Tabish Khair, "Literature Against Fundamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. I'm your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. And today I'm here with Dr. Tabish Kair to talk about a very recent book that he has published with Oxford University Press. The book came out in 2024, a few months ago, I'm guessing. And it's called Literature Against Fundamentalism. Okay.

Dr. Tabish Khari is an associate professor at the English department at Aarhus University in Denmark, and he is an internationally published novelist as well. Tabish, welcome to New Books Network. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you for accepting our invitation. Let us start with a very brief introduction of you and your field of studies. You're a professor of literature. You also write fiction as well.

So can you just briefly introduce yourself and then tell us how the idea of this book came about? Sure, sure. To be honest, I would prefer to be considered a writer because that's what I started out to be. I mean, sometime in early secondary school, I realized that the only thing I was really good at, to some extent, was reading. And obviously, from there, it moved on to writing.

But being a middle-class Indian, I needed to have a profession. So while I was in India, I worked as a journalist. Then I moved to Denmark. I joined academia. So this is where I am now. Now, this book is in some ways, obviously, a study because of a number of reasons. First of all,

A general book on literature won't get too many big publishers, to be honest. You can write a general book on the hard sciences, a popular book on the hard sciences. That you can do. But a serious popular book on literature would not find too many publishers. And secondly, being attached to a university, I need to get

some scholarly work published once in a while to justify my salary. So this was a bit of a compromise because what it actually is

It's partly, it presents my experience of being a writer, of struggling to write, struggling to deal with the world in writing, in what is called creative writing. So it's partly my experience as a writer combined with my scholarship and all of it put together in as legible an English as possible, avoiding jargon. But that's what it is, essentially. Yeah.

And I think you're absolutely right in terms of writing a book on literature, because I do a lot of podcasts and I do check books that come out on literature. And I studied literature myself. There's a book, for example, on the 18th century romantic literature and Byron. And then I'm sad. I'm not sure if I want to read that at this moment, unless I was like, unless if I were a scholar of romantic period, then I might have gone to that one.

But one thing that attracted me to this book was actually the title. And I guess it's the best publisher because Oxford has a series of books called The Literary Agenda. And I really love those series. They're short, punchy, accessible. You don't really need to have this.

dense education in literature or literary theory to be able to understand them. And this one, literature and fundamentalism. And I must confess that the meaning of fundamentalism, I've misinterpreted that before reading the book, but after reading the book, I could see how it could apply to a wide range of ideas, literary and fundamentalism,

Political fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism. And I absolutely enjoyed it. I must say that you hit the nail on the head by choosing this topic and then this publisher as well. Well, there are lots of things in the book that I want to discuss, but let's take the first part. When we speak of fundamentalism, I guess something that these days at least comes to our mind is religious fundamentalism.

And in the book, you have a section on literature and God and how those two overlap. And I really love that part of the book. So I'll leave it to you to talk about why do you compare literature and God and in what sense?

Should we cross over? Sure. It's a very complex question. I'll only be able to answer some aspects of it. I mean, to begin with, of course, if you look at any kind of religious writing, it is also part of literature. I mean, that's what all religions claim, whether it's the Bible or the Koran or...

or the Ramayana, or the Vedas. It's also, at the same time, literature. And very often, religions make the claim that this is the best of literature. It cannot get better. Along with that, very often, not religion as such, because there are mystics and other people who are willing to be open about exactly what this means.

open to doubts, open to interpretation. But let's say the bureaucrats of religion, the clerics, they pin it down at the same time and they say, this is what it means. Not other aspects. Ignore the doubts. Ignore the blurred areas. Ignore the questions. Just this is the only meaning you can derive out of this particular book, revealed book or whatever it might be, religious book.

That's where we enter the sphere of fundamentalism. And as you said, this can be done in other spheres too. For instance, when you take a political attempt to explain the world socioeconomically or politically and say that this is the only interpretation you can put on it.

you close various other areas of argument, doubt, analysis. So in that sense, obviously, literature and God overlap. But in another sense, I think literature and God overlap because God as such, the concept, I'm not talking of a God as an existence because that becomes the area of a fundamentalist takeover. But the concept of divinity is impossible to pin down. And if you look at overal,

old religions, actually, there are large extracts in their original texts that say you cannot define God, you cannot understand God, you cannot tell what God really wants. So that to me is what I mean by agnosticism. I don't mean atheism. I mean agnosticism in the sense that doubts about knowledge.

No, but I leave that out because we might want to go into it later. And in that sense, again, what happens to God is very similar to what happens to other attempts to textually understand the world. And again, to some extent,

sometimes scholars very often do that to literature as well, in the sense that they define what literature is. This is literature, this is not literature, and so on and so forth. One quotation that comes to mind is a line by Hannah Arendt

who says, it is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the natural essences of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselves.

This would be like jumping over our own shadows. And to me, that's the connection that I bring, that I examine. And that's what connects us.

my discussion of God with the discussion of literature. And again, I've left that question open. I define the matter from an agnostic perspective, not an atheistic perspective. So if you want me to take up that issue, I can take it up later. Sure, I guess that's something we'll discuss. And I really...

I enjoyed how you described the idea of God in different religions. So I was, by birth, I'm a Muslim myself. I'm not a practicing Muslim, but by birth I am. And I remember when I was a kid in school, we had a course on religion. And whenever people asked, what is God? The teacher wouldn't be able to define it. And they would refer to different Islamic texts.

which has this really nebulous definition of what the Muslim God is. He's not born. He cannot give birth. He or she is a neutral, permanent God. He's everywhere. He's nowhere. So it's just a nebulous idea. You can never put it down. And I can really see how you approach it again from a literal perspective, saying that textual analysis of meaning, because I guess very...

Those who are novice in literature, criticism, always looking for meaning, symbols, what is hidden in a text. But it's innovative. It's phenomenal. You can't really pin it down. It's just like God. It's there, but it's not there. And it becomes...

But once you're a professional, you don't really care much about pinning down. You just look at the play of the words, the text you apply, and you just enjoy all that ambiguity. Exactly. I would take it a bit further because that is where postmodernism largely stops. It stops with ambiguity. But I would say the attempt to create meaning, that's also a very human attempt. So when we stop with ambiguity or ambivalence, it very often denotes

a position of privilege because we are privileged enough not to try to make meaning. So I would not say that the attempt to make meaning is wrong or incorrect, but the attempt to impose one's meaning, to insist on just one meaning, one reading, one text, that is the problem. So I would put it like that. And when I was, again, when I was a tutor in my student days,

So when I was doing my PhD, I was a tutor, and when we were reading texts, people were trying to come up with this definition. I said, yeah, it's a valid definition. And then somebody else was coming with a radically different interpretation of a text. I would say, yeah, it makes sense because you have enough evidence to support it. And then somebody said to them, what the heck is this book about? This is not what the author meant. I said, yeah, but...

It's your interaction with the text and what you make out of it, as long as you can partly justify it by references to your lived experience and the textual and also the historical, political, sociopolitical context that is around the work. Yeah. And I might ask this question now because I do want to ask you about agnostic reading, but I think it's a good time to discuss this.

So there is this new trend in, I don't know if it's taking, I think it's kind of dormant now. But anyway, among literary critics or literary theories, there is this new literary trend or literary movement called post-critique. We want to get over critique because critique is always...

associated with negativity. It's always associated with politics. And when you get to read these books, you don't really enjoy the book because you're looking for all those hidden meanings. And it takes the pleasure out of reading literature. And in a way, post-critics are trying to reaffirm the idea of affect and emotions in literature.

bring it back, let's say, to what it was many, many decades ago before the professionalization of literal criticism. I'm not a big fan of post-critique myself. I do love to engage with politics. Of course. What do you think of post-critique? Because you also, in the book, you also argue that literature is beyond only aesthetic criticism.

pleasure. It's something different. It's a much, much larger phenomenon. What do you think of this literary triangle post-critique? I mean, it depends on what people do with it. And that's the case with all critiques. But for me,

Looking at the larger aspect of this argument, there is no real division between political literature and apolitical literature or political literature and aesthetic literature or public literature and individual literature. And I would illustrate this with a very simple example. Again, one can write a book about this. But if you think of literature as something that we construct out of words, okay?

different kinds of words, whether in writing or spoken words or whatever, but it's words. Now, the word itself does not belong to just you or me or anyone. The word is something that exists in a public sphere.

And we engage with this word. When we use a word, that word comes with, as I put it, the weight of the world. It's already been spoken by millions of people, written in thousands of books. And that is basically a political act. Because what is politics but the individual's engagement with other individuals in a public sphere?

So the moment we're using language, we are engaged in a political act. There's no way out of it. The question is, what do we privilege? Do we want to make it overtly political? Do we want to make it subvertly political? What part do we privilege? But to say that we can actually write or even speak without any kind of political, let's say, accent to our language,

That is not possible. So I would say any critical school that thinks it can do away with politics is not really dealing with language in its full complexity. That's what I would say. I guess even the very fact that they say they don't want to deal with politics is in a way a political statement, a political act, right? It doesn't matter. Again, I'm really excited about talking to you about this because we'll get to that again later on.

one of the Marxist literary critics was Pierre Macherey, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, who wrote this famous article, what the text is

I don't remember the title of the article, but it was about what literature doesn't say, which is also the title of part of the—I think it's one of the chapters in the book as well that you discuss, those moments of absence and gaps. We'll discuss that soon. But let me go back to what you discussed earlier, agnostic reading, going back to literature and God.

agnosticism, agnostic reading. You are asking for this agnostic reading of literature. What does that mean? How do we engage in an agnostic reading of literature? Okay.

Probably it would be best to illustrate it with a text that is both religious and literary. And I do that in my book, too, where I discuss the book of Job from the Bible. Now, at its simplest, what is the book of Job? From a very, I would say, a fundamentalist religious perspective, it's just about belief.

What happens to Job is that he's a very successful person. God is very proud. Yahweh is very proud of, I use God. God is very proud of Job. Satan goes to God and says, well, you're very proud of this man who's the perfect man for you, but you have given him everything. That's why he worships you. He obeys all the covenants and so on and so forth. If he suffers, he'll start blaming you.

So God allows things to happen to Job. So Job loses his cattle, loses his children, loses his wife, gets ill, and people come to him, his friends come to him and say, you must have done something bad, or God is unjust, or this doesn't make sense. Different ways of making sense of actually why bad things happen to good people. That's the agenda of this story. At the end of it, God appears...

and says to Job, well, this was a test, so and so forth, and now you'll get everything back. So the religious would say, oh, Job just stayed steadfast, God rewarded him. But what Job does is he says, I am not, I do not deserve the suffering.

and I don't understand their suffering, and I want an explanation. This is not really just being subservient. He insists on these points. At the end of it, God comes and gives him an explanation, but that explanation doesn't work for us. It doesn't even work for the job because lots of issues stay unresolved.

But it doesn't work for us because God will never appear and give us an explanation. So if you look at the book of Job as a text, even if you believe that that explanation works for Job, you know that this is not going to happen to you. Which means that all the questions that Job asks still remain hanging.

And this is what I mean by an agnostic reading. I'm not saying you dismiss everything, but I'm saying that you look at the questions that are asked and you do not resolve them with the fact out there. Because for the religious, that God, the God who appears, is a fact. For us,

that God is not a fact in two ways. First of all, you can think of God as a fiction. Secondly, that God is never going to appear and tell us, okay, this is why bad things have been happening to you. We'll still have to make sense of it, which requires an agnostic reading, not a fundamentalist reading. I think that's basically at its simplest what I'm trying to say.

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And this is quite an interesting example in terms of, because I, the book of Job, I mean, if I'm not mistaken, well, no, I think that was it. I'm thinking of something different. I'm thinking of Eric Oberbach's

Famous book, Mimesis, Representation of Reality in Western Literature, where he talks about, I think that was Abraham that he mentioned in the book. Yeah, that's Abraham. You're thinking of Kierkegaard or Fionnuala Bramling, maybe? It's their famous book of literature, it was written in Germany, and then I guess Edward Said wrote a preface to it as well. Ah, yeah, of course. But that was Mimesis. Yeah. Yeah.

Because the book of Job is actually a very famous, popular example. And I think he was the best one to describe this idea of agnostic reading. Another thing that I'm interested to know, and again, that was the point we were talking about, those moments of absence. I might start with a little anecdote. My friends and I have this reading group. Every Sunday evening, we get together on Zoom and we talk about a book.

We read a book and we discuss it. And then every two or three months, we choose a different book. And I'm the only guy who studied literature there. But another guy there who's a big fan of literature as well said, well, we don't really have to read political books. We can read a piece of fiction and talk about it as well. Everybody was dismissive of that.

Apart from me, I love that idea. But everybody else was dismissive. And then I said, well, you can actually have really meaningful discussions about literary works and again, relate what you read in those books to what's happening in the world these days. You don't really have to want to read a book about politics or economics. But anyway, they were dismissive of that because I guess the main idea was, oh, it's just a scape thing. Even if you read something serious, it's...

It's simply an aesthetic pleasure. And you were arguing in the book that literature, yeah, it's true. It's a material phenomenon. It has words. You're dealing with words. You're dealing with rhythms and, you know, all that, those literary devices. But it's beyond that. Literature tells you things by showing you what is not there. Okay?

Can you tell us about this storytelling? How can we go beyond that notion? And again, how does literature work through things it doesn't say, which is that peer mastery, Marx's reading of books? No. Again, I mean, this is a huge question. I'll try to, because there's so many aspects of it, I'll try to keep all the aspects in mind, but I might forget something, in which case just bring it up again and say, okay. Okay. So, I mean,

First of all, one of the points I make in this book is that literature as a field is

is very different from the kind of disciplines that we encounter in the humanities or in the universities or in science and social sciences. These are disciplines, and the reason they work is by disciplining language. The word discipline is quite revealing, which is why you need to have technical terms and so on and so forth. In the hard sciences, it's easier to maintain the legitimacy of those technical terms.

In the social sciences and humanities, those technical terms change because, especially the humanities, we deal with a very quickly changing phenomena, human existence. No, I mean, the earth doesn't change that quickly as a planet. Species do not evolve that quickly. But human beings, their language, their society changes so fast.

And we are dealing with that in the humanities in different ways, which is why in the humanities, very often these terms slip into jargon within 10 or 15, 20 years. Literature is a good example of how easily terms become jargon, and then they cannot really be used in a productive way to the same extent. So what is happening is that we are using language to deal with something that can only be accessed through language, but

cannot be exhausted in language. It exists beyond language too. Now, there is no direct connection between language and this reality. They are mutually exclusive.

they affect each other mutually. The language we use also sometimes enables us to see things in a certain way. Whatever exists out there affects the language we use. This is the matrix we're existing under. And I suggest that literature, because it works beyond the provision of factual proof, actually brings into play all these factors. Because even if you're dealing with facts, you're still dealing with facts in language.

And just the fact out there is never sufficient. It still has to be understood in a certain context with reference to other matters. Again, appearance of God in Book of Job is an example from the religious perspective. So if you think of God as a fact for the religious, but it explains nothing. And it's the same with even in the heart sciences. I mean, basically, if you look at discussions of religion,

any complex matter like quantum physics or evolution, you can see that there is language is being used to explain things. Now, of course, in the hard sciences, because they also have another language which works very well for them, along with this language, which is mathematical language, they can define things in different ways. But even there, in order to explain it to them, they switch

explain it to us, they switch into language and then again the question stays in place: how do we make sense of what is being described? How do we even make sense of the fact

a fact that is out there. And these are things that can be addressed in literature in a big way. That's the general philosophical assumption there. In a smaller way, you can think of how literature talks about things which are difficult to pin down. At its simplest, for instance, you can take, I gave a very early example. Let me see whether I can find it. I think...

This is a very simple example taken from a 14th century book in Sanskrit called Sahitya Darpan, which means Mirror of Literature, by an author known as Vishwanath Kaviraja. And this is the translation. This is how it runs. The dress is one you have worn before, the bracelet on your wrist, and the jewel belt you carry on your hips.

So why does it all seem too big? Dear friend, on this lovely spring day, that buzzing bees make lovelier. Now this is used in this book, which is a critical book, as an example of a certain kind of character, a stock character, used in Sanskrit plays and so on and so forth. And this is a stock character, a woman whose lover or husband has gone away. So what this is telling us is that this woman has lost weight.

because she has been pining for her husband. And the clothes that she's wearing, the ornaments that are wearing, have grown loose on her. On the other hand, it is a spring. There are bees around. So it's the season of fertility and love. Now, these are things that the poet doesn't say. He just suggests it.

I mean, if he had said it, he would have said something like, oh, your husband has gone away, your lover has gone away, and you've lost weight. Now, this would not be a poem, okay? But more than that, it would not even suggest the complexity of longing, loss, and so on and so forth. So this is a very simple example. But you can have more complex examples of how gaps are addressed, even by writers who seem to be not always fully aware of what they're doing.

One good example is obviously Sherlock's great monologue in Merchant of Venice. He says, does not a Jew bleed? Okay.

Now, as Greenblatt has pointed out in one of his studies, the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, that we read this monologue and we immediately sympathize with Sherlock, which is the way we should. Because what Sherlock was saying, I am also human. But he says that was not necessarily the way a lot of people in Shakespeare's time would have reacted to Jews. They did not even consider Jews human.

So now Shakespeare has put in something that many people in his audience would actually hold against Shylock the character. Oh, he's claiming to be Christian, human, like us. But of course they bleed differently. But Shakespeare in that moment turns it around so that later on we see, oh wow, what powerful lines. Shylock is insisting on his basic humanity and we agree with that. Again, if you think of Heart of Darkness where Conrad has his narrator talking about

civilization because that is the justification of all the colonial barbarism that is taking place in the Congo. And there are parts where, for instance, the narrator suggests that, well, we are bringing civilization into this savage place. At the same time, he describes civilization as a god, as an idol to which we bow and offer sacrifices.

So, on the one hand, he's saying, look, these people are Pagan, they don't have real religion, real civilization. And on the other hand, he's describing civilization using the same image.

So what civilization is, is like a Padawan God demanding human sacrifices. So what is the difference? What are we really bringing to these people? Even from a colonial perspective, it gets subverted. I think those are things that literature does very well. Things that cannot be said in a certain period, they can be implied. Things that cannot ever be said, perhaps existential ideas,

ideas of what life might be, they can be suggested. And these are suggested not in words, because words will pin them down, but very often in gaps, silences, noises between the words, which is why literature ends up doing things that I think disciplinary uses of language fail to do. That's my big, and I would say somewhat ambitious argument.

And I think you talk about Shakespeare and Greenblatt's scholarship, New Historicism. I guess it's a perfect example of New Historicism. It's a perfect example of those moments of gap or silence. I used to read Shakespeare and enjoy him, of course. And then I read Greenblatt and it gave me a completely different understanding of Shakespeare and Elizabethan politics.

And theater as well. And then even, I guess, I do remember there was a long time ago, I read a very short, it was a really short story. It was a short story. I don't remember what it was called. It was by Hemingway. It's about this guy who goes, checks in in a hotel with his wife. And there's a lot of interaction between him and his wife. But then the hotel concierge or the hotel owner is super, super kind and nice and

to the woman. Towards the end of the story, the woman just loses it and shouts at his husband. And then I said, wait, wait, wait, what happened? And then I started reading it again. It's all about silence and moments of gap. I mean, it's a love story in a way, but it's all about how a woman has been silenced. A woman's needs have not been attended to, but it's this hotel concierge who is being nice. And it just brings out something. It's okay, now I see. The husband...

Doesn't really care much. And it's all about the woman's voice. I think even, I know that I'm rambling, I think even feminism, feminist literary criticism, they started reading works of literature and they found those moments of gaps and silence. Where was this woman, Jane Austen, the mad woman in

I have them in the attic. Where are these slaves? They're alluded to, but they're not there. How does this mansion stand there? Exactly. I mean, think of Edward Said's great essay on Mansfield Park. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Which I read in school. I'd never thought of it along those lines. Then I read Edward Said's essay in college and I say, wow, yeah, this is a new way to look at it. Yeah, yeah. I think if our listeners might be interested, there was this... Oh, God, I forgot his name. Um...

The guy who wrote, who had this network theory of literature, who had this mathematical lab in Stanford. He's this huge literary critic. I forgot his name. But he has this mathematical literary lab in Stanford, and he wrote an article called Network.

Shakespeare network theory, network theory on Shakespeare. So he uses a lot of mathematical modeling and statistical modeling, which is not really literature, but it tries to map all interaction between different characters in Shakespeare, Hamlet, I guess. And then he reaches an interesting conclusion that mathematically speaking, the interaction between peasants or soldiers or guards, non-Irish circus and peasants is mathematically more

In terms of numbers, then the interaction between aristocrats. And at the end of this story in Hamlet, the aristocrats all die. And it's a sign or a symbol of transition of England from aristocracy to more classless or more bourgeois society where peasants are rising up.

becoming more citizens. And again, maybe he was pushing the argument a little bit, but at the end it was a new interpretation and he had mathematical data to back it up. Something you can't see unless you look at the corpus of Shakespeare's work. Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, that kind of quantitative analysis can be useful too. As long as we don't suppose that

that exhausts everything that takes place in literature. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Hamlet is a good example. I mean, I have a chapter that uses Hamlet in this book too. And Hamlet has always bothered me. From the time I read it for the first time in high school, I hated Hamlet. I love Shakespeare, but Hamlet, I hated. And I didn't know why. I really didn't know why. I

Until the second Iraq war taking place, and it resumed again, and it falls in place. What has bothered me about Hamlet is Hamlet's character and Ophelia's erasure. Because Hamlet pretends to be mad, or maybe he's really mad, but most critics say he pretends to be mad. He claims he pretends to be mad. And his madness is hugely enacted. Ophelia actually goes mad, commits suicide, off the stage.

And Hamlet, even his love is enacted. Ophelia goes mad partly because she feels that Hamlet has abandoned her. But even when Ophelia dies, Hamlet was actually caused the death. And Ophelia's brother is there burying her. Hamlet has not even bothered with all that. Hamlet comes and jumps into the grave and says, not a hundred brothers can love her as much as I loved her. And I used to find it so irritating. Then...

During the Iraq war, I realized where it is connecting to, and that's a term like collateral damage. Ophelia is collateral damage in this play. And the reason I hated this in my small town in India was that a lot of men, young men my age, teenagers, when they fell in love, thought that that's the relationship they had to women. It was all about themselves.

So, essentially, I think when I look back, I feel that my early feminist inclinations were what caused me to be offended. Which is not to say that Hamlet cannot be read along other lines as a play about existentialist angst and all that. But there is this element of self-absorption, which is extremely male in Hamlet.

which I found offensive. And then when I came across collateral damage as an established term, I realized that this is why I found it offensive, not just the feminist perspective, but the fact that entire life can be erased, destroyed.

in the name of something that we consider most significant. That is a very disturbing thing. And obviously, this is not a historical reading of Hamlet. I'm not saying I blame Shakespeare for not seeing it. That is not the point. The point is that

Reading Hamlet now from my space, having experienced what I've experienced in a small town in India where men tend to be slightly more full of themselves than they would be in perhaps some other places, plus collateral damage as a term that is so widely used.

then obviously I have the right to go back to Hamlet and read it along those lines. So that kind of reading becomes, technically speaking, a historical, but it's not invalid. I mean,

It would be invalid if I read Hamlet as a novel about an alien invading Earth from Mars. That would be an invalid reading because I'm imposing things which are not already there in the language and structure of Hamlet. But there are many things which are there, and then we kind of excavate them from our own spaces, our own cultural, political traditions. And that, I think, is a perfectly valid tradition. And that, again, is something that literature enables. Yeah.

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Yeah, Mary Shelley, speaking of how those moments of absence and silence, literature enables readers to...

observant readers, you know, to pick up those moments. And sometimes it's deliberate to put there by an author, maybe. It's one of, I guess, the examples, the best examples is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It's one of those most versatile novels. They use it to talk about politics, feminism, genetic and modified food, eco-criticism, you name it. Anything, technology, science, it's all there. It's so versatile. It lends itself to all those different types of readings. And I guess...

There has been this new, when I say new, it's been for a few, a couple of decades maybe, contemporary authors looking back at classics, reading them or rewriting them in a new light. I heard that there's a new translation of Iliad and Homer from a feminist perspective. Uh-huh.

People have rewritten Frankenstein from a, it is a feminist text in a way, but also from a different angle with feminist characters leading, being the leaders, being the lead characters there. And I'm from the Middle East myself. And when you spoke of Iraq war, another great example was Frankenstein in Baghdad, which is about that, the guy, you know, who picks up pieces of his dead friends from the street, Frankenstein Baghdad. Yeah.

And again, speaking of the Middle East and everything that is going on there, there is this British-Kuwaiti playwright, I think, Basom, I think I forgot his name. But anyway, he wrote a trilogy, he rewrote Shakespeare trilogies. It's called Al-Hamlet Summit. And that one... I'm not aware of it. Okay, but you've got to read it. I'm sure you'll love it. It's called Al-Hamlet Summit, which is three of Shakespeare's plays. One of them is Hamlet, of course.

Anopheles is a suicide bomber there. Macbeth himself talks with weapon smugglers. It's in this imaginary fictional Arab land. And yeah,

My Macbeth's father is being killed, but there are generals there. So it's actually whatever is happening. And there was the United States, but, you know, with different characters, again, smuggling weapons into that country. So it's a re...

let's say a reinterpretation of Shakespeare based on what's happening in the Middle East. I love that one. And when I was reading it, I said, wow, it doesn't matter how many political analysis you read. You cannot really, you know,

hammer the message as potently and as cogently as Bassam has done in this trilogy. That's only something that literature can do. I totally agree. I agree with all three examples. The third one I'm not familiar with, but Frankenstein, of course, is a great book, mother of all genre novels in English. And

and the other tradition of rewriting, writing back. I mean, one of my favorite books from the 20th century writes back to one of my favorite books from the 19th, which is Gene Breese's White Sag S.O.C., which writes back to Charlotte Apprentice, Jane Eyre. Yeah, you're right. Good. All those texts that I haven't read for a long, long time after I graduated, they were coming back to me. I'm glad.

Let me ask you another thing. There is also, I love the idea of that agnostic reading and literature against fundamentalism. It's more or less an American thing, the whole idea of cancer culture. And I think some of it is just, you know, it's just a phony thing that Americans have invented and all the people all over the world are just talking about cancer culture. But in a while, there are conservatives in the U.S. especially who

are canceling some of the greatest works of literature, even history, but let's talk about literature here in public schools. They don't want these books to be on the shelves, but they want to rewrite the word, the books. But I really love this sentence in your book that truths are contextualized. You cannot look at the work in a vacuum.

Truths are contextual. And again, a few years ago, there was this controversy about the N-word in Mark Twain's Hockelberfin. Can you talk about truths being contextual and maybe talk also about the example of Hockelberfin that you have in the book? No, no, sure. No, I mean, cancel culture is problematic. I mean, it might have genuine resources, but

And it's perfectly okay to come up with a very strong critique of certain books, certain positions in books, and that, of course, has to be done. But I think it's problematic in a way that very often it is being done by people who want to believe that just by canceling something, this solves the problem.

And this seems to be more so in America. And I realized that last year because I was asked, and I'm thankful for that ask, to spend...

the fall semester at Iowa University as part of the International Writers Program that they have, one of the oldest. Now, Iowa City and the university itself, these are very apolitical places, okay? Unlike some other universities in America. But Iowa City is also a very politically, say, correct place, okay? There were lots of BLM posters, for instance, everywhere.

Everyone was against racist and sexist things. The people I met, it's a university city. And mostly the students studying there come from more or less privileged backgrounds or have got very good scholarships to enable them to study. They are all very aware people and they all took the right stand.

But on my second or third day there, I realized that actually I did not meet, I had not met any working class African-American in those circles. They were similar students, but they were from rich families. Many of them were from outside America, actually. And then one evening or morning, early morning, I forget what, I went out. I think early morning, I woke up early and went out for a walk. And suddenly I saw a lot of colored people.

people on the streets, African-Americans and I think Mexicans all. And I realized that they were part of the street crew, people doing the cleaning up. And that is exactly the problem with cancel culture in the sense that, okay, you can make your own discursive space very nice.

But what are you going to change the socioeconomic circumstances which actually enable a certain kind of exploitation of people and also pejorative description of these people? So that is my problem with cancel culture. On the other hand, obviously, if you contextualize something, and I think...

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the use of the N-word there is a good example. You remember that there was this African-American scholar, I think Gribben, who

argued that the N-word should be replaced with the word slave, and there was a big controversy about 20 years back about that. This is something that comes up every 20 years in America from different sites. And of course, he was also attacked by people on the left, people who were in favor of so-called free speech, but they end up in some ways caricaturing his position, because what he was saying was that this is a great novel that needs to be taught.

in high schools. But a lot of the students find the N-word impossible to deal with, African-American students. So once they encounter the N-word, they shut themselves off from the book. So why not use a word that enables them to read the book? Now, that's a different argument. We are talking of a pedagogic use, and I won't even get into that. But as a novel, the N-word is... And I think that's what a good teacher ought to do also in the pedagogic context. You see that

basically Twain does two things which are very important. He creates a certain kind of narrator. This is a white adolescent who

mimics all the white values, but is himself not part of the mainstream. He's on the margins, Huckleberry Finn. His language is limited. He doesn't want to be civilized and so on and so forth. But he's white. And his attitude to African Americans is a white attitude. He uses the N-word for them. He sees them as irrational, unreliable, and so on and so forth.

So Mark Twain uses all these prejudices, but in the narrative.

The escape slave he's talking about, Jim, is, as one critic has pointed out, the only admirable adult male. When you really look at what's happening, Jim comes across as a highly admirable and in his own way, very intelligent person. So what does Mark Twain actually do? He uses the N-word, he sets up all your prejudices, and he undercuts them.

He showed that actually this N-word says nothing about Jim. It's just a prejudice. So I would say it's better actually to be faced with that undercutting than just to erase the N-word and let all the assumptions stay in place. I would say it's the assumptions that need to be critiqued, that need to be changed. That's my position.

And you're right. It's a really difficult topic to deal with. And I do remember a few years ago, I studied in New Zealand myself. I don't live there anymore. My friends are teachers there, and they said about the controversy that the student was recording a teacher's voice. I don't remember which literary work it was. It was Shakespeare, I'm guessing. And it was this word that referred to...

I don't remember either Jew. It was a minority community there anyhow. Students were offended and the schools just jumped ahead and suspended the teacher, which was wrong because...

We know Shakespeare, at least, we know that he's not trying to be... We have to read them, these books, and he's not trying to be a majority of some of those minorities. The same with Hocker, a perfect example you mentioned. I think I do understand that these are sensitive topics, but you look at the intention of the writers, and sometimes literature does need to be confronting.

But not in a negative sense. I don't mean literature needs to reinforce racial stereotypes by no means. But I guess it's the same with philosophy. It needs to confront people, it needs to shock people to make them think, to make them talk, discuss way different arguments, rather than completely shutting them down. I mean, to be honest, all of us are limited. Okay?

All writers are limited. All readers are limited. Like, I'm not saying that Mark Twain was such a supernatural thinker that he could see through all prejudice. But I can see he actually does manage to see through quite a few. He makes mistakes too. For instance, as one critic has pointed out, why do Jim and Huckleberry Finn fail South?

If they're escaping slavery, they should have sailed north. Okay. Why do they sail south? And part of the reason is that Huckleberry Finn writing for a white audience does not really think too much about these things. Also, Mark Twain writing through Huckleberry Finn for a white audience. And secondly,

The standard myth there is, and it's still there, that somehow slaves were being freed from slavery. Now, we know that was not the case. We know that African-American slaves organized whenever they could. They had networks. They did everything to actually enable themselves to get into a better space. Now, that is the part that Mark Twain or Huckleberry Finn, whoever it is, fails to see. So I'm not saying it's a perfect book.

I'm saying it's limited. All books are limited, but there are also things which actually go far beyond anything that a racist white American would be even able to think about. Yeah, you're right. Yeah.

Let me ask you another question. I think it's mainly a habit in literature departments. There's usually this backlash, especially if you're teaching literature or literature criticism, there's this backlash against reading literature in a historical context. I used to be very much against it when I was a, let's say, vulgar critic. I had recently read about different

post-modernism, different schools of literary criticism. I absolutely hated the historical reading of books. I wanted to read it and find those, let's say, moments that the text breaks down, deconstructs itself,

You look at it from Marx's perspective, regardless of when the text was even written, before even something such as Marxism existed, which had its benefits. But anyway, I guess there's this backlash against reading literature from a historical perspective. It's dismissed as being irrelevant to our times. Do you agree and do you think that a historical reading of works of literature exhausts

its political potentials or its sociological potentials? I think, again, I would look at it as something that is embedded in the word. The basic building brick of literature, every word. Words have a history.

A good writer needs to be aware of it. I mean, one of the things I noticed sometimes in India, I grew up in a small town in India. I went to an English medium school. There were also people around me. I came from a family where there was a lot of English along with other languages, but there were other people around me

who also went to a similar school and for some time tried to write poems under the largely romantic influence, the influence of romanticism that is what we get in schools. And one of the things that always struck me as revealing was, say, a use of a word like gay. Now, the Romantics used gay to mean

happy. And these people who were writing poetry in mimicry of the Romantics also used gay to mean happy. But of course, today if you say, I am gay, it has other connotations too. So you cannot just use gay to mean happy without being aware of this history of the word. And in that sense, every word demands that kind of historical effort. But again,

It is not exhausted by that effort because the words also change. You also have, if you are smart enough, you are clever enough, you might also actually change the word in the way you use it. That's one of the things that great literature has done. So again, as is the case with politics, it's not an either-or question. It's an and-both question. You don't have to choose in favor of one or the other. They come together.

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Yeah, you're right. And I must say that I've become, I still nurture my love for literary criticism and all those schools of literary criticism. But I have realized, I guess, after all those years that having that historical knowledge, historical understanding and background of any concept, regardless of whether it's literature, politics, whatever it is, that gives you deeper knowledge. And I've

become more interested these days. It's been a few years in medieval history because I don't think you can understand modernity without reading medieval history. I don't even, I'm these days again really interested in political ideas. What is liberalism? But if I want to pick up a book to define liberalism in the 20th century, I'll completely miss the point. So I started reading Cicero to understand what he meant by the idea of liberality. Having that historical understanding of works

of political concept really, really gives you a deep understanding of how things have evolved, how things have changed, how different historical periods looked at these concepts differently, how people reacted to, let's say, Hockelberfin in the 19th century and how people reacted in the 20th century. That gives you that perspective which really helps in interpretation, interpreting words. Yeah.

I think also somewhere in the book, I say that great literature is not literature that is read in the same way across the ages. Shakespeare was read differently when he was writing. He was read differently in the 18th century, differently in the 19th, differently now. Maybe great literature is just literature that allows us space to have reading. Is that what you mean by, and I guess it's a perfect segue to my next question,

a historical reading, reading that is not anti-history, it's not historical. What do you mean by a historical reading of literature? Is it similar to that agnostic? Yeah, I think that's essentially what I mean. I don't mean that historical elements... Actually, I have a chapter where I give a historical reading, and then I have a chapter where I give a historical reading, and I say both of these are valid approaches. Of course, a historical reading can also have its limitations. If I'm just going to

connect it against a checklist. Now, did this happen? This is how this happened. Then it's not really a work of literature. And a historical reading can be bad too if I just impose a reading on it, something that the text does not allow a space for. What good readers do is something which is a combination of the two. Some might slant more towards historical reading. Some might slant more towards a historical reading. But

Every good reader does something which is a combination of the two to some extent. I think so. Let me ask you, you have talked about fundamentalism. I guess now listeners have a better understanding of fundamentalism. That's just this really restrictive idea or biased idea that this is the interpretation of

So literature can go against that. Literature can be an antidote to that. But can you clarify now here that, I guess we have discussed most parts of the book, is that what you mean by fundamentalism in this sense? So it could be political, it could be fundamentalism in religion, it could be in literary fundamentalism.

Totally. It can even be scientific. I mean, in the sense that one of the things that we forget about science is how open it is, how open it is to questioning its own premises. And there are people who sort of think of science a bit like how fundamentalists

religious people think of God. Okay. Like it's all done and given. And one of the points I suggest, and I would like to do a book on that, is that on both sides, there are other ways to look at this concept.

I mean, there are people who look at God as something very open, something that at the most you can only relate to at an individual level, that it cannot impose on other people because who are you to claim that you know the mind of God? You're not God. That's actually from a certain perspective, that is a blasphemous claim to say that I know what God wants. And similarly, scientists are very often quite open to the fact that things need to be

question, it's usually politicians and bureaucrats and technicians who use science who tend to close it down and say, this is it. We have got all the answers. This is all we need to do. And again, say, if you think of economics, on both sides, on the left,

What happened in communist countries, for instance, this replacement of capitalism got taken in a very fundamentalist direction under Stalinism and so on and so forth, where no questioning, no conversation was allowed, and it failed partly because of that. And now what neoliberal capitalists are doing are very similar in the 80s. There is no alternative, Tina. And it's again a kind of fundamentalism. You're right.

And they are called, by a lot of critics, they are called market fundamentalists. I guess it was David Graeber who called them market fundamentals. There were other people who did the same. And Graeber is a good person to read. And you ought to get into that bullshit job. That's right. Yeah.

And again, that example of science, I was talking to someone else a couple of weeks ago. It was a book called The Global History of Ignorance. So it was talking about how we define ignorance, how ignorance was perceived in ancient Greece. And skepticism was their reaction to ignorance when it came to religious context in the Middle Ages. Yes.

the idea of faith was like a reaction to ignorance, but they were all aware of the idea of ignorance. And there was a section on science that scientists are aware of their ignorance, and it's something they were looking for, because that allows them to have a different reading that allows them to progress, that allows them to question scientific facts and revise them as they go ahead. And all the great scientists, if you mentioned, have done that. Darwin, I guess, I was reading Darwin a few months ago, he

I think it's in the early pages of his great book, The Ascent of Man, if I'm not mistaken, which says that he just kind of dismisses, not dismisses, he acknowledges that what is written here might not be absolutely correct. And there might be future great scientists who can pass doubt or shadow of doubt on what is written.

And again, that reminded me of a friend of mine who we share the same office. He was looking at literature from an evolutionary perspective. I was looking at literature from a different perspective. And I learned a lot from him. I knew nothing about evolutionary psychology, but I read a lot because of him. So I'm indebted to him in that sense. But...

He was a literary fundamentalist in a way because he looked at the work as literature completely devoid of all its historical minutiae and so on. And so look, this is what this text is about because that's how humans react or

Or that's how humans have evolved based on evolution psychology. So I get your point. You're right to some extent. But you cannot say that's the only interpretation. I'm joking. You used to say, like, you're like a religious convert, a new religious convert. You said, oh, that's just the word of evolution psychology and nothing else matters. And I see you're dealing with...

as social and also biological phenomena humans and you can't just narrow it down to that single interpretation and i guess that's what you were calling fundamentalism yeah exactly and i said look what you make you say perfect sense but you're going to change your department you can't be in literature department that's such a reading you're going to go to psychology department yeah

Some areas, it's become very common, that kind of reading, where very specific literary perspective, this is what explains everything. And obviously, we have that tendency in universities at times, too. Because when we go to a class, I go to a class and I come up with these open readings. And sometimes the students find it difficult because they want answers. And what I'm asking them to do is,

work out the answers for themselves. And that is the more difficult thing. You're right. Speaking of, maybe it's a speculative question. You mentioned science. These days, because of the new liberal economy, the idea of productivity and progress, humanities are usually denigrated, defunded.

Students are encouraged to do science for the reasons that I understand, but they can't completely be dismissive of humanities, given that the idea of a university started because of humanities, and science is more or less a new thing in universities. What do you think of this argument that truth, facts, science, well, facts with a capital F is only produced through science?

and not literature, and we need to be dismissive of them, of humanities. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding there at different levels. First of all, what the humanities are looking at are slightly different things. Humanities are looking at phenomena that change very quickly, all the time.

I mean, the hard sciences in particular are not looking at phenomena that change that quickly. I mean, the structure of an atom has not changed for a long time. Even geological or evolutionary matters take millennia to change. So the notion that the sciences are more correct is true, but then they're also looking at

elements that change more slowly. Humanities look at things that change very fast. A language, for instance, when I teach English in my university, we start with Beowulf. Now, Beowulf is supposed to be in Old English. Not one of my students can understand even one sentence.

of Beowulf written. Maybe if they understand one out of ten words, then that's a very knowledgeable student. So obviously, just in a few hundred years, we have, in the same language, we've moved so far.

So that is something to keep in mind, because the humanities deal with phenomena that change a lot, they cannot come up with the same kind of statements that science can make. Obviously, you can make statements about something that has not changed for a few millennia once it's discovered. And again, that kind of information gets cumulative because that thing has not changed, but you have been working on it for centuries and you've found more and more and more about it.

On the other hand, when it comes to humanities, the language itself has changed, society itself has changed, villages have changed, economic structures have changed. So anything you find gets controverted 10, 20, 30 years later. So there's obviously this justified feeling that the humanities are more in flux, but they're dealing with phenomena that are in flux. And we just have to accept that we need to have both these options. Now, having said that, the

The sciences change too. Entire paradigms change. The way we understood the world under Newton is very different from the way we understand the world under Einstein and so on and so forth. So this notion that somehow one is better than the other

doesn't take into account the different purposes, different aims, different material that these fields work on. That's my feelings. I mean, of course, in some ways, politicians and bureaucrats try to highlight sciences, okay? But what they're talking of is actually the applied part of it. These days, you are aware that funding is being cut from the humanities in almost all universities across the world.

It is not just happening in the humanities. They're also cutting the funding of the hard sciences because the hard sciences, again, useless for them. They want something that they can employ to make money. Okay? That's about it. So that's why always when I talk to those people who are advocates, who are a fan of that duality and kind of dismissive of humanities, I do tell them, like, be careful what you're wishing for, right? Because

the concern of those politicians is not really wasting money. It's not really humanity. It's not that the humanity doesn't produce knowledge. It's something they're going to come after psychologists as well. They're going to come after biologists in many ways. Those even that study theoretical physics, because you're right, it doesn't produce hard facts. It produces knowledge. It produces science, but not hard facts.

And the reason they might be interested in some aspect of particle physics is that they can use it to make nuclear bombs. You're right, yeah. And they have done it, so I guess they don't need more. They have the knowledge there. This is a final question. I really like the ending of the book. This is literature against fundamentalism. You do not

You ended by a session called Call to Literature, not Call to Arms. And I really like that duality there because when you say, well, again, it's one of those moments of absolutely, you don't talk arms, but that's what comes to your mind. Literature is a weapon there. What do you think about Call to Arms?

No, I mean, that reminds me of a book by a friend of mine, an American professor, Jim Hicks, who wrote a book called Lessons from Sarajevo, which was soon after all that happened in Sarajevo. And right at the start, it talks about how when he visited Sarajevo, he actually learned the language and everything. So the

And he kind of felt that maybe, and the people were rebuilding with bricks, and he kind of felt that working with words seems to be less useful than working with bricks. And then, of course, he looks into various aspects of it, and he both agrees and disagrees with that position. And what he points out, and that is also where I stand, is that, see, the first thing that gets destroyed is language. Okay?

When we are allowed, we are told to use words like collateral damage without questioning them. When we are told to use, to accept assumptions like there is no alternative without questioning them. When we are told to refer to a team of adult women, a sports team of adult women as our girls.

But not our boys when it comes to adult men playing the same sports. I mean, this is language being destroyed. This is the first thing that gets destroyed. And one of the things that writers do is actually rebuild with words.

Once words are destroyed, then we move on to destroying things made with brick and things made with flesh. That comes later. So I think we need to be very aware of the fact that we are in this field and we have a war, but it's a war against words. And we need to fight back on the side of things like human rights,

equal rights and so on and so forth, justice. And that's what I mean by a call to literature. A call to literature is that kind of call. And again, call to arms have been given again and again. Lessons from Srajiv also highlighted how

The way in which we talk of war is stuck in some ways, has been stuck for the last 300 years. We also need to find other ways to talk about what is happening. That discourse of war is problematic, just as a term like collateral damage is seriously problematic. Because what it is saying, it

Its implication is that if I'm hurrying, I'm driving very fast from work or from my house to work because I'm getting late, and I drive over five people, I can claim that it's their fault. They just got in my way. Okay. I'm exaggerating it, but it's the same logic. Okay. Yeah. And I think you're absolutely right because I think we've witnessed that these in the past couple of years how...

Howard, genocide is being... Yep, exactly. The way they play with words with a genocide, you know, what's happening to Palestinians. Exactly. Any criticism of that is being dismissed as anti-Semitic. Even the Jews who are against that are being called self-hating Jew or traitors,

We choose to be in the world of language. We have to, I guess, win the world of language, really. And again, the way it's reported in the media, Palestinians just seem to die. You don't get killed. They die for some mysterious reasons. The way the language or politics of language is utilized to dehumanize them is quite horrifying.

And also, I mean, they're always seen as in mobs, as groups. Yeah, mobs. Almost though you do visualization of, yeah. I mean, like I have Jewish friends who are exactly in that situation in the sense that they're very critical of what is happening and no one is willing to even listen to them. Okay.

Okay, so that's a serious problem. It's just a Palestinian mob, right? You're right. You're absolutely right. But you never talk about... They have stories, they have lives, they have families. You've got to talk about their individuals. And it's just a bunch of numbers, 40,000, 50,000, which is really sad.

When the Israeli captives are released, which is very good, we meet them as individuals. Yeah, you're right. I'm yet to meet a single Palestinian as an individual. And I completely agree with you. It's great that the hostages are, and again, the word hostage and prisoner, two different things. They're free to go back to the families. Wonderful theme. And we get to know their names. Great.

There are Palestinian prisoners who have been there for years, decades. They are being released, but you never hear of them. You don't know a name unless you just watch some Arabic channel that might be interested in that. And the West doesn't know that. Professor Tabish Kari, thank you very much for this really, really fascinating conversation. I really enjoyed it, and I think I should do more podcasts on literature. But very few literature professors write

like this that I'm interested in. And I do strongly recommend this book to our listeners. It's highly accessible. It's really short. You can read it in a day during the weekend. Literature Against Fundamentalism, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. It's really been a pleasure. Thank you.