The University of Jordan :: Research Groups :: Text and History in Qassim Haddad’s Chronicles...

حداد1.jpeg

This paper presents an investigation of Qassim Haddad’s Chronicles of Majnun

Layla by comparing the text with history, noting how the truth is based on texts rather than

actual events. The aim is to show the impact of texts on the formation of Arabic poetry at

the end of the last century. This research stems from the idea that a poet’s work is based on

a purely mental experience that results from reading texts, and the contemplation of the

human subject and the nature of its feelings and thoughts, as well as the fact that the truth

the poet seeks to embody, as is the case with Qassim Haddad, is related to the mental and

emotional state rather than real experience. From this standpoint, the work of Qassim

Haddad is interpreted as his wanting to correct what was reported about Majnun Layla; in

so doing, he compares the value of this information with the ability to express the human

condition, indicating that what happened in history was relevant only in so far as the state

of mind produced by this case of love and passion was achieved.

The paper consists of three sections. The first is the textuality of the historical story—the

historical version is only texts that do not represent historical truth. The second is the text

and the historical subjects, which, in the information about Majnun Layla, are nothing but

a linguistic textual form and as such their existence in history is unimportant. The third is

language and truth; in reading the language in Chronicles of Majnun Layla, it can be seen

that it over-stresses the significance of referring to a mental content that embodies the

abstract idea of human love without restricting it to a single historical situation.

"The understanding resulting from this reading of Chronicles in the light of the relation of the text to the subject shows that Qassim Haddad, as much as he seeks to talk about Qays' subject, fears at the same time that his subject will be consumed or perish under the influence and power of the presence of Qays' subject. Accordingly, Haddad faces what Harold Bloom calls 'the anxiety of influence, wherein 'poetic influence need not make poets less original; as often it makes them more original, though not therefore necessarily better' (Bloom 1997: 7, Hetherington 2020:260)"

Trending

Text and History in Qassim Haddad’s Chronicles of Majnun Layla

Cooperative Interpretation and the Poetics of Modernist Poem

Text and History in Qassim Haddad’s Chronicles of Majnun Layla