Reading a story tends to be a solitary act today. Still, engaging in a narrative remains a vital social practice. The aesthetic, affective, didactic, and political are always tightly interwoven in narrative webs. Critical storytelling is built on the idea that if we arrange those strings in the right way, narratives can indeed make us live better together. But the way to do this is not always straightforward or intuitive. I want to reflect on two ways of being social in and through narratives. Recognition and dialogue are ancient ingredients of narratives. They blur the lines between the content and the form of the story. I follow their threads through Byzantine narratives and contemporary literary theory and suggest that being passively exposed to the limits of your knowledge and actions – like when quietly reading a book – can be much more radically social than engaging in a dialogue at any price. The value of this can be appreciated especially by those for whom the right to narrate remains limited or even inaccessible.
What can a story do?
In Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, the 2023 Edward Said memorial lecture, Isabela Hammad traces the motif of recognition. Anagnorisis made its way into literary theory through Aristotle’s reading of Greek tragedy. Aristotle defines it as “a change from ignorance to knowledge”. It is what Oedipus experiences when realizing that he is his wife’s son, his father’s killer, and the cause of the plague that gnaws on the people of Thebes. Hammad notes that anagnorisis can also take a negative form, like in Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Return to Haifa. A Palestinian couple separated from their baby during the 1948 Nakba returns to the city of Haifa after the Six-Day War in 1967. They find that a stranger living in their house has raised their son. He now carries a Hebrew name and their enemies’ uniform. The son feels angry and abandoned. He denies the significance of blood ties and refuses to be recognised.
It is just as startling to recognise that a stranger is your kin, as it is to be exposed to the fact that your kin has been a stranger all along. Hammad holds that it is not the sudden burst of knowledge that gives a punch in the gut to both the characters and the readers exposed to anagnorisis. It is rather the seeing the limits of our knowledge. This is why anagnorisis might not be just another motif in the plot. In this subtle play of who knows what and when, which includes both the characters and the readers, the sharp borders between the story and the way it is told are explicitly blurred. The recognition can affect the laws and relations of the storyworld, including focalization, sequence of events, narrative levels and narrative time. This exposure to our cognitive limitations, Hammad argues, is the best we can get from novels and other narratives. It makes us realize that we are not alone in the world and that the world exists outside of our heads. “To realise you have been wrong about something,” she writes, “is to experience the otherness of the world coming at you.” A fundamental social act.
Between and Against
Hammad is a Palestinian. She regularly witnesses moments when strangers recognise the violent acts of occupation and apartheid in Palestine. Israeli citizens, Hammad notes in her lecture, are much less likely to experience such recognition in comparison to other foreigners. It would mean not only witnessing an inhumane treatment of their neighbours but also recognising Palestinians as being equally human. It could make them question their own humanity, as being complicit in systems of oppression or benefiting from them.
Here lies the crucial difference between recognition and dialogue. Certainly, as a theatre piece, Oedipus the King is almost entirely made of dialogues. So, why does Oedipus not avoid all the bloodshed – including of the people much more innocent than him – by simply engaging in a proper conversation with any of his families, or at least some of his servants? Isn’t dialogue an easier and shorter route from ignorance to knowledge? Recognition comes with a trauma. Would it not be better to avoid it by just having people discuss their opposing positions in face-to-face encounters? For some reason, this question might seem much more naïve and absurd when asked about fiction.
In her book The Past Can’t Heal Us, Lea David analyses the practice of reconciliation dialogues between Israeli and Palestinian civilians. These meetings that started taking place in the 1980s under the auspice of NGOs and educational institutions, were an attempt to bridge the conflict through shared memory culture. David argues that the inter-communal dialogues indeed fostered a sense of solidarity among the participants. But that solidarity easily dissipated once they went back to the entrenched ethnic groups and to the structures of domination and inequality. The dialogical setting was flawed, since “from the very beginning it was not ‘people’ who came to embrace differences among group members, but Jews and Palestinians who came to establish clear ethnic boundaries.”
Similarly to the way in which anagnorisis slides between the content of the narrative and its form, so has the dialogue form served as a basis to interpret narratives beyond their formal characteristics. Soviet narratologist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about dialogism. He believed that all social and discursive interactions occur not inside humans but in the borderlands between subjects. He started from analysing the form of dialogue in Dostoyevsky’s novels. He ended up concluding that novelistic storytelling is often dialogical beyond its form, since it reflects this intersubjective foundation of our social lives.
Hana Meretoja takes inspiration from Bakhtin to show how storytelling can be ethical and foster emancipation. In her Ethics of Storytelling, she argues for the possibility of non-subsumptive storytelling, that is, telling stories that do not dissolve the individual human characters into general laws or principles of a dominant worldview, that do not swallow and subject them to other humans in the story. Still, the limits of dialogical storytelling become clear in her interpretation of David Grossman’s anti-war novel To the End of the Land. She notices how the conflicted and complex Israeli characters of Grossman’s novel manage to make and unmake each other in a “dialogical space of possibilities.” At the same time and despite their best efforts, the Israeli protagonist and her Palestinian employee remain stuck in “a culturally inherited choreography” and the “narrative unconscious” that keeps them irreconcilably apart.
Not every dialogue is ‘dialogical’. When the topic of a dialogue is the participants’ right to exist and speak for themselves, its oppressive form is revealed. The outcomes of such dialogues are set beforehand and limited. It can only end in the conversion or annihilation of one side.
Unlike the anagnorisis, there seems to be an agonistic element in both the dialogue form and dialogical storytelling. They seem to enforce the boundaries between individuals or communities that precede the interaction. In contrast, despite being potentially traumatic, the recognition allows the boundaries to shift and pass over the characters’ bodies, erasing the established communities and revealing the possibility of a common humanity. The consequences can be both salvific and devastating. There is no community, family or city that Oedipus can go back to. Truly, recognition is not only about knowledge. Aristotle frames it as having emotional, relational, vital, and narrative consequences, since it is “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love [friendship] or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune”.
Byzantine literature offers plenty of examples of both recognitions and dialogues. On the one hand, we read of tokens of recognition that bring separated families and romantic couples back together in medieval Greek novels.
We meet transmasculine monks and hermits whose female body parts are revealed posthumously in hagiography, making their communities reconsider the boundaries of gender, piety, and sanctity. On the other hand, as noted by Averil Cameron in her Arguing it Out, self-standing dialogues in Byzantium were both very popular and very monological. The ‘opponent’ would be allowed to enter the dialogue, only to be defeated. This, again, is not a contradiction in terms, since ‘dia-’ in ‘dialogue’ does not refer to the number of participants or positions represented but to the fact that the interaction is conducted ‘through’ discourse. Byzantine dialogues can revolve around the purity of Orthodoxy, the ‘faults’ of heretics, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, or social issues like poverty. Whatever the topic, they are more often framed as being against someone than as being between people. The same is the case with dialogues embedded in larger treatises or narratives.
Conversion, Annihilation, Recognition
The central text of the Retracing Connections programme, the Life of Saint Theodore of Edessa, contains interesting cases of both dialogues and recognition. This text was written by Euthymios the Athonite/Iberian (ca. 955-1028), a former child hostage in Constantinople, a prolific translator, and a Georgian immigrant abbot of a prosperous monastery on Mount Athos. The text was composed as a collage of original passages and chunks of text from Euthymios’ earlier Greek translations. It was translated into Georgian and Arabic soon after its writing, and it became widely popular in its Old Slavonic translation. It is a life story of a fictional Christian monk and abbot called Theodore. Theodore lived in Palestine and Syria, under the sovereignty of Umayyad caliphs, in a mix of seventh- to ninth-century contexts, but without strong attachments to precise chronologies. Theodore spent most of his life as a monk in the Monastery of Saint Sabas, in today’s Bethlehem Governorate in Palestine, and as the bishop of the city of Edessa, near today’s Şanlıurfa in Turkey. Here I want to look at two dialogues and one recognition scene from this hagiography.
Theodore’s beautiful, young, and pious disciple Michael is the protagonist of the first dialogue in the text. Michael came to Jerusalem to sell baskets during the visit of the Persian king Adramelech (Abd al-Malik?). The evil queen Seis tried and failed to seduce Michael, only to accuse him of rape in front of her husband. The king knows the accusation is false. Instead of a trial, he initiates a debate on true faith between Michael, a Jewish intellectual, and himself. The king and the scholar fail to defend Islam and Judaism in words. Michael tells the king that he can either let him go, kill him, or convert to Christianity. The king puts him to torture. Michael miraculously survives standing on hot coals and drinking poison. The Christians at the court are encouraged by the miracles, but the majority of the king’s Muslim subjects furiously request “with shouts to the king, that either the monk dies or all the Christians be slaughtered.” Michael is taken outside of the city walls and beheaded.
The second dialogue takes place at the court of the Saracen Persian king Mauias (Mu’awiya?). Theodore travels to Babylon, with an explicit divine mission of converting the king. He miraculously heals Mauias and preaches the Christian faith to him. The king secretly becomes Christian, while Theodore’s influence grows among the population of Babylon. The leading Jewish intellectual and religious figure is displeased by this. He bribes the main judge, who organizes another tri-religious debate. Believing that the king would be on his side, the unnamed Jewish leader does not even attempt to present an argument. He showers Theodore with “blasphemies and rumors” against Christians. In return, Theodore refuses to defend himself from smears, and used his saintly power to afflict the Jewish speaker with mutism. After being muted and imprisoned for three days, Theodore’s opponent choses to convert to Christianity. His power of speech is restored. In his turn, king Muaias, renamed John at baptism, decides to come out as Christian in front of his Muslim subjects. The enraged Muslim mob tears him and his three Christian servants into pieces in a public square.
Both episodes and their characters abound in stereotypes aimed at fortifying the existing boundaries between religious and ethnic communities. Despite multiple debates incorporated into the story, these positions reflected and produced violent acts over the centuries. Another embedded episode in the story can be interpreted as breaking this pattern by allowing the separation lines between characters to disappear, while making the storyworld big enough to fit their differences. It goes as follows.
Theodore’s spiritual father, the hermit Theodosios, lives on a column close to the city of Edessa. This old man tells Theodore a series of educational and pious tales. One of his stories is about the rich man Ader and his family. Ader abandoned his family and became a monk at the Saint Sabas monastery. His wife felt abandoned and furious at him for neglecting his parental duties. Ader then appeared in two visions: he revealed the future to the hermit Theodosios and he told his wife that he would take his children with him, so she could join a monastery and save her soul, too. He miraculously killed his two older sons and made the youngest fall severely ill. The desperate mother ran around with the dying toddler in her arms asking for help from passersby. The person who stopped to help her was a prostitute. Despite her sins and the lack of faith in herself, she took the child in her arms and uttered a prayer, both humble and defiant. Not asking mercy for herself, she challenged God to show clemency towards her helpless neighbor. The child was miraculously healed. The mother and the merciful woman spent the rest of their lives together in a nearby monastery. The healed child was raised there and went on to become the patriarch of Jerusalem.
This story is complex, and has a clear religious message in its uni-religious setting. Still, there is moment of anagnorisis at the heart of it. The family is dismembered and reassembled, as the father kills two sons and a stranger saves the third one. Transcending the boundaries of piety, respectability, and social class, one marginalized and one helpless character recognize each other’s humanity. They make space for a more livable life on earth through mutual faith and care. At the same time, the hermit watches carefully from his column and goes on to tell the story.
This resonates strongly with Isabel Hammad’s arguments in Recognising the Stranger. When we find ourselves trapped in a triangle of the oppressors, the oppressed, and the bystanders, she invites us to follow Yasmin El-Rifae’s advice. Rather than trying to persuade or convert the oppressor, we should try “breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves.” We should try to think together, resist together, and support one another openly.
This is not an invitation to create segregated, monological societies or narratives. On the contrary, it is a call to question the dialogues that make us choose between conversion and annihilation. It also an invitation for people who are used to telling stories to quietly listen, lest they miss the chance to recognize the limits of their knowledge and to perceive the stranger in themselves. It is a call to stay attentive to elements of common humanity when faced with foreign narratives and epistemologies. This lies firmly within the domain of storytelling. According to Hannah Arendt, storytelling “reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it” and “brings about the consent and the reconciliation with things as they are.” Such an approach might reveal that “things as they are” may offer a space of non-oppressive coexistence. If not, it can at least inspire us to tell a better story, a story of resistance, and keep telling it until the end of the loveless world.
Milan Vukašinović
Researcher in Greek and Bzyantine Studies, Uppsala University
Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, New York 2024.
Aristotle, Poetics. ed. S. Halliwell Cambridge, Mass 1995.
Lea David, The Past Can’t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights, Cambridge 2020.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin, Tex 1981.
Hanna Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, Oxford 2018.
Averil Cameron, Arguing it Out. Discussion in Twelfth-Century Byzantium, Budapest – New York 2016.
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, New York – London 1955.