Chapter 5, ‘Time and Causal Collapse’, builds on the themes of inheritance, rupture, and the past encroaching on the present by discussing time loops, and repeated or mirrored events. Arab women writers register themselves as outside of modernity. This does not mean that they are bastions of tradition and the past, though: instead, women in these texts are “out of time” on a number of counts. What I mean by being “out of time” for this chapter is to be outside of what Julia Kristeva calls ‘monumental time’ (Women’s Time (1977). In The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present. Princeton University Press, 2009, 14), which describes the ‘wide angle camera’ of history (Haddad, The Seamstress’ Daughter. Naufal, Hachette Antoine, 2019, 220) which tends to erase women from its sweeping gaze. This is registered as Gothic repetitions and cycles which ‘are traditionally linked to female subjectivity’ (Kristeva, Women’s Time (1977). In The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present. Princeton University Press, 2009, 188). Indeed, women’s experience of modernity is “out of joint”. I thus examine how the sense of multiple histories and cyclicality register the ways in which women are caught between tradition and modernity, in how the marriage market suspends women outside of modernity in Samman’s short story ‘Beheading the Cat’ from The Square Moon: Supernatural Tales [al-qamar al-murabba‘: qiṣaṣ gharā’ibiyyah] (1998 [1994]). I then engage with the ambiguous endings of El Saadawi’s Love in the Kingdom of Oil [ḥubb fīzaman al-naff̣t] (2001 [1993]), Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra [hikāyat Zahra] (1986 [1980]), Maryam’s Maze [matāhat Maryam] (2009 [2007]) by Ez Eldin, to show the tensions between cause and effect that Arab women writers present alerts us to the ambivalences and futilities in negotiating patriarchy. I then examine temporal loops and the frustration of “if/then” diachronicity in Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019), Ghandour’s The Honey (2009), El Saadawi’s The Fall of the Imam [Suqūṭ al-imām] (2009 [1988]), and Shibli’s Minor Detail [tafṣīl thānawī] (2020 [2017]). By way of conclusion, I show that many texts find characters or events to be “out of time”, both in the sense of running out of time, and also to be beyond causality due to intergenerational repetitions of systemically upheld violence.

Time and Causal Collapse

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发表日期：

2025年

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Roxanne Douglas

摘要

Chapter 5, ‘Time and Causal Collapse’, builds on the themes of inheritance, rupture, and the past encroaching on the present by discussing time loops, and repeated or mirrored events. Arab women writers register themselves as outside of modernity. This does not mean that they are bastions of tradition and the past, though: instead, women in these texts are “out of time” on a number of counts. What I mean by being “out of time” for this chapter is to be outside of what Julia Kristeva calls ‘monumental time’ (Women’s Time (1977). In The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present. Princeton University Press, 2009, 14), which describes the ‘wide angle camera’ of history (Haddad, The Seamstress’ Daughter. Naufal, Hachette Antoine, 2019, 220) which tends to erase women from its sweeping gaze. This is registered as Gothic repetitions and cycles which ‘are traditionally linked to female subjectivity’ (Kristeva, Women’s Time (1977). In The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present. Princeton University Press, 2009, 188). Indeed, women’s experience of modernity is “out of joint”. I thus examine how the sense of multiple histories and cyclicality register the ways in which women are caught between tradition and modernity, in how the marriage market suspends women outside of modernity in Samman’s short story ‘Beheading the Cat’ from The Square Moon: Supernatural Tales [al-qamar al-murabba‘: qiṣaṣ gharā’ibiyyah] (1998 [1994]). I then engage with the ambiguous endings of El Saadawi’s Love in the Kingdom of Oil [ḥubb fīzaman al-naff̣t] (2001 [1993]), Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra [hikāyat Zahra] (1986 [1980]), Maryam’s Maze [matāhat Maryam] (2009 [2007]) by Ez Eldin, to show the tensions between cause and effect that Arab women writers present alerts us to the ambivalences and futilities in negotiating patriarchy. I then examine temporal loops and the frustration of “if/then” diachronicity in Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019), Ghandour’s The Honey (2009), El Saadawi’s The Fall of the Imam [Suqūṭ al-imām] (2009 [1988]), and Shibli’s Minor Detail [tafṣīl thānawī] (2020 [2017]). By way of conclusion, I show that many texts find characters or events to be “out of time”, both in the sense of running out of time, and also to be beyond causality due to intergenerational repetitions of systemically upheld violence.