In a series of forty-five short essays that constitute his book translated into English under the title “Damn the Novel: When a Privileged Genre Prevails Over All Forms of Creative Writing,” Sudanese-born poet and essayist Amr Muneer Dahab denounces the privilege granted to the novel, the literary genre that is treated by publishers—and viewed by the public—as superior to all others and is virtually guaranteed marketability and profitability, to the detriment of others.

In this series of posts, the prolific author shares excerpts from the book.

This week: Chapter 7

Liars!

Poetry is said to be governed by this dictum: “The more lies it tells, the more beauty it brings about.” The novel goes far beyond this old adage about verse; I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that it is the biggest lie in contemporary Arabic literature. If “poetic lies” stand for basically the remote perspectives to which the poet’s wild imagination may lead, the novel deserves the title of “the biggest lie” as it is, above all, an instance of fantasy whose credibility is doubtful in spite of the novelist’s seemingly honest claim that their work is based on a real story. A piece of literary work is not regarded by critics as worthy of being a “real novel” if it just mimics life without embracing the boundless horizons of imagination. Similarly, readers seek novels that fly across the perspectives of fantasy before they’re seen as worthy of support and devotion.

The above-mentioned imagination is only an act of deviation away from reality (truth?) that goes beyond just changing the names of places and heroes—or their roles in the novel—to inventing a course of events, along with narrative knots that lead to multiple presumed endings, none of which necessarily correspond to the real story the whole work is based on. Is there a more flagrant evidence of mendacity in creative writing than this?

Al-Asma’i  is famous for his saying, “Poetry is a house of misery whose gate is evil, so if it seeks the good it turns weak.” Similarly, the novel would have been described accordingly if it had survived the brilliant Arab critic more than a thousand years ago. In fact, Al-Asma’i’s dictum, in addition to the concept that “the more lies poetry tells, the more beauty it brings about,” applies to all other genres of literature and art, not only poetry (like it was said more than ten centuries ago as a veneration of its artistic value) and the novel (having no intention to venerate narrative fiction in this context). Both statements are intended only to emphasize the fact that moral values are narrowing down perspectives for any literary and artistic aesthetics to the extent that the two (morality and beauty) often seem to be at odds with each other.

By the same token, the temptation of the novel is not less potent than the seduction of verse, no matter how different the interpretations of this Quranic verse: “As for those poets, only the perverse follow them.”  We have just seen how novelists subject reality (and the truth being the opposite of fiction) to overt fabrications more than poets do when it comes to “telling lies” throughout literary work as a transgression of reality away from any trials about morality. Novelists are, therefore, more willing to go too far in every direction and say things that they cannot do. Worst of all, even their “job description” is grounded mainly on that sort of wandering and deliberate transcendence not only of “things they cannot do” but also of the challenging, or potentially impossible, attempts of the community (or any social context) across the pathway of knowledge and truth assimilation.

Accordingly, novelists are excellent liars. They have committed more lies than those told by poets—their poor colleagues who have been violently criticized for a sin they did not commit. All they did was let their imagination accelerate in a light way that did no harm to reality. While poets would set their imagination free to fly to faraway destinations (not always innocently but with a great deal of economy and respect vis-à-vis the different literary worlds), novelists have broken into those worlds not through their widest gates but across the doors of falsity, basically to weave their own worlds that have already taken over the hearts of beholders among distinguished critics and the general public in a way that calls for boredom. Poets felt the huge threat dragging the red carpet from beneath their feet after they had been walking proudly under the lights of public literary prominence for centuries. This is perhaps a reason why it is believed that the biggest losers in this context are generally poets, many of whom have rushed to walk in the steps of the new trend and its prestigious prizes; I, among others, do have my reasons for strongly protesting against any new “fad” in life when it diverges away from its original creativity to turn into apparently an “individual obligation.”

Thus is the authority of “new trends,” either related to the way we use clothing to beautify our bodies or the way we create pieces of literature and art to feed our souls. This is regardless of the truth claimed by each party in literature and art (and life as a whole) in a nonstop process of inventing sweet lies.