Abstract
This chapter explores the first Arabic translation (1909) of Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur novellas as the instance of a major formal shift in the Arab narrative genre system that emerges in creative tension with changing regimes of personhood in colonial Egypt. Selim shows how ʿAbd al-Qadir Hamza’s translation interlaces the narrative modes of medieval popular genres (the sira) into Leblanc’s ironic, post-novelistic detective fiction to produce an Arabic text that can be read as a challenge to the fixed and stable construction of identity necessary to both the colonial police state and nahdawi reformism.
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Notes
- 1.
The most important of these was ʿUmar ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ʾAmin’s weekly series Riwayat al-Jib (1936–1986).
- 2.
See Basilius Bawardi and Alif Faranesh, “Non-canonical Arab Detective Fiction: the Beginnings of the Genre.” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 18 (2018): 23–49. Yves Gonzales Quijano, Les Gens du livre: editions et champs intellectuel dans l’Egypte républicaine (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1998); Richard Jacquemond, Conscience of the Nation (Cairo: AUC Press, 2008); Alessandro Buontempo, “Vertigo and the Dove’s Necklace as Romans Noirs” in Crime Fiction in and around the Eastern Mediterranean (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, Verlag, 2016), pp. 9–32 and Elliott Colla, “Anxious Advocacy: the Novel, the Law and Extrajudicial Appeals in Egypt,” Public Culture, 17. No.3 (2015): 417–443.
- 3.
Lupin made his début in the story “L’Arrestation d’Arsène Lupin” (The Arrest of Arsène Lupin) in the popular review Je Sais Tout no.6, 15 July 1905. See http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_Jacob#L.27anarchiste_qui_inspira_Maurice_Leblanc
- 4.
For an overview of this process with regard to the Sherlock Holmes stories, see Yves Varende, “Dickson-Holmes. Le clone retourne à son modèle.” Le Rocambole 11 (2000): 85–94.
- 5.
Vidocq escaped from prison numerous times between 1795 and 1800. Imprisoned once more in 1809 on forgery charges, he struck a deal with the authorities to work as an informant in Bicêtre prison. In 1811 he was released and given authorization to found an informal plainclothes detective unit which eventually became the Sûreté National. In 1827 he was forced to resign by the new regime of Charles X. In 1833 he founded the first known detective agency which practiced elaborate frauds on its clients: for example, arranging thefts then hiring out agents to recover the stolen goods.
- 6.
Indeed, just to be on the safe side, he spends four years investigating himself under the guise of the defunct Inspector Lenormand, chief of the Sureté, the French Secret Police.
- 7.
“Même—et peut–être surtout—il y a au début des années 1910 un notable changement dans notre littérature: le 2 mai 1911, Alain-Fournier constate dans Paris-Journal ‘la fin du roman psychologique’. L’équipe de la Nouvelle Revue Française, face à la ‘crise du roman’, pense que la nouvelle forme de ce genre de littérature doit être celle du ‘roman d’aventure’. Ce à quoi s’essaie André Gide, qui donne au début le 1914 Les Caves du Vatican. Mais n’est pas Maurice Leblanc qui veut…” Jacques Derouard, Le Monde d’Arsène Lupin (Paris: Encrage, 2003), 7.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Valentin Groebner, “Describing the Person, Reading the Signs in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Identity Papers, Vested Figures, and the Limits of Identification, 1400–1600” in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, eds. Jane Caplan and John Torpey, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 16.
- 10.
Pierre Piazza and Xavier Crettiez, Du Papier à la biométrie: Identifier les individus (Paris: Presses de sciences politiques, 2006), 34.
- 11.
Caplan and Torpey, “Introduction,” in Documenting Individual Identity, 8.
- 12.
Ibid., 7–8.
- 13.
Maryvonne Bernard, “La réorganisation de la police sous le Second Empire (1851–1858): ‘des bras infatigables,’” in Maintien de L’Ordre et Polices en France et en Europe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Créaphis, 1987), 119.
- 14.
Martine Kaluszynski, “Republican Identity: Bertillonage as Government Technique,” in Documenting Individual Identity, 127.
- 15.
Ibid., 128.
- 16.
L. Herbette cited in Ibid., 127.
- 17.
Caplan and Torpey, “Introduction,” 8.
- 18.
For example, Gaston Leroux’s Chéri-Bibi, Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain’s Fantômas and of course Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin. This French strain partly emerges from the mid-century roman-feuilleton of the mystères and neo-gothic subgenres of which Dumas’ Edmond Dantès and du Terrails’ Rocambole are distinct types. See Jean-Claude Vareille, L’Homme Masqué, le justicier et le detéctive (Presse Universitaire de Lyon, 1989).
- 19.
The term is Gregory Jusdanis’: Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
- 20.
Salah ʿIsa, Rijal Raya wa Sakina: Sira siyasiyya wa ijtimaʿiyya (Cairo: Dar al-Ahmadi lil-nashr, 2002), 587–595.
- 21.
Sir Thomas Russell Pasha, Assistant Commandant and then Chief of Cairo Police from 1913 to 1929 recounts a fascinating and comic anecdote about a would-be police sting endlessly impeded by the Capitulations: “The Capitulations held us up almost indefinitely in dealing with the unlicensed brothels run by foreigners. One particular house of some size and popularity defied Bimbashi Quartier, our chief detective officer, and myself for months by ringing the changes on the nationality of the padrona. Police could not enter a foreigner’s house without the consent and presence of the Consul or his representatives. When we arrived with the French consular canvass to demand admission from the French padrona, the spy-hole in the front door would be opened and a husky voice announce that Madame Yvonne had sold the business to Madame Gentili, an Italian subject, without whose Consular representative we could not enter. Next week we would arrive with the Italian canvass to be met by another change of nationality of the padrona. Piqued beyond the ordinary, Quartier one night assembled seven Consular canvasses at the fast-closed door, and one by one the fictitious landladies were defeated, entry obtained and the law enforced.” Thomas Russell, Egyptian Service 1902–1946 (London: John Murray, 1949), 182. Anecdotes like these are many. In his marvelous social history of Alexandria in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Salah ʿIsa describes how Egyptian born and bred futuwwat (neighborhood bravosi) were able to continually evade the police and thrive with impunity by acquiring French citizenship via proof of Lebanese ancestry. Rijal Raya wa Sakina, 81–82.
- 22.
Khaled Fahmy, “The Anatomy of Justice: Forensic Medicine and Criminal Law in Nineteenth Century Egypt,” Islamic Law and Society, 6, no. 2 (1999): 224–271 and “The Police and the People in Nineteenth Century Egypt,” Die Welt des Islams, 39 no. 3, (1999): 340–377.
- 23.
Lupin later tells Ganimard that he has carefully studied the Bertillon system for potential cracks and flaws (Leblanc, Les Aventures, 52).
- 24.
See Luc Boltanski, “Les Conditions de l’apparition du roman policier,” Communications, Vol. 99, No.1 (2016): 23–4 for a discussion of the seminal relationship between the roman policier, the social order and the state in the European context.
- 25.
Francis Galton described this situation from a distinctly colonial point of view: “whether it be from the impossibility of identifying the mass of natives by their signatures, or from the difficulty of distinguishing them by name, or from their roving habits, or from the extraordinary prevalence of personation and false testimony among them, the need for an Identification Office has been strongly felt both in India and in Egypt.” “Identification Offices in Egypt and India,” The Nineteenth Century, 48 (1900): 119.
- 26.
Ibid., 124. Sometime around 1905, 10,000 of these files were handed over to J.L. Craig, Director of the Computation Office of the Egyptian Survey Department as part of an ongoing project on the comparative anthropology of ancient and modern Egyptians. See J.L. Craig, “Anthropometry of Modern Egyptians,” Biometrika 8:1–2 (1911).
- 27.
Conscription and corvée were the most obvious and widespread of these. But the state was also sometimes a welcome employer. Galton describes one of the uses that the Cairo Identification Office was put to: “to find whether candidates for responsible employments have ever been convicted of serious crimes. A small but coveted kind of post is that of night watchmen, who are engaged by the week. Every Monday some two hundred applicants present themselves, out of whom twenty have to be selected. The most promising are picked out provisionally; they are then measured and fingerprinted. Search is made, and if no record is found against them, they are appointed. But as opportunities for substitution occur between the provisional and the final selection, during the interval when the provisionally selected candidate is passing from room to room through crowded passages, each has the office stamp impressed at once in red ink on the palm of the hand. Without that mark no candidate may be measured or receive his certificate. A different method is used in the recruiting service, where the would-be recruit has sometimes to travel far to the place of measurement; therefore it is necessary to provide a more durable mark than the red stamp on the palm. So each of these men is treated like a package, about to be sent duty-free through alien territory; that is, he is plombé. A string is passed round his neck, its ends are threaded through holes in a small lump of lead, then a pair of powerful nutcrackers with the office seal inside their jaws impresses the lead and squeezes it so tightly on the strings that the authenticated necklace is irremovable except by cutting it” (Galton, “Identification Offices,” 125–126).
- 28.
We know from numerous testimonies, memoirs and from fiction itself—the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, for example—that the hakawati, or public storyteller, continued to exist as a popular institution in Egypt and Syria till around the Second World War. See Thomas Herzog, “La Sirat Baybars: Histoire d’un texte,” pp. 228–245 and, Claude Audebert, “Le Public égyptien d’aujourd’hui et la literature de sira ,” pp. 201–227 in Lectures du Roman de Baybars, ed. Jean-Claude Garcin (Marseille: Editions Parenthèses, 2003).
- 29.
Cited in Badr, Tatawwur, 122.
- 30.
According to Badr, Mahmud Khayrat—a writer and contemporary of Hamza—was of the opinion that the European literary penchant for endless description was plain old boring for the Arab reader (Badr, Tatawwur, 143).
- 31.
The sole mark of Baybars hero-status—of his identity even—are the mysterious ciphers inscribed on his brow, while for Lupin this status, this identity, is visible precisely in the absence of all signs or markings—of that which constitutes stable and recognizable personhood.
- 32.
See Selim, “Languages of Civilization,” 139–156 for a discussion of the conceptualization of “the crowd” in late nineteenth-century French and Egyptian thought.
- 33.
Jacqueline Sublet, “Un héro populaire dans un éspace encombré,” Arabica LI, nos. 1–2 (2004); 144. Lupin, as I have already pointed out, is possibly the son of a poverty-stricken seamstress, while Baybars is a Central Asian prince of mysterious provenance, sold into slavery as a child and brought, through a series of misadventures, to Damascus.
- 34.
Derouard, Le Monde d’Arsène Lupin, 106.
- 35.
Jean-Patrick Guillaume, “La Sīrat Baybars et la tradition du roman épique arabe,” in Lectures du Roman de Baybars, 86.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Denis Gril, “Du sultanat au califat universel: le rôle des saints dans le Roman de Baybars” in Lectures du Roman de Baybars, 183–5.
- 39.
Cited in ibid., 184.
- 40.
Lupin’s love-interest in this first collection is an American heiress called Miss Nelly, whom he meets in the first story (“L’Arrestation d’Arsène Lupin”) while crossing the Atlantic and again in the last story (“Herlock Sholmès arrive trop tard”) while conducting a complicated robbery at a country château under the assumed identity of a fashionable Parisian artist. Hamza greatly elaborates the original lighthearted encounters into a major sentimental mode complete with expanded interior monologues and fragments of verse. See MS118:1–2, “ʿAla matn al-bahr”, and MS118:140–188, “ʾAwwal al-nidal bayna Arsin Lubin wa Shirluk Hulmz.”
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Selim, S. (2019). Fiction and Colonial Identities. In: Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20362-7_6
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