Historicizing the Arab apocalypse with Walter Benjamin : Etel Adnan’s “Master of the eclipse” and Rabih Alameddine’s The angel of history

Abstract

In 2009 the prominent Lebanese American painter, poet, and author Etel Adnan published a book of short stories whose title story, “Master of the Eclipse” focuses on the life of Iraqi poet Buland al-Haydari and his interest in angels. In the story, Adnan situates this interest in relation to the Marxist German dialectician Walter Benjamin’s famous allegory from his theses “On the Concept of History” (1940), i.e., the angel of history. Recently, in 2016, another prominent Lebanese American author, Rabih Alameddine, published a novel that also revolves around the life of a poet, and which bears the title The Angel of History. Both Alameddine and Adnan have been recognized as offering complex literary presentations of the Lebanese civil war in their previous work by scholars such as Syrine Hout and Sonja Mejcher-Atassi. Hout and Mejcher-Atassi also link these authors to the problem of narrating the unnarrateable, a conundrum that has been related to post-war Lebanon by Saree Makdisi and Sune Haugbolle. This project extends this investigation of narrative experimentation in the Lebanese context by asking: How can we understand the angel in the context of Benjamin’s philosophical work in order to better interpret Adnan’s and Alameddine’s literary re-glossings of said angel? What narrative mode surfaces in the confluence of post-war Lebanese themes about remembrance and Benjamin’s materialist historiographical vision for using the past as a tool to combat danger in the present? Highlighting Benjamin’s 6th, 9th, and 17th theses from “On the Concept of History,” this research shows that Adnan and Alameddine are confronting images from the past constructively in order to combat the personal and poetic dangers of silence, depression, and despair during an ongoing historical moment of loss and destruction in the Arab world. Within the frames of philosophical and literary-generic explication with Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin, close readings of these two