January 16, 2020 23
of Bassam’s damaged stoicism. Instead,
he’s a fast-talking con artist. Although
he claims to see through the hypocrisy
of those around him—“I see people for
what they are,” he boasts—we have lit-
tle reason to believe him. He lies to his
therapist (he also breaks into her apart-
ment, where he sniffs her pillow, eats
her food, and steals her slippers), and he
might be lying to us as well.
But one of the narrator’s brags does
ring true, and it points toward the
moral stakes of the novel. The narrator
belongs, as he says more than once, to
“the underground.” He means that he is
a creep, but a peculiarly literary kind of
creep. Like Dostoevsky’s spiteful mo-
nologist, he is hypersensitive to slights
(imagined or otherwise), at once abject
and full of pride (because other peo-
ple are even worse), and permanently
plotting some act of revenge, a repri-
sal that will wipe out the memory of
previous failures. For Hage’s narrator,
this means the failure to kill his sister’s
murderer. While Dostoevsky’s narra-
tor admits his desire to be an insect,
Hage’s actually becomes a cockroach.
These underground men confess
their wretchedness out of a desire to be
seen, to be recognized, even at the cost
of humiliation. When Dostoevsky’s
narrator makes a lame witticism, he
says, “Seeing for myself that I simply
had a vile wish to swagger—I purposely
won’t cross it out!” The extremity of
this (properly Christian) desire to be
known is only explicable by the desire
to be forgiven. Hage’s narrator hedges
on this score. He allows his therapist to
know he is a thief, and to imagine that
he might be much worse—he wants to
keep her interested, after all. But it isn’t
clear that he truly wants to be seen for
what he is, in part because he doesn’t
quite know what that is.
The most uncanny episode of the
novel is a dialogue between the narra-
tor and a giant cockroach—something
like the narrator’s tribal id, a projection
of his repressed desire for violence and
belonging. The roach mocks his inabil-
ity to pull the trigger when he had the
chance. “Look at you,” it says, “always
escaping, slipping, and feeling trapped
in everything you do.... You are what I
call a vulture, living on the periphery of
the kill. Waiting for the kill, but never
having the courage to do it yourself.”
It is the narrator’s failure to take re-
venge—his inability, in other words, to
live up to the codes of Maronite mas-
culinity—that shows his true colors. So
his dilemma ends up being the same as
Bassam’s. As he puts it, “How to exist
and not to belong?” It is a question
that hangs over all of Hage’s fiction,
and indeed over the history of mod-
ern Lebanon. How to create a deeply
felt, historically grounded identity that
isn’t defined by violence toward one’s
neighbors?
The protests that erupted in Leba-
non this past October were an attempt,
in part, to answer that question. The
demonstrations are a belated but rec-
ognizable version of the Arab Spring,
aimed at a corrupt state unable to pro-
vide basic services to its constituents.
Though Lebanon is not a poor country,
its infrastructure is among the worst
in the world, and its public debt is the
third highest. In 2015 similar protests
broke out when no one picked up the
garbage (the protesters’ slogan was
“You stink!”). One cause of this ne-
glect is a history of promoting local
identities—sometimes, though not al-
ways, sectarian ones—at the expense of
forming a national community. Each of
the 128 seats in Lebanon’s parliament
is assigned to one of the country’s reli-
gious groups. Clientelism is the law of
the land. Among the protesters’ basic
demands is to replace the current gov-
ernment with one elected along non-
sectarian lines, or as they put it, “All of
them means all of them.”
No doubt Hage would welcome the
protesters’ antisectarian spirit, but his
newest novel, Beirut Hellfire Society,
includes stories that remind us why they
are unlikely to be met. The book’s pro-
tagonist is an undertaker from (Chris-
tian) East Beirut, nicknamed Pavlov.
As a boy, working at his father’s mortu-
ary, Pavlov happened to feed a bucketof entrails to one of the neighborhood
dogs just as the church bells rang out.
The dog came back for more food at
the same time every day, and Pavlov got
his name. It’s a good Lebanese joke. It
turns the church bells into dinner bells
and suggests that the staying power of
sectarianism has everything to do with
the regular provision of basic needs—
even if what it provides is mostly rancid
slop.
In another part of the novel, a Mus-
lim convert to Christianity dies and his
relatives disagree about his funeral.
He’s finally buried in a Christian cem-
etery, but washed according to Muslim
rites. A priest and a sheikh are invited
to perform the prayers:The priest offered the sheik the
first prayer, but the sheik declined
and insisted that the priest start
the prayers since this was his home
village, upon which the priest in-
sisted that although the village
might be Christian, it still upheld
the old traditions of Arab hospital-
ity. The sheik replied that he was
eager to hear the priest’s beautiful
voice and the prayers of Issa, Jesus,
whom he acknowledged as one of
the prophets of Islam.... In the
end, the priest was compelled to
go first and give the sheik the last
prayer, and not utter a word more.
But when the sheik was done, the
priest splashed some holy water on
the grave.If sectarian identities are intractable
and rigid, Hage’s new novel is a parade
of deviants. It is set in Beirut in the early
years of the civil war, which means thatbusiness is steady for undertakers.
Pavlov isn’t a conventional embalmer,
however. He has inherited the busi-
ness from his father, a man who made a
practice of picking up “orphaned bod-
ies,” cadavers unclaimed by relatives.
The last rites the father performs for
these anonymous corpses are a ritual
of his own devising, including a hodge-
podge of what seem to be Zoroastrian,
Greek, and Hindu elements—in other
words, nothing native to Lebanon.
Over the course of the novel, Pavlov
meets a number of characters who ask
him for a nondenominational burial.
Some are members of the mysteri-
ous, quasi-Masonic “Hellfire Society,”
a group of self-styled illuminati who
view Lebanon as a prison of orthodoxy.
The founder of the society is a liber-
tine named after the Marquis de Sadewho requests that his funeral services
include an orgy, with his dead body
swinging from the rafters. The society’s
enforcers are a pair of gender-fluid mo-
torcyclists who appear to be modeled
on Harut and Marut, fallen angels of
Muslim tradition.
Hage has some heretical fun with this
mix-and-match approach to religious
mythology, and he’s obviously declar-
ing his own affinities with the misfits
and outcasts of the world. But while his
novel has episodic pleasures, it never co-
heres. The book is structured as a series
of digressions, somewhat in the style of
The Arabian Nights, as Pavlov bounces
off the oddballs who swerve in and out
of his path. But these encounters only
ever accumulate detail rather than mo-
mentum or interest (which can also be
a problem with Hage’s awkwardly un-
furling sentences). While Pavlov has
a vocation, he has no real story of his
own. Hage’s fitful attempts to give him
one—the novel ends, like Cockroach,
with a shoot-out—feel mechanical.
Hage has spoken in interviews about
his determination to leave behind what
he regards as old-fashioned realism,
suggesting that Arab novelists have
something to learn from their Latin
American peers. But magic only works
in fiction when it has some ballast of
the real. There’s nothing inherently
implausible about an undertaker who
makes up Zoroastrian-Gnostic burial
rites in modern Lebanon. When we
are given no explanation for his strange
behavior, however, and when the novel
also includes nuns who supervise an
orgy, dead dogs who speak like theol-
ogy professors, and assassins who jump
out of coffins at a wake, then we no lon-ger feel the frisson of deviance, since
weirdness has become the rule. When
the chief libertine complains of living
in a “traditional society” characterized
by “meek religiosity” and “a culture of
shaming and shame,” it is hard to credit
him, since the Lebanon of this novel is
the very land of unorthodoxy.Hage has said that the seed of Bei-
rut Hellfire Society lies partly in his
encounter with images from the cur-
rent bloodletting in Syria, an intrac-
table conflict that resembles Lebanon’s
own civil war in many ways. It would
not have escaped his attention that a
number of the Syrian uprising’s earliest
flashpoints were funerals doubling as
protests. Beirut Hellfire Society is full
of references to ancient Greek funer-
ary practices, philosophy, and litera-
ture, of which Pavlov is an avid reader.
The epigraph is from Sophocles’ Anti-
gone (“To lay my dearest brother in the
grave”), and the novel strives to adopt a
tragic posture toward the grisly history
it evokes.
Throughout the book, we see Pav-
lov standing on his balcony or at his
window, smoking cigarettes while an-
other funeral passes beneath him, a
thoughtful spectator to the danse ma-
cabre of civil war. Pavlov is a witness
to violence, but he makes no pretense
of judgment, and there are no spirits
of justice on the horizon. Like other
central figures in Hage’s novels, Pavlov
would like to escape Lebanon’s war-
ring communities. His solicitude for
outcasts and “orphaned bodies” makes
clear his wariness toward any officially
recognized identity. This neutrality
makes his character a cipher, and it
poses technical difficulties for Hage’s
novel. And yet, confronted with the
tangled history of Lebanese and Syrian
conflicts, with their baffling local and
international dimensions, who can feel
justified in taking sides?
The best passages in Hage’s fiction
subject his own characters to wither-
ing moral scrutiny. In Cockroach, it is
the giant bug who sneers at the narra-
tor’s “arrogance,” his belief that he can
avoid getting his hands dirty because
he belongs “to something better and
higher.” In Beirut Hellfire Society, the
same criticism is leveled at Pavlov by
a war photographer, a bored drug ad-
dict who comes to Beirut to get as close
as possible to the action (Hage is also
a photographer, and has written about
his attraction to the ethic of bearing
witness). The war-junkie mocks Pav-
lov’s attempts to suspend judgment.
Staying above the fray, he says, simply
turns violence into an entertainment.
There is nothing admirable about re-
fusing to take sides; on the contrary, it
is a sign of cowardice. “What the weak
ultimately desire is one spectacle after
another,” he says. “Does that sound fa-
miliar, Pavlov?”
The photographer will later join a
local militia, train as a sniper, and die
on the Green Line separating East and
West Beirut. He is hardly a figure of
conscience. And yet his words should
give pause to any writer who thinks of
turning the subject of war trauma into
an evenhanded fiction. His monologue
also suggests, perhaps against the grain
of Hage’s own beliefs, that the idea of
refusing one’s identity may be as diffi-
cult to defend as the desire to have one.
In times like these, there’s really no es-
cape from the fire. QRawi Hage, Mantua, Italy, 2019BassoCannarsa/Agence^ Opale/Alamy