Fiction and Colonial Identities

Abstract

This chapter explores the first Arabic translation (1909) of Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur novellas as the instance of a major formal shift in the Arab narrative genre system that emerges in creative tension with changing regimes of personhood in colonial Egypt. Selim shows how ʿAbd al-Qadir Hamza’s translation interlaces the narrative modes of medieval popular genres (the sira) into Leblanc’s ironic, post-novelistic detective fiction to produce an Arabic text that can be read as a challenge to the fixed and stable construction of identity necessary to both the colonial police state and nahdawi reformism.

Throughout the twentieth century, Egyptian writers from Tawfiq al-Hakim to Sunʿalla Ibrahim have recalled fond youthful memories of devouring Arabic translations of the adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur in cheap paperback editions. Along with popular nineteenth-century justiciers, criminals and masters of detection like Alexander Dumas’ Edmond Dantès, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Ponson du Terrail’s Rocambole, Lupin has made himself a place in the informal canon of great modern fictional heroes for three or four generations of Egyptian writers and readers. While The Count of Monte Cristo and du Terrail’s immense roman-feuilleton Les Drames de Paris were first intercepted by Arab translators at least a couple of decades after their appearance in French, translations of the Holmes and Lupin stories were being produced only a few years after their original publication dates in France and England. The first Arabic Lupin stories appeared in 1910 in The People’s Entertainments . Re-translations were made throughout the following decades, including in popular “pocket novel” editions (riwayat al-jayb) produced by a variety of Cairo presses.¹ Unfortunately, no detailed study of this substantial archive exists, nor of the publishing institutions that supported its circulation over at least half a century, and very little work has been done on its literary sociology in relation to the modern Egyptian cultural imaginary.²

This chapter attempts to address a very small piece of this larger inquiry, from the beginning as it were, when ʿAbd al-Qadir Hamza published in the Entertainments his translations of five of the nine stories that make up the first collection of Lupin’s adventures, Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur (1907) as Al-Liss al-zarif (The Gentleman Thief, 1909). My interest in the Lupin stories and their translation is twofold. On the one hand, the translation of this most impeccable of Belle Epoque heroes into Arabic at the beginning of the century signals a deep interest in the modern legal and sociological reconstitution of the individual as this was taking place in Egypt in the context of colonialism and the extensive social and juridical reforms of the nahda . At the same time, the literary system in Egypt was undergoing a significant transformation. A “middle-brow” reading public was emerging, print fiction was slowly beginning to replace poetry as the dominant medium of literary production and the modern novel was coming into being. Hamza’s Lupin translation represents a new literary experiment in narrative genre: one, I will try to show, that drew on the generic codes of popular medieval Arabic narrative while simultaneously forcing them open in order to interpret and translate the novel subjectivities and temporalities produced in European fictions—in this case, crime fictions—and as a form of “internal” translation or adaptation. In other words, Al-Liss al-zarif adapts Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur as a re-writing of popular Arabic narrative forms within the complex and dynamic social space of modern colonial Egypt.

The main questions I try to answer in this chapter then are why, and how does a particular text get translated at a particular historical moment? In other words, why, in 1909, translate Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur and not say, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education or Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure? Why urban gothic, detective fiction and historical romance, for example, and not the classics of French and English realism? And what kinds of strategies are mobilized when adapting a new narrative genre like the novel? Domestication and foreignization are often understood as opposite poles of practice, separated and fixed by the translator’s ethical or political intention. In Hamza’s translation however, both strategies are closely entwined. The emergence of the “individual” and of “personhood” as a set of ambivalent legal, rhetorical and textual concepts and practices in the nineteenth and early twentieth century is a central concern of this chapter, as is the literary figure of the hero. In what follows I will argue that the modern anti-hero represented by Arsène Lupin crystallizes a profound social tension in early twentieth-century Egypt and that this tension is visible in the morphological experiment that Hamza undertakes in his translation. Precariously positioned in between overlapping and discordant juridical regimes, social practices and narrative modes, the Egyptian Lupin marks a complex passage from romance to novel in Arabic literature.

Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Thief

It has been suggested that Maurice Leblanc, Lupin’s creator, loosely based his acclaimed hero on the infamous French anarchist Marius Jacob (1879–1954).³ The term “gentleman thief” was born along with the first collection of stories, and though many imitators have since laid claim to the title, it is nonetheless irrevocably bound to the deadly and mercurial French dandy whose career roughly spans 20 volumes and 35 years. Lupin’s afterlives are equally impressive, with numerous literary re-writings and stage, film, television and comic book adaptations (including a contemporary Japanese manga). Like his nemesis Sherlock Holmes, Lupin was translated into scores of European and non-European languages, from Portuguese to Malay in the first half of the twentieth century.⁴ Jacques Derouard has devoted an erudite and entertaining monograph to the tastes, habits, accessories and bon mots of this most extravagant of Belle Epoque criminals, and in 2004 the prestigious French publisher, Omnibus, issued the collected works in two handsome paperback volumes with a preface by the Academician and former government minister Alain Decaux.

Lupin emerges from two distinct but related traditions in nineteenth-century French popular fiction. He is a direct descendent of Eugène François Vidocq (1775–1857) whose autobiography Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de Sûreté (1828–1829) introduced the sensational figure of the notorious criminal-turned-detective into French literature,⁵ a trope established and worked into an emergent genre by Emile Gaboriau (1832–1873) and his Inspector Lecoq (a bona fide detective who, inversely, poses as a criminal). Like Vidocq, Lupin is a thief who masquerades, when need be, as a detective.⁶ But Lupin is also distantly related to the justicier of the mid-nineteenth-century feuilleton: he only steals from the rich—and most particularly those who acquire their wealth through stock market speculation and other forms of sanctioned financial chicanery. He is a thief, but a cultured, fashionable and urbane thief who inhabits the world of the rich and famous as though he was born to it, rather than to a penniless and unmarried Parisian seamstress. He chooses to be a criminal mostly out of sheer pleasure and is never having so much fun as when he is successfully outwitting the police (which is almost always). He very much appreciates a good joke, even when the joke is—rarely—on him. Above all, Arsène Lupin is a great modern, an eloquent and vivacious ironist and a passionate aficionado of spanking new technology in all its forms, even its literary forms: the tired psychological novels of the Second Empire bore him (and, according to Derouard, his contemporary French critics too) to death⁷: “Everywhere, everything was moving faster … Everything was changing: women’s silhouettes, which Poiret liberated from the corset, aesthetic form with the Russian Ballet and Cubism, news magazines in which photography was ever more present, science above all: x-rays, telegraph, automobiles, aviation.”⁸

Lupin is a master of spectacular disguise, intrigue and evasion à l’ancienne, but he is also an avid connoisseur and consumer of the latest technological gadgets. Inspector Ganimard: “Notre individu n’emploie pas des procédés aussi vieux jeu. Il est d’aujourd’hui, ou plutôt de demain”/[“Our man doesn’t get up to such old tricks. He’s a man of today—or rather, of tomorrow.”] (Leblanc, Les Aventures, 31). In the world of the gentleman thief, irony—the irony of the consummate fin de siècle mondaine—orchestrates this peculiar marriage of the marvelous and the modern. From his Parisian prison cell, Lupin sends a solicitous little note to the nouveau-riche miser, Baron Cahorn, to inform him of his coming spoliation:

Monsieur le baron,

Il y a, dans la galerie qui réunit vos deux salons, un tableau de Philippe de Champagne d’excellente facture et qui me plait infiniment. Vos Rubens sont aussi de mon gout, ainsi que votre plus petit Watteau. Dans le salon de droite, je note la crédence Louis XIII, les tapisseries de Beauvais, le guéridon Empire signé Jacob et le bahut Renaissance. Dans celui de gauche, toute la vitrine des bijoux et des miniatures.

Pour cette fois, je me contenterai de ces objets qui seront, je crois, d’un écoulement facile. Je vous prie donc de les faire emballer convenablement et de les expédier à mon nom (porte payé), en gare de Batignolles, avant huit jours … faute de quoi, je ferai procéder moi-même à leur déménagement dans la nuit de mercredi 27 au jeudi 28 septembre. Et, comme de juste, je ne me contenterai pas des objets sus-indiqués.

Veuillez excuser le petit dérangement que je vous cause, et accepter l’expression de mes sentiments de respectueuse considération.

Arsène Lupin.

P. S.—Surtout ne pas m’envoyer le plus grand des Watteau. Quoique vous l’avez payé trente mille francs à l’Hôtel des Ventes, ce n’est qu’une copie, l’original ayant été brulé, sous le Directoire, par Barras, un soir d’orgie. Consulter les Mémoires inédits de Garat.

Je ne tiens pas non plus à la châtelaine Louis XV dont l’authenticité me semble douteuse. (Leblanc 2004: 23)

[Baron,

In the gallery that runs between your pair of drawing rooms there is an exquisitely wrought painting by Phillipe de Champagne that pleases me infinitely. Your Rubens also appeal to me, as does your smallest Watteau. In the drawing room on the right, I note the Louis XIII buffet, the Beauvais tapestries, the Empire pedestal table signed by Jacob and the Renaissance sideboard. In the room to the left, the glass case of jewels and miniatures.

For now, I shall be glad to content myself with these objects as, I believe, they shall be fairly easy to transport. I beg you therefore to pack them properly and to direct them, postage paid, in my name to Batignol Station in the space of eight days, in default of which I shall be obliged to remove them in person on the night of Wednesday September 27 or Thursday September 28. In said event, and in all fairness, I shall not content myself with the pieces mentioned above.

Pray excuse the small inconvenience I may cause, and accept the expression of my most respectful regard.

Arsène Lupin

P. S.—Above all, do not send the largest of the Watteaus. Though you may have payed 30,000 francs for it at the Hotel des Ventes, it is but a copy, Barras having burned the original in a nocturnal orgy in the days of the Diréctoire. Consult the complete Mémoirs of Garat. Nor do I care overmuch for the Louis XV châtelaine, the authenticity of which appears doubtful to me.]

Criminals and Detectives: Personhood in Colonial Egypt

The late twentieth-century post-structuralist turn applied itself to demolishing that great imperial temple to the central tenet of Western humanism, the individual, by focusing on the web of highly regulated discourses and social practices that constitute the subject. The genealogy of the individual in modern Europe was not only linked to “the construction of lost origins [and] the emergence of statehood” as Valentin Groebner claims,⁹ but also to the genesis of the criminal as both an ontological category and an object of scientific inquiry. In other words, if the absolute condition of the emergence of the nation-state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the effective identification, management and activation of persons (i.e. the persons residing within its territory), then the bureaucratic and scientific practices that made this process possible were also responsible for producing the individual, the citizen and the criminal as related juridico-forensic categories. Identity and identification are central to all three of these categories, and the history of legal and bureaucratic technologies of identification in modern Europe is also, in a way, a history of their genesis.

In eighteenth-century France, paper identities began to replace physically embodied ones and legal identification came to depend on written, official documents rather than the oral testimony of neighbors and kin, a process built on what Piazza and Crettiez call “familiarity and face-to-face” recognitions.¹⁰ Identity papers were first used by the French state as a means of controlling internal displacement but eventually—and particularly after the revolution of 1789—came to serve as a mechanism for distinguishing the citoyen from the potentially subversive outsider, and later, from the gypsy, the nomad and the immigrant. Caplan and Torpey refer to “registrations, passes, censuses and the like” in the repertoire of eighteenth-century bureaucratic practice in Europe,¹¹ but the late nineteenth century was to witness the implementation of a far more effective and “scientific” set of identification practices that emerged alongside the new disciplines of anthropology and criminology. Both of these disciplines were inextricably linked, both were based on the scientific study of the human. The former targeted the colonial subject and the savage, while the latter took the deviant citizen as its object. Anthropometry—the systematic measurement of the human body—was shared by both as a central scientific method. It was the key to establishing positive scientific standards of normalcy and deviance, development and degeneration, the advanced and the primitive.

The Bertillon system of identification—introduced in France in 1883 and soon thereafter the world over—placed anthropometry at the service of Caplan and Torpey’s “well-regulated police state,”¹² and on a scale that would have been unimaginable merely a few decades earlier. France’s turbulent nineteenth century transformed the police into a formidable political institution with direct ties to the regime in place, particularly after the major reforms of 1851. Socialism and anarchism were major concerns of the Second Empire and the Third Republic, as much as, if not more than common criminality. The 1851 reforms instituted a centralized and highly efficient system of national surveillance headed by the infamous Service de Sûreté:

In order to defend itself against theft, pillage and murder … “society needed a terrible weapon, an invisible power, active, vigilante, ever-present, in all places at all hours, to see, seize and strike the guilty” … but also to better survey all the zones of illegal activity and popular agitation in which the “rogues” and “thugs” who politicize public opinion against the regime in place flourished.¹³

The Service de Sûreté oversaw a vast and highly effective intelligence-gathering network based on a system of spies, informers and undercover agents. In this shady world of multiple identities, the criminal was a potential detective and the detective a potential criminal. Recidivism was now perceived by the state as a major social and political problem at the same time that César Lombroso’s bio-hereditary theories of degeneracy and criminality were spreading throughout Europe. Bertillonage “… was based on the measurement of certain dimensions of the body—including head, arms, and legs,” verbal description (the portrait parlé), a sophisticated method of forensic photography and finally, an elaborate system of notation, classification and filing. Beginning in 1882, any person coming into contact with the police for anything from a misdemeanor to a felony was measured, photographed and filed into a central office register in Paris, and in 1887 the system went national: “all penal establishments were under orders to apply the Bertillon method to their inmates, and to file a duplicate of each set of measurements with the prefecture, where it would be classified.”¹⁴ With the sensational arrest and positive identification of the anarchist Ravachol in 1892, Bertillonage was adopted by police services around the world: “the United States … England, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, British India, Rumania, the South American republics … Denmark”¹⁵ … and Egypt. Its goal, as one contemporary commentator noted approvingly, was no less than “to fix the human personality, to assign to every human being a definite, durable, invariable, always recognizable and easily verifiable identity and individuality,”¹⁶ and this, by means of a vast paper bureaucracy that established legal personhood with one hand, while stripping the person of uniqueness on the other:

The elaboration of systematic regimes of representation disclosed a central tension in the project of identification, as opposed to mere classification. The identity document purports to be a record of uniqueness, but also has to be an element in a classifying series that reduces individuality to a unit in a series, and that is thus simultaneously deindividualizing. This discloses the fundamental instability of the concept of the “individual” as such, and helps to explain the uneasy sense that we never fully own or control our identity, that the identity document carries a threat of expropriation at the same time as it claims to represent who we “are.”¹⁷

It is no accident then that the detective story proper is born around this same time, when legal and discursive personhood was being established in criminal terms. While the English strain took the form of the novel of detection (à la Conan Doyle), the French strain was fascinated with the figure of the criminal-hero who eludes detection while being obliged to engage in a fair amount of it himself from time to time, and often, as mentioned earlier, in the very (dis)guise of the detective himself.¹⁸ I do not intend to speculate here on the socio-historical reasons for this interesting difference, though no doubt, others have done so. What I am interested in is rather the particular fascination that this French strain exercised over translators and readers in turn-of-the-century Egypt, and the specific hermeneutic strategies that the former used to “rewrite” these fictions into the contemporary Egyptian context. If we think of the relationship between a centralized, expansionist and modernizing state and its citizens—a relationship mediated by specific, “translated” legal and bureaucratic instruments and policing regimes—as a major form of capitalist modernity, we can begin to detect the patterns of a common apparatus of domination—and resistance to it—shared between “center” and “periphery” in real time (rather than as the symptom of a “belated” modernity).¹⁹

As in France, the steady institutionalization of legal reforms and medico-forensic innovation were changing the way personhood was constructed and managed by the state and its bureaucracies in the Egypt of the British Occupation; as in France, the police was also a largely political body (run by and for the Occupation) and corruption was rife.²⁰ Unlike France however—and here is a key difference—official personhood in colonial Egypt was vastly complicated by the Ottoman Capitulations, and by the legal chaos of identity masquerade that resulted. Moreover, shariʿa law continued to exist side by side with siyasa and later, Western law (the Code Napoléon) well into the twentieth century. The quasi-divine fiat of consular protection, the complex interplays and rivalries between Shariʿa Courts, Native Courts and Mixed Courts produced a dizzying web of interchangeable identities and subject regimes: being an official “person” in the Egypt of 1909 could be a very mysterious, complicated, even dangerous affair—and an eminently modern one at that.

The thriving world of business in the urban centers of colonial Egypt—in both its legal/financial and criminal sectors—was especially implicated in, and governed by, this bio-juridical system. Quite apart from the large communities of European nationals that resided and did business in Egypt, ethnic and religious minorities (both Egyptian and regional) were able to use the capitulations to claim French, Swiss, Italian or Greek nationality and hence to evade local law and the Native Courts.²¹ Needless to say, this was very good for business, be it the business of property-development, money-lending, drug running or the white slave trade (of which Egypt was a major center in the first quarter of the twentieth century), but it also most certainly contributed to a sense of the person’s basic instability in relation to the state as well as to established communal affiliations. Moreover, the legal options available to Egyptian Muslims in civil and criminal cases were shaped by parallel, if at times complementary juridical regimes (shariʿa, siyasa and Napoleonic law) that activated significantly different concepts of the individual. In shariʿa law, for example, accusation and bearing witness (and in the case of homicide, even sentencing) were oral, face-to-face and highly personal acts enshrined as the legal obligation of the concerned victim/individual, while in siyasa law as it developed over the latter half of the nineteenth century, the state took over this role and the whole sequence of accusation, testimony and investigation became an impersonal process relying on written documents and extensive medico-forensic and bureaucratic technologies processed through impersonal and aloof agencies, commissions and tribunals. With regard to both the capitulations and, as Khaled Fahmy has shown, the dual legal system, people grew adept at using and manipulating the regimes of personhood in place in Egypt at this time to their advantage.²² The capitulations enabled an elaborate play of disguise and assumed identities and the law offered points of access to alternate juridical subjectivities. In this context then, modern personhood—the “fixed, always recognizable and easily identifiable human personality” referred to by Herbette—was, in an important sense, understood and negotiated by people as more or less a series of mobile and strategic constructs, or fictions.

Lupin appealed to Egyptian translators and readers because he incarnates this new social experience, while at the same time evoking the older heroic modes of popular Arabic romance, as we shall shortly see. In a world turned upside down, where corruption and colonial government render polity and citizenship empty fictions, the Arabic Lupin is a very modern hero, if a somewhat ambivalent one. Then (as now) the law—and particularly the police—was an object of suspicion and satire. Hamza inserts original additions into the Arabic text that elaborate on this theme for his Egyptian readers. In one of these interpolated passages, the soon to be robbed Baron Cahorn has this to say to Inspector Ganimard:

.دعني بعد ذلك من الشرطة والحكومة فقد أصبحنا في زمن أولياؤنا فيه اللصوص الفاتكون

(MS118:51)

[Don’t speak to me of police and government! In these times, it’s the masters have become vicious thieves].

At the same time, certain aspects of this social experience are less easily translatable into the Egyptian context. After his arrest in “L’Arrestation d’Arsène Lupin” and imprisonment in “Arsène Lupin en prison” comes the much vaunted and much awaited moment of his escape in “L’Evasion d’Arsène Lupin.” Lupin effects his escape by successfully substituting an elderly alcoholic tramp for himself in prison. He makes the daring switch convincing through weeks of careful retirement from the watchful eyes of his wardens, fasting, special exercises to alter his musculature and posture, chemical treatment of his skin, make-up, and by bribing the workers in the anthropometry office upon his arrival in prison to falsify his measurements (“C’est suffisant pour que tout le système dévie”/ [“It’s enough to throw off the entire system”]).²³ By the time of his trial, it is no longer Lupin who stands in the prisoner’s box, but a silent, broken double who insistently claims the unknown identity of Désiré Baudru. Inspector Ganimard himself, Lupin’s grim arch-enemy and the agent responsible for his arrest in the first place, is the one who makes the (false) positive identification at a dramatic moment during the proceedings. The presiding judge:

malgré toutes les recherches, il a été impossible de reconstituer votre identité. Vous présentez ce cas assez original dans notre société moderne de n’avoir point de passé. Nous ne savons qui vous êtes, d’où vous venez, où s’est écoulée votre enfance, bref, rien. Vous jaillissez tout d’un coup, il y a trois ans, on ne sait au juste de quel milieu, pour vous révéler tout d’un coup Arsène Lupin, c’est-à-dire un composé bizarre d’intelligence, de perversion, d’immoralité et de générosité. Les données que nous avons sur vous avant cette époque sont plutôt des suppositions. Il est probable que le nommé Rostat qui travailla, il y a huit ans, aux côtés de du prestidigitateur Dickson n’était autre qu’Arsène Lupin. Il est probable que l’étudiant russe qui fréquenta, il y a six ans, le laboratoire du docteur Altier, à l’hôpital Saint-Louis, et qui souvent surprit le maître par l’ingéniosité de ses hypothèses sur la bactériologie et la hardiesse des ses expériences dans les maladies de la peau, n’était autre qu’Arsène Lupin. Arsène Lupin, également, le professeur de lutte japonaise qui s’établit à Paris bien avant qu’on y parlât de jiu-jitsu. Arsène Lupin, croyons-nous, le coureur cycliste qui gagna le Grand Prix de l’Exposition, toucha ses dix mille francs et ne reparut plus. Arsène Lupin peut-être aussi celui qui sauva tant de gens par la petite lucarne du Bazar de la Charité … et les dévalisa.

…

Telle est cette époque, qui semble n’avoir été qu’une préparation minutieuse à la lutte que vous avez entreprise contre la société, un apprentissage méthodique où vous portiez au plus haut point de votre force, votre énergie, et votre adresse. Reconnaissez-vous l’exactitude de ces faits ? (Les Aventures, 44, italics added)

[In spite of all our inquiries, we have found it impossible to reconstitute your identity. You present the rather original case in our modern society of having not the slightest trace of a past. We know not who you are, where you come from, the place in which your childhood unfolded, in brief, nothing. You sprang up out of nowhere one fine day three years ago in the declared person of Arsène Lupin, that is, a bizarre composite of intelligence, perversion, immorality and generosity. The information we have about you during this period is mostly based on conjecture. It is likely that the man named Rostat, who trained with the conjurer, Dickson, eight years ago was none other than Arsène Lupin. It is likely that the Russian student who frequented the laboratory of Doctor Altier at the Saint-Louis Hospital six years ago and who often surprised his master with the brilliance of his hypotheses in bacteriology and the rigor of his experiments on skin diseases was none other than Arsène Lupin. Arsène Lupin, the Japanese martial arts professor who installed himself in Paris well before anyone had ever heard of jiu-jitsu. Arsène Lupin, we believe: the long-distance cyclist, who won the Grand Prize at the Exposition, accepted his 10,000 francs and vanished into thin air. Arsène Lupin perhaps also, the man who saved so many people through the skylight at the Charity Bazaar … and then relieved them of their purses.…

Such was this period, during which you seem to have done nothing but scrupulously prepare yourself for the battle that you continue to wage against society; a methodical apprenticeship in which you pushed your energy and endurance to their very limits. Do you then acknowledge the accuracy of these facts?] (italics added)

In this long passage Hamza carefully follows the detailed and fantastic itinerary of Lupin’s supposed curriculum vitae in a faithful, word for word translation. The penultimate sentence of the passage in which the judge expounds on Lupin’s “battle against society” (italicized above) is however, curiously, deleted in its entirety. At the turn of the twentieth century, “society” as a discursive and semantic concept had not yet been stabilized in Arabic, though the reformist intelligentsia in Egypt had begun to take an interest in modern social theory and to produce various neologisms in the late nineteenth century. “Society,” after all, is inseparable as a concept from that of “individual” in liberal theory.²⁴ Mass identification techniques introduced by the British colonial administration at the turn of the twentieth century seem to have been largely ineffective in a social system where illiteracy, flexible naming conventions, volatile migration patterns and oral, face-to-face community-based affiliations were the norm.²⁵ In 1897, Colonel Harvey Pasha, Chief of Cairo Police, singlehandedly instituted a Central Identification Office (Qalam al-tahqiq) based on a combination of Bertillon’s anthropometric system and Francis Galton’s method of fingerprinting. By 1899, 20,836 files had been assembled (a “small number” according to Galton himself).²⁶ The fact that a variety of other kinds of ingenuous identification techniques were constantly being devised and tested in Egypt at this time is a testament to the recalcitrance of a population to whom “society,” if it meant anything, largely meant state intrusion and control of their lives and livelihoods.²⁷

Far from being an enemy of society in the sense enshrined in liberal theory, in the new science of criminology, and in the moral economy of the nineteenth-century French novel, Hamza’s Arsène Lupin is a threshold figure, a hero of medieval romance precariously translated into the tumultuous world of automobiles and anthropometry, high finance and bureaucratic discipline, police corruption and colonial disguise. The order that he challenges and continually outwits is that of personhood itself. Master of disguise and evasion, he is impossible to identify (and hence to capture), except through his acts, which are staged, ironically, as epic acts:

Son portrait? Comment pourrais-je le faire? Vingt fois j’ai vu Arsène Lupin, et vingt fois c’est un être différent qui m’est apparu…ou plutôt, le même être dont vingt miroirs m’auraient renvoyé autant d’images déformés, chacune ayant ses yeux particuliers, sa forme spéciale de figure, son geste propre, sa silhouette et son caractère.

-Moi-même, me dit-il, je ne sais plus bien qui je suis. Dans une glace je ne me reconnais plus.

Boutade, certes, et paradoxe, mais vérité à l’égard de ceux qui le rencontrent et qui ignorent ses ressources infinie, sa patience, son art de maquillage, sa prodigieuse faculté de transformer jusqu’aux proportions de son visage, et d’altérer le rapport même de ses traits entre eux.

-Pourquoi, dit-il encore, aurais-je une apparence définie? Pourquoi ne pas éviter ce danger d’une personnalité toujours identique? Mes actes me désignent suffisamment.

Et il précise, avec une pointe d’orgueil:

-Tant mieux si l’on ne peut jamais dire en toute certitude: voici Arsène Lupin. L’essentiel est qu’on dise sans crainte d’erreur: Arsène Lupin a fait cela. (Leblanc, Les Aventures, 21, italics added).

[His portrait? How shall I delineate it? Twenty times I have seen Arsène Lupin and twenty times it is a different creature that has appeared to me … or rather, the same creature whom twenty mirrors reflect back to me in as many distorted images, each one having his particular eyes, the special form of his face, his manner, his silhouette and character.

-I myself, he tells me, I no longer really know who I am. I no longer recognize myself in the mirror.

Droll, certainly, and paradoxical, but true enough for those who encounter him and who know nothing of his infinite resources, his patience, his skill in the art of make-up, his prodigious ability to transform the very proportions of his face and to alter the relations of these same traits to each other.

-Why, he continues, should I have a definite appearance? Why not avoid this danger of an always identical personality? My acts suffice to identify me.

And he elaborates with a hint of pride:

-All the better if they can never say with certainty: This is Arsène Lupin. The essential thing is that they say without fear of doubt: Arsène Lupin has done this.]

In this passage, Lupin explicitly claims the status of the hero of romance—a hero always staged in terms of his acts, rather than through an elaborated interiority or “character”. Leblanc’s Lupin is thus a kind of post-novelistic protagonist, an anti-character positioned beyond the conventional moral and psychological devices of the nineteenth-century realist novel, whose ancestry nonetheless invokes pre-modern narrative traditions of picaresque and romance. Hamza picks up and magnifies this older literary lineage in his translation. His Lupin belongs as much to the world of the Arab sira as to that of modern crime fiction. The relationship to realist fiction is inversed here, however. While the French Lupin is a post-novelistic figure, the Arabic Lupin comes into being during a historical moment when the transition from romance to realism was just beginning to unfold.

“Translating” the Medieval Romance: Heroes, Thieves and Tricksters

“Trickery and stratagems” have always been part of the hero’s repertoire in popular Arabic narrative. Mysterious origins, disguise and metamorphosis and a special relationship to the social order are all part and parcel of the hero’s staging in the great epics, romance cycles and stories that continued to evolve throughout their beginnings in the early middle ages through the nineteenth century. Not only was this repertoire still available to Hamza and translators like him at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was yet a dynamic, partly oral, partly textual tradition that continued to shape the popular literary imagination in powerful ways.²⁸ Jurji Zaydan referred to this living popular tradition in 1914 in his reflection on the new novel genre:

The writers of the nahda translated many of these books—which are today called ‘novels’ (riwayat)—from French, English and Italian. These translated Arabic novels are countless and most of them are intended to be read for amusement—rarely for social improvement or historical value. Educated Arab readers have welcomed these novels as a substitute for the stories authored in medieval Islamic times, popular amongst the masses till now. For example, the stories of ʿAli al-Zaybaq and Sayf Bin Dhi Yazan and al-Malik al-Zahir and the Banu Hilal, etc., in addition to the old stories like ʿAntara and the Thousand and One Nights. [These readers] found that the translated novels were closer to reality and hence better suited to the spirit of the age, and so they have become a dedicated audience.²⁹

“Translated” novels then functioned as a kind of medium through which a dynamic local genre system was re-calibrated and re-written into a modern idiom in keeping with “the spirit of the age.” Hamza’s Arabic translations of the five Lupin stories are shot through with some of the typical temporal and discursive strategies of sira . On the other hand, the translation freely plays with the modern and “foreign” languages, narrative devices and tropes of the original. The Arabic stories are full of fast-paced vernacular dialogue, interior monologue, contemporary neologisms (with colloquial “translations” sometimes placed in brackets), exotic proper and place names and narrative techniques new to Arabic like the unframed first-person narrator. The result is a text that devours and domesticates the original in order to become “foreign” to itself. Description is kept to a minimum.³⁰ For example, the entire page of description with which the first story in the volume opens is replaced by a single paragraph of neo-sajʿ in the Arabic:

قامت بنا السفين في يوم صافي السماء عليل الهواء فانطلقت تمخر في عباب الماء كأنها جؤذر يفر من صياد أو طالب ثار يطلبهعند الآفاق فاستبشر السفر ورجوا أن تنقضي رحلتهم ما بين لهو العين وانشراح الصدر وجعلوا يتسامرون جماعات جماعات في قلب السفينة وعلى ظهرها

(MS118:1)

One could call this particular translational choice a domestication strategy and simply have done with it, but one could also go further and see it as a kind of textual marker or framing, like the kan ya ma kan (“once upon a time”) of the folk-tale, that places both text and reader within a recognizable genre, but only in order to safely depart from that genre, and perhaps even the more to mark the novelty of the contrast between two styles and two languages. The passage that immediately follows switches comfortably into what will soon become modern standard Arabic:

مضى على تلك الحال يوم وبعض يوم ثم تغير الجو وبدت طلائع العواصف فلم نشعر إلا والتلفون اللاسلكي ينقل هذا النبأالمرعب. "حاذروا فان أرسين لوبين بين ركاب الدرجة الأولى وهو بغير رفيق ذهبي الشعر مجروح في عضده الأيمن ينتحل.اسم ر...." ثم عصفت العاصفة ودوى الرعد فانقطع تيار الكهرباء وحيل بيننا وبين بقية اسمه

(MS118:1)

This translational process implies a complex and active interpretive movement, not only between source and target text but between narrative systems and generic languages. Take, for example, the scene, in the same story, where Lupin steals into a passengers’ cabin in her absence and robs her of her jewels (Les Aventures, 14–15/MS118:9–10). In the French text, the scene, half a page long, is narrated as a flashback in the past imperfect (“on avait enlevé”). In the Arabic version, Hamza chooses to move the scene to its proper, sequential place in the story and changes the tense throughout to the past perfect. At passages where the translator reads moments of potential emotional or comic intensity (produced in an ironic mode in the source text), he inserts illustrative fragments of poetry. On the other hand, Hamza largely excises the figure of the primary, reporting narrator from the original stories (Lupin’s unnamed friend and unofficial chronicler) even though this was a common device in the Arabic narrative prose tradition.

Along with the novel itself as a social artifact, a new structural and temporal figuration of the hero comes into being in this translation, a figuration that preserves, re-shuffles and even amplifies older modes while straining toward a new social expression of the “hero.” Arsène Lupin is no more an “individual” than the medieval epic hero Al-Zahir Baybars al-Bunduqari³¹ but they are both nonetheless almost super-human “sons of the times” (abnaʾ al-zaman), both inexhaustible warriors against a corrupt social order, and both celebrated by the “public” or “people” as the case may be. In Hamza’s heavily extended and adapted description of public opinion regarding Lupin’s projected escape from prison, the French concept of “the public” is transformed into “the townsfolk” or “the city people” and the lighthearted “personage” who is the French Arsène Lupin imperceptibly metamorphizes, by the end of the translated passage into an avenging hero with the associated metaphors of fire and sword. Moreover, Hamza shifts the semantic register of the French original from the impersonal mode “on,” with its corresponding sociological construction of “the crowd” (les foules)³² to the concrete third person plural, thereby staging the coming escape as a popular spectacle and not incidentally, a popular act of political insubordination:

La curiosité publique, cependant ne s’était pas affaiblie. Chaque jour on avait attendu la nouvelle de son évasion. On la souhaitait presque, tellement le personnage plaisait à la foule avec sa verve, sa gaieté, sa diversité, son génie d’invention et le mystère de sa vie. Arsène Lupin devait s’évader. C’était inévitable, fatal. On s’étonnait même que cela tardât si longtemps. (Les Aventures, 43)

[Public curiosity, meanwhile, had not abated. Every day, news of his escape was expected. It was almost hoped for, so much did this personage please the crowd with his verve, his gaiety, his variety, his inventive genius and the mystery of his life. Arsène Lupin must certainly escape. It was inevitable, destined to be. People were even shocked that it was taking so long to transpire.]

بينما كل ذلك يجري في السجن كان الناس في المدينة ينتظرون خبر فراره على أحر من الجمر ويتمنون من صميم قلوبهم أنيوفق في عمله ليهزءوا برجال الشرطةويضحكوا منهم طويلا. فلما قربت الجلسة وعلموا ما نزل به من الحزن وهد القوى بدأيساورهم القلق وأخذوا في كل يوم يتناقلون أخباره فاشتد بينهم الجدل وانقسموا فمنهم قانطون من نجاحه يرون أن مصرعه قدحان وأن ثرثرته وحبه للزهو هما اللذان أردياه وأوديا به... ومنهم واثقون به لا يئسيهم ضيق السجن ولا كثرة الحراس ولااقتراب الجلسة بل يزيدهم ذلك نزوعا إلى الرجاء وشغفا بانتظار الساعة التي يكسر فيها كل تلك القيود ويخرج خروج السيف.الصقيل من النار

(MS118:87–88)

[While all this was taking place in prison, the townspeople eagerly waited for news of his escape and heartily wished him success in his endeavor so that they could have a good laugh at the expense of the police. As the trial drew nearer and they heard about the sorrow and weakness that had suddenly afflicted him, they became uneasy and daily exchanged news of his condition. Controversies arose and opinion was divided: there were those who despaired of his success, who felt that his demise was approaching and that his prideful prattle had been his ruin … Others firmly believed in him in spite of the prison walls, the many guards and the fast approaching trial. In fact, these obstacles only increased their hope and their eager anticipation of the hour in which he would certainly break free of his chains and emerge like a burnished sword from the fire.]

The hero of romance is “un homme sans généalogie,” ubiquitous, master of transformation and disguise, with the gift of seeming to be everywhere at once.³³ In the Baybars romance cycle (Sirat al-Zahir Baybars), Baybars is the divinely predestined and long-awaited liberator of the common folk from the greedy and vicious agents of the Mamluk state—wali (governer), muhtasib (market inspector) and kashif (tax collector)—and their underworld accomplices. Lupin is the self-appointed spoliator of the “crooked bankers, German barons, financial and public corporations” of the Third Republic.³⁴ Both are, moreover, connoisseurs of the good practical joke. Hamza’s Lupin of 1909 not only invokes the heroic figure of Baybars (and others like him in the tradition), but more importantly he is written into Arabic as a reworking of the larger hero-triad in the Sira , a fusion of the distinct but allied characters of hero (batal), thief (liss) and master of tricks and stratagems (the ʿayyar, or what Jean-Patrick Guillame calls “le technicien de la ruse”).³⁵ This latter in particular is an extremely interesting figure who “appears, with various inflections, in the quasi-totality of Arab epic cycles.”³⁶ In the Sira of al-Zahir Baybars, this figure is incarnated by Shiha, an arch-villain who breaks ranks and joins Baybars to become the head of his secret services (criminal turned detective?). His list of professional skills reads like an exact catalog of those of Lupin:

He is master of a certain number of skills (an aptitude for disguise and identity-theft, the ability to infiltrate, unseen, into hermetically sealed or heavily guarded places, the expert use of diverse narcotic substances) which make of him the hero’s precious auxiliary, while at the same time allowing the latter to avoid compromising himself by committing morally doubtful actions contrary to the chivalrous values he is supposed to incarnate (emphasis added).³⁷

Like Shiha, ʿUthman—the thief and strongman whom the mysterious saint Al-Khidr recommends to Baybars as a subaltern and boon companion—functions in the Sira as a kind of scapegrace and wise fool, an incorrigible but devoted and loveable scoundrel whose amusing, if dubious, exploits serve to satirize the folly of the laws of men.³⁸ This theme is a pervasive one in the transcendental moral universe of Baybars, in which the only real law is God’s law and God, as we all know, works in mysterious ways. Shiha and ʿUthman change sides in the battle between good and evil, without essentially changing their natures. They are neither “saved” nor reformed but simply choose to serve a new master and the divinely ordained destiny he represents. The comic ʿUthman in particular remains very much a thief, but a thief touched by the divine: “Cet homme est béni de Dieu, par Sa gloire, ne le tarabuste pas trop, il n’en viendra que du bien” [“This man is blessed by God. By His glory, don’t pester him too much. Only good will come of him”] the saintly King of Egypt, al-Malik al-Salih declares to Baybars.³⁹ The criminal as an ontological category has no place in this world of hidden truth and manifest illusion.

The “chivalric values” of romance that Guillaume evokes above are however, thrown into question by this new composite hero through which Hamza’s Lupin is translated. Many of the translation’s original Arabic interpolations into the text serve to erase Lupin’s exquisitely ironic attitude toward his status as an outlaw and to turn him into a morally ambivalent figure. Hamza’s Lupin is “stuck” between the inherent amorality of his double literary genealogy and the new conception of the literary subject which was beginning to take root in Egypt: a fixed and morally stable subjectivity that would soon become implicated in the rise of romanticism and the Arabic bildungsroman. His Lupin is a transitional figure, at one and the same time divorced from the absolute truth of a transcendental divine order and ill at ease with the buoyant irony of the dandy’s pose. In a semantic shift that is entirely at odds with the spirit of the source text, Hamza’s Lupin recognizes his own morally divided nature, and wistfully longs for redemption through love.⁴⁰ At the dramatic moment of his arrest in front of the astounded young lady he had courted during the Atlantic passage, a wistful and ironic remark—“Dommage, tout de même, de ne pas être un honnête homme” (“What a shame, after all, to not be an honest man”)—is rendered by Hamza as رب لا تذرني بعد اليوم شقيا (Lord, let me no more be a wretched scoundrel!) (Les Aventures, 21/ MS118:30). The movement from the invincible and divinely appointed hero of the popular Arab tradition to the morally fractured protagonist of the bildungsroman—a literary history in microcosm—can be traced in this curious passage.