This talk was originally given by Professor K. Tölölyan on 6 March 2002 at an event at the Yale Club, New York City.

I was told not to speak for more than fifteen minutes. Faced with this edict, my first temptation was just to read to you some of the many laudatory passages from the various prepublication reviews of Berberian’s book that have been posted on the Internet. But you are all members in good standing of the new cyberculture and have read them already. Lacking that option, I wondered how a loquacious literary critic like myself could do justice in fifteen minutes to the bombs, babies, bicycles, and baklava that Berberian brings together with stylistic magic to make this very original novel. I decided that I could not. Even offering a summary of its plot would be a complicated task, and not really a very productive one, because while the plot enables the author to write his book, it is not the primary source of its many meanings and pleasures. Therefore, I will talk primarily about one aspect of the book, will refer briefly to others, and will hope that my discussion at least offers a hint of its many other riches, and my appreciation of them.

The novelist John Updike writes:

I don’t think that life falls into plots; it does not end quite the way books do. In that sense, the bourgeois novel is a falsification of modern experience…. I do believe that there are dead conventions and I’ve tried in my own way to shake free of them. *1

*1 footnote, John Updike, “An Evening with John Updike,” Sa/magundi 57 (1982), p. 45.

Terrorism is just the kind of modern, indeed very contemporary experience that Updike mentions, and so his remarks anticipate a problem that confronts Berberian as he imagines the mind of a man recruited by terrorists to plant a bomb in a crowded Beirut hotel. Since 1911, when Joseph Conrad published Under Western Eyes and offered one of the very few good literary treatments of the topic, terrorism has been depicted in dozens of bad commercial novels and in dead narrative conventions.

Berberian faces the task of writing a novel that deals with terrorism but that must not be hostage to the dead conventions and the misguided documentary impulses that govern so much of the writing about terrorism. He succeeds. In theme and form, he makes terrorism an important element of a novel that is also about several other experiences, issues, and conflicting desires, and he earns the right to call his work The Cyclist, rather than The Terrorist *2. This is one of the many achievements of this remarkably original novel.

*2 Four years later in June of 2006, Updike published his novel, Terrorist.

It begins by depicting the mind of a man who, while riding a bicycle, has been hit by a car and is immobilized in a hospital bed. It ends with the same man having a second accident, this time involving a parked car. Between these two parallel yet subtly different events, we come to learn something of this man, who is the nameless narrator. His memory ranges back to his childhood as the son of a Druze father and a Jewish mother living in a village in Galilee. That village in Israel is depicted as a multicultural haven of peaceful coexistence for its inhabitants, who are Israeli, Muslim Arab, Druze, and Christian. It is, in fact, evocatively depicted as a kind of miniature Sarajevo, and its peace is shattered by a bomb in the marketplace that evokes the endless grisly bombing of the Sarajevo market a decade ago. The bomb leaves “mangled and twisted men next to mangoes, beets and bloodstained baskets.” (p. 156) This mixture of body parts and fruit, described in greater detail than I have quoted, dominates the book, but not as a merely sensationalist image of the results of terrorism. Rather, it serves as what literary critics call the central trope, or figure, or metaphor of the book. In one awful moment, a peacefully coexisting mix of people and a delightful festival of food turns into a nauseating mixture of body parts and fruit.

The dominant experience of the book, the one around which desire, joy, and pleasure coalesce, is the experience of good mixture; equally central is the experience of deadly mixture of explosives and mangled bodies and social mosaics that tear at each other.

Berberian uses depictions of food rather than politically partisan discourse to make this point and others. His narrator says, “you must excuse me for these culinary asides,” (p. 167) but of course this is the canny author speaking, creating camouflage. He knows very well that we’re all foodies now, as he knows how much time we spend not just on eating but on searching for new culinary experiences. His pudgy hero is happy to use food as a major metaphor, depicting his own body, its sexuality, and the violence he can do, all in terms of food. In a telling passage, the narrator juxtaposes western and Middle Eastern cuisine in these terms:

“While in most Western cultures dinner is an immutable progression of courses, the concept of mezze is a spontaneous free-for-all, an antithesis, even a threat, to structured order. The dishes are all served and consumed at the same time in no specific rank. This communal approach is reinforced by the crossing of hands, and the exchange of sometimes more than twenty different dishes.” (p. 149)

The formal and thematic wisdom of the book is evident in such a passage. Here and elsewhere, there is a subtle critique of the West through its food: served linearly, it lacks the pleasures of heterogeneity, simultaneity, and mixture. Eaten individually rather than communally, it does not provide the occasion for the crossed hands of family and friends as they reach for different mezze items. Eaten in progression, western food offers a punning parody of western progress, moving with relentless single-mindedness from appetizer to dessert in a way that symbolizes the western preference for structured order, which the passage tells us is threatened by the refusal of structure in the mezze. Yet here as elsewhere Berberian is appreciative of what the West also offers, and his appreciation is consistently expressed in terms of food. Though lacking some of the happy multiplicity of Middle Eastern food, western food is nevertheless endowed with its own power, the power of McDonald’s and of good-looking, waxed fruits that lack aroma and taste. Berberian carefully balances his critique of the West through western food by his acknowledgment of the seductive virtues of such food. He does this in a tactfully oblique manner, starting with a passage in which he describes the sign in front of the store of the man who helps to save the narrator after his first accident. This gentle, peaceful man is a juice maker who nevertheless has reason to be angry with the West.

His sign reads: “Boycott the aggrieved oranges of the West. My citrus fruits have superior carpels. My melons are home to evenly dispersed seeds. My lemons shine without ethylene. My mandarins are never coated with edible wax.” (p. 97) Six pages later, the narrator alludes to this passage when he remembers that when he was a child in the ancestral village, he crossed the whole village to Ghaemi’s [house, where her] parents offered me an apricot. If I were to make the same journey today, would I become the target of a determined slingshot? Or should I be more alarmed that the orchards in our village are fast disappearing, and there seems to be a fruit blockade in place? Or that more than three quarters of the world’s apricot output now comes from the United States? There was a time when our neighbors paid a premium for our glorious fruits, but somewhere along the way, the terms of trade moved against us, and the world became more interested in the terror that we produced. (p. 103)

I cite these passages because they underscore what I regard as Berberian’s greatest accomplishment. He manages to write about terrorism without becoming hostage to the ordinary politics of the Middle East. He does not distance his work from the pleasure and pain of the region, but he manages to do justice to both-I insist, to both-while remaining deliberately unclear about political allegiances, while stepping away from the morass of polarized political discourse that would have turned his novel into a documentary tract.

It’s worth noting how carefully he weaves and balances the two concerns. His narrator wonders whether, if he were to cross the multicultural village again to go to Ghaemi’s house for an apricot, he would be the target of a slingshot, a favored weapon of young Palestinians, and so by implication of a certain kind of violence we now call terrorism. Yet power and politics also appear in another, less bloody but insidious form on which the author spends some time as he discusses western domination by talking about the colonization of Middle Eastern food habits by the West.

This colonization, which is coercive and yet finds willing takers, uses economic power to drive Middle Eastern orchard farmers and juice sellers out of business and yet is welcomed by some of their customers, the bourgeoisie in what Berberian calls “the badlands of Beirut.” In another passage, he writes that Beirut seems to be saying: “It’s the foreign troops that we cannot digest. Yet your cultural icons, your accomplished and oily fries, your glorious and griddled pancakes, your floury and flippant waffles are more than tasty. Colonize us with your food.” (p. 113)

The world of the nameless terrorist in bicycle training is also a world in which food is both joy and the emblem of threat, both seduction and colonization. In one of his most resonant passages, Berberian’s cyclist almost loses the bicycle race from the Shouf to Beirut when he is sidetracked by a boy’s invitation to breakfast. The scene is deeply touching in itself, in the way in which the boy’s love of bicycles is depicted and links up with the narrator’s own yearning for a bicycle in childhood, but above all it works because it is linked to an earlier sidetracking by food. In a way that is daring, I won’t hesitate to say profound and successful, Berberian evokes through red lentil soup the potage for which, in the Old Testament, Esau surrendered his right as a firstborn to Jacob. It helps to remember that in the Old Testament Jacob is also called Israel.

Once again, Berberian politicizes food and culinarizes politics, handling some painful issues with humor and nuance. The family politics that divided Jacob and Esau are seamlessly joined through lentil soup and waxed fruit to the politics of the modern Middle East. The skill and virtue of Berberian’s approach is that at no point does he have to surrender pleasure to pain, food to violence: his realism is not the realism of stale partisan discourse but the realism of a multicultural coexistence, represented by the culinary, a realism that desperately needs to trump the phony realism of violent realpolitik that dominates our time.

In these remarks, I have only touched upon one important aspect of the book. There are many others, and as with any literary text, how much readers will be able to extricate and enjoy depends in large part on what they bring to the book. As always, some meanings are given; others are hinted at; and still others may or may not be intended by the author, but can be legitimately constructed by the reader. I, for example, work on diasporas, nationalism, and globalization, so I am intrigued by the several passages of the book in which he addresses these major contemporary phenomena. I am also alerted by my literary training to the symbolism of names, yet I cannot make good meaning out of some names in the book, for example the names the Underground Academy and the Attorneys, which are used for some of the terrorist institutions. Nor do I know what to do with Leng, the name of one of the terrorists, which hints both at East Asian cooking and the blood-thirsty Central Asian conqueror, Timur Leng, known to the West as Tamerlane. On the other hand, two of the others in the terrorist cell are named Sadji and Ghaemi, which in Arabic can mean clear and cloudy. Does the author intend us to discern a hidden structure of meaning here that ripples out through the text? Is he tantalizing us with an appetizer or are these meanings part of the main course? I do not know. But let this appetizer stand for the larger pleasures that The Cyclist offers us. Go thou and read.

Khachig Tölöyan, Professor of English and Letters, Emeritus, Wesleyan University

Originally read on 6 March 2002 at the Yale Club, New York City.