Between writer and militant: Arab realism and the accidental

This article explores Arab theories of socialist realism in the 1950s with a focus on the literary battles among Marxist-oriented critics in Egypt and Lebanon who debated literature’s role in creating a homogenous form of culture in an ideal socialist state. Analyzing works by Egyptian literary critic Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim (1922–2009) and the Lebanese Marxist critic Husayn Muruwwah (1910–1987), I explore how these thinkers understood socialist realism. Their conceptions of realism were a hybrid of Sartre’s existential call for a littérature engagée and the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism; however, these critics’ brand of realism had its own demons, specifically those that had to do with chance. Al-ʿAlim, for example, theorized coincidence as a scientific principle that could accommodate the accidental and yet remain universally valid as a philosophical method of literary and social critique. Muruwwah treated chance in relation to authorial mistake, promoting a realism that would contain potential mistakes on the road to an ideal socialist existence. The article explores how they approach chance in relation to both literary creation and its occurrence as an uncalculated event in the world represented in the literary work. It outlines how the two writers conceived of a realist literature that would provide a rational and scientific understanding of totality. Their approaches, the article illustrates, confront idealism and materialism in literary criticism, using the terms نقد (criticism) and منهج (method). To conclude, the article demonstrates how their theories mobilize the role chance plays in literary creation to push back against concurrent existentialist and romantic trends that were seen to foreground the solipsism of authorial subjectivity. It argues that their deployment of chance adapts socialist realism to respond to debates on cultural autonomy and authorial agency in the Cold War Arab world. Their treatment of chance reveals how they adapted literary trends to speak to possibilities of Arab literary autonomy in the time period.