A Cultural Criticism of the Novel “He Dreams, or Plays or Dies” by Ahmad Saadawi According to Foucault’s Theory

Cultural criticism is a major literary phenomenon in the post-modern literature. It explores the various layers of the society and interprets them from cultural, social, political and historical points of view. A recent subject of cultural criticism has been the Iraqi society, which has had bitter experiences through the tough years of several wars, from the Iran-Iraq war to the invasion of Kuwait to the US invasion of Iraq, as well as the advent and dissidence of terrorist groups. This has created a cultural problem that Ahmad Saadawi, a contemporary Iraqi novelist, adopted as the main theme of his works including the novel “He Dreams, or Plays or Dies”. The novel best depicts such cultural adversities in the society as corruption and oppression. The present study delves into the novel to detect the elements and techniques of exerting authority and to show how the cultural layers of the society have undergone changes and damage. The research is conducted through a descriptive-analytical method and on the basis of Foucault’s theory. With regard to the three types of authority discussed under the theory, it is concluded that the Iraqi society has shifted toward cultural degeneration represented by such evils as declined sense of religion, immigration, immorality, violence, pugnacity, and prevalence of derision.
Among the most important pioneers of cultural criticism in the West are pioneers from the Frankfurt School, including Michel Foucault (1921-1991), who critiqued politics and literature in the era of modernization. As Foucault believed, political, historical and social events affect literature, which is based on the perception of a world that results from culture. There is no difference between literary history and cultural history; rather, both are manifestations of social criticism. The most important thing that Foucault touched on in his modern theories is the mechanisms of the flow of power in society and how all these mechanisms affect the emergence of a form of culture whose impairments can be addressed through the same theory. Foucault does not see power as an imposition by the use of an external force, as the state imposes its own rule, for example, but rather as a fluid that flows through the entire social body. There is a manifestation of power at all levels of society; from major political phenomena such as the drafting of the constitution, down to personal relationships between individuals, such as the relationship between a father and his children or between a doctor and a patient. Foucault calls this theory “the tactics of domination or power.”
The novel is used as a tool for research, exploration and analysis of reality and its problems, and a representation of the urgent course of life and its exciting events. It is not surprising that we find in it a reflection of the cultural, social and political reality, as it may be very self-evident to say that the novel is a literary art with a cultural implication. So, in this study, we try to shed light on the phenomenon of cultural impairments and techniques, showing it through cultural criticism in the novel “He Dreams, or Plays or Dies” by Ahmed Saadawi as a novel that narrates the various forms of impairments in Iraqi society and reveals the deterioration of human relations as a result. We adopted Michel Foucault’s approach to extracting forms of power because of the comprehensiveness of dialogue in the expression of impairments. It is worth noting that Foucault divided force into three categories: visual force, mechanical force, and physiological force.
The method of exercising power in Iraq in terms of visual power weakened Islamic thought and the culture of jihad and martyrdom on the one hand, and on the other hand it created a wave of contradictions in a sea of ​​beliefs. The most famous example of the dominance of visual power in the way of marginalizing culture is the permissibility of immoral scenes such as casinos. The domination of despair and betrayal over life, the loss of any vitality or activity due to seeing war scenes, and the indifference to social problems and difficulties are other effects of this type of power.
On the other hand, the use and planning of a certain type of mechanical power represented by the ruling regime’s use of discipline to exploit people for its benefit has increased the wave of migration and drained the brains out of Iraq. In addition, the habit of blind obedience, uprooting the culture of slavery, and ignoring civil and human rights are among the other destructive effects of the mechanism of exercising power in Iraq.
At the same time, physiological force, by refraining from punishing social wrongs, has led to widespread corruption in the structure of government institutions and financial and moral corruption of government officials. We often deal with scenes that indicate the absence of laws to provide social justice that leads to economic corruption in the structure of a government without the people. And it is what creates pleasure in resisting right and law in the cultural structure of society.