DISSOLVING THE RATIONAL SELF

The overarching thematic of self-dissolution in the wine poem lies in the suspension of rational self-control induced by wine. “She makes love to a man's intellect (

aql) before he smiles/And swindles him of his sense and self-control (ḥilm).”

⁸

For normative morality, reason or intellect (

aql) is the key to self-integration, which manifests itself in virtue (faḍl, muruwwa). Reason is the psychic faculty that suppresses and controls the passions (ahwā

) and is therefore closely associated with self-control (ḥilm). Al-Jahiz defines ḥilm as “the general name of all virtue, the power of reason to suppress passion (huwa al-ism al-jāmi

li-kull faḍl wa huwa sulṭān al-

aql al-qāmi

li-l-hawā).”

⁹

We read in al-Adab al-Saghir, a work attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffa

, that “all virtues belong to reason (al-muru

āt kulluhā taba

li-l-

aql).”

¹⁰

Reason is regarded as properly belonging to the self and therefore associated with autonomy, while the passions, lusts, and instincts are regarded as heteronomously exerting control over the self. Ibn al-Muqaffa

says that your reason, anger (ghaḍab), lust (hawā), and violent emotion (jahl) vie for control over your tongue. If your reason succeeds in controlling it, it belongs to you, but if the others do, it belongs to your enemy.

¹¹

Therefore, the dominance of reason over the passions is necessary for you to really be yourself. Yet the passions are the source of pleasure; only when they are loosened from the domination of reason can one experience a pleasurable state. Consider the following anecdote reported by al-Jahiz: “Mu

awiya said to

Amr ibn al-

As: ‘What is pleasure?’

Amr replied, ‘Command the youths of the Quraysh to leave us.’ When this was done he said, ‘Pleasure is the casting off of virtue (al-ladhdha ṭarḥ al-muruwwa).’” Al-Jahiz adds, “

Amr spoke truly, for grave and dignified behavior cannot exist without a great burden upon the self and exhausting discipline.”

¹²

The identification of virtue (muruwwa) with the overwhelming effort required to conform to standards of courtly behavior would appear to stand in contrast to the more heroic ethos of virtue associated with pre–Islamic life. This contrast no doubt arises in the context of the social transformations that took place with the formation of an Islamic empire and, in particular, the dominance of courtly life and institutions over the social patterns and ideals of the ruling class. The sociologist Norbert Elias has argued that the emergence of more centralized political authority within society, particularly that of an absolutist court, brings about greater social complexity, increased differentiation of roles and division of labor, and larger and more involved networks of interdependence. The higher degree of complexity and the centralized concentration of power and force require more rigorous regulation of patterns of behavior achieved through greater, more invasive control of emotional impulses. This is true in the highest degree at the level of court and elite society, where competition for power, reputation, and other forms of social capital, with little or no recourse to force, dictates utmost care and self-awareness in social interactions of which even the most trivial may adversely affect one's status and livelihood. From this perspective we can view texts on how to behave in social and, particularly, courtly settings such as al-Adab al-Kabir by Ibn al-Muqaffa

, which outlines a program of intense scrutiny and regulation of one's emotions so as to control them successfully in pursuit of one's own ends and conceal them from the designs of one's ever watchful enemies.

Elias argues further that both internal and external mechanisms of control work to eliminate sharp fluctuations in behavior and affect by applying constant pressure to diminish and even out the range of emotional intensity. The result is that individuals become more regular in their conduct, more rigorously determined by behavioral regimes and expectations, and less prone to reactions of extreme passion and violence. They become more “civilized.” The cost, however, according to Elias, is a significant reduction in the capacity for pleasurable experience.¹³

Consider in this regard al-Jahiz's extended definition of self-control (ḥilm):

The programmatic definition offered here manifests the imperative of emotional dampening and stabilization in spelling out what al-Jahiz regards to be the essential features of the self-integrated individual. These features are linked to high social status, as al-Jahiz indicates in describing the man of self-control as one who “belongs to the elite, seeks leadership and courts lordship, adorns himself with culture and refinement (adab), maintains grave and dignified demeanor.”¹⁵

The manner in which al-Jahiz sets out the meaning of self-control suggests a discursive intensification of the opposition between reason and passion in the courtly setting. This should lead, as suggested by Elias, to the enfeeblement of emotions within individuals and thus to the reduction of their capacity for pleasure. At the discursive level, however, the emphasis on the near-impossibility of controlling the passions has the effect of sharpening the bifurcation within the self that the opposition between reason and the passions posits and of aggrandizing the power and potential pleasurability of desire. The more monstrous the depiction of desire, and the more intense the struggle required to control it, the greater the harvest of pleasure promised by its eventual fulfillment. Yet the promise must apply to the loosening of desire in a more direct fashion, as well. This is precisely what is graphically depicted by the wine poem in the same elite, courtly setting invoked by al-Jahiz.

The motifs of the wine poem therefore sketch the unravelling of rational self-control through effects that invert the virtues associated with reason while preserving their structure. The primary consequence of self-dissolution is the dominance of violent emotion (jahl), the opposite of self-control, which brings states of passionate excess such as faraḥ (joy), wajd (ardour), and ṭarab (rapture), the latter particularly in conjunction with music. These conditions confer pleasure and constitute true enjoyment (

aysh) but are characterized by moral dissolution (ṭalāḥ, fitna) and sin. This is particularly evident in the violent and transgressive terms used to describe the drinker's night out, such as fatk (marauding) and qaṣf (destruction). Surrendering to uncontrolled passionate states through the suspension of reason results in liberation from care (hamm), the immense burden of anxiety constitutive of the empirical self. “Shatter clinging cares with musical rapture (ṭarab)/And be perpetually blissful with the daughter of the vine.”

¹⁶

Care is the term for all of the miseries of ordinary existence, the subjective experience of fate. Therefore, the lifting of care signifies escape from everyday life. To be blissful perpetually, in spite of fate (

alā al-dahr), means to escape time and fate and hence to be carefree. Wine is the privileged means to this condition. “I will cut the cords of care with the wine glass/For there is no physician for care like the wine glass.”

¹⁷

The elimination of care goes hand in hand with moral dissolution, because the essence of care is the constant struggle to control desire and to satisfy it in prescribed ways. Care lies in the self-awareness necessary to conform to social norms and expectations, to maintain one's status and propriety. The elimination of care is therefore attended by various forms of excess through which the drinker exceeds the bounds of the empirical self ordinarily under rational control. In addition to emotional excess, the poet glorifies in the prodigious amounts of wealth and time squandered for the sake of wine. “My heart fell for her and her love made me hate/Every valuable thing that I possess.”¹⁸

The generous man happily gives up his wealth in a socially productive manner out of his love of glory and virtue. His self-sacrifice gives life to the community. The drinker, however—the generous man's demonic twin—makes sure to pay the highest price possible to non–Muslims for the socially useless end of self-dissolution, the opposite of virtue. Even the miser, who is the most bound to quotidian contingency and thus practices the severest form of self-suppression, becomes a liberal spender under the influence of wine. “She banishes care and relaxes the heart of the miser.”¹⁹ In this regard we can consider the double meaning of faḍl (surplus, excess) as used by al-Jahiz. It designates both virtue, in the sense of surplus, and moral dissolution, in the sense of excess or waste. Al-Jahiz explains this by saying that reason “fetters surplus (faḍl) and restrains it from becoming excess (furuṭ) in the path of ignorance, error and harm.”²⁰ The wine poem is devoted to turning surplus into excess.

The drinker squanders not only his wealth, but also his honor. He reveals his “secret” and willingly exposes himself to public shame:

Revealing one's secret, a frequent motif in Abu Nuwas's wine poetry, constitutes a critical transgression of the boundaries of personhood. Al-Jahiz has thematized this in his epistle Kitman al-Sirr wa Hifz al-Lisan (Concealing the Secret and Guarding the Tongue). In this epistle, al-Jahiz casts concealing one's secret as a privileged instance of the struggle of reason to tame the passions. To let out the secret is to yield to desire, to lose self-control and surrender oneself to the control of one's enemy. Al-Jahiz makes holding one's secret emblematic of self-possession and personal autonomy. The “secret” itself becomes a metaphor for the inner self that must be kept concealed and under control, a task that even the most virtuous find nearly impossible, because “there is nothing more difficult than overcoming the passions.”²³ Revealing the secret, then, is tantamount to releasing the inner self and succumbing to the dominance of the passions. Successfully holding the secret is the mark of self-integration. The wine poet signifies the violation of ordinary selfhood by describing himself as “having a rent covering (munhatik al-sitr).” The curtain or veil that keeps inviolable what is proper to his self as an individual and thereby preserves his respectability and standing within society has been torn off. His interiority has come into the open. This utter loss of face, more hateful to most people than death, the drinker welcomes, showing that the contingencies of his empirical self have been completely cast off.

The ultimate forms of self-transgression and dissolution are sex and death. “There is no good in life if you are not/Slain by gazelles and wine cups.”²⁴

Death is associated both with intoxication itself and with the extinction of self-consciousness and self-control brought about by erotic infatuation and the sexual act. Wine poems often end with a sex scene, usually of a homoerotic variety.²⁵ The drinking of wine is the means to attaining this privileged form of pleasure, which serves as the culmination of self-dissolution. The sexual act violates borders of bodily and personal identity and stands for the complete suspension of reason and surrender to instinctual desires. It requires the transgression of ordinary social taboos. When illicit, as it must be in the wine poem, its transgressive nature is complete. Georges Bataille, in his analysis of sexuality from this perspective, asks, “What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners?—a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?” He continues:

This is precisely the nature of sexuality as it appears in the wine poem, which concentrates on the scandalous and violent features of the sexual relation. The violation of self and other that the drinker achieves through sex signifies the completion of his regression to the inner self, his escape from everyday life and the empirical self, and his union with fate and the forces of nature. Illicit sex, with its symbolically potent mixture of power, danger, and pleasure, is the ultimate liminal act of the wine poem.

TRANSGRESSIVE DESIRE AND THE DESCRIPTION OF WINE

The description of wine invests wine with the properties that allow it to transform the drinker by transfering him from the everyday reality of the empirical self to the dangerous, supremely pleasurable domain of primordial desire, to which the inner self belongs.²⁷

The properties of wine therefore correspond to those of the inner self. Like the “high” poetic genres, the wine poem reveals the true nature of the self through the features with which it endows its object of description. In contrast to them, however, the wine poem finds this truth not in an ideal self of moral perfection and sublimated desire, but in the “real” underlying nature that unites us with all beings. For the wine poem, the release of the primal desiring self offers the same euphoria of power and pleasure promised by the discourses of self-fulfillment in the higher realm of virtue. Therefore, it endows wine with the same otherworldly, spiritual characteristics ordinarily associated with virtue. Yet the path of fulfillment offered by wine leads to transcendence of everyday reality not through moral perfection of the self but through self-dissolution. For the wine poem, escape from everyday life, the aleatory domain of care and constraint, is achieved through the violation of its moral order, the overturning of its stifling inhibitions. Transcendence lies in what surpasses and confounds everyday categories: excess, paradox, non-identity. So it is that the description of wine embodies a demonic spirituality; it figures a transcendent realm of bliss and wisdom that is liminal in character, a “heterotopia” that arises not from the perfection of ordinary existence, but from its negation.

Through the description of wine the wine poem reconfigures the qualities ordinarily associated with desire so as to make desire transcendent of everyday life. Like primordial desire, wine is natural—that is, wine is anterior to the discontinuity of selfhood, the rules of society, and the categories of cognition. It returns the drinker to the realm of pleasure and continuity that precede individuation. For this reason, the poet calls the vine his mother, who “suckled me with her milk and wrapped me/In her shade against the searing mid-day heat.”²⁸

The maternal vine fulfills his need and insulates him from the world's harm. His dependence on this mother is the same as that of any infant. “I crawled to nurse from her with the alacrity of a child become hungry.”²⁹ In contrast to mother's milk, however, wine does not confer a purely natural form of bliss; it does not simply reinstate the satiety of infancy. Its effect is an exhilarating regression that undoes the vestments of selfhood. Rather than returning the drinker to a pre-existing, innocent nature, wine produces a nature that is the undoing of culture. This is a nature that comes into being through the violation and exceeding of the boundaries of culture and is thus a nature subsequent to culture and inclusive of it. We can see this paradoxical form of nature in the description of wine as both raw and cooked. “Cooked by the sun, not by any pot/Of water, no, nor seared by any fire.”³⁰ Cooking is the process that brings the products of nature into the moral order of society. To be cooked by the sun (i.e., to be aged), however, is to be cooked by time and fate, which are devoid of moral order. It is to be perfected by the agent of corruption, to become human through excessive exposure to the inhuman. Wine is thus simultaneously natural and cultural, a form of nature that subsumes culture through paradox. The description of wine exalts nature as disorder and chaos, rather than as primitive simplicity, by depicting nature as the transcendence of culture though its negation.³¹

The key to the reality depicted in the wine poem lies in its realignment of the ordinary relationship between transgression and normativity, linking the former to fulfillment and the latter to fate. The transgressive character of wine is formalized in its status as legally prohibited (ḥarām). Like the desiring self, it is inimical to the order and discipline of everyday life and therefore must be put off limits. This fact is crucial to the wine poem. There is no issue here of any possible loophole in the prohibition, or of wine as something that merely enhances ordinary social interaction. It must be outside the bounds of decency, the conduit to a state that overflows and sweeps away the legal and moral framework that regulates social life. “I hit it off with the forbidden (ḥarām) when we meet;/I recoil from the company of the permitted (ḥalāl).”³²

Prohibited things and practices are often regarded as sources of power and danger. In many instances, they are understood as lying on the margins of ordinary existence and transgressing its bounds, thus coming into contact with or belonging to the superordinary realm that contains the power to sustain as well as to destroy ordinary life. For this reason, something may be both sacred and forbidden, a conjunction familiar in the term “taboo.” Such an object, because of its status as outside of everyday life and regulation, its connection with extraordinary powers, must be approached with great care.³³ The category “ḥarām,” in what is perhaps an archaic semantic substratum, has a similar meaning, as in the phrase “al-masjid al-ḥarām (the sacred site of worship [of Mecca]).” Operative here is the opposition between the superordinary, ringed by special protocols and conferring an extraordinary state, and the everyday, belonging to the routine patterns of second nature. Although this opposition is usually superseded by the more purely legal opposition of illicit and licit, the first opposition remains present latently or as a constituent of the legal category. It is this opposition and its apparent incompatibility with the legal category on which Abu Nuwas's aesthetic treatment of wine centers. Wine is sinful. Drinking it attracts the wrath of God. Yet it confers great power on the drinker and liberates him from everyday life. Therefore, it is both sacred and illicit—sacred because it is illicit. Through this paradox, the wine poem transvalues aesthetically the domain of illicit pleasure, making it coextensive with the sacred, higher realm ordinarily associated with virtue.

The description of wine therefore invests wine with spiritual, divine, and celestial attributes. The realm of spirit is eternal—that is, it is not subject to the rule of dahr (time, fate). The wine poem gives wine this quality, as well. A prime manifestation is the celestial or cosmic character of wine. “As though the cups of wine as they circulated/In the darkness were the stars of Orion.”

³⁴

The wine poet persistently compares his drink to the stars, whose movement constitutes the visible clock of fate. Yet the stars, by virtue of being fate, are not subject to it or of it; they belong to the eternal realm of the heavens. To this realm the drinker of wine is transported. “When the drinker sips his wine you imagine/In the dark of the night he is kissing a star.”³⁵

Wine is celestial because it miraculously produces light. This, too, indicates its supernatural origin in a realm opposed to the dark bodies of ordinary existence. “As though it were a firebrand in its glass/Incandescent, yet without heat or flame.”³⁶

The freedom of wine from the authority of fate is also indicated in its age. Like the soul, wine pre-exists time and is not corrupted by it. The terms designating the nature of wine come from philosophical and theological discourses that posit a higher world of imperceptible spiritual essences separate from the lower world of gross, perishing bodies.³⁸

To this higher world belongs divinity itself. Therefore, wine mingles with divinity and takes on its attributes. Like God, it bestows blessings (ālā

) and has beautiful names.

³⁹

Like God, it is too sublime for language and imagination, so that the conjectures of intellect to which it gives rise are as diverse as the theological doctrines of the different religions.⁴⁰

Indeed, people often prostrate themselves before it. By endowing wine with these attributes, the wine poem appropriates the spiritual realm and reveals its full character. The description of wine shows the domain of the “lower” self and its transgressive desires to belong to the higher, sacred realm of light and spirit, with the result that the higher realm is revealed as fusing the spiritual and the demonic in a liminal totality.

The world of the wine poem, then, consists of two opposed states: the care and constraint of everyday life, and the sacred bliss of primordial desire attained through transgression. Any fulfillment of desire belongs to the latter, meaning that all fulfillment is transgressive in nature. The wine poem establishes this through the attributes with which it invests wine. We can consider in this regard wine's sexual attributes. Wine is both a virgin and an old lady (bikr

ajūz).

⁴¹

Simultaneous youth and age signifies transcendence of time; this characteristic is often ascribed in a masculine form to the hero of panegyric poetry, who is the ultimate figure of moral self-perfection. The properties of wine, however, derive from its association with desire. Being an old woman links it to this world (al-dunyā), which is conventionally depicted as an old woman who has speciously beautified herself to attract lovers whom she can grant no satisfaction. Wine redeems the temptations of this world and lifts them into the higher realm normally contrasted to this world by uniting eternity with direct sexual fulfillment as a sort of inverse parallel of the perpetual virgins of paradise. The drinker “deflowers a virgin-old lady beautified by old age/Decked out as a girl serious about pleasure.”⁴²

This metaphor extends to violate further distinctions on which the order of everyday life is based. The frequently encountered motif of “marriage” to the virgin wine makes a travesty of ordinary marriage by crossing boundaries of endogamy and reveals the inherently transgressive nature of marriage by equating it with sacrifice. The wine taken by the Muslim poet as his bride is the daughter of a non–Muslim household. “He counted out the bride price, then she was wed to him/In her bridal clothes and in her sacred belt (zunnār).”⁴³

Here we have an apotheosis of “marriage for pleasure,” which systematically subverts, both socially and symbolically, the design of ordinary marriage as the linchpin of social structure and nexus of socially productive exchange—not to mention the reproductive (though not sexual) nullity of marriage to wine.

Yet ordinary marriage also attracts through its promise of pleasure, an institutionally validated pleasure harnessed to social ends. This pleasure, however, is itself a form of transgression—evident in how much social and libidinal stock is placed in violating, and thus establishing, the virginity of the bride. The wine poem exposes the transgressive nature of this act by casting the deflowering of the virgin bride—that is, the perforation of the wine cask—as a blood sacrifice. “I inserted the spike in the dark night/And the liquid of the pierced artery gushed out.”⁴⁴

Thus, the wedding culminates in the sacrifice of the bride. Wine is the correlate of desire and, like desire, can be released only by means of a violation. Because such release of desire results in rapturous pleasure, in temporary self-transcendence, the violation is “sanctified.” From this point of view, social obsession with the consummating act of marriage is bound up in the extreme violation this act constitutes when not authorized. The same act may be either an abomination or a sacrament, but when it is the latter, its bloody, violatory nature is no less publicly fetishized. As Bataille has observed from a similar perspective, “[S]exual intercourse in marriage or outside it has always something of the nature of a criminal act, particularly where a virgin is concerned.”⁴⁵ In the wine poem, a criminal act (wine drinking) is cast in the form of a socially sanctioned institution (marriage), which is then shown to have “something of the nature of a criminal act.” In this way, the key institution of social life is shown to base itself on a sanctified violation of the very order it regulates.

Pleasure, or the release of desire, is thus the escape from the normatively ordered world of everyday life. In the world of the wine poem, desire is precisely the over-reaching and unraveling of all categories and norms of thought, behavior, identity. Wine therefore has this character, as well. It, too, is paradoxical, unidentifiable, self-overflowing. Consider, for example, the impossibility of attaching a particular wine to a specific geographic or religious community:

Again, the wine is characterized by multiple, incompatible identities. This overflowing of boundaries extends to the physical nature of the wine, as well. Wine is a spirit not confined to the body. It is effulgent; its light not only fills the room it occupies, but it appears to be morning breaking and can serve as a guide for travelers in the night. Its fragrance, when the cask is pierced, overpowers the assembly. When mixed with water, it erupts with foam and sparks and causes those present to sneeze. It contains a fiery strength (sawra) similar to that of the lusts and passions. It flows out of its container and mingles with the bodies of others. Similarly, on a cognitive level, wine proves to be ungraspable. It is likened to a glittering mirage in the desert. Its “meaning” (ma

nā) is so subtle that it can be sought only through conjecture. The eye fails in the attempt to visualize it. The imagination cannot fix it. It is impossible to form any certainty about it.

⁴⁷

In all of these respects, wine exceeds its physical location, its material manifestation, and the social and cognitive categories by which it ought to have a unitary identity. It thereby mirrors the desiring self and serves as the prime means of access to it. For this reason, the description of wine stands in for the process of transition from the everyday state of confinement within the empirical self to the state of self-transcendence achieved through temporary dissolution of this self. The description of wine poetically conjures the euphoric escape from ordinary existence, so that when the description comes to an end, the new state is fully in effect.

THE LOGIC OF THE WINE POEM

We are now in a position to examine the wine poem's logic of de-sublimation, which counters the logic of the courtly panegyric. Both the panegyric and the wine poem are concerned with self-transcendence, the liberation from fate and nature, from the constraint and suffering of quotidian existence. To attain this goal, they set out in opposing directions. The form of the panegyric is linear and dialectical in that it traces a totalizing movement beginning with enthrallment to nature and culminating in eternal moral fulfillment attained through the person of the heroic ruler. The linear movement preserves the distinction of opposed categories and resolves them by lifting them into the higher, utopian realm of virtue. Moral order subsumes fate and desire in its harmonious totality. In contrast, the polymorphous wine poem usually takes an open-ended or circular form that has no point of final resolution or closure. The wine poem is characterized by paradox in that it combines opposed categories without resolving them. Its movement cannot be totalizing because it depicts an ephemeral contact with the realm of eternity that has no lasting issue but can only be perpetually repeated. Rather than uplift the self into a beatific union with the virtuous community, the wine poem dissolves the self, bringing about a re-immersion in primordial desire, a symbolic reunion with nature. The logic of the panegyric implies that of the wine poem because the chaotic, insatiable nature of desire is essential to both.

Both the panegyric and the wine poem begin with the condition of separation definitive of the empirical self, figured through the idealized, unattainable beloved. The wine poem enables us to understand the condition of separation through the picture it gives of the empirical self and its struggle with desire. In this picture, the empirical self comes into being through the constraint of desire. Desire strives to burst out of the bonds of the self, to reattain its primordial state of free, undifferentiated continuity. The self, however, strives to augment and perfect itself by constraining desire as much as possible. The self is a contingent, artificial construct in that its identity is determined by random factors—pressures of social norms and expectations, the accidents of one's social and cultural identity, one's family, one's particular body, and all the other accidents that form one and give rise to the petty and ephemeral contents of one's everyday consciousness. The empirical self, determined by all of these contingent factors, can never succeed in winning the struggle with desire by taking up all of desire into itself. Desire is absolute in that it demands nothing short of total release and can only be converted into a form commensurate with itself; the artificial empirical self cannot contain it. The self's attempt to channel desire into factitious pathways, pleasures that appear to offer satisfaction, are doomed to failure because they fall woefully short of the full unleashing that is required. The inability to satisfy desire is therefore experienced as a lack, an incompleteness of the self. Desire is perceived as fate—the natural force that rules the self with impossible demands, the tyrant that can be neither mastered nor propitiated.

The self therefore seeks to eliminate its sense of lack by finding what would redeem it. In other words, desire, straitened within the self, focuses on objects that appear to offer an ultimate fulfillment that would put an end to the struggle and thus provide self-completion. Such an object is the beloved. Idealization of the beloved is precisely the hope, the delusion, that union with the beloved would gratify desire once and for all and thus redeem the self of its lack. There can be no such union, and each failed instance appears as a victory of fate. The impossibility of satisfying desire, of filling the lack, of having the ideal beloved, is the fatality to which the empirical self is doomed. Consider the following opening of a wine poem:

These lines depict the ideal and unattainable character of the beloved with the conceptual wit of the badī

style.

⁴⁹

This has the benefit of bringing out more fully the “metaphysical” nature of the beloved's distance from the lover. The premise of the lines is that the beloved is paradoxical in that he appears to offer what the poet desires but in fact does not, a contradiction the poet is unable to reconcile or tolerate. It is not simply an accidental and reversible incompatibility of lover's desire and beloved's will, however; the poet indicates this, in verse 5, by identifying the beloved with the polysemic character of language. The polysemic beloved, like meaning in language, is intrinsically ungraspable, unpossessable. Indeed, it is precisely because the beloved is accessible only through consciousness and language, that he appears to be but cannot be fixed as the image of desire. The beloved signifies the fulfillment of desire, the missing part of the self that, if captured, would eliminate the experience of fate and confer self-completion. Yet this signification is impossible. There is no such supplement that can make good the self's illusory lack. The condition of fulfillment that precedes the sense of lack created by the empirical self is anterior to language and signification, inaccessible to consciousness. The “blind site” or “conundrum” (mu

ammā; verse 6) to which the poet is led is precisely the location of untrammeled, fulfilled desire as it appears within language and consciousness. The alienation of desire into language and consciousness has the effect of setting up an unceasing procession of beloveds that unsuccessfully signify the utopian bliss of fulfillment. The idealized beloved thereby becomes the poetic emblem of the endlessly thwarted desire for self-completion definitive of the empirical self and its everyday existence.

The panegyric escapes this situation by embarking on the purgation of the self of its attachments to nature and finding the ideal self, the redemption of its lack, in the realm of social virtue. The heroic ruler provides the figure for the conquest of fate and self-transcendence through subsumption in the virtuous community. The dark side of nature—violence, constraint, death—is directed wholly against the enemies of the moral order, while nature's allure, its specious promise of sensual bliss, is transmuted into the spiritual bliss of abiding evermore in the indestructible values of the just community.⁵⁰

The wine poem goes in the opposite direction. The Dionysian reversion to primordial desire eliminates fate not by subjecting it to a higher moral order but by melting back into fate itself, becoming one with it. The experience of fate as such can exist only through the empirical self and its struggle with desire. The temporary suspension of this self and experience of fusion with nature and natural being eliminates self-consciousness, contingency, constraint, and lack. It re-establishes the primordial state of continuity. The resulting feeling of immense power arises not from control over fate per se, but from the elimination of fate as the experience of the tyranny of an external force over the self.

In this regard we can consider the reversal depicted in the wine poem that begins “ya sahir al-tarf.”

⁵¹

This poem begins with an impassioned address to one whose languid, enchanting eyes reveal the secret of hearts, who is naked of that in which time has clothed the poet, and whose effect on the poet is fatal. The poet encourages the ravishing youth to indulge in wine, whose description follows, leading to a final scene of drunkenness and vice, “obedience to Satan,” in which the poet has his way with the youth by means of “violation and transgression (ẓulm wa

udwān).” The poem ends with the poet's callous rebuff to the weeping youth's anguished complaint, “I said, ‘A lion saw a fawn and pounced upon it/Thus are the many-colored twists of fate.”’ J. S. Meisami has discussed this poem as a parody of the conventions of love poetry (ghazal). Through the contrast between its final and initial scenes, the poem “deliberately invokes ‘reality’ and opposes that (putative) reality to the idealism of much contemporary love poetry of both the courtly and

Udhri varieties.”

⁵²

A more complete specification of the opposition between “ideal” and “real” allows us to take this analysis a step further. The initial idealization of the beloved is brought on by the constraint and suffering of everyday life, the state of separation. The beautiful youth signifies everything the poet wants to have and to be but cannot. The youth's form is the image of desire—his eyes expose the “secret of hearts,” the taboo interiority imprisoned within the self. Himself free from fate, he is the instrument by which fate tortures the poet. Within the realm of the mind's images he has sovereignty. The poet's liberation from this state of impotent enthrallment, signified by the description of wine, comes through a regression to the “real,” the primordial state of desire unfettered by the contingencies of the empirical self. The poet reverts to a natural state and becomes one with fate. The ideal therefore corresponds to the condition of everyday life, while the “real” transcends this condition. Whereas the poet is initially the victim of both fate and the beautiful youth, the effects of wine allow him to identify with fate and victimize the youth, just as lions victimize gazelles. This reversal inverts the movement of panegyric poems through its parody of the progression from lover to hunter that occurs especially in poems culminating in self-praise (fakhr). In this sort of depiction, the poet is initially brought to the point of death by the women he is infatuated with, whom he likens to gazelles and antelope. After the purgative sequence of the raḥīl, he becomes the hunter and slayer of such animals.⁵³

In the context of self-praise, hunting signifies the conquest of fate, mastery of nature for the sake of the community, which is at the same time self-mastery, control over one's own desires. In Abu Nuwas's parody, the lion's sexual violation of the gazelle is an act of fate, a dissolution of moral order, the freeing of desire from the self. The poet's identification with this lion of fate signifies the completion of his regression.⁵⁴

The inversion of self-praise is indeed a generic transformation, a substitution of heroism with the “mock-heroic,” as John N. Mattock has argued.⁵⁵

The paradoxical nature of this mock-heroism is indicated at the close of another poem recounting a night of dissolute pleasures, where the poet concludes, “We were, under God's eyes, a most wicked company/Swaggering in the finery of sin, no boasting (fakhr).”⁵⁶ The drinkers are the negative image of the utopian community; they enjoy the blissful euphoria of fakhr without the virtue, the moral perfection, that constitutes its content. They swagger with the flush of pride, yet they have willingly given up the social basis of actual self-praise, for the poem takes the violation of secrecy, the repudiation of honor and reputation, as its point of departure. The drinkers mock courage by sacrificing themselves not in the path of social virtue, but in the socially useless pursuit of pleasure. The inversion of the heroism of fakhr through its parody in the grandeur of depravity sets in relief the counter-logic of the wine poem. Whereas the panegyric culminates in the completion of the empirical self, the redemption of its lack, and the conquest of fate, the wine poem suspends the self and thus eliminates its lack by fusing with fate. The two states, however, offer identical sensations of power and pleasure. They are subjectively indistinguishable but that one is eternal while the other a momentary taste of eternity. “We lived [it up], and that was for us, eternal;/Then when it passed, it was a thing borrowed.”⁵⁷

The heterotopian path of escape from everyday life charted by the wine poem therefore accesses the same realm of pleasure, of spiritual bliss, as the utopian panegyric, in that desire finds total fulfillment in both. For this reason, the wine poem casts the experience of self-dissolution as a kind of spirituality, a form of contact with divinity—that is, with the authentic plane of existence that finds only a distorted and attenuated expression within the framework of the empirical self and its world. In contrast to ordinary piety, which serves as the handmaid of everyday life, mounting a deluded and hypocritical effort to renounce desire while shaping it in conformity with the demands of pure contingency, the spirituality of transgression and self-dissolution provides an experience of authenticity, a brief immersion in the immense, unfathomable forces from which our existence ultimately derives.

⁵⁸

This experience cannot displace everyday life or the moral discourses that regulate it; rather, it categorically alters the nature of our consciousness and our values through the brief access it provides to a perspective from within the “real” that transcends the narrow, contingent, and ephemeral perspective ordinarily available. We can consider in this regard one of Abu Nuwas's most celebrated wine poems,⁵⁹

said to be addressed to the Mu

tazili theologian Ibrahim al-Nazzam (d. 840):

The wine poem mounts its polemic against reason and everyday life through the heterotopian reality that it invokes.⁶¹

Transgression permits entry into a world characterized by paradox, in which blame is temptation and maladies are medicines. This is the paradox of transcendence and overabundance, vividly embodied in the erotic plenitude of the double-sexed cup bearer. The drink prohibited by law turns out to belong to the domain of light and spirit, of subtle essences antithetical to the gross and quotidian substances of ordinary existence. Fate is no longer the archenemy but ministers to the desires of the antisocial counter-society formed by the drinking companions. Time has, for the moment, stopped, while the revolution of the luminous wine cup displaces that of the stars.

The experience of this higher realm grants the drinker a knowledge to which his censurer, the theologian, can have no access. The theologian's strictures are designed to consolidate the boundaries of the empirical self and regulate the order of everyday life. In the name of the deferral of pleasure to the afterlife, the theologian represses and mutilates desire in the present by demanding its imprisonment within the limits of his rational categories. In other words, he imagines that the wordly contingencies that determine social norms and the limits of his own reasoning are absolutes that govern all of existence, forgetting that desire is an irreducible whole that can be fulfilled only as such. His repudiation of excess desire is hypocritical, for it derives from the entrenchment of his own inhibitions and his enslavement to them. Simply because he is an inhibited man he cannot suffer anyone else to be uninhibited and imagines that God cannot, either. What escapes him is that it is precisely these inhibitions of the self that block us from authentic sensations of divinity inaccessible through ordinary consciousness and cognition. Transgression of the self is the drinker's back door to the divine. It allows him to perceive viscerally that the realm of divinity and spirituality far exceeds the normative categories, such as the “good” and the “licit,” that are indispensable for ordinary existence. It confers a sense of the supreme pleasure and power of continuity from which all individuals have been alienated and are ordinarily banished. It alters his self-consciousness by granting a perspective outside the self that reveals the contingency and ephemerality of all that ordinarily preoccupies mundane consciousness.

The theologian's sin, however, does not lie in his strictures and inhibitions, for these are necessary—there can be no transgression without a taboo, and permanent extinction of the self is impossible short of madness and death. It lies, rather, in his denial of redemption to those who transgress (see verse 12). Through this denial, the theologian limits the divine and the authentic desire belonging to the realm of divinity to the poverty of his own personal concept. He cannot admit the possible authenticity of anything he happens to find abhorrent and irreconcilable to his categories of valuation. He cannot fathom that God is transcendent of quotidian reality and must comprise both the taboo and its transgression. Imprisoned within the confines of his self, and barred from any genuine sense of divinity, the theologian deifies an etiolated figment of his consciousness in place of God.⁶²

The ecstasy of self-dissolution, which by virtue of its brief duration heightens awareness of the misery and delusion of ordinary existence all the more, gives rise to feelings of nostalgia and regret. To weep over wine, however, is a far cry from weeping over lost beloveds and their vestigial camp sites (see verse 9). The chaste bedouin lover or urban epigone mocked in wine poems weeps over the emblem of his imprisonment within the everyday, the false idol whose idealization within consciousness perpetuates and sustains straitened desire in its futile quest to fulfill its artificial lack. The idealized beloved and the empirical self constitute the illusory dyad of alienation. The drinker dissolves both in his narcotic draught and, when the effect has worn off, partially redeems his straitened desire by investing it in the “real” from which he has been banished rather than in the “ideal” he has seen through. The drinker's reality is therefore bipolar and cyclical: wine is his medicine as well as his malady, for it both relieves and deepens the suffering of discontinuity. In both conditions he is more authentic than the lover, who remains enthralled to a figment or void that corresponds to the fate built into his artificial self. Nevertheless, the lover's lament of separation authentically figures the condition of ordinary existence. Therefore, as we are shown in other wine poems, it is precisely as a song of lament, an aesthetic object, that the suffering of the lover finds redemption.⁶³

The poetic depiction of the lover's passionate excess, set to music, serves as the foil, the point of departure, of euphoric release (ṭarab). Music and intoxication allow the symbol of the self and its suffering to become an objectified image in which the self may be submerged. To free one's self from the condition of everyday existence through its aesthetic objectification is to transfigure it into something with which one can live.⁶⁴

Although the spirituality of the wine poem sets itself in contrast to the strictures of normative morality, it does not offer itself as a substitute for them. It remains a mock religion dependent on the real thing for its exhilarating effects. It calls not for a revolution but, rather, for a transgression that relies on the durability of the boundaries it pierces. Moreover, it enacts its transgressions as an aesthetic game, a symbolic manipulation of normative categories and contradictions that adheres to a logic of replication and inversion. It remains, therefore, within the framework of the courtly culture whose ideals it overturns. Its aesthetic de-sublimation is not the depiction of an absolute regression to the primordial but a dissipation of the moral attributes of perfected selfhood made normative for the ruling classes by courtly discourses. The critics Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, taking their cue from courtly processes of self-constraint in their analysis of the formation of modern bourgeois identity, have argued that transgression is often

It is precisely such a squandering of self-mastery, honor, reputation, and wealth that the wine poem depicts for its aesthetic purposes. Abu Nuwas has given this a particularly explicit form in a poem that proclaims the superiority of the Arabs in what might almost be regarded as a direct parody of the celebrated argument for the same attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffa

.

⁶⁶

According to Ibn al-Muqaffa

, the Arabs have outstripped other peoples in glory (fakhr) and achieved dominion over them because of the superior moral traits, the innate virtue, that their condition of poverty and deprivation allowed them to manifest. Whereas other nations passively inherited the ornaments of culture from their fathers, the Arabs disciplined and tutored themselves, thus earning God's bounty. Abu Nuwas's poem inverts this argument.

⁶⁷

The wine, allowed to choose her suitor, rejects drinkers with base attributes, as well as Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians, before demanding to be given only to Arabs. The poem ends with the invocation, “O dark wine forbidden but to the man/Who amassed riches then ruined for her sake his money and property.” The Arabs have earned the right to have the wine by conquering the world through moral discipline and then squandering their conquest for pleasure, turning their generosity into excess, their virtue into dissolution. This is the logic of dissipation of the wine poem, which symbolically squanders the moral wealth of the self-integrated man. The wine poem need not appeal to Arab dominance for this purpose; in another poem, it is the Persian who, because of the refinement and sophistication of their manners in contrast to the uncouth Arabs, are worthy of being the poet's drinking companions.⁶⁸

Regardless of nationality, the poet's companions are always “noble youths (fityān ṣidq)” who, by virtue of their courtly manners and unlimited time and money, may aspire to the program of dissipation set forth by the wine poem.⁶⁹

The courtly nature of Abu Nuwas's wine poem compels us to reconsider the relationship between pleasure and power posited by Elias. The increasing stringency of external and internal controls over behavior and affect identified by Elias as the “civilizing process” was in effect during the age of Abu Nuwas, under the aegis of both Islamic norms and courtly ideals. The hegemonic deployment of this process, the social capital made of its effects by ruling classes to justify their ascendency, is also clearly in evidence in the discourses of the period. Those dominant in the social order attributed to themselves the highest degree of virtue and self-mastery. Does this mean, however, that these men of power and affluence were more firmly barred from pleasure than those otherwise less privileged? Elias argues that “the specifically courtly way of being civilized, resting on self-constraint that has become second nature, is one of the things distinguishing court-aristocratic people from all others, an advantage they believe they enjoy. For this very reason their self-constraint is inescapable.”⁷⁰

Domination of the self is the price of dominion over others. The one respite Elias allows is what he calls romantic idealization, which he regards as the basis of all so-called romanticism:

The Abbasid version of this tendency is presumably the idealization of pre–Islamic bedouin life, popular in courtly and scholarly circles. In his wine poetry, however, Abu Nuwas makes the bedouin the butt of ridicule. The wine poem exalts excess and dissipation and derides the exiguous means and impoverished pleasures of the desert Arabs. Rather than search for solace in images of primitive virtue, the wine poem finds it in sophisticated decadence. It is not bedouinity per se that the wine poem denigrates but bedouinity as a heroic image of self-formation. Pleasure lies precisely in squandering the moral riches of elite selfhood.⁷²

Through its symbolic manipulation of normative categories, then, Abu Nuwas's wine poem reveals the dialectical relationship between self-mastery and desire. Whether Elias's doctrine of the diminution of desire in proportion to the increase of self-control is accurate at the sociological level, it ignores the reciprocity of the pair at the discursive level. Elias's account in fact replicates the elite point of view that casts the inhabitants of past eras and lower social orders as less civilized primitives. It omits, however, the parallel elite ideology of pleasure. As Foucault puts it, “[P]leasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement.”⁷³

The wine poem reveals that, at the discursive level, self-control produces desire rather than diminishes it. The more intense the self-restraint that is called for, the more intense must be the desire calling for restraint. All the more gratifying, then, will be the pleasure held in store. This is no unsightly byproduct of logic but the very foundation of the socio-moral order. For as the wine poem also makes plain, desire is the source of power. The wine poem reveals this through its reverse transaction, which cashes in the distinguishing marks of elite moral supremacy for instant gratification. We thereby take notice that each inner constraint, each moral inhibition, each boundary of honor and disdain is a congealed quantum of desire that elevates the noble man above his inferiors. The noble man is not only more rational than the ignoble but stronger in desire. Indeed, he is the former because he is the latter. The triumphal desire and pleasure of the ruling class must therefore take public manifestation—whether as extreme violence, the infernal side of desire, directed at the enemies of the moral order, or as paradisiacal enjoyments and luxuries, both licit and illicit, extracted from the toil of the undeserving. The wine poem is just such a manifestation, but one that has gone too far, one that has made a vice of necessity, thus making a mockery of the whole enterprise in its excessive zeal. The wine poem parodies the imperative of elite self-aggrandizement, the cultivation and spectacular display of prodigious selfhood—in short, fakhr—by driving this imperative through its limit. The selfless devotion to pleasure contrived by the wine poem is therefore the mocking obverse of heroism drawn from heroism itself, the demonic twin whose distorted features complete the truth of his brother.

The parodic operation of Abu Nuwas's wine poem has the effect of affirming the lineaments of the self and the social hierarchy of virtue and pleasure posited by normative discourses. Nevertheless, the wine poem cannot be regarded merely as an affirmative genre. It is not simply a titillating but harmless entertainment that provides vicarious moral release while unobtrusively shoring up the normative order. The wine poem's process of inversion secures for it a measure of transcendence. Its provenance in the contradiction that lies at the heart of normativity gives rise to the meta-perspective of its liminal, demonic spirituality. In embracing the power and danger of desire, it outflanks the discourses that seek to harness the power and suppress the danger. Abu Nuwas's heterotopia therefore counters and complements the utopia of ideal selfhood but, at the same time, exceeds it on the level of irony. The wine poem does not resolve the contradiction of normativity; neither does it assert a normative alternative. Rather, it makes the contradiction the basis for its representation of a paradoxical reality in which the distinctions and limits of normativity provide the means of fulfillment only through their temporary suspension and violation. This process draws on and opens the realm of the “real,” primordial desire, which is within and yet beyond the self. From the perspective of this realm of pleasure and freedom, the components of normativity, of everyday life, of the empirical self, are mere contingencies. All forms of identity and distinction are the ideal projections of a lack seeking to constitute itself as a whole. For this reason, the wine poem's moments of affirmation and subversion cannot be separated. Its transgression reaffirms, yet it also exposes and relativizes. In other words, it is ironic and can be so because it is an aesthetic performance that need have no practical consequences but is instead valued for its striking effects. Nevertheless, Abu Nuwas's wine poem sustains and perfects, as a representation, the heterotopia that normativity implies but cannot comprise.