In the 7th grade I became a philosopher. It is not that I had never read anything philosophical before, because by the 7th grade most Americans have, but the day my english teacher asked us to pull out our books to discuss a reading we had been doing the week before is one of my earliest memories of a truly intellectually engaging moment. Of course, it would be easy to dismiss reading The Kite Runner as reading just another somber novel that everyone’s uninspired english teacher loves to analyze the figurative language in. In part, that is what The Kite Runner and the hundreds of literary works required to be read in middle school, high school, and college, are rightfully used for. But those compositions are the very same compositions that have turned the American student body of English, yes, including you, into philosophers.
It is probably in my best interest to clarify what I mean by philosophy, as I am sure the above statement is going to make some heads turn. The idea of philosophy in the respect that I mean to use it is certainly not the exact same respect that comes to mind when someone says “Hey, how about the philosophy of that guy Aristotle”, nor is it the debatably useless major that so many colleges still love to offer (I can say this because I am a philosophy major myself.) The best way to characterize it would be to keep it to its less modern, and therefor less refined, primal components. Put in simplest terms, it is powerful writing conveying some serious thought or ideology, or “scholarly writing”, as some may call it. This writing is generally associated with only proportions of people that specialize in philosophy, the philosophy “scholars” if you will. Granting all this, it becomes a loose term as we realize that philosophical writing lays in a lot more than just a theory of ethics text book.

Source: http://khaledhosseini.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/TheKiteRunner-cvr-thumb.jpg

To understand the claim that Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel, The Kite Runner, is just as philosophical as, let’s say Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (a philosophical work that discusses guilt and punishment, amongst other aspects of morality), it would help to provide some context of where the novel is coming from. Hosseini, who was born and lived many of his formative years in Afghanistan, wrote the novel with his homeland, which at the time of writing had been devastated by changes made by the Taliban, reflecting heavily on some characteristics of his early life, but also basing much of the book purely of imaginative fiction. The Kite Runner is like most melodramas of the 21st century. The common themes, striving for a seemingly distant father’s affection, reminiscing of a time in a place that is no longer present as it used to be, and regret, are all present throughout the book.
The plot line is a a simple one really, with a man, Amir, recalling his childhood in Afghanistan, and his relationship with one of his best friends, Hassan. As he recalls his childhood, he battles with understanding his relationship with his father, and his innocent juvenile selfishness that ultimately results in years of uncertainty, regret, and most important for the purposes of this paper, guilt.
There is a reoccurring, as English teachers love to call it, “theme”, regarding guilt and the emotional revelations experienced upon growing up throughout the novel. From the very beginning of the book, literally the first words “I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975…” (Hosseini 1), there is a suggestions of some traumatic event that haunted the protagonist for the rest of the novel. In the following paragraph, the ball is further dropped and a guilty conscious is confirmed with the line “It was my past of unatoned sins” (Hosseini 1).
But what does that mean to us, the reader, if there is a reoccurring theme of guilt? How does that have anything to do with revelations or philosophy. Well, those expository moments are the book’s way of leveling off with the reader and establishing a platform off which an argument is built. It would be strange to jump straight into whatever the book is trying to say of guilt and redemption without putting those two things in some context.
With a foundation set, Hosseini can, and does, spend the rest of the novel making some point of this marginally familiar feeling of guilt and desire of redemption. One of the most substantial points the book puts out, is the idea that guilt can make us act irrationally (no surprise there) and, in fact, lead us to undertake some business that we would not normally do. Hosseini demonstrates this theory using events that occurred in Amir’s youthful years leading up to his departure from Afghanistan. Amir, driven by biting feelings of guilt that are rooted in how he acted as a passive bystander to [spoiler alert!] Hassan’s rape, can not fathom how Hassan has no resentment towards him. Out of hopes to feel some release through punishment, Amir aims to drive Hassan into being angry at him by doing various despicable things. At one point, Amir pelts Hassan with pomegranates, later he frames Hassan for stealing a watch and some other birthday goods. Ultimately, Amir does not receive the release he is looking for, and his guilt manifests itself as anger toward Hassan for being so mild and not seeking revenge.
In addition to these irrational, and quite frankly ironic, actions that Amir takes in coping with his guilt, we also see into the primitive human mind. Amir is angry because he feels guilty and wants Hassan to punish him. By this, Amir is looking for his guilt to be relieved, and while it may seem that Amir is a morally conscious person who wants to be punished for his wrong doings, he really only wants to be punished so that he can move on with his life. Punishment would be a good thing for Amir, as he would be released from any “debts” he owes to Hassan.
The use of the word “debt” was not of pure chance. It is the gateway to the philosophy of all of what was discussed above. We can now turn to concept of the primitive human’s mind and the selfish desire to be relieved of any emotional debt owned, aka guilt. In Friedrich Nietzsche Genealogy of Morals, a fairly well-known work in the philosophy world, Nietzsche talks of the roots of guilt, and how it is strongly associated with the German word “Schuld” which means debt (Nietzsche 39). The very theme described by Nietzsche is paralleled Hosseini’s work, but put in a more personal setting.
Just as in The Kite Runner, In Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche also alludes to the idea of how being guilty limits the freedom people have in decision making. So like how Hosseini writes of Amir’s inability to make rational decisions when he is under the influence of guilt, Nietzsche argues that having an undisturbed conscience leads every individual to have the great responsibility of being liable for all their own actions. (Nietzsche 23)

Source: http://asiaportrayed.weebly.com/uploads/2/8/0/6/28061643/9861971_orig.png

Hosseini wrote The Kite Runner on and off for a little over three years, balancing out his morning writing sessions and his regular job practicing medicine, as we would expect of an entertainment writer. While many other popular novels had been published that same year, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and The Sisterhood Of the Traveling Pants, to name a few, The Kite Runner experienced some rather impressive successes. Its success as a novel is a great external factor as to why it can be seen as not just a plausible piece of philosophy, but a strong sample of philosophy for that matter. The parallels between the philosophy of Nietzsche and The Kite Runner should appear more than obvious at this point. What may not be as obvious, or at least not as much of a priority to think about when considering The Kite Runner as philosophy, is the idea that a work of literature just served an equally important lesson in the philosophy of ethics and guilt as Nietzsche, but in a more accessible and (a claim that I have only personal evidence to support but nonetheless is plausible) more entertaining fashion. When will you ever read the Genealogy of Morality on your own terms? How about The Kite Runner? It is safe to say that most of the young adults in America’s middle school, high school, and college systems now, would probably prefer to read a books like The Kite Runner as opposed to Nietzsche.
What does this say about literature as philosophy? For one thing, it certainly appears to be more accessible. That is a big claim to make considering that many have yet to see literature is philosophical (but if you read this paper and understood anything of it, I am sure you would at least reconsider taking a second look at the evidence supporting such a claim). Literature has undoubtedly historically been more accessible to general populations, as opposed to Philosophy, which requires a specific type of education and mindset. Literature makes philosophy more accessible, and because it is framed more attractively, it can spread ideas more conveniently. So, as we see that literature is more accessible than traditional forms of philosophy, we also begin to see that it is more effective at the job of spreading knowledge. It can be said that literature is like philosophy but more accessible and more effective. The effectiveness of literature to spread complex ideas comes partially from its natural accessibility, but also from its framing. The ideas are hidden in literature and cloaked in such a way that the reader almost has no chance to argue agains the philosophy. In order to enjoy and enjoy a novel in its rawest sense, there are philosophical ideas that are accepted as a baseline for understanding.
So what is the role of philosophy? In order to unpack the deep philosophical meanings within literary texts, experience in classical philosophy certainly will not hurt.
Any job that can be done by philosophy can most certainly be accomplished on a wider scale by literature. Literary philosophy, however, can be a two sided dagger. As suggested above, it will often require the acceptance of various philosophical ideas. Within literature, the acceptance of the ideas comes subconsciously. In other words, in books like The Kite Runner, philosophy gets served under the veil of entertainment. We can accept ideas without fully understanding them. The concern for lack of a deeper more holistic understanding, as opposed to a special case understanding, is likely to be the reason that regular philosophy is still around today. In other words, while philosophy in literature can be just as powerful and more accessible that traditional philosophy, we carry on with the study of regular philosophy because the philosophy scholars are afraid of losing their imagined “edge” over the rest of us philosophizing school kids.

I think I should start by stating this plainly, because there is really no kind way to put it, and because at least then you’ll know what you’re getting yourself into: fiction is the most dangerous hell-spawn form of literature there is, and we should be scared of it. We would, were we half as wise or kind as we claim to be, board up the bookstores and liken “storytime” to a perverted pastime of the ignorant before, speaking of the days spent in novels with sighs and helpless lamentations, murmuring reassurances that at least, now we know. We would call for the heads of those great trespassers that stand before us now, tirelessly spinning a web of beautiful lies that we promptly ensnare ourselves within, writing and re-writing the world with the callous and careless letters that drip unheedingly from their fingertips; down with Dickens, out with Austen, and will someone please tell J.K. Rowling to shut up.

There. I’ve said it, and I’m not taking it back.

Before you slam the laptop shut in anger, before you roll your eyes in derision, before you scroll mindlessly past what seems to be another hackneyed, jaded, backwards blogger fighting Society and condemning conformism, allow me a moment of exoneration. I’m not going to argue that we shouldn’t have fiction. I’m really not. Selling that horse would take a lot more time and patience than I’m sure either of us have, and, quite frankly, it’s not one I particularly want to sell. And I’m almost positive it’s not one you want to buy. It’s really not the point I’m trying to make here. What I’m saying is that literature that we classify as being false; more than that, literature that we fully and truly expect to be false, that we ardently desire to be false, harms us because we are so captivated by the eloquent designs carved onto a sheet of lies that we fail to see the torrent of truth rushing beneath.

Before we go further, I invite you to take a moment and fall backwards through the passage of time with me. Screw your eyes shut, if that helps, and recall fondly that favorite book from childhood. Specifically, find that first book you really fell in love with, when you were finally old and wise enough to understand the gravity of words placed delicately in a sentence, when rhymes and nonsense syllables gave way to the development of lovable characters and the fine points of plot structure. To read that first book again, to pore over the pages with unabashed excitement, to capture and hold in your mind and your heart the first story of your existence! Cue the sentimental music.

Out of curiosity, show of hands for anyone thinking of The Phantom Tollbooth?

For the unacquainted, The Phantom Tollbooth is widely considered a classic pick for that first love a la literature experience: you’ve got the all-too-relatable protagonist (a young boy named Milo), the whimsical sidekicks (a half clock-half dog named Tock and a likewise rhetorically relevant oversized beetle called the Humbug), an epic quest (to bring the princesses Rhyme and Reason back to the Kingdom of Wisdom), a formidable foe (in the form of various dastardly demons who attempt to thwart Milo’s mission), a whole cast of quirky side characters (we’ll get to them in a minute), and, of course, a moral at the end, delivered in a tidy bow, signed, Societal Expectations (being, in this case, to question, explore, and appreciate the glorious world around you). For added fun, the author, Norton Juster, packs the book to the brim with puns, word play, and logic problems by setting the novel in a made-up world, accessible only through a mysterious tollbooth, complete with the feuding cities of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis and a literal take on all the whimsies of the English language. The book is thinking about thinking, playing with language, and seems, as Common Sense Media puts it, a perfect score in educational value, positive messages, and positive role models. A seasoned writer from The New York Review of Books insists that it remains, to this day, one of the best books of our time. It was selected as NPR’s November 2011 Kids’ Book Club Pick, for Christ’s sake, and if that’s not a stamp of squeaky clean liberal approval, then I don’t know what is. Good, clean, innocent fun for all. Right?

Right! That is, if you’re a White, educated, English-speaking male Westerner. Juster, born and raised in Brooklyn in 1929, loads the novel with so many clichés about “foreigners” projected onto the various side characters that it becomes hard to keep straight the hodgepodge of ethnicities. He certainly doesn’t ease us into them, either: the very first character we’re introduced to in this markedly foreign and visually exotic land is short, plump, and wearing a toga. He’s called “the whether man” and apparently spends his time asking pointless questions that lead him nowhere…Juster:1, Greek philosophers:0.

Before I continue, I want to take a minute to speak to the importance of illustrations in this book, because they arguably play just as big a role as the words themselves (if not bigger, in some regards). First, it needs to be noted that the illustrator, Jules Feiffer, was a long time friend of Juster, and the two of them collaborated heavily on the novel. That means that Juster directed, edited, and signed off on all the illustrations as being accurate representations of his original vision, and that’s really important. We can’t dismiss the pictures as a separate, afterthought-like apparatus, claiming independence from Juster’s true words, but instead are forced to accept them as a reflection of his narration. And this is crucial. Because on more than one occasion an illustration elaborates on physical details not enumerated in the text, but shapes our perception of the story all the same. An example: by the description of one character, we know he has big ears and a small mustache, but it’s not until we get a stylized illustration that pulls in previously unmentioned overbearing eyebrows and a skinny, hairy body that creates a full Middle Eastern type look (a look furthered by his tendency to create “unpleasant sounds” and keeping of an analogous genie in a lamp).

This matter plays an even bigger role when we consider the audience that this book is catered towards: young readers. New readers, coming straight off picture books, who drink in visual representations to quench the dry taste of words not fully understood, and pull in hungrily from their senses to feed the ever-gnawing questions surrounding their slow descent into the sea of knowledge.

And this all takes significance in the following manner: if a child reading this text misses the subtle jab at totalitarian government in the form of a single character acting as policeman, judge, and jailer, the same character who is constantly angry, bossy, self-centered, and irrational, whom Juster has the audacity to send into battle riding a dachshund (because the whole “German” thing wasn’t coming across enough), he or she can still identify the presented image of a short, stout, severe, bald, flat-headed man as someone who is overall unsavory. And now the association can (in fact, must) be drawn between those traits and actions outlined in the story, and the visual presentation of this character. Lo and behold, here we have it: the birth of a stereotype. Because even if a child doesn’t yet know to label this character, it is the tireless and unthinking repetition of these caricatures that allow them to infiltrate and perpetuate in the minds of an entire nation of individuals. And it begins here, in the minds of children who project themselves onto a protagonist, and therefore the world of the protagonist onto their own; here, by pairing the idea that if someone looks like x they will act like y; here, in the pages of a story so delightfully whimsical that we hardly think to look twice.

To be fair, it is not necessary to have illustrations for this mental molding to take place: it simply augments the process for young children, for whom the words might not always conjure up already formed images. And I’m not claiming that every character from every novel does this: rather, just that The Phantom Tollbooth does this particularly well with a large portion of its characters, mainly (and unfortunately) because it exemplifies these typecasts that we see again, and again, and again.

I can hear your counter argument; I can hear you telling me to lay off already. I’m reading too far into the subtext, seeing ghosts in the lines, and, after all, surely the author didn’t intend any of these things, so, no harm, no foul, goodnight.

Alright, so I think there’s some definite weight to the argument that Juster didn’t intend for all of the subtext. Take, for example, the character Faintly Macabre, a shriveled grandmotherly figure with an unfortunately sized hook-nose, seen sitting in a rocking chair, knitting, while she tells stories and offers hard candy to our protagonists, recalling how her own selfishness and greed landed the country in economic peril before she was stripped of her power and sent to jail. She so overwhelmingly embodies the typical Jewish babushka (the word macabre, after all, deriving from the Jewish name Maccabee), and yet Juster himself is Jewish. This becomes a tally in favor of the idea that perhaps all of us, even our author, have been inadvertently and unwittingly instilled with stereotypes so deeply rooted that we fail to recognize them if we forget to look. But the stereotype itself is still present, even if we don’t acknowledge it. In fact, it is exactly in not acknowledging it that it becomes all the more dangerous. It is easy to fight a demon standing plainly in front of you, but the task takes on an entirely new dimension when the demon is invisible; or worse, when we fail to realize that the demon even exists.

And this is where the danger of fiction truly lies. Let us return to the novel for a moment, because, besides typecasting his entire crew into what ultimately play out as long-embedded societal stereotypes, Juster is additionally guilty of incorporating a symphony of white supremacy ideals into the language and plot itself. He openly condones the imperialistic acts of the supposed “good guys,” who literally sailed into this imaginary land and “in the name of goodness and truth…laid claim to all the country”, driving out the savage, lazy, non-time keeping, uneducated (as in, non-English speaking; there’s one great scene where the characters literally eat the letters of the English language and talk about how exclusively delicious it is) natives. Really. And we’re all fine and dandy with this, in the same way we’re all on board with blatant stereotypes running rampant throughout the novel, because we remove the concept of reality from something we’ve already designated as being unreal.

What I mean is this: when we read non-fiction, we become critical because we know we are looking at an analysis of facts. You can disagree with a historical standpoint; you can think a philosopher got it wrong. But we seem to lose that inherent power of opinion when faced with fiction. You can like it, or you can dislike it, but you can’t exactly say that it’s wrong or right if it doesn’t truly exist in the first place. No one would take me seriously if I said that the dog’s name was supposed to be Tick instead of Tock, and that Juster was telling it all wrong, because we give authors license to lie to us in whatever manner they please, under the assumption that we will accept it as is. And thus is the saving grace of the author, of the poet, of the playwright: the farther they publically distance themselves from reality, the more they seemingly delve into a world of their own creation, the more remote such concepts of right and wrong become.

And this would all be fine and good, except for that fiction isn’t independent of reality: in fact, quite the opposite. All of our stories, even the ones where a boy and watchdog and beetle run rampant through a land of pure imagination, are grounded in true life, and they all carry elements of that throughout. But we are so quick to forget this that we fail to recognize the language of our own reality, even when it is staring us straight in the face. At one point, the novel uses direct anti-immigration rhetoric to decry the influx of new “sounds” (read as: foreign languages), but no one blinks an eye because we aren’t looking for a political ideology wrapped in a children’s tale. And it is this selective blindness that makes us so vulnerable to the power of suggestion in fiction, because we buy into real world concepts that have been so trussed up by decorative language and thrilling plot sequences that we forget that they pertain to our own lives. We forget how to see racism, sexism, anti-Semitism because we have been so desensitized to these concepts throughout our entire literary experience. We perpetuate and internalize them without thought, and thusly project them onto the world with an equal measure of carelessness. And in doing so, we move these stereotypes, these ideologies, from the world of fiction into our own lives, blithely unaware of the gravity of our own ignorance.

I would stop here, but there’s one more thing I cannot, in good conscience, ignore. There’s only one decidedly dark skinned character in the entire novel, and that character is the Humbug. He isn’t an overt antagonist, so at first this might seem like a step in the right direction, but the way he is instead cast is, arguably, more damaging. He is the foil to the pure, brave virtue of Tock; decidedly untrustworthy, incredibly lazy, incorrigibly cowardly and distinctly lacking in intellect. He makes it into the motley crew, but serves mainly as comic relief, the bumbling oaf who is constantly the cause of whatever rotten mess they’ve gotten themselves into this time. The kicker? Besides being the only black character, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to an African Hercules beetle, Juster makes a point to dwell on the fact that the Humbug is afraid of water, and can’t swim. And, in the same vein, the only two strong female characters in the novel, the princesses Rhyme and Reason, are without exception described and praised primarily for their beauty. Seriously, there’s not a single time that the book talks about them without talking about how they look, whereas we don’t get a single physical description of Milo, our male protagonist. And somehow, also, although these princesses are supposed to be wise and all knowing, it’s not until Milo shows up to save them that they can leave their Castle in the Sky? The one that literally has stairs leading up to it? So, what I’m really trying to say, or rather, what Juster is saying, is that if you’re an educated white boy in America, sure, the novel’s chock full of strong messages and stellar role models, and that’s all great and fine for them. But for everyone else? Well…I guess you were going to have to live out that constructed reality eventually.

It is claimed “You only need to be a good writer if you don’t have truth and justice on your side.” As Socrates determines early in his debate with Gorgias, the truth is weak; in order for rhetoric to be persuasive, it is imperative that the argument is painted in the best light possible. Consistently throughout history, we have seen biased speeches portraying opinions in a perspective entirely different from our own. Oftentimes, these speeches rely on personal, and therefore relatable, experiences, making the account seem much more reliable. Now, whether or not these speeches are examples of “good writing” is ambiguous; sometimes, these speeches work, while other times, they fall short. Additionally, it is often the case that these speechmakers must have “good” speeches, because their reasons are unjust or ignoble. One of the most infamous combinations of an unjust, yet skillful rhetorician is Hitler; though Hitler’s cause was barbaric, he managed to win the support of the German nation. What made thousands of people blindly follow him, emulating him as the savior of Germany? It is evident that he had neither truth nor justice on his side, yet he was able to inspire millions of people and persuade them to support his cause. We must ask ourselves why people were so inspired by him; what did they see in him that would justify such a ruthless cause as the Holocaust? In addition to this, we must consider whether Hitler’s speeches were cases of “good writing;” was Hitler truly a “good” rhetorician, or were the German people simply ignorant and desperate for a leader? As a whole, what makes people “good” writers? When exploring the themes common to people deemed “good writers,” or “good orators,” these people tend to rely on similar strategies; hyperbole, personalization, eloquence, and charisma. When considering the prominence of exaggeration in writing, one must speculate whether any writing holds the truth, or whether good writing is reliant upon exaggeration and deceit. The best way to delve into these questions is to make a case study out of Hitler and figure out why he was able to inspire such a large mass of people in his attempt to kill off an entire race.

The answer lies with his charisma and his adeptness at persuasion; Hitler, just like many great politicians, disguised deceit and hyperbole within eloquent and moving speeches, both relating to and inspiring his citizens in the process. His speeches were compelling enough to justify decimating an entire race of people, while opposing the greatest powers in the world and threatening the destruction of the German nation. His passion and charisma were convincing enough to justify his extreme views.

In his “Fuhrer to the German People,” on June 22, 1941, he presents himself as the hero who attempted to maintain peace, despite the unwillingness of the enemies to compromise. Though Hitler’s cause was unjust, the strategies he employed in his speeches were compelling and eloquent, thus enabling him to convince millions of people to follow him. The accuracy of his speech did not matter nearly as much as did the delivery and the reassuring nature of it. Hitler begins his speech by bringing up Britain’s past aggressions, making it seem like they are the nation that is unwilling to compromise, painting Germany into a tranquil and stable state that Britain wishes to destroy: “…the British attempted once again to frustrate any attempt to begin a consolidation, and thus a strengthening, of Europe by fighting the then strongest power on the continent.”(Bytwerk, Randall). Portraying Britain as a menacing force that is seeking to weaken the continent of Europe as a whole is a brilliant strategy for creating a common enemy among the German people, as they rely on Hitler to offer solace and options to fight off this threat to the survival of their continent and country. Not only does Hitler depict Britain as the ultimate threat to the European continent, but he expands this idea by claiming that Britain was the catalyst for the start of World War I: “In summer 1939, England thought that the time had come to renew its attempts to destroy Germany by a policy of encirclement. Their method was to begin a campaign of lies. They declared that Germany threatened other peoples. They then provided an English guarantee of support and assistance, next, as in the World War, let them march against Germany” (Bytwerk, Randall). Hitler evades mentioning the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at the hands of a Serbian nationalist, choosing instead to focus on portraying England as the main point of contention in the World War. Instilling fear within the people would encourage them to look for a powerful and reassuring figure to save them from a common enemy. And sure enough, Hitler is right there delivering a speech that offers a way to save Germany. Throughout his speech, Hitler relies upon certain untruths and deceptions to win the trust and confidence of his citizens, proving that the truth does not matter in cases of threat, since people only seek reassurance and promises of security. Hitler further depends on this strategy when he claims the Jews and Democrats are united in a conspiracy against the strengthening of the German government; “…we faced the plot we all know about between Jews and democrats…to prevent the establishment of a new people’s state, to plunge the Reich again into impotence and misery.” (Bytwerk, Randall). Here, Hitler characterizes democrats and Jews as the enemy, thus justifying his desire to annihilate them, as a mechanism of self-defense. When the threat of one’s own country is taken into consideration, people have a tendency to act impulsively as a means of self-preservation.

The diction Hitler uses throughout his speech results in an incredibly powerful outcome of simultaneously flattering Germany and its citizens, while denigrating the Soviet Union and Britain, representing them as ruthless and jealous enemies. Hitler claims England wishes to “destroy” Germany, as the Reich grows more powerful, for they fear the strength of the Germans. Hitler relies upon commending his own efforts and accomplishments in maintaining peace, stabilizing and strengthening Germany, and attempting to compromise with Germany’s enemies, as a strategy throughout his speech. In his speech, Hitler claims “I kept silent about all this, because I had to keep silent…” (Bytwerk, Randall) and “I behaved as the responsible leader of the German Reich, but also as a responsible representative of European culture and civilization” (Bytwerk, Randall). He is certainly not short of being sycophantic in his speech, which is a central method in his orations. Incorporating direct personal pronouns proves to the people that he is the only hero in this situation, the only way Germany can be victorious against the enemy. Hitler is certainly not shy about ensuring that he is given the credit he deserves in his efforts to preserve the German nation and make peace with its enemies. By personalizing his speech, Hitler makes it more relatable and thus more believable; he seems to be saying “we are all in this together;” “Germany is not being threatened, we are being threatened, and here is what I will do to save us.” When Hitler declares, “When the German government gives a guarantee, it will stand by it…we are neither English nor Jewish,” (Bytwerk, Randall) he directly confronts Jews and the English as being deceitful, while maintaining Germany’s noble illusion. Hitler’s genius rhetorical strategies rely on deception, diction, personalization and reassurance to win over his audience. He also has a tendency to organize his speech chronologically as if he is telling a story, thus making the entire speech more pleasurable to listen to. These strategies result in a powerful and convincing speech, despite the inclusion of falsehoods and exaggerations, thus proving that the truth is weak and the deciding factor in oration lies within the delivery of the speech, not the probity of it.

Analyzing Hitler’s speech makes one question whether the inclusion of truth within writing is ever the determinant factor in the convincing capacity of the speech. Furthermore, it is apparent that Hitler relies on personalizing his speech, thus strengthening his argument and making it more relatable. Does all good writing have to be personal? Are there cases of good writing that are entirely objective and impersonal? When taking Hitler’s speech into consideration, it is evident that personalization is essential to good writing, resulting in a more compelling and convincing oration as a whole. Socrates makes the argument in his debate with Gorgias that the truth is weak; this idea has been proven continuously throughout history. It is not the content of the writing that matters; rather, it is the delivery of the speech and the eloquence of the work that hides the inner deception within it.

Sycophancy is incorporated in every German aspect of Hitler’s speech; he flatters himself and Germany excessively, while denigrating England and the Soviet Union. In his dialogue, Socrates views rhetoric as “a subdivision of sycophancy,” (Plato 31), because it “…makes an intuitive guess at what is pleasant, with no interest in what is best” (Socrates 30). As a result, the sycophancy of rhetoric allows this rhetoric to be personalized, flattering the articulator and encouraging his interests. Hitler relies on sycophancy in his speech to make himself appear to be an expert, thus assuring his audience of his reliability as a leader, while also proving that Germany is ultimately the ideal state in regard to truth and justice.

In his dialogue with Gorgias, Socrates determines “that is how rhetoric should be employed-aiming always at the just-as should any other activity” (Plato 113). Despite this claim, rhetoric is often employed for more nefarious purposes, as is the case with Hitler’s speech; he utilizes his skill as a rhetorician for the unjust purpose of convincing ignorant citizens to support him in his quest to decimate an entire race of people. Hitler’s use of rhetoric spurs the question of the character and motivation of the rhetorician. In Socrates’ argument with Gorgias, Gorgias brings up the case of a doctor and a rhetorician in court; “Indeed, I maintain that a rhetoric expert and a doctor can go to a city, anywhere you like, and if they are set against one another, in an assembly of the people or any other gathering, to argue which of them should be chosen as doctor, then the doctor will make no showing, and the one with the ability to speak would be chosen, if that was what he wanted” (Plato 19). In this case, the rhetorician is acting unjustly, since he is convincing the ignorant masses to vote for him, even though he is well aware that he is less qualified than the doctor for the job. Socrates maintains that, since the rhetorician is less knowledgeable on the subject matter, the doctor will ultimately reign victorious over the rhetorician, for he is the true master of medicine:” If you make someone an expert in rhetoric, then he must necessarily know the things which are just and the things which are unjust-either beforehand, or by learning them from you later” (Plato 24). Here, Socrates distinguishes a true rhetorician as someone who is an expert on the subject matter he is discussing. Therefore, the deceptive rhetorician in Gorgias’ example is not a true rhetorician.

            Conclusively, it is apparent through Socrates’ dialogue, and through Hitler’s speech, that truth is negligible in comparison to the presentation of the argument; it is not the content of the speech that matters most, but the extravagance of the speech and the sycophancy of the orator. Proven through these examples, writing does not necessarily rely on truth; it relies on verbosity, skillful deception, and exaggeration to successfully convince an audience of the reliability of the rhetorician. After all, a lie that works to improve an individual’s life is always preferred over an unfavorable truth. As Socrates maintains, the truth is weak, and what matters most is the persuasion of the rhetorician, rather than the content of the speech.

Citations

Bytwerk, Randall. “Hitler’s Proclamation of 22 June 1941.” Hitler’s Proclamation of 22 June 1941. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Oct. 2016.

Griffith, Tom, Plato, and Malcolm Schofield. Plato: Gorgias, Menexenus, Protagoras. New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.

What I am about to attempt to do is going to seem like a complete contradiction. It may even seem like something out of Inception. The question of whether or not authors need to write about the “truth” has been in the background of literature throughout its history. To defend both sides of the claim, there are many arguments, which are my focus. One school of thought is that authors that write well enough can either make their readers look past the falsities of the writing or convince them of another truth altogether. For readers like us, people with a decent amount of experience with literature and language in general, this is a scary thought. No one wants to admit that they are gullible enough to fall for a false reality, but we have come to find that words have more power than we originally imagined. The contradiction that I want to argue, then, comes when I try to convince you that I am telling you the truth when I say that you have been forced to believe total lies through literature and other articles just like this one.

To start, it is important to realize just how gullible and impressionable the human race is. There have been countless examples of the blind leading the blind throughout history, but there are none better than those of Germany and Russia during World War II. In their respective countries, both Hitler and Stalin were able to rise to power through their mastery of rhetoric and oration. Despite their arguments being based on complete fabrications, they connected to the hungry, tired, and generally unhappy populations of their nations and promised to bring them out of their despair. The important point is that both leaders made their moves after revolution and war when life for the average citizen was at its worst. Times like these are when people just want to hear what someone else can do for them.

The exact same scenario can be seen in George Orwell’s Animal Farm in which a group of animals stage a revolution to take over their farm from the abusive owner, Mr. Jones. In the aftermath of the revolution, it is the pigs, the wisest of the animals, who assume the positions of leadership. As the story progresses, one of the pigs, Snowball, is forced out by another, Napoleon, leaving a power vacuum that Napoleon is more than happy to fill. As the sole leader of the group, Napoleon begins to lie about everything to make his life better and to keep the rest of the group under his control. He makes claims that Snowball was the enemy the entire time, that food rations were up, and that everyone was working less, but these were all lies to keep the others in check.

Does this scenario sound familiar? It should because every character in Animal Farm represents a person or group from Stalin’s Soviet Union. Napoleon is, of course, Stalin himself. Boxer, the faithful work horse, is the ignorant proletariat. The sheep that constantly chant whatever the pigs want represent the means by which the Stalinist government spread propaganda. If you kept going through the rest of the animals, you would find as equally accurate examples for each of the rest of them, so given the disastrous nature of this novel, it is clear what Orwell was trying to comment (Fadaee 23).

Just as Stalin did in Russia, Napoleon used his words to convince the rest of the group to follow him. Although he often worked through Squealer, the pig known for his talent with words, it is through language in general that he won the trust that he later took advantage of, as shown by Boxer’s mottos of “I will work harder” and “Napoleon is always right”. There were two aspects of farm life after the revolution that catalyzed his rise to power, the first being that the animals on the farm became just as desperate as the Soviets were after the Russian revolution. Even if it was just by giving the dogs an extra biscuit, once Napoleon proved that he could improve the quality of life in even the smallest ways, they were willing to listen to anything he had to say. It was from this point on that everything he said carried the same joyful tone as always but now contrasted the world around them. Rations were down but the statistic sheets said they were up; they worked harder but should now be “proud” of the work they were doing, and the good of the pigs began to come before everyone else for the most convoluted reasons. The common animals, though, were blinded by the excitement and accepted these lies as truth.

What you could probably notice is that I have used the word “truth” a number of times already, but what does that really mean? Truth is inherently a difficult idea for us to pin down because of the limitations that we have to explore and describe it. Other than through language, there is no way to describe truth, which could become something that goes far beyond the capacities of words and sentences. As Friedrich Nietzsche writes in his essay “On truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” it is entirely possible that there is no “truth” that humans could hope to achieve because humans try to impose themselves on the world to force it to make sense in their terms. This, he argues, cannot lead to anything even close to an overarching truth. As proof, Nietzsche writes, “The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages” (116). Should this hold true, I need to be willing to accept that the truth that I am going to talk about is confined to one that humans have created, one that is inherently human-based, and one that humans therefore can change at will. And that is perfectly fine, for if we do not accept it, everything that I am about to write and everything we have all ever said, read, or heard means nothing. I set this limit because the truth for our intents and purposes should be considered something not only as equally flawed as humans, but that can also be played with and molded by humans through words.

The second aspect of farm life that proved beneficial to Napoleon comes from this very idea; the pigs’ mastery of language gave them the greatest advantage. All of the animals could speak, some could read at a very modest level, and some could memorize and remember about as well as a two year old, but the pigs could do it all with adult human proficiency. Their grasp on language is what ultimately gave them their overwhelming control. It was said that, “The birds did not understand Snowball’s long words, but they accepted his explanation, and all of the animals set to work to learn the new maxim by heart” (Orwell 25). Later in the novel Napoleon was able to alter the animal commandments because no one could read or remember them well enough to prove that they were changing, and when they caught Squealer fall off his ladder while painting them, no one wanted to. One of the most surprising parts of this story is that none of the other animals ever put a stop to any of this.

The real question, though, is whether they ever really could have stopped it. For one thing, they did not have the linguistic power to know what was being written or said most of the time. For another, they could not remember a time before the revolution, so no one knew if life was better or worse. But above all, they were too deeply involved in what Napoleon had been telling them to be willing to go against it. A similar phenomenon can been seen in our society right now with a certain political candidate running for president. This is in no way becoming a political discussion, but those of you who do not agree with Mr. Trump will easily agree with this argument. I also know that many of you who, like me, are moderately on Mr. Trump’s side will agree as well.

What Mr. Trump is saying, whether it be true or not, is fundamentally controversial, and to put it nicely, his delivery is rough. As worldly adults, we notice this, but it does not have the profound impact on us that it has on children. There is something called the “Trump Effect,” which is affecting the more impressionable and gullible younger generations, and it has been well documented in schools across the country. On one hand, “It’s producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom. Many students worry about being deported” (SPLC). On the other hand, the same source writes,

Other students have been emboldened by the divisive, often juvenile rhetoric in the campaign. Teachers have noted an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail.

The first part of the Trump Effect shows that when people hear something they like (in this case, scared and ignorant Americans hear that he is going to deport minorities), they repeat it to everyone, including their children, who go on to repeat it to others. Even though he almost never says anything with any style or grace, what he says proves to have a big enough impact to stick in people’s minds. The second part goes a bit deeper; these children wonder how anyone could support a man saying such horrible things about them and their families. But even the children could understand an argument that Socrates made in Plato’s Gorgias.

Imagine a court room where the judge is a chef, the jury is a group of kids, and the defendant is a doctor. The chef/judge wants to lock up the doctor because he hurts the children by poking and prodding them and making them ingest disgusting liquids while he, the chef, makes the children good food that is pleasurable to eat. The children do not understand that it is through the discomfort that the doctor causes that they are healthy enough to eat and enjoy the food the chef gives them, but of course, none of the children want to hear that. The children, in real life terms, represent how Socrates views human nature in general. (Gorgias)

The main point that we have to understand is that even though Mr. Trump may not be a good speaker, he is the judge in the metaphor. He speaks to people’s emotions, and that is what reels them in. They hear what they want to hear, and this is good enough for them, just like it is for the children that do not want to listen to the doctor. If we accept, therefore, that people are gullible to what they want to hear because it plays to their emotions, I want to examine more thoroughly how Napoleon does this. From the beginning the reader is told that Napoleon is the type of speaker that is very direct and to the point, contrasting his more outgoing enemy, Snowball, who speaks with a more colorful style. There are numerous examples of this style, such as the moment after the windmill falls when he simply says, “Comrades, do you know who is responsible for this? Do you know who has come in the night and overthrown our windmill? SNOWBALL!” (Orwell 50). So what is most impressive is that he garners the same type of emotional response from the animals from this short discourse that another, lesser leader, would hope to get from a prolonged speech. In some aspects, but certainly not all, he and Mr. Trump have this in common; they speak very directly to the ignorant hearts of their listeners because they know this will get a reaction. There is no need for fluffy decoration.

Then you might ask if that goes against everything I have been arguing this entire time, that you need to be a master of rhetoric to be persuasive against the truth, but the answer is no. In reality, it alters my argument to show that you do not always need “good” writing to convince someone of lies, something politicians prove every day. Plus, there are many different forms of “good language” shown by the contrast between Napoleon and Snowball. It is also, however, not enough to just tell the truth in many cases because the idea of truth is so ambivalent. We saw an example of this when the doctor could not speak his argument well enough to the children to convince them. Therefore, if truth is not good on its own and if you do not necessarily need good language to be convincing if you speak to affect emotions, the best way to write about something that is not the truth might be to use good language that plays to the emotions of those receiving the language because that takes the truth out of play. At that point, whether the author is writing truths or lies makes no difference to the reader because they are too captured by the literature to want to make the effort to find the difference. Emotions are powerful, and although they help us in many situations, they also cause us to make the wrong decision countless times in our daily lives in everything from the food we eat to the people we fall in love with. Emotions could not care less about the truth, so it makes perfect sense for literature to use them against you to bypass the truth.

Works Cited

Costello, Maureen B. Splcenter. Rep. Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d. Web. 14 Oct. 2016.

Fadaee, Elaheh. “Symbols, Metaphors and Similes in Literature: A Case Study of “Animal Farm”” Journal of English and Literature 2.2 (2011): 19-27. Academic Journals. Feb. 2011. Web. 14 Oct. 2016.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. S.l.: Aristeus, 2012. Print.

Orwell, George. Animal Farm. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Plato, and Malcolm Schofield. Gorgias, Menexenus, Protagoras. Trans. Tom Griffith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones…

but the words ‘stick’ and ‘stone’ are arbitrary stand-ins for physical entities, so ‘sticks’ and ‘stones’ really can’t hurt me,” may well have once been uttered on the playground by a young Friedrich Nietzsche.  As speakers, as writers, as readers, as people with the capacity for thought, we are conducted through life on the backs of words, and so it is imperative we know just what we’re treading on when we consume and produce language–when we so much as invoke the word “word.”  And if Nietzsche is right, then we’re treading on air.

A nineteenth-century philosopher, Nietzsche would rise to prominence as the curator of polarizing ideologies ranging from morality to epistemology, of which his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” is of interest to any user of language.  Briefly, his argument is such:  All things posses “essence[s]” (Nietzsche 117).  We are concerned primarily with the essences of things, and it is these essences that words attempt to name. Words are “metaphors”–arbitrary fabrications completely irrelevant to the essences of things–which cannot actually come any closer to describing the thing, yet are as close as we can get (Nietzsche 116).  We then attempt to unearth cosmic truths via the flawed words created by us, and so continually deceive ourselves with language that will forever circumscribe the truth.

That is, language categorically bars us from truth, and language’s most atomic unit–a word–can merely serve to offset meaning rather than define.

Perhaps the affront to tangible reality that Nietzsche’s theory puts forth is its trivialization of the senses: What good are they when our perception of the world necessitates a language which obscures and mutates it anyway?  A century after Nietzsche, Valentin Volosinov¹ conceives a theory that similarly asserts the fundamental ambiguity of words, defining a word as that which is “multifarious” (“many-speaking,” from the literal Latin) (72).  A word by nature cannot be static, and must possess multiple meanings; a ‘word’ with one single meaning transcendent of context would indeed cease to be a word, instead acting as a “signal²” akin to the red light of a stoplight indicating a STOP! command, or hearing a particular register of animal cry and instinctually recognizing it as ‘pain.’  A word may only be a word if its very definition is in flux; to utter one is to grasp at water. 

While perhaps self-evident, it is critical to enunciate that reflection, critical thinking, premeditated action, or any sort of interpretation of stimuli is linguistic.  Our most basic and most proximate tool for accessing reality is words, though they be as blunt and imprecise as the rock which clobbers an oyster to get at its delicate flesh.  The very process by which words access reality distorts it indelibly.   

I will describe schematically the fundamental wedge language imposes.  Let A be an entity–something that exists–such as a tangible object or a concept. We can denominate the word assigned to it as A₁, since it is not literally A, yet is its closest and most fundamental association. A implies A₁ and vice versa. The problem is that, because we are conscious of language’s inherent multifariousness and fallibility as well as our own fallibility as its operators, we have learned through socialization that the linkage between A and A₁ is not strict. For instance, suppose we were to predictably and concertedly meet for lunch every other day, and otherwise never run into each other due to distance.  If I were to part by saying, “See you tomorrow,” you would not show up expectantly the next day; that is to say you would not interpret “tomorrow” literally, because you can deduce what I meant, and substituted the correct and appropriate meaning to “tomorrow.”  Not only have you decoupled A (the concept of tomorrow) from A₁ “tomorrow,” you have reassigned A₁ to B (the day after tomorrow), based on your own assumption.

Not only do words lack inherent meaning or value, but also functional meaning by being so susceptible to alteration via misuse. As linguistic purists, we could obsess over the grammatical genocide of adverbs in colloquialisms (“man I did so bad on that test..”), or the loss of  “fewer” (“there are less pigs than sheep”) and “spat” (“ew, you just spit on me!”) from social vocabulary–but such pedantic anal-retentivity is hardly the point.  Extrapolate the above premise to a world cluttered by words, where we are constantly bombarded by a deluge of advertisements, news, electronic communications, face-to-face conversations, books, etc. where we prioritize efficiency over correctness, and are likely to be completely oblivious to the ramifications of certain linguistic choices, deliberate or not. Apart from the select scholar, who is yet still fallible, there is no language police. Invariably through careless use, words become diluted and adulterated, where A₁ can come to mean essentially anything in different contexts. Any nonliteral interpretation can be seen as the degradation of language, and the mortal risk is that the original association between A and A₁ can be completely lost (‘nice’ has lost all connotation of its Latin etymology, nescius, meaning “unknowing” or “ignorant”), words can sometimes mean their very antonyms (turn the light off, the alarm went off (on)), producing a nonsensical world. This is frightening, that we are all complicit in the confusion of our best tool to understand the world.

A precedent follows, then, for mistrusting language in an anxious and conspiratorial way, since we as its users have been denied, systemically, the very possibility of meeting the task we have employed language to perform.  One reaction to Nietzsche would be to militantly interpret language at face-value in narrow and strict fashion–to rigorously excise language from all contextual and ideological connotation and so strip it down to its naked germ to come closest to reality.  To do so would be to read apathetically, disengaging ourselves as readers from the equation.  Granted, apathy here is relative–since utter apathy is robotic and therefore inhuman–so apathy to the extent that we may not allow ourselves to be moved emotionally by any particular line, but may still react on the whole. We will take Nabokov’s Lolita to investigate what Nietzsche’s paradigm means in practice.

Under this rule, we can explain Lolita’s acclaim as follows: the text on a literal level follows the narrative of a sexual deviant as he serially preys on an underaged girl. This text appeals to us the readers because it depicts an identifiable real-world phenomenon of which we either partake or do not, where the former enjoys self-recognition (the same comfort of looking into a mirror and indeed seeing oneself), and the latter enjoys the self-aggrandizement of alienating depravity.  Both of these are narcissistic reactions in concord with Nietzsche’s assertion that man can only perceive the world in terms relative to himself, and fabricates the universe around himself at its core.

Nietsche’s claim about language should be troubling to the scientist or the historian whose fundamental purpose is to access truth. But literature for the most part is uniquely unbound in that it need not reconcile itself with truth in this way.  If the sum total virtue of word was its capacity to describe the literal, word-play would not exist. Different forms of utterance would not exist, meaning no singing, no slam poetry, not even variable intonation in speech.  If words meant only the things they intend to describe, we would need a cumbersome amount of them, or increasingly acrobatic ways to put them together, compounding the problem of the world-object gulf.

And we can show this to be untrue.  Words are complexes of associations, networks of glowing neurons that trigger memories, feelings, sights, sounds, tastes, sensory experiences and recollections. Here stems the emotive force of language that transcends the literal.

As opposed to static definitions, words are artistic and mutable renditions of reality.  Literature works to assemble fragments of disparate meanings, and, collectively, with all their various connotations and associations, form a homogenous picture (one big image made from smaller images).

What literary language–fine language–novelly introduces to words is aesthetic value, and in doing so obviates the need for words to have inherent value; their arbitrariness is then rendered no more bothersome than the arbitrariness of preference for chocolate or vanilla.

     Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip  of  the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

     She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four  feet  ten  in  one sock.  She  was  Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

These opening lines are beloved not for their word-for-word literality, but for their imagery and lyricism. Not only can what sounds good be good, but what sounds good is good because there are no dictums on aesthetic preference.

So why should we like Lolita, and regard it as exemplary?  Because of its beauty. Because of its tragedy. And because the coincidence of the two in their juxtaposition are evocative. Beauty is to be sought. Tragedy is to be avoided. We are presented with an immanent dilemma in the very election to read on. Our interest is feed by the desire to know which force succeeds in the end, the pursuit of omniscience, to predict our own fates. Literature combats language’s failure by flinging the failure back in our face: the real world can only be represented by illusion, so literature employ illusions to manifest dream-worlds that overlap real-life such that we can easily conflate the two, and cyclically repeat the process until a dream-world has replaced whatever real-world existed originally. Literature trains us to be indifferent towards reality by interchanging reality with fictions. And so, once we are liberated from preoccupation with ‘real’ reality, we can make peace with language’s failure to touch it.

Language is an incantation. A conjuring.  It is the summoning-spell of ideas and meanings, and like any good magic trick, it features the element of illusion.  And this isn’t a defect.

1. Russian linguist distinguished for championing the diachronic study of language.

2. Formal linguistic terminology bifurcating the linguistic sign into the phonetic/pictorial ‘signifier’ and conceptual ‘signified’.  For more, see Ferdinand de Sassure’s influential Course in General Linguistics, on which Volosinov’s work heavily piggybacks.

Works Consulted

“Eye Made of Headshots.” Digital image. Picture Mosaics. Chan Excela, 11 Feb. 2016. Web. 15 Oct. 2016. <https://picturemosaics.com/photo-mosaic- tool/hotlink.phpfile=storage/s1/M9994582/ p0/pmt-thumb&e=jpg&s=1>.

“Word.” Sarah Mennel. On Words. Digital image. Odyssey. N.p., 29 Feb. 2016. Web. 15 Oct. 2016. <http://az616578.vo.msecnd.net/files/2016/02/29/635923654799611463-251196307_635921981639834124-997424637_word.jpg>.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. S.l.: Aristeus, 2012. Print.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. N.p.: Random House, 1997. Print.

Voloshinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986. Print.

Last semester, on a whim, I took a class on Classical Arabic poetry. Over the course of several months, I covered ground from the deserts of pre-Islamic Arabia to the tumultuous cities of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, reading everything from the boastful qasidas of tribal warriors to the mystical ghazals of Sufi masters to the musical muwashshahats of the noblemen of al-Andalus. I went in knowing nothing, but each passing week increasingly impressed on me the sense that not only do Arabs revere poetry in a manner unmatched by most, they especially love poetry about love, in all its forms. Then I got to the modern day, and encountered Nizar Qabbani.

A Syrian diplomat who left his post to compose in self-exile in London, Qabbani’s greatest inspiration for writing was women. He is hailed the Arab world over for his ability to portray male-female relationships, to capture love, as never before, and is thus often considered the love poet for modern women. Many of his poems have even been turned into popular songs—on the day of our seminar on Qabbani, I walked in to a video of a soulful crooner murmuring Qabbani’s verses to a packed audience of women, each new stanza sending them into paroxysms of joy.

Meanwhile, I was just confused. I didn’t get Qabbani, not the way those several thousand women did. His verses were plenty lovely, but I couldn’t understand why the man celebrated as the greatest poet of love of the last century was a man who seemingly didn’t care for love, or the writing of love, at all. One poem in his collection ends with the poet-persona declaring that he has discovered he is “incapable of loving the minutest creature” (26). Another poem proclaims that “Love, as we knew it, has ended” (138). And the last poem is sprinkled with outbursts about his desire to completely change the history of love, a wish that ends on a rather grim note: “I haven’t demolished the hurdles / of ugliness the way I imagined. / In fact, I’ve been exploding / in my own fire” (66). I had spent the whole semester with discovering Arabic’s extremely rich tradition of love poetry, and now I was puzzled over how to fit Qabbani, anti-love and anti-love poetry, within this storied heritage.

It is only when I read Nietzsche that I was able to resolve this tension in Qabbani’s work between his role as a poet of love and his disavowal of that love. In “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche articulates a theory of the relation of a word to the “truth,” the object it is meant to encompass, that boils down to: there is no connection; language is independent of the object it purports to name, and a change in the latter does not constitute a change in the former. In applying this formulation to my knowledge of Arabic love poetry, however, it seems not that there is no link, but rather that it is flipped around—it is not the object that governs language, but language that governs the object.  It is not love, the reality and experience of it, that shapes the expression, the poetry of love; rather, it is the poetic tradition that shapes the reality and experience. And in many cases, this language, so long and refined in its literary history, highly codified and specific in its forms, is rather restrictive, shackling love by forcing it into set schemata for how it can emerge. A rich poetic tradition here is not a boon, but a fault. This is counterintuitive, I know, but it explains much of Qabbani’s glaring ambivalence towards love, the emotion and object, and love, the poetry and language. His poems are a record of his struggle as a lover and a poet to give voice to his own love, his uniquely personal love affair and beloved, within the context of a canon full to the brim already with love affairs and beloveds. Qabbani wishes to free love from the chains of past traditions, and to do so he must destroy it whole so that he can create it anew.

Let us look, for example, at “Give Me Love, Turn Me Green,” the poem in which Qabbani reveals the most heightened awareness of his position as a love poet in a long line of love poets. The poem is composed like a love letter, opening with an entreaty to the beloved to “Listen carefully. / Listen carefully,” and continuing with an ode to their love:

This love ordeal I’m going through

happens only once in a lifetime.

An ordeal that is poetic, aquatic,

mystical and sensual,

glorious in its sadness (60)

The following stanzas proceed along the same vein, Qabbani striving to elucidate, in as vivid and minute detail as possible, the intensity of his feelings for his beloved. Holding her makes him feel weightless, “as if my veins had dissolved / and my bones vaporized” (Qabbani, 60). Every small moment spent with her, every little thing she does—“The taste of the first kiss before breakfast. / Your white feet diving into the thick carpet, / the brush massaging your hair, / and the eye shadow in the corner of your eyes”—is cause for joy, “reason enough / for the entire universe / to transform itself into music and poetry” (Qabbani, 70). His love even approaches the transcendent—every time they meet, he says, “the colour of time in our watches / turns green, / the yearning in our eyes / turns green, / and the moon that rises from your cleavage / turns green,” green like the color of Paradise as described in the Quran (68). As described by Qabbani, his is special, so great that it touches the divine.

Strangely enough, however, Qabbani is unable to stop himself from repeating this refrain that their love is one of a kind over and over again. “So give me another chance to write history, / for history, my lady, does not recur,” he says to her, and repeats a few stanzas later, this time staccato, more emphatic: “All of this, my lady, are pages of history / that will never recur. / That will / never / recur” (70). But his very forcefulness casts doubt on this assertion, hinting at it does to an underlying tension in his words, a hidden anxiety he is trying to assuage. If he were as sure in his love as he pretends to be, we are led to ask, why would he feel the need to keep assuring us, and his lover, it is so?

Our suspicions are correct: an examination of the language Qabbani uses to depict his love affair reveals that it is suffused with the oft-used conventions of Classical Arabic literature. Early on, he asks of his beloved, “Wash your hair in the river of my madness. / But then, isn’t the madness of love inexplicable?” a line that to any Arab reader would immediately evoke that most famous pair of literary lovers: Layla and her Majnun, who loved her so fiercely that he was known by all as “Layla’s Madman” (60). He traces her arrival into his life back to “the spas of Granada / and the sorrows of the mandolin,” an allusion to the myth of the Golden Age of Andalusia, a halcyon period in the minds of many said to have witnessed the flowering of Arabic literature, and in particular the poetry of love (64). His compares their love to the intoxication of wine—“All the ports have closed, / and the marina’s wine runs red” when she is near—a metaphor that traces its roots in the canon back centuries, all the way to wine songs of the exalted mu’allaqas of the ancient tribes (64). Far from not having a “guidebook for love,” their love is clearly very much grounded in the canon of Classical Arabic poetry, a fact that even Qabbani implicitly admits in the end, when he says: “Whenever a new love tale / is added to the annals of love / in my town” (64, 66). His is this new love tale, added to the already great annals of Arabic love poetry.

But it is not only Qabbani’s ability to express love that is circumscribed by Arabic poetic tradition; love’s very course and reality is as well. Qabbani relates the text of love to the action of love when, early on in “Give Me Love, Turn Me Green,” he calls on his lover to

Read me intensely.

I am always searching for an avid reader,

one who wears poems about her wrists

like bracelets

and sees the whole world

in the portrait of a poet (62).

Qabbani’s very self is contained in literary terms, and it is his qualities as a poet that he credits for forging his connection with his beloved in the first place: “How wonderful for a woman to lose her head, / to become intoxicated before the face of poetry” (Qabbani, 62). The entirety of their love, their lives together, proceeds along the same lines, revolving around the reading and writing of poetry:

What really amazes me

is the feeling every morning

that whatever I touch or lay eyes on

turns into poetry.

My things and yours—no matter how trivial—

turn into poetry (68).

 The vast poetic tradition that is both Qabbani’s heritage and profession informs every aspect of his relationship with his beloved, such that it almost seems alive, a thing that looms over his life: “What’s happening to our histories, my lady? / Whenever I squander kisses on your hair, it grows before my eyes” (Qabbani, 72). Not that the plural “histories” makes this reference not to their personal story, their by-definition singular history, but rather to the broader “history of my time” and “history of females” (Qabbani, 64). Love the object, the emotion, the felt and sensate experience, converges with love the language, contrary to Nietzsche’s claim that there is no connection between the two. Poetry emerges here as the only framework in which love can be conducted, manifested.

But this dominance of language over love is a curse for Qabbani, imprisoning him and his lover within rigid archetypes that constrain their freedom to love as they will. About halfway into “Give Me Love, Turn Me Green” Qabbani exclaims: “In fifty years I haven’t met / a hind that fled her captor, / nor a woman who desired freedom” (66). The word “hind” is the stock metaphor in Classical Arabic poetry for women, and its use here conjures up an entire literary history in which women are portrayed as passive, helpless, captive. This vision of women is much than a simple figure of speech, as it has acquired the power to affect reality, influence Qabbani’s actual love life to the extent that all of the women he’s met so far are “hinds” and the men “her captor.” This theme of bondage by language resounds all over Qabbani’s oeuvre, and to an even greater degree than in “Give Me Love, Turn Me Green.” “Painting With Words,” for example, begins with Qabbani declaring that the “record of my life” is so long a story it is as if “I have lived through all the ages. / It’s as if I have existed thousands of years” (24). His descriptions of his love affairs with numerous women are couched in imagery that recalls the lengthy history of Arabic love poetry:

I try to use my traditional way of evasion—

through women.

Where are my concubines?

Where are the harems?

And where is the smell of incense

wafting through my chambers? (26)

Qabbani’s personal loves have been entirely subsumed within the preset patterns of Arabic love poetry, such that he and his any of his beloveds are unable to break away from these traditions and forge a love that is unique to them. “All kinds of love appear the same, / as indistinguishable as leaves in the forest” (Qabbani, 26). Qabbani joins the other poetic heroes, and his lover melds into the ranks of the women, becoming indistinguishable despite his protests to the contrary. “For I know exactly which among my women / and my poems I desire,” he says in his poem “The Last Declaration of King Schariar,” only to refute this idea in the very next line: “and I know that nothing is new in the realm of women” (134). Notice too how problematic, how sexist these all-consuming literary models are—love is depicted always as “conquests,” the man strong and daring, the woman pure and receptive (Qabbani, 24). In this way love becomes trite, Qabbani discovering that he is incapable of truly “loving the minutest creature” (Qabbani, 28). The language of love is all-encompassing and oppressive, absorbing every individual love and compelling it conform to rigid, dominant, and problematic archetypes passed down from literary history.

The only way to save love from the despotism of language is, ironically enough, to destroy all love as it is conceived in the present day. Even more ironically, the tool of destruction is more language, more poetry. “For what’s the value of poetry / if it doesn’t have the power of change? / And what’s a poet if he can’t command change?” Qabbani asks, indicating his great faith in the power of language to transform the meaning of other language even as it ossifies, becomes rigid and confining (64). But the roots of the poetic language are dug too deep in Arabic society and culture, and simply speaking and shouting ad infinitum to others will produce no results:

 For fifty years I’ve been jumping

from one landmine to another,

preaching to my people

so that they might change.

I haven’t demolished the hurdles

of ugliness the way I imagined.

In fact, I’ve been exploding

In my own fire (66).

No, the sole path out is to dismantle the very meaning of love as it is understood in the present day, a love that is based in the inherited language of Arabic literature. Thus Qabbani proclaims:

The era of Nizar has ended.

Love, as we knew it, has ended.

Lovers’ memory has shriveled,

and the Mythical Lover no longer remembers

the name of his sweetheart (138).

We must abandon love, and learn to “worship” ourselves instead, find our answers not in a “sweet mouth” but in our “notebooks,” our own ability to paint with words (Qabbani, 28). Only when we have rid ourselves of all love as it is manifest today, completely replaced the traditions of the past with our new metaphors and language and formulations, can we finally free ourselves to practice again the “religion of love” and this time reach its true “essence,” finally become “the work of heavens” he had characterized it as at the start (Qabbani, 138).

I had always assumed that love poetry is necessarily preceded by love, the purpose of language to capture as closely as possible the real emotions. How strange it is for me to see the way this relation is switched in Qabbani’s poetry, the language of love actually decreeing, limiting, the ways in which love can be materialized. The richer a literary tradition is, the more it bears on our lives—and in the case of Arabic poetry, with such a long and illustrious history, this means that all love is essentially chained by its poetic forms and types. To free love, as Qabbani discovers, recover its true essence, we must combat language with language, dismantle the calcified remains of the poetic past and replace it with new words of our own choosing.

Works Cited

Kabbani, Nizar. “Republic of Love: Selected Poems in English and Arabic.” Translated by Nayef al-Kalali. Edited by Lisa Kavchak, Kegan Paul, 2003.