One of the first questions raised by Himmich’s work in relation to the subject of dictatorship is that of the ability of a historical novel, informed by fictional and allegorical rewritings, to develop an efficient counter-discourse to despotism and authoritarianism. At first, the author’s recourse to history is not surprising given both his cultural background and overall literary production. Born in Meknès in 1949, Himmich completed a PhD in Philosophy at Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (1983), worked as a Professor at Mohamed V University in Rabat and was the Minister of Culture of Morocco from 2009 to 2012. Writing in both Arabic and French, he produced a wide range of publications, including novels, poetry and philosophical essays. His non-fictional works are widely informed by philo-sophical and historical sources, more specifically the works and legacy of North African historian Ibn Khaldūn. In Himmich’s equally erudite novels, history and fiction are often blended to render the life of eminent figures such as Ibn Khaldūn himself in Al-‘Alaama (translated as The Polymath) or Sufi philosopher Ibn Sab’in in Hadha Al-Andalusi! (translated as A Muslim Suicide). In one of his articles, Himmich claims his attachment to
what he calls his ‘triptyque favori (philosophie, histoire et littérature)’ (103) [favourite triptych (philosophy, history and literature)], but he admits his recent inclination for the novel ‘comme genre total exigeant recherche et réflexion et sollicitant le concours du souffle poétique, ainsi que des formes d’expression scénique et dramaturgique’ (104) [as a totalizing genre that demands research and reflection, and necessitates the support of poetic inspiration as well as scenic and theatrical art forms]. This conception of the novel as a space of erudition and poetic staging is at the core of Himmich’s fictional works. In Le Calife de l’épouvante, which is advertised as ‘a novel of historical fiction,’17 Himmich cannily subverts the subgenre of the his-torical novel to propose a personal reflection on the figure of the despot and the performances of tyranny. This process of subversion can be seen as a continuation of Himmich’s numerous articles on the novel and histori-cal writing that reveal ‘not merely the breadth of his reading in literature and philosophy, but, more specifically, his familiarity with the interest-ing generic blendinterest-ing that is reflected in current discussions of historical fiction’.18 Among those discussions, English novelist A. S. Byatt, quoted by Roger Allen in his ‘translator’s introduction’, suggests many reasons to explain novelists’ recourse to history. These include ‘the fact that we have in some sense been forbidden to think about history’, the quest for ‘a new possibility of narrative energy’, the attempt ‘to find historical paradigms for contemporary situations’, ‘the aesthetic need to write coloured and metaphorical language’ and ‘the political desire to write histories of the marginalised, the forgotten, the unrecorded’.19 While these different reasons can be potentially used to support Himmich’s project, they might seem at odds with the ‘realist strategy’ and what Kubayanda terms the ‘unfinished business of decolonization’.
On the one hand, Le Calife de l’épouvante stands as an overt invitation both to reread the history of dictatorship in North Africa and the Arabic-Islamic world, and to re-appropriate the lessons of the past in order to tackle
17 Allen, Translator’s Introduction’, viii.
18 Allen, Translator’s Introduction’, xii.
19 A. S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories. Selected Essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 11.
the persistent challenges of the present. On the other hand, the intrinsic complexity of Himmich’s novel and its dizzying blurring of the boundaries between history and fiction could hamper this process of rereading and recovery, leading unavoidably to those ‘complex problems of interpreta-tion’ flagged by Kubayanda. An illustration of this paradox can be read in Wen-chin Ouyang’s hesitations regarding Himmich’s work in her Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel. Ouyang defines the novel as an ‘essay on tyranny’ and ‘a synthesis and assessment of the historical records’ but not
‘a straightforward modern historical narrative’.20 She also describes it as ‘a historiographical treatise on the nature of political authority’ and ‘a study of power’ but not ‘a fictionalised biography of the Fatimid ruler’.21 These successive attempts at defining Himmich’s work reveal the challenging intricacy of the text and the difficulties it entails in terms of understanding and appropriation. This problematic aspect becomes even more disturb-ing if one compares Himmich’s overt calls to promote history as ‘the best gateway to strengthening the mind for the purpose of comprehending and internalizing [present] reality’22 to the more circumspect warning he chose to add as a foreword to the second edition of the French translation:
‘Tout renvoi à l’Histoire (faits, récits) est strictement référencé et marqué en italique. Le reste, c’est-à-dire l’essentiel, est littérature et fiction’ (2010, p. 7) [All references to history (facts, narratives) are rigorously noted and highlighted in italics. Everything else, that which is essential, is literature and fiction]. While sounding like a belated clarification of the boundaries between history and fiction, Himmich’s foreword strengthens the fictional aspect of the work and pushes the historical dimension into the background, therefore relegating or at least minimizing any purported ‘realist strategy’
in the process of exploring the figure and the performances of dictatorship.
Interestingly, Himmich associates this dominant fictional feature with the discourse of the despot himself: ‘Al Hakim, comme d’ailleurs presque tous les autres personnages du roman, n’ayant rien écrit, tout propos que
20 Wen-chi Ouyang, Poetics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel. Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 115.
21 Ouyang, p. 116.
22 Ouyang, p. 116.
je lui fais tenir n’est qu’allégation, supputation ou hypothèse, fruit d’un essai de descente dans la psyché perverse, ambivalente et complexe du despote’ (2010, p. 7) [Since Al Hakim, like most of the other characters in the novel, has not written any work, every statement I make his own is nothing but an allegation, a guess or a hypothesis, a result of an attempt at diving into the perverse, ambivalent and complex psyche of the despot].
Thus, any political reading of Himmich’s novel should bear in mind the very hypothetical reconstructions of history suggested and framed by the author. This is confirmed in Himmich’s text when Al-Hākim’s chronicler Moukhtar al-Mousabihi explains that his historical account, which works as a reflected image of the novel itself, is ‘élaboré par l’imagination et la poésie [et] se transformera lentement en un document vrai, qui sera reproduit par tous les historiens’ [created through imagination and poetry [and] it will be gradually turned into a genuine document to be reproduced by historians for all time] and will be read ‘comme d’autres documents qui commencent comme des fantaisies et deviennent Histoire’ (185) [like other documents that start as poetry but later become history]. In other words, history is a space for manipulation that seems as suspicious as fiction. In this respect, Le Calife de l’épouvante is nothing but a personal attempt at reading and reusing the complex material of history in the process of creating a fiction about despotism, tyranny and madness. In his introduction to a volume of essays exploring the politics of novels and novelists, Robert Boyers notes that ‘if we understand the significance of politics in a given novel as central, or marginal, that understanding has much to do with our sense that we have been invited to read that novel in a particular way’.23 The problem with Le Calife de l’épouvante is that the obscure and wavering linkage between history and fiction disrupt the invitation to read the novel in a particular way. Therefore, it forces the reader to be extremely cautious when dealing with interpretations and drawing inferences from the novel’s discourse about despotism and tyranny.
23 Robert Boyers, The Dictator’s dictation. The Politics of novels and novelists (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 4.