What if the most deep stories in the novels are not narrated at the heart of the events, but rather whispering in the margins of the dark narration, hiding behind the silence of the characters, and sneaking through the hidden tensions of the language? What if the function of criticism is not just an analysis of what is apparent, but rather potholes in these areas that embraced deferred conflicts and excluded representations?
From this bold critical hypothesis, the Jordanian critic and academic, Dr. Laith Saeed, launches in his latest book, “The Poetry of Narrational Poetry”, to present a dismantled project that reads the novel as a cultural field that wrestles with hidden symbolic powers. In this work, the horoscope monitors how cultural patterns produce their speech quietly, and how to reshape our awareness from within the shadow, away from the center of the center.
At the heart of this project, its remarkable concept of “the poetic pattern”, revealing alternative aesthetics that emerge from fragility, alienation, and refraction, in the face of traditional beauty models.
The promoter is a Jordanian academic critic and researcher, who specializes in modern Arabic literature and his criticism, who holds a doctorate from the Hashemite University, and he was the first to pay him, and he won the award for the best doctoral thesis for his studies tagged with (blindness and insight in postmodern criticism: a deconstructive study in contemporary Arab criticism).
He worked in his research on coordinating and cultural approaches to Arabic literature, and was interested in analyzing the implicit format, representations of identity, power and text margins from a perspective based on critical insight and intersects with multiple cognitive fields.
In this dialogue, Al -Jazeera Net is diving with Dr. Laith Al -Rawajafa in the depths of his critical project, to ask him about how to listen to these margins without falling into the trap of a new authority, and the meaning of the presence of “ugliness” as a narrative response to deep damage to the Arab cultural structure, and the validity of the major critical references in dismantling our contemporary narration.
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In your book, they refer to the “dark narrative margins” as sites in which cultural formats produce their speech quietly. How can the critic listen to these margins without reproducing a new authoritarian centralization in the name of detection and dismantling?
The “dark narrative margins” are referred to those textual places that do not lead the interface of the story, and do not reveal the patterns of the main characters or the visible rhetorical formulas, as these margins are hidden behind the neglected details, stylistic displacements, and semantic voids that show themselves as elements with an unclear function, but their interpretative capacity grows in the shadow, and produces our possibility A narcotic narrative sneaks outside the text domination and rebuilds the meaning with hidden and intertwined ways.
Thanks to these margins, the cultural formula accumulates its most effective discourse, as it works through the silence, the methods of neutralization, and the symbolic infiltration strategies to revive a hidden semantic movement, and rise with a productive function that operates within the layers of the meaningful meaning, where cultural formats are lined up in indirect formulas, and the authority is reformulated through what is hidden behind the apparent text and postponed The statement, which revives the text with every new reading.
Listening to these margins requires the critic to reconsider his interpretative location itself, and to be freed from the illusion of “textual mobilization”, as the criticism that illuminates an external location or an independent interpretative privilege that the text is quickly subject to the dictates of its method, and the meaning is reproduced according to pre -map that identifies with power more than it dismantles, and codifies the movement of meaning in the name of analysis or dismantling. The freedom reading is based on apprehension of complete understanding, and the accountability of the same critic before holding the text of the text, and to pay attention to what remains stuck in the edges: that which is frequent between reference and tolerance, and between attendance and absence.
The listening to the dark narrative margins requires the critic to deal with them as sites in which cultural formats produce their speech with hidden tools, without being dropped on them or being reshaped according to the logic of authoritarian interpretation.
This listening requires a critical awareness of the structure of the discourse and its work mechanisms, with permanent attention to the critic location within the cultural structure itself, in order to avoid the transformation of the margin into an extension of a new center, as the cultural critic monitors the movement of the meaning within the margins as areas of symbolic conflict, in which power and resistance intersect, and deals with it as part of an intertwined cultural field that is not reduced in the center of the center and the margin, but rather It reveals through a network of relationships that require continuous accountability for the limits of understanding and tools of analysis.
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You present the concept of “poetic pattern” as a representation of fragility and alienation. How do you explain the presence of this pattern in the contemporary Arabic novel? Is it an aesthetic expression of the crisis, or a narrative response to deep damage to the Arab cultural structure?
The concept of “poetic pattern” is launched from the accountability of the aesthetic structures that have long been associated with the concepts of (harmony, purity, and balance), and the shift to work on dismantling the familiar perceptions of beauty, so it suggests alternative aesthetics that emerge from (fragmentation, tension, and refraction), where the meaning is formed from within the chaos instead of harmony. This pattern works to transform the aspects of ugliness, deviation, and distort into active narrative elements capable of producing meaning from outside the stable models. Everything that was seen as a deficiency or a defect turns into a semantic structure that carries its own expressive capacity, and an aesthetic effect stems from its refraction, not from its completion.
The “dominant pattern” often appears within the texts that embody the fragility of the contemporary man, and its alienation is highlighted from himself, his community, and his history. This pattern is involved in reshaping the human image by dismantling the ideal model of the self, and evoking the representations of fragility, collapse and impotence in a way that reveals the symbolic structures that produce identity in a strong and cracked context. It is worth noting that fragility goes beyond the representation of characters, extends to the narrative language itself, where traditional structures are broken, tight plots collapsed, sounds are scattered, and the references lose their ability to fix or direct meaning.
The presence of this pattern can be explained in the contemporary Arab narration due to the broad shift in its discourse and its narrative structure, as it no longer seeks to present the world through the models of the coherent championships or structures, but rather it is biased towards the narratives of fragmentation and disintegration. This is due to the exacerbation of existential, political and social questions in the Arab context, as ugliness has become one of the manifestations of reality and not just an aesthetic imbalance.
In the current context, the Arabic novel has become more inclined to detect damage instead of preoccupation with cosmetics, and it went to highlight cracking and tension as tools that resist ready formulas and accountable for stable narrative patterns without closing on a pessimistic discourse or a nonexistent tendency. Hence, the poetic pattern of the pattern represents an aesthetic and artistic displacement, and expresses a transformation in the same narration function, towards the accountability of the culture from the inside.
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Your study started from three references: classic, modernity, and postmodernism, as semantic systems. To what extent are these references still valid today to dismantle the Arab narration? Do you think that we need new chapter references that stem from the Arab cultural margin itself, not from importing concepts?
My studies were not launched from classic, modernist or postmodern references as the rules of analysis or cash frameworks that are projected on texts, but were addressed within the theoretical framework of the study as semantic systems that produce different narrative perceptions about the self, society, history, and identity. This classification enabled me to track the transformations of the Arab narrative pattern from the stable structure to the fragmented structure, by analyzing the relationship of the novel with heritage, identity, and various forms of aesthetic formation, without the goal being confirming the validity of these references or identification with them.
The three references are still present in the syntactic depth of the Arab narration, and they work as interrelated semantic fields that reshape their presence within the text through renewed narrative patterns that go beyond the time or interim classification, and show the overlapping of the references within the same structure. Also, the Arab narration does not move within a straight time line that leaves a reference to be resolved in another, but it restores dialogue with it all, as it adjacent to the one text – sometimes – elements of the classic pattern with modernity or post -modern removals.
Therefore, these references contribute to the formation of Arab narrative awareness, and remain present in the backgrounds of reading and analysis, except that the dismantling of the complications of the contemporary narration requires re -interpretation within a cultural and historical context that emanates from the privacy of the Arab experience, allowing the crystallization of reading tools emanating from the inside, and is able to understand textual transformations as a reflection of local questions not for an imported conceptual history.
Arab cultural criticism is an urgent need to re -framing its tools and concepts based on its cultural structure, based on the accountability of Western references and their removal from the monopoly site, and opening the way for references that emerge from within the Arab context and express his private transformations and speeches. The so -called cultural margin is able to produce alternative knowledge, and at the same time reveal the mechanisms of the formation of power and meaning within different contexts, as the significance consists through the interaction of the margin with the dominant structures and the trends of its representation.
And if there is a need for new chapter references that should stem from reading the rooted patterns in the Arabic discourse, including the transformations in the language, identity, representation, and tension of the relationship between the heritage and contemporary. Also, these references are not built through adoption or import, but rather by dismantling the cultural interior itself, and listening to the letters, themes, and non -stereotypes that it produces.
In conclusion, the critical practice today is no longer a technical affair concerned with the description of phenomena or the classification of trends and patterns, it is a conditional practice of its ability to produce cultural awareness that is listening to what changes in the text and in the world together. This is consistent with the contemporary Arabic narration that presented itself within the movement of a chapter that reshaped the meaning and dismantled its representations from the inside, and the ready -made references and pre -patterns exceeded through a narration that produced its questions from the same experience, and not from the perceptions imposed on them.
Hence, this study came as an attempt to expand the horizon of the critical approach, and to think about the narration as a cultural field in which the aesthetic structures intersect with the work of consciousness, and it reveals the inherent tensions between the center and the margin, and the harmony and fragmentation. This approach exceeded the construction of a closed interpretative model, and sought to accountize the forms of acting, and capturing what is formed in the narrative margin as a productive location of the meaning.
What the novel produces today goes beyond the limits of the story to asking major questions about identity, power, and language, and they are questions that embrace inside the discourse, and disintegrate through reading, making cultural criticism an open horizon for thinking about the Arab self, and it writes its reality with narrative tools charged with tensions, and open to the questions and cracks of reality.