hi Stephen, Roger -
>When I first read the Robinson poems in the Sixties I found that isolation
>self-serving, disturbing, off-putting and antithetical to the communal
>political aspirations of the time. Definitely counter-populist - and yet,
>as an American westerner - creepily familiar.
Rather as I would read & react to Larkin's Mr Bleaney's Room (a much simpler
and more boring poem than Kees' Robinsons, I think)- more with an
ethnographic eye than a reading-enjoyment - but here is the absent named one
not known - though Larkin can't help being sly and wink-wink, trying to
co-opt us in to one viewpoint: But the great melancholy of aloneness with a
God too far away is here too, only now God is too high up in the high
windows to even be feasible. Creepily familiar, but differently.
>It will be interesting to see if there's a direct connection between Defoe
>and Ibn Tufail. Is there a history of such literature in the Islamic world?
I suspect the connection has been subject to academic scrutiny - it's a
connection drawn more often in Arabic commentaries. The third Crusoe work,
comprehensively titled "Serious reflections during the Life and Surprising
adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with his Vision of the Angelic World" gets
closest to the "journeying soul" of Ibn Tufail whose character Hai bin
Yaqzan translates as Alive, son of Awake.
The philosophical romance flourished for hundreds of years in Islamic
literatures - and in great diversity - My knowledge is too scatty to surmise
what Ibn Tufail's (full name Abu Bakr bin Abd al-Malik bin Muhammad bin
Muhammad bin Tufayl al-Qaisi, known in the medieval West as Abubacer, born
in Granada in 1100, died in marrakesh 1185) sources are, though the
immediate context is that the work argues against al-Ghazali's Destruction
of the Philosophers through a striking variation on a story by Ibn Sina
(Avicenna) which tells of a princess's son cast onto an equatorial island.
Ibn Tufail's work was one of a number of these philosophical romances &
"assemblies" taken up in post-Napoleon Egypt as models for the development
of an "Arabic novel". Interestingly, Robinson Crusoe was one of the first
Western novels to be translated into Arabic, c.1800, a good fifty years
before the movement to translate Western novels took off. More recently, Ibn
Tufail and his Hai bin Yaqzan has had a marked influence on a number of Arab
women novelists - crude generalisations: sensing a character outside, who
must always begin again?, spontaneously generated & so un-sexed? - I'd
recommend Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat's The Stone of Laughter (Hajar
al-Dahk) - (it has an excellent translation by Sophie Bennett from Garnet
Publishing) - which is a novel about an androgynous young man Khalil living
in Beirut at war, attracted to an asocial Robinson-mode, as the city is
reduced to remote islands of life cut off from each other.
Edmund
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