Fictitious Capital: An Interview with Elizabeth Holt
Simon Conrad, PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and contributing editor at Borderlines sat down with Professor Elizabeth Holt to discuss her book: Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel.
Simon Conrad (SC): Fictitious Capital retells the history of the rise of the Arabic novel by turning to novels serialized in periodicals in the late 19th and the early 20th century. Focusing mainly on Beirut and Cairo, you bring to the fore how this rise was premised on the arrival of finance capitalism in the region. How did reading these serialized novels change your understanding of this history? To what extent is the story of the rise of the Arabic novel the story of the Nahdah?
Elizabeth Holt (EH): Thank you for that question. Let me back up a bit and discuss a little how I came to this interest in the serialized novel, the Nahdah and what was going on in the academy at the time, since this is a while ago. It was around 2006, 2007 – I was in Cairo studying at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad trying to sort out next steps for my dissertation. There was not a whole lot of work out yet on the Nahdah – we didn't yet have Stephen Sheehi's sense that there was a field of Nahdah studies, and it was still somewhat typical to hear that Zaynab, published in 1914, was the first Arabic novel. Of course, people were generally aware that there was other material – if we went back to read somebody like Matti Moosa we would see that there were these journals that influence, amongst others, figures like Jurji Zaydan. But originally, I had a different question entirely: I was looking to understand more about gender in the early Arabic novel and sought to bring to light figurings of the female reader. But many questions emerged as I was reading al-Jinan, American University of Cairo Library photocopies made at the Greek campus when it used to be on Tahrir Square. I returned to the States, spent my time reading these serialized novels, and soon realized there was something very porous going on here: that this is an open genre that doesn't quite know itself yet. I was continually finding economic questions in the fiction: part of the drama was often about the math, when you went to market, for instance, or who owed you what, or what have you. This is persistent. Another thing that kept coming to the fore was silk – not always when I would expect it: there was this sense – not unlike the ‘American Dream’ – that you were going to get to wear silk, this would be what it was to arrive. Having come in with this question about gender, I realized that I didn't know what was going on in the silk industry. I started looking for the book that would explain it all to me: how was the novel related to the silk industry? How did the early Arabic press interface with the merchants and the market stalls, and how did that relate to the role of merchants as brokers? What did these transactions, both between merchants, and in the securities and stock markets actually look like? Why were people in such high debt? Where was all the silk coming from, and going to? That book didn't exist – but I soon discovered it was the book I was writing.
SC: You describe how this rise of the serialized Arabic novel is related to a new way of reading – on the one hand, you speak of the suspense and anticipation of waiting for the next issue, but also the way novels, in their serialized form, are published side by side with current affairs. How did you recreate the reading practice you describe in Fictitious Capital for yourself?
EH: I was reading a number of journals simultaneously, reading al-Jinan, al-Nashra al-Usbu'iyya, al-Bashir, and al-Zahra – later al-Muqtataf and Lisan al-Hal – at the same time, trying to create a two-month mood, to get a sense of what one could have been reading together, and to understand what this bourgeoning periodical press in Beirut was. This was also part of how I started noticing the silk: it wasn't just al-Jinan and Salim Al Bustani, Yusuf al-Shalfun and al-Zahra, that is: novelists who were interested in the silk industry; it was everywhere in the background of what was going on, and these serialized novels were part of a larger discourse on, among things, the changing economy.
For the Cairo part of the book, I did a lot of archival work at Dar al-Hilal in Cairo, where I was in 2012. Every day, I took a cab to sit in the reading room of Dar al-Hilal in Sayyida Zeinab, a dusty and slightly unorganized reading room with bound editions of al-Hilal. As a site for research, Sayyida Zeinab was more fun than heading out into the desert to AUC’s new campus. I had the reading room to myself, and I quickly noticed that Dar al-Hilal was a bigger operation: we don’t have these resources in the case of al-Jinan, the ability to go back to the holdings of the printing press. At Dar al-Hilal, I would find ephemera that had accidentally slipped into the bound editions of the journals – ad circulars and the like -- elements that were not being shown for posterity.
But another point concerning your question on reading, concerning discipline. I’ve experienced a pushback from historians in calling this an archival project: sure, there’s some work with the French archive at the beginning, but the rest of the book is based on my reading of periodicals – stuff in the library’s general collection, some say we shouldn’t be calling that archival work. When I discuss my work with colleagues in comparative literature, it’s very much an archival project. There's something interesting in your question that concerns our methods and practices of reading as scholars of literature, where we're very much dealing with the bound novel; and as historians, who are more often than not sent towards government archives. I had a fascinating conversation 15 years ago with Rashid Khalidi about the suspicion around work that takes seriously the Arabic periodical press as an historical document. I constantly found myself moving back and forth, trying to figure out how to approach these as objects. I was inspired reading Raymond Williams who insists on the materiality of the production of novels, considering not just the ink and paper, but the ways suspense itself is material. We enter this world of waiting, of clocked, calendrical time; and enter in with these novelists and those writing in the press to imagine what it was to be a reader in this moment, and what it was to wait. There’s an anxiety that, to an extent, also came up in my French archival work: time is changing. In the French archive, it's the daily reports of officials from Beirut in the 1870s: they're incredibly detailed, very anthropological. You begin to get a sense of their concerns, their worries about the silk industry, how time was being re-engineered, but also that it was an imperial encounter. But it’s both, reading the archive and the Arabic periodicals of these years together, that bring this sense of anxiety and suspense to the fore.
SC: Maybe another question on reading, while we’re at it. I was fascinated not just by your astute analysis of the novels, but also your attention to details in language: for instance, you point to garden and landscape metaphors in the journals’ titles and to shared roots of Arabic words, such as ‘newspaper’ and ‘locust’. This might get both of us into trouble, but it seems you did something one might call – if one were old fashioned – philology or ‘close reading’. Could you speak to the importance of these observations?
EH: I had no idea what my sin was going to be, you paused just before you said philology, there was a bit of suspense there. It's true – I did philology! I think the influence that Edward Said’s presence at Columbia had on all of us is evident. And there’s another bad phrase you mentioned, ‘close reading’, which caused huge debates in literary circles around the fascism that might be lurking in the project of the New Critics. But it’s true: I closely read novels, I behaved philologically. And I think this allowed me not to batter the novels with the theory, but rather to tap Arabic’s rich root system as concept history. There certainly was a preoccupation around terms related to botany that were just coming up again and again – so you indulge the author for a moment and lean into it, the equivocations in different derivations of the same root. And you suddenly realize how it matters – how it’s cohering and becoming something.
To give you a specific case: Salim al-Bustani, for instance, was certainly very aware of the meaning of words and their slipperiness. Sometimes he will define words for his readers in early novels and in early articles as well. This is also the time in which great dictionaries and encyclopedias made it to the new presses, and we must assume that Salim himself was involved in Muhit al-Muhit, a dictionary his father, Butrus al-Bustani, was composing then, not to mention the Da’irat al-Ma’arif, the encyclopedia the family was putting together. I feel that amidst all this definitional work and sensitivity towards language, when we see a repetition in a root – such as the botanical theme, the garden – we might do worse than to play along.
But on another level, it’s been gratifying for me to see the value of this proximity to the text come out in some of the book reviews. Rebecca Johnson and Ziad Dallal pointed out how the lexicographical fields of finance terms that were operative, as well as the ways that people were trading in the markets, have long been obscure and difficult to grapple with for intellectual and economic historians. Sometimes the author isn’t particularly clear in these financial adventure novels either, and that becomes a source of suspense: what you might get is an understanding that you did not understand what exactly it was that was so interesting about a given plot point, why moving money in one direction made somebody so nervous all of a sudden, and begin to suspect a financial ruse, or hidden debts. Sometimes it was actually attending to the affect that was coming off the page that allowed me to understand that to understand what was happening with these financial transactions, that I had to go deeper. This was the case in particular with Salim al-Bustani’s 1875 novel Bint al-‘Asr: You have to work to figure out what the ruse was that was swindling the honest merchant out of his money – indeed, the narrator warns it will be difficult to spot. In other words: it might help to recognize that fiction, as it becomes harder to parse, it offers a snag that can begin to help us understand where we need to do some reconstructive concept work. In the interstices, there is something that literary method allows us to approach, sometimes just because we have to put back together the plot, resolve the financial mystery. There's a certain way of reading for the plot here that enables us to get a sense of what it is that we don't see clearly about what was animating these moments: worry, concern, suspense, hope, desire, deceit.
SC: Let me return to the question of serialization, since it’s such a crucial aspect to your discussion. In addition to new ways of reading, there’s the economic dimension to printing in intervals, a dimension of risk and anticipation, the logic of finance capitalism on which the rise of the Arabic novel is premised in your account. Was there any hesitance and suspicion on the part of the novelists you discuss to buy in to this game of profit?
EH: In the 1860s, we still have different models for how a journal might work out. With respect to what’s coming out of the Syrian Scientific Society in the late 1860s, with figures such as Yusuf al-Sharfun and Salim al-Bustani in the 1870s, not to mention Khalil al-Khouri a decade earlier, there’s a subscription model that is blended with patronage and funding coming from important families in Beirut. This period represents a hopeful moment of dense new activity around the 1870s Beirut periodical press, around the novel, and around capitalism in the region. But there’s another model for how you might finance a journal coming out Jam‘iyat al-funūn beginning in 1875, the organization that publishes the journal Thamarat al-Funun, which contains much more poetry than al-Jinan: Jam‘iyat al-funūn is a joint stock company held primarily by a Muslim cultural group undertaking this project, in contradistinction to all other Beirut journals in the 1870s, and it goes on to publish for years. Poetry is a genre where we see less profiting off of risk, readers’ suspense, and waiting. Compared to the way the novel, the stock market, and finance capital more generally march in shared formation, we see something different happening with poetry and the joint stock model. There’s a little less precarity, a sense of mitigated risk – and maybe a bit of suspicion towards serialization even then.
But let me jump forward to the early 20th century, to Alexandria, to Farah Antun’s al-Jami‘a. That’s where he publishes a highly philosophical novel, al-Din wa al-‘Ilm wa al-Mal – we might translate it as Faith, Science, and Money. It comes out all in one go, he doesn’t serialize it, and he’s very straightforward about why he doesn’t: because it’s a short, dense text, because he’s not looking to make profit from it, because he’s looking to get an urgent idea across, in this case the worker-owned space on plantation factories-as-communes. This feels a lot like Francis Marrash’s Ghabat al-Haqq published several decades earlier in Mount Lebanon: we see something of the pastorals of Mount Lebanon being imagined in certain corners in the late 19th century transposed to Cairo as a socialist garden plantation scheme – at the precise moment that the British are indeed invested in plantation-like financial schemes along the Nile. This is something of an Arabic socialist proposal in novel form that deliberately eschews the sense of suspense, eschews the parlor tricks of the serialized novel and the ways it flirts with risk, and does something a little bit different. I think we can see a certain level of critique here towards both the practices of finance capital and the practices of serialization that have essentially made the novel an industry by the time Antun is writing.
SC: You discuss both the underlying anxiety reflected in the serialized novel as well as cases of suspicion towards its serialized, profit-oriented form with reference to Walter Benjamin – you reference his insistence that “with the upheaval of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they’ve crumbled.” In the case of Beirut, this crumbling includes both the physical monuments, the villas, the gardens, as well as the cultural ones, such as the novel, the gardens of literature, all built on debt. But you also draw attention to nationalist accounts of the rise of the Arabic novel produced by a generation of historians writing in Nasser’s Egypt, such as ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr with his Development of the Modern Arabic Novel in Egypt, 1860-1938. To what extent would you say that your attention towards the workings of capital, silk, and risk in your reading of the fiction tells us something about our time, just as Badr's focus on the nation might say something about his?
EH: As you say, Badr writes the 1960s, it's Nasser's Egypt, it's Egypt for the Egyptians, a specific state socialist moment in Egyptian national literary history. That's very much the frame within which he's writing: the novels that don't sit well with him are the novels that don't sit well with this idea of the novel as the progenitor of the nation. And there are years in which this does hold, where we do see these sorts of national allegories coming out of the Arabic novel. But at the same time, there’s this question of national allegory that Aijaz Ahmad asked, coming off of Fredric Jameson and his insistence that the ‘Third World’ can be relegated to only ever writing national allegory novels. It seemed absurd. The academy was so focused on reading literature through nation; it could feel like all nation, all the time, with Benedict Anderson and all of this business. So many of us were wondering: how would we need to read in order not to be blinkered by this national allegory hypnotism, how do we get past this? When I was finishing the dissertation, the subprime mortgage crisis hit in the United States, rippling elsewhere. In terms of bourgeois monuments crumbling before your very eyes, you just needed to go for a drive around the neighborhood and see with every third house how so many had misapprehended the risks and precarity that they were taking on. There’s some exciting work going on about speculation, capitalism, risk, and thinking about the stock market in the last 20, 30 years. But we need to think the late 20th and 21st centuries in relation to the 19th. It's almost as though the moment of Badr and the national allegory is going to be the shorter episode – a moment bookended in this sense of deep risk, a different kind of story, one that I think we can see in the novels that are coming out of the region in the present as well, really since the eve of the 1967 war.
SC: Your forthcoming book focuses on the Arabic novel during the Cold War. How did this new project grow out of your research for Fictitious Capital?
EH: My second project started in the middle of my work on Fictitious Capital in 2012, so it’s not actually that new. I was reading Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North for a class I was teaching and was to present at an Arabic pedagogy conference. I had read Laila Lalami's introduction to the New York Review of Books edition of Season of Migration to the North, which errantly claims that the novel was serialized. So initially I thought I could simply apply the method of my work on 19th century serialized novels to those of the 20th, but when I got the journal, Hiwar, I noticed that the novel had not in fact been serialized but had come out in its entirety in a single issue. This was unusual, even at that time: Season of Migration to the North isn’t as short as Farah Antun’s al-Din wa al-‘Ilm wa al-Mal, mentioned earlier, which was short, more properly a novella; Tayeb Salih’s novel filled over one hundred pages of a journal. This struck me as really bizarre publication practice. All of this is happening in the fall of 1966, Hiwar is based in Beirut, and there's this Sudanese novelist publishing this novel that I know to be amazing and should keep any journal running for at least a little longer. But then there's the 1967 war, and it's right around the 1967 war that Hiwar collapses. This was a riddle to me, I couldn't figure it out. What did the naksa have to do with Tayeb Salih? Why wasn't Beirut far enough away from it all? I started reading about Hiwar interested in its funding and found out that it was a project of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a covert front of the CIA in the Cold War, and spent several summers in their archives at the University of Chicago, and in Beirut researched at the Institute for Palestine Studies and in the American University of Beirut’s collections. I persisted with my method of reading the periodical press and moving beyond the bound book form, and again, found capitalism and socialism articulated in and through the Arabic novel. Sure, we could go with the national allegories and a text like Badr's and call it a day. But in fact, this is the exact moment that Badr is writing and he's writing a particular narrative that makes it harder to see the Cold War that's going on all around, the competition between China, the USSR and the U.S. for influence over Third World literary movements; much as the influence of French, British and local financial speculation on the history of the early Arabic novel is obscured by nationalist allegory. I think the question of an attenuated sovereignty and the enduring inter-imperial interference in Arabic letters holds the two books together.
Elizabeth Holt, Associate Professor of Arabic and Director of Middle East Studies at Bard College, New York. In addition to Fictitious Capital, she is the author of several articles and chapters that have appeared, amongst other places, in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Abhath. She is also an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Arabic Literature, at Bard College since 2008 and is currently working on her second monograph on Arabic literature in the Cold War.
Simon Conrad is PhD candidate at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. His research is in modern Middle East intellectual history, particularly on modern readers – and makers – of Islamic mysticism and philosophy in 20th century Egypt and beyond.
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Layla Varkey, who is studying for the joint MA/MSc in International and World History at Columbia University and the London School of Economics.