Not all poets share the specific emphasis on the visionary and the
prophetic. While different from other modernists like Jabrm, especially in
respect to modernity as an ahistorical constant, Adnnlsian poetics was mainly
a challenge to leftist poetics, which argued throughout the period in question
for an urgent engagement with present evils, including authoritarianism and
exploitation. Leftist poetics shared the agenda for innovation, the creative
involvement in tradition, and the emancipation from hegemonic discourse.
However, its early advocates like the Iraqi poet al-Baymtl(d. 1999), insisted
on immediacy, too, in view of urgent issues. Adnnls reacted against the
“mechanical” response as an expression of “poor artistic perspective,” as he
argued in another publication.^117
To understand Adnnls in terms of the relation between his early poetics
and his writings of the 1970s, a further note may prove worthwhile. The
underlying thesis in Adnnls targets authority. “The emphasis on a connect-
edness to tradition is practiced by the inherently dominating forces, unifying
thereby their domination of the system and their control of speech, for the
single purpose of enhancing their culture and hegemony.”^118 These forces
manipulate theological discourse to preempt criticism and equate power con-
trol with religious infallibility. In line with Foucauldian analysis, and with a
tinge from Bakhtin, the poet as critic targets unitary discourse as a fossilized
one that ends up “in the sealed eternal text of religion.” Conversely, he opts
for a poetry that opens up boundaries, and assumes multiple layering, “join-
ing the visible to the invisible,” to be the language “of the edges” that “flays
words and in so doing expresses the world.”^119 In relation to poetry, he
charges literary criticism with imitativeness and dormancy.
Most Arab critics express the same notion [using the past as the
measurement for the present and the future], for as much as poetry
is close to the origin, its owner becomes a recognized poet. The
origin is a static and fixed point around which poets revolve. But
they lose in value whenever they are at a distance from this origin.
(Ibid. 114–15)This whole discussion is couched in paradigmatic antithetical frames of
reference that leave some space for the vertical whenever things cannot
square. The underlying assumption relates to hegemonic culture, that of the
status quo, “... as established, like the system, on the proclaimed adherence
to fundamentals, and preservation of inherited values, as they stand or as they
are inherited” (The Immutable and the Mutable, 1: 22). This culture, “...as
it proclaims, is literal, fundamental, and referential,” he argues in Al-Thmbit
wa- al-muta.awwil(Ibid.).
Adnnls’ discourse resembles Foucauldian analysis. In more than one
instance, he also believes that discourse, to use Said’s paraphrase of Foucault,
“overrides society and governs the production of culture,” for discourse is
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS