Arachnotopia

Abstract

Arachnid and insectile lifeforms form an apocalyptic literary cluster linking early Islam, Lautréamont, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Salah Stétié. This essay begins by reimagining dialogues and interpersonal affections between the prophet Muḥammad and his close friend Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, who were granted safe passage through the mountains of Mecca by a spider. The story highlights the central role of animal life in the Qurʾān, which reads like a bestiary of elect creatures for the end of the world. Spiders and insects likewise populate french poetry, carrying it over from post-Enlightenment modernity to the mid-twentieth century and beyond. In this convergent literary historical view, when Stétié evokes arachnids and insects, he always means Qurʾānic apocalypse, while simultaneously rewriting Lautréamont and Mallarmé. The spider infiltrates spoken idiom. In turn and time, vernacular infiltrates poetic obscurity. Poetry emerges out of a continual process of skimming old cobwebs.

Keywords:

• Islam
• animals
• apocalypse
• Lautréamont
• Stéphane Mallarmé
• Salah Stétié

Notes

1 See Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, edited by Muhammad Muhsin Khan, 9 volumes, Kazi, 1976–1979, vol. 1, p. 3; yasser elhariry, Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation & the Postfrancophone Lyric, Liverpool UP, 2017, p. 171; Hoda El Shakry, The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb, Fordham UP, 2020, p. 22.

2 See yasser elhariry, “8^e dormant. Vers une poétique franco-arabe: Salah Stétié lecteur de Rimbaud,” Rimbaud & le sacré, edited by Denis Saint-Amand and Robert St. Clair, Parade sauvage : revue d’études rimbaldiennes, no. 27, 2016, pp. 169–181.

3 See Ahmad Ibn Ḥanbal, Musnad Imām Aḥmad bin Ḥanbal, edited by Huda al-Khattab, 5 volumes, translated by Nasiruddin al-Khattab, Riyadh, Darussalam, 2012, vol. 3, pp. 158–159.

4 Abdelwahab Meddeb, “La matière du poème,” Dédale, no. 11–12, 2000, pp.15–19 [pp. 16–17]; Matière des oiseaux, Saint-Clément-de-Riviére, Fata Morgana, 2001, p. 87.

5 See Gaston Bachelard, Lautréamont, Paris, Corti, 1939, p. 24; Alain Paris, Quatre lectures de Lautréamont, Paris, Nizet, 1972, p. 6; Tao Sanz, “Un refuge redoutable: La Nature chez Lautréamont,” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 46, no. 2, 2006, pp. 42–55 [pp. 50–51]; Jean-Pierre Lassalle, “Le Bestiaire de Lautréamont: Classement commenté des animaux,” Anthropozoologica, vol. 42, no. 1, 2007, pp. 7–18 [p. 8].

6 See Claire Wade, “The Importance and Implications of Animal-Human Figures in Les Chants de Maldoror,” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 18, no. 4, 1978, pp. 47–65 [p. 47], and Thacker p. 89.

7 Abigail Lang, “Contemporary Poetry and Transatlantic Poetics at the Royaumont Translations Seminars (1983–2000): An Experimental Language Laboratory,” Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age, edited by Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning, London, Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 145–163 [p. 145]; “The Ongoing French Reception of the Objectivists,” Modernist Revolutions: American Poetry and the Paradigm of the New, special issue of Transatlantica, 2016, p. 1. https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/8107. Accessed 30 Dec. 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yasser Elhariry

yasser elhariry is Associate Professor of French at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation & the Postfrancophone Lyric (Liverpool UP, 2017), and the editor of Cultures du mysticisme (Expressions maghrébines, 2017), Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Æsthetics & Deployments of a Sea in Crisis (with Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, Palgrave, 2018), The Postlingual Turn (with Rebecca L. Walkowitz, SubStance, 2021), Sounds Senses (Liverpool UP, 2022), and Khatibi Now! (with Matt Reeck, PMLA, 2022). A recipient of the William Riley Parker Prize, his writing appears in New Literary History, Yale French Studies, Francosphères, Contemporary French Civilization, Parade sauvage, French Forum, Hyperion, Jacket2, and several edited volumes.