round” (Ibid. 87). As if echoing William Wordsworth’s pronouncement that
“Nature never did betray / the heart that loved her” (“Tintern Abbey” 122–23),
the protagonist is quick to set some correctives to his doubts, making a similar
surmise, for “She would never forget a person who did not forget her” (Ibid. 87).
In other words, the dedicatee is represented in the familiar terms of patronage,
according to some ritual of exchange whereby retribution and reward assume
“qualitative relationships between the subjects transacting.”^22
Although his love for Suzy Dupont offers some substitution for faith, as his
forgetfulness of his patron saint indicates, its failure is synonymous with
wastefulness and loss. Structured in retrospect upon other popular veiled
autobiographies including Goethe’s Sorrows of the Young Werther and
Carlyle’sSartor Resartus, this experience in al->aklm’s life coincides with
traditional poetic constructs of love, loss, search, and subsequent passage
into some communal or spiritual integration. In the terms of Van Gennep’s
rite of passage, superbly studied and applied by Suzanne Stetkevych in
her reading of Abbmsid panegyric, the passenger-poet’s failure in love or
experience entails the following: “Separation from his former condition
expressed in the naslb; the Liminal transitional stage in the ra.ll, and the
Aggregation, that is reentry into society and assumption of new status, in
themadl..”^23
Inscribed in retrospect, al->aklm’s dedication is an act of compensation for
his forgetfulness and doubt. Even his love experience is attributed to an
atavistic urge that releases him from self-blame, especially as his view of
love as a feeling of sublimity continues to counteract the actual affair with
Suzy and others. Gathering snatches from >mfiz (d. 1390), Ishmq al-Mawxill
(d. 849) and cUmar al-Khayymm (d. 1123) on his side, he is keen on express-
ing his disapproval of the Parisian tendency to display love, as a “vulgar
exhibition of the soul’s most noble treasures, which ought to be jealously pre-
served in the heart like pearls in a jewel-box” (Bird, 42). Rather fraught with
the experiential and the cultural, his letter to Suzy Dupont is a site onto
which is inscribed an amalgam of fragments and allusions that make up its
matrix as a mirror-in-the-text, another verbal construct that synthesizes his
three-staged voyage into the metropolis. In the larger text, allusions and
quotations from innumerable cultural terrains, Eastern and Western alike, are
available to present an experience of identity and acculturation that applies
to many intellectuals of the period of Arab awakening. While leaving
l’humanitéfor André and his father, Marx and Cocteau for Ivan Ivanovich,
a Russian émigré, al->aklm’s surrogate is there to choose from >mfiz and
Khayymm, among others, whatever meets his fluctuating mood. Thus, upon
loss and failure of love, >mfiz is there to be quoted:
Ah! She alone it was that soundly slept.
However, the entire world was sitting up with me.
(Bird, 128)DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS