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The Role of the Reader in the Fiction of Muḥammad Khuḍayyir

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The Role of the Reader in the Fiction of Muḥammad Khuḍayyir University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 A Shared Imaginary City: The Role Of The Reader In The Fiction Of Muḥammad Khuḍayyir John Joseph Henry Rossetti University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Modern Literature Commons, and the Near Eastern Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Rossetti, John Joseph Henry, "A Shared Imaginary City: The Role Of The Reader In The Fiction Of Muḥammad Khuḍayyir" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2557. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2557 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2557 For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Shared Imaginary City: The Role Of The Reader In The Fiction Of Muḥammad Khuḍayyir Abstract This study examines the literary output of the Iraqi author Muḥammad Khuḍayyir (b. 1942), and specifically analyzes how his fiction—by turns puzzle-like, metafictional, and open-ended—invites the reader to create meaning. This project employs the theoretical approach of reader-response theory to examine his texts, specifically addressing the work of three theorists: firstly, Umberto Eco and his concept of the “open work” as a distinct quality of modern literature; secondly, Wolfgang Iser, who proposed that texts destabilize the reader’s horizon of expectations, and thus prompt her to fill in its gaps; and finally, Stanley Fish, who argues that a reader’s response is structured by his participation in an interpretive community. These insights are applied to stories from Khuḍayyir’s collections (al-Mamlaka al-sawdāʾ [1972], Fī darajat khams wa-arbaʿīn miʾawī [1978], and Ruʾyā kharīf [1995]), as well as to his full-length texts (Baṣrayāthā [1993], Kurrāsat Kānūn [2000], and Ḥadāʾiq al-wujūh [2008]). Notably, his longer works blend elements of fiction, literary essay, memoir, and history, and thus subvert familiar expectations of genre. The prolonged violence wrought by war and international sanctions—particularly the destruction that his home city of Basra endured during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988)—has prompted Khuḍayyir’s thematic preoccupation with an organic local past that stubbornly endures against forces that seek to erase it. This sense of endurance is encapsulated in his magnum opus, Baṣrayāthā. The city of Baṣrayāthā, Basra’s fictional analogue, appears not only in the book of the same name, but in several of his more recent stories. In them, Khuḍayyir envisions memory as urban space, and the city as a palimpsest of all its past historical iterations. Drawing on Fish, this study suggests that Baṣrayāthā and its interpretive community are mutually generative: not only does a pre-existing set of readers familiar with the Iraqi context create aesthetic meaning from a text such as Baṣrayāthā, but the book in turn creates its interpretive community, as evidenced by some of the extra-textual phenomena influenced by Khuḍayyir’s literary project. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations First Advisor Roger M. Allen Keywords Arabic, Basra, fiction, Iraq, Muhammad Khudayyir, reader response theory Subject Categories Modern Literature | Near Eastern Languages and Societies This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2557 ii for Umm Mumkin, Harīdī, and Yaḥyā al-ṣabr jamīl iii ABSTRACT A SHARED IMAGINARY CITY: THE ROLE OF THE READER IN THE FICTION OF MUḤAMMAD KHUḌAYYIR John Rossetti Roger Allen This study examines the literary output of the Iraqi author Muḥammad Khuḍayyir (b. 1942), and specifically analyzes how his fiction—by turns puzzle-like, metafictional, and open-ended—invites the reader to create meaning. This project employs the theoretical approach of reader-response theory to examine his texts, specifically addressing the work of three theorists: firstly, Umberto Eco and his concept of the “open work” as a distinct quality of modern literature; secondly, Wolfgang Iser, who proposed that texts destabilize the reader’s horizon of expectations, and thus prompt her to fill in its gaps; and finally, Stanley Fish, who argues that a reader’s response is structured by his participation in an interpretive community. These insights are applied to stories from Khuḍayyir’s collections (al-Mamlaka al-sawdāʾ [1972], Fī darajat khams wa-arbaʿīn miʾawī [1978], and Ruʾyā kharīf [1995]), as well as to his full-length texts (Baṣrayāthā [1993], Kurrāsat Kānūn [2000], and Ḥadāʾiq al-wujūh [2008]). Notably, his longer works blend iv elements of fiction, literary essay, memoir, and history, and thus subvert familiar expectations of genre. The prolonged violence wrought by war and international sanctions—particularly the destruction that his home city of Basra endured during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988)—has prompted Khuḍayyir’s thematic preoccupation with an organic local past that stubbornly endures against forces that seek to erase it. This sense of endurance is encapsulated in his magnum opus, Baṣrayāthā. The city of Baṣrayāthā, Basra’s fictional analogue, appears not only in the book of the same name, but in several of his more recent stories. In them, Khuḍayyir envisions memory as urban space, and the city as a palimpsest of all its past historical iterations. Drawing on Fish, this study suggests that Baṣrayāthā and its interpretive community are mutually generative: not only does a pre-existing set of readers familiar with the Iraqi context create aesthetic meaning from a text such as Baṣrayāthā, but the book in turn creates its interpretive community, as evidenced by some of the extra-textual phenomena influenced by Khuḍayyir’s literary project. v Table of Contents Introduction 1 Part I: Theory 15 Chapter 1: Reader Response Theory and Reception Theory 16 1.1 Introduction 16 1.2 Background: New Criticism and the Affective Fallacy 19 1.3 Emergence of Reader Response Theories 23 1.4 Umberto Eco and the Open Work 24 1.5 The Konstanz School 32 1.6 Hans-Robert Jauss and the Horizon of Expectations (Erwartungshorizont) 34 1.7 Wolfgang Iser and Reader Response 37 1.7.1 The Text’s Controlling Structure and the Reader’s Performance 40 1.7.2 Repertoires and Strategies 43 1.7.3 Coherent Deformations 45 1.7.4 “Blanks” in the Text 47 1.8 Stanley Fish: Meaning-Making and Interpretive Communities 50 1.8.1 Reading as an Event 52 1.8.2 Formal Units and Interpretive Strategies 54 1.8.3 Interpretive Communities 58 1.9 Conclusion 63 Part II: Context 67 Chapter 2: Modern Iraqi Fiction 68 2.1 Introduction 68 2.2 The Emergence of Iraqi Literary Fiction 69 2.3 Mandate Iraq and the Parameters of Iraqi Fiction 75 vi 2.4 Iraqi Fiction in the 1930s and 1940s: Romanticism and Dhū l-Nūn Ayyūb 80 2.5 Ascendancy of Socialist Realism 83 2.6 The Decline of Socialist Realism and the Shift from Metonymy to Metaphor 89 2.7 State Co-optation of Intellectuals and “The Project for Rewriting History” (Mashrūʿ li-iʿādat kitābat al-tārīkh) 95 2.8 Repression, Silence, and Exile: The Impact of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) 102 2.9 Violence, Sanctions, and War 106 2.10 Iraqi Fiction after 2003 111 2.11 Conclusion 113 Chapter 3: Muḥammad Khuḍayyir—His Life, Background, and Fiction 114 3.1 Introduction 114 3.2. Biography and Background 114 3.3 Published Writings 119 3.4 Basra 123 3.5 Khuḍayyir’s Writings on Authors, Texts, and Readers 130 3.6 Khuḍayyir and Iraqi History and Identity 140 3.7 Khuḍayyir and Iraqi State Power 143 3.8 Khuḍayyir and His Peers 145 3.9 Conclusion 152 Part III: Application 154 Chapter 4: Ambiguity, Indeterminacy and the Construction of Meaning: Khuḍayyir’s Stories as “Open Works” 155 4.1 Introduction 155 4.2 “Al-Tābūt” 156 4.3 “Al-Asmāk” 163 4.4 “Ilā l-maʾwā” 168 vii 4.5 “Iḥtiḍār al-rassām” 175 4.6 Conclusion 178 Chapter 5: Defamiliarizations and Deformations in Khuḍayyir’s Fiction 180 5.1 Introduction 180 5.2 Defamiliarization through the Magical and Uncanny 183 5.2.1 “Ẓahīrat al-qirṭa” 184 5.2.2 “Shajarat al-asmāʾ” 188 5.2.3 “al-Mamlaka al-sawdāʾ” 192 5.3 Defamiliarization through Narrative Doubling 196 5.3.1 “al-Qiṭārāt al-layliyya” 198 5.3.2 “Manzil al-nisāʾ” 201 5.4 Defamiliarization of Genre 209 5.4.1 Kurrāsat kānūn 211 5.4.2 Ḥadāʾiq al-wujūh 221 5.5 Conclusion 229 Chapter 6: Khuḍayyir’s Interpretive Community 232 6.1 Introduction 232 6.2 The City as Interpretive Community 235 6.3 Reclaiming Memory for the Interpretive Community 238 6.3.1 “Ruʾyā al-burj” 240 6.3.2 “Ḥikāyāt Yūsuf” 247 6.3.3 “al-Ḥukamāʾ al-thalātha” 252 6.4 Evocations of Danger and Fear 256 6.4.1 “Ṣaḥīfat al-tasāʾulāt” 257 6.5 Baṣrayāthā: An Invitation to an Interpretive Community 270 6.6 Conclusion 286 Conclusion 288 viii Appendix: Khuḍayyir’s Short Stories 292 Bibliography 296 Index 312 1 Introduction Hundreds of eyes have looked at it, extracting from its letters a refined elixir for the mind or memory. A series of substances and transmigrating souls pass into this literary work—the author is not the first of them, nor is the final reader the last, but between them is a continuous stream or successive series of recipients. Each of them relates it to himself or imagines it as something for his life…1 Why does a shared imaginary city appear to every one? Because the sources of this dream are one: the desert surrounding the city’s walls, its domes, the tunes pouring from towers, earth, forests, and clouds are possessions held in common among dreamers, limitless symbols, realizations driven by winds from one imaginative region to another.2 —from al-Ḥikāya al-Jadīda (The New Tale) This study examines the literary output of the Iraqi author Muḥammad Khuḍayyir (b.
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