and in Arabic translation) are neatly juxtaposed with each other. The process of following Rashid's logic, and relating it directly to the literature at hand, is thus straightforward and immediately rewarding. As a result, her conclusions often appear self-evident.

It is beyond the scope of this review to discuss the particular temporal fragmentation displayed by each book, its aesthetic resonances and historical import. Suffice it to say that time, whether historical or individual, is practically inseparable from a sense of place; and that the subjective perception of time -- the various non-chronological techniques employed by modern novelists -- is characteristic of the colonial/post-colonial situation, however seemingly disparate their outward manifestations in time and space. The novel, as readers of this book are likely to conclude, does provide an epistemological domain specific to itself; these three novels, illuminated as they are in Rashid's articulate account, allow us to think more about ourselves, our existence in the day and in history, and our relations with the places we consider our own. "The three novels put forward the issue of the modernism of the novel," Rashid writes, "each in its own society and by its predetermined conditions of writing, in a dynamic contact with an alienated reader aware of his alienation. Each lives through times of defeat, of entry into new worlds that take the human being out of his familiar surroundings, leaving him ignorant of where he is going next. The techniques of temporal fragmentation definitely express this modernism, but they do so through a deeper enactment of a consciousness sharply aware of a time severed from its familiarity, a space severed from its features, and a human being severed from his humanity."

Reviewed by Youssef Rakha

		Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 November 1999 Issue No. 455
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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