Humph

This shouldn't gall me, so common is that attitude, and perhaps it is simply that it is the fourth or fifth such blind, watery mindlessness that I have come across today, but really. What's got my goat? The insufferable willingness of the chattering class to try and puff themselves up while insulting their readers, most often without even the wit to realize that they are doing so.

Claudia Roth-Pierpont of the New Yorker is this evening's example. In her article in the January 18, 2010 New Yorker, Found in Translation, she manages to hold back till all of the second paragraph before beginning to show her disrespect for her reader.

Our long history of indifference has made it difficult, down the years, to come by stories of Arab life that do not involve genies or magic lamps. True, the novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon in Arabic literature; poetry, an ancient art, has traditionally held wider prestige.

I don't think you have to be overly sensistive to read "Our long history of indifference . . . " as a sotto voce accusation of our own reading habits. And who is this "Our" Kimosabe? I was reading Lebanese and Palestinian writers in college nearly thirty years ago. But that's just me. Indifference? Well maybe people have other interests. Even the most enthusiastic 10% of readers only read an average of 25 books a year. Given all the non-fiction books, attractive but more plebian genres such as mysteries and adventure stories, and the five hundred years of authorial outpouring in English much less the rest of Western literature, there is an awfully large backlog of books to get through that probably have higher interest/cultural affinity/usefulness/etc. before you get to contemporary literary fiction of the Middle East. So indifference: let's be fair to the reader and say it is not indifference but different priorities. Or at least priorities different than those of Claudia Roth-Pierpont.

But it gets worse. Roth-Pierpont then goes on in her article to acknowledge that, in terms of novels:

The form developed sporadically in the first half of the last century, and no more than three or four Arabic novels appeared in English before the mid-fifties. After the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize, in 1988, there was a significant surge of interest - Mahfouz himself finally got an American commercial publisher - but the burden of bringing Arabic books to English readers still falls mainly on devoted translators, and on the small and heroic presses that have performed this service from the start. Their joint efforts have rarely mattered more. The Arab reading public, although avid for all sorts of fiction, in a plethora of newspapers and cheap feuilletons, has (for evident economic reasons) not fully embraced the novel as a published book. Few Arabic novels sell enough copies to earn their authors anything like a living income; even Mahfouz kept a civil-service job until he was sixty.

So, before the 1950's there were only a couple of novels translated, there haven't been many since then, and the Arab reading public itself is pretty indifferent to the novels being written. One is left to wonder just what sort of contorted world view it is, if these are the facts, that allows one to conclude that Western readers carry some special burden for their long history of indifference which they apparently share with the Arab reading public. This all smacks of supplicating self-criticism in the face of a reality that the author doesn't wish to acknowledge but is comfortable to translate into bilious accusations against her readers. You could leap to a further conclusion that is even worse, i.e. that Roth-Pierpont has higher expectations of her Western readers than she has of Arab readers, but let's not go in that direction.

All of which is pretty disapointing since the article in its entirity is actually pretty interesting. But how many readers drop out after that first gratuitous, baseless and non-contributing insult? So what is my gripe? I guess it would be the wish that our chattering classes would actually practice what they preach. 1) Respect people; 2) Expand your horizons and respect a true diversity of world views including those that view the Western intellectual heritage as a valuable one; and 3) Drop the ludicrous assumption that westerners are responsible for all the world's ills.

Roth-Pierpont ends her article with the anodyne observation that "it is unquestionably good to have stories that we hold in common." True enough, let's get there by presenting them well (as she does) and not insulting people along the way.

By the way, and ending on a happier note after this rantlet, there is a very intriguing book, regrettably out of print, The Past We Share, by E.L. Ravenlagh which diligently tracks those stories that we do in fact already share ranging from Biblical stories such as Joseph and Potiphar's Wife through folkstories of the Middle Ages. Very interesting indeed.

I have to add that I love the picture with which they illustrate the article. It brings back memories of when I was a boy and we lived in Libya. A visit to the souk was always a sensory delight: the colors, the smells, the sounds, the sights, the light and shade of the constant sun.


Photograph: Peter Adams/Getty