What Do We Read?

The man of letters and poet Youssef Ghossoub published, not long ago, an article in the magazine "al-Mina" in which he examines the causes of the meagerness of literary production in Lebanon, and he concludes his inquiry with one principal finding: that the predominance of foreign culture, languages, and newspapers in this country, its people's eagerness to read the literatures and sciences of the Westerners in their original languages, and the influence of emigration and Frenchification on the other hand — all this stands as an obstacle to literary production here, whereas the neighboring countries, which have not been favored with the great number of foreign institutions, institutes, and influences with which Lebanon teems, remain on the whole in less direct contact with the cultures of the West, and their literature is less exposed to the competition of foreign literature; hence their writers, when they write in Arabic, can find readers for their literature even if it is of slight value.

Although the causes of literary stagnation in Lebanon are many and not confined to one, we cannot but say that there is much truth in this explanation; to prove it you need only take a count of the number of foreign books and magazines sold every day in Beirut, while the Arabic bookshops all but confine their activity to selling the schoolbooks read by the Lebanese students of the certificat and the baccalauréat.

The number of readers in Lebanon is not small, and the rising generation is much given to reading, especially the young men and women who have received a classical education in which theory prevails over practice. But the members of our educated class have a better command of the languages of the West than of their own tongue; indeed many of them recoil by nature from anything of local color and despise it, despite the boasting of some of them of their Lebanese-ness, and they have not the national pride that would move them to encourage local production, however feeble it may be.

And suppose they had mastered their language until writing in it seemed an easy matter — they find no clear practical benefit in this mastery. For the places of work — the foreign institutions and companies with which Lebanon abounds — require of them mastery of foreign languages. And if they turn to writing in Arabic, they may find no readers among the Lebanese, and the sister countries are more zealous to encourage their own writers than to encourage the writers of Lebanon — a natural thing. One of them may sacrifice his time, his money, and his energy for a spell, then become unable to sacrifice, or averse to it. And then there are the merchants of literature — the schoolbook committees, the broadcasting stations, the publishing companies, and the institutions of colonial cultural cooperation between East and West — all these new faces stretch out their hands to them and tempt them with commercial literature, which makes men of letters out of dabblers; so why should the rising writers not hasten to them?

Add to this that entry into the field of pure literature grows harder every day

with the rising level of culture, the exactingness of readers, and the spread of weariness in the souls of the educated elite. What, then, do these people read? The essay has been cheapened by the ease of its making; it is not read unless it appears in some enticing, novel form — in the form of practical experiments and statistics in the American manner, or philosophical truths and deep study or artistic exposition in the European manner — and we do not blame these readers if they turn away from the light essay that is the child of its hour, created without effort. Beyond that, the cultivated want stories of modern style, on the order of the stories of O. Henry and Chekhov, or plays in the manner of Maeterlinck or Gabriel Marcel, or poetry in the manner of the symbolists and the surrealists. And these Westernized literary colors Arabic literature attains only through one who devotes himself wholly to the service of literature, gives his life over to it, and travels for its sake the rough, thorny road on which feet bleed and breath is cut short — and where have we such a mystic, to whom his livelihood comes without toil, so that he may spend it on literature?

In Arabic we read the local news and the political developments. And then whoever is accustomed to reading the foreign papers cannot but set the style of these against the style of those. He reads, for instance, in "Time" magazine: "To so-and-so, owner of such-and-such factories, and to his wife so-and-so, a boy was born weighing so much." And in an Arabic paper: "God has graciously bestowed upon the esteemed merchant so-and-so and his refined wife a male child in whom the parents' eyes delight; he has been named such-and-such, in felicity, after his grandfather of goodly memory, and we ask God to make him one of the children of well-being, to keep him in the shadow of his noble parents, and to make him the apple of the eye of the happy household, etc."

Here I ask: how can one accustomed to reading the foreign papers endure such a waste of words?

We may read translated literature, but without pleasure, for whoever can read a literary piece in its foreign original cannot relish it in translation. For this reason I see no benefit in transferring the world's masterpieces into Arabic, since whoever has attained a degree of culture that enables him to understand these masterpieces in translation must know enough of the languages of the West to be able to understand them in their original tongues. And what culture do you expect of a person who knows nothing but Arabic? And how do you expect him to understand the translated masterpieces of the West when he is ignorant of the spirit of the West and its civilization, because he knows nothing of its languages?

There remain the popular magazines and newspapers read by the common people and by those of limited culture. The political ones among them may find a market, while the literary and social ones sell only if they escape the competition of their Egyptian counterparts, brimming with pictures, news, jokes, and colors.

Finally, where shall we find a solution to the problem of Lebanese literature? The solution may come through the Arabization of the schools, together with care for the mastery of one foreign language. But this makes up only part of the solution, for our literature would still remain unable to compete with foreign literature; and there remains the financial problem, whose solution may lie by way of the emigrants, if they would donate to establish endowments set apart for writers and for serious literary magazines — and the hope of that is faint, because most people consider Lebanon's need of the emigrants' donations for the necessities of life more pressing than its need of them for luxuries.

Or it may come by way of the government, or through the cultural committee of the Arab League, which has shown no tangible activity up to now. In any case, the problem still arrests our gaze and calls for our thought.