A Muslim philosopher on the soul and its fate: al-'Āmirī's Kitāb al-Amad 'alā l-abad . By Everett K. Rowson. (American Oriental Series, Volume 70.) pp. vi, 375. New Haven, Connecticut, American Oriental Society, 1988.

Abstract

connected which ultimately reflects the value system that is the actual subject of the poetic mimesis, whereas the mannerist style depicts the object qua object through a series of comparisons in which the poet seeks to impress by his brilliant use of language, and the subject of the mimesis is not " reality " but literary language itself. Both styles demonstrate the need to redefine the notion of "reality" as applied to medieval literature; for in neither case is the object the mimesis of concrete reality as such, but its presentation through language at a certain level of experience, whether this is primarily ethical or rhetorical. " The essential distinction between the two styles", Sperl observes, "does not reside in preponderance of reality or language as correlates of poetry. These are merely reflections of a more fundamental axis: that between language and its referent, a relation re-created and affirmed in classical style and disjoined in mannerism" (p. 164). It is arguable that an important function of the mannerist style, as contrasted with the classicist, is to force a reappraisal of traditional values by breaking down the classicist association of poetic mimesis with such values and requiring the audience to reconstruct an alternative value system encoded in the language of the poem. Hence the importance of mannerism in religious and meditative poetry, as for example in the Luzumlyat, which deliberately subvert the moral values of the classicist zuhdlyat of Abu al-'Atahiya to "evolve an idiosyncratic moral code so that the meaning of zuhdis changed; it is an intellectual creed remote from the simple asceticism of the earlier model" (p. 97). Thus the notion of mannerism, as "language at play" is only partially adequate to deal with the broader implications of such a style, which must, as Sperl observes, be seen not merely as a stylistic alternative but as occupying one end of a literary continuum (with classicist poetic mimesis at the other) which seeks to include all aspects " of an (ideally comprehensive) semiological mimesis" (p. 157). The view that in mannerist (as opposed to classicist) mimesis "the moral significance of the objective world is irrelevant" (p. 159) must be modified; the deliberate withdrawal of a moral dimension (often more apparent than real) is often itself a moral statement. It has been argued that Western critical terminology cannot be applied to non-Western literatures because of their inherent difference from " Western literature ", viewed as both unique and normative. The validity of borrowing critical terms from other disciplines (in the case of mannerism, from art criticism) has also been questioned. Sperl's lucid analyses do much to validate both strategies; avoiding the trap of positing close correlates between Arabic and European mannerism, he investigates the distinction within the Arabic literary system between classicism and mannerism as they function within that system. His approach runs counter to that of Heinrichs, who posited a monism in the development of Arabic poetry which assumes its basic static quality from 'Abbasid times onwards, a thesis which cannot be upheld in the light of Sperl's analyses. His book makes a valuable contribution not only to the study of Arabic poetry but to comparative studies which focus on literature as a self-modulating system embodying a tension between alternative stylistic strategies; it thus places the study of Arabic literature on an equal footing with that of other, more familiar traditions, and will be welcomed not only by specialists but by comparativists and generalists concerned with the dynamics of poetic systems.