Fictions of Connectivity

This chapter discusses the Arabic translation of Alexander Dumas's Count of Monte Crist. The Arabic translations of Cristo demonstrate that what Holt calls the “thick nexus of global finance and Arabic fiction” manifests itself above all as a problem of translation. Scenes of exchange necessarily invoke problems of translation, which in the context of nahḍa debates about the relative benefits of Arab and European cultures and economies puts special emphasis on what Lydia Liu has called “the meaning-value” of the sign. Especially in systems of exchange like global markets and literary translations, neither meaning nor value are intrinsic but are what Gayatri Spivak has called textual, in that they have no adequate literal referent. Fictions of connectivity like Monte Cristo, which focus on the global mobility of capital and bodies, are ideal places to see this instability in meaning-value. The Count is never only the Count, even in French. He is a vanishing semblance, always appearing in translation: Dantès, an English lord, and Sindbad the Sailor — himself an avatar of circulation — too. That Monte Cristo is a novel-length exploration of transnational circulation explains its singular popularity during the nahḍa's own world-making projects. The translations of Monte Cristo embed the economics of their literary relation with Europe into their techniques.