Despite this hint at formlessness, the author’s preface gives two possible generic possibilities: to “give prominence to the oddities of the language, including its rare words” (0.2.1) and to “discuss the praiseworthy and blameworthy qualities of women” (0.2.12). Yet no study exists that treats the work as either a linguistic treatise or a sociology of gender. Instead, scholars have categorized it as belonging to a variety of literary genres. Luwīs ʿAwaḍ and Shawqī Ḍayf, for example, classify it as a maqāmah or neo-maqāmah, Radwa ʿAshour as a novel (“the first and most important Arabic novel”), Matityahu Peled as Menippean, and Paul Starkey as fictional autobiography or a “voyage of self-definition.”61 For Nadia Al-Bagdadi, the work transcends categorization: she argues that it should be understood both as a novel and as “a unique literary expression of its time,” or “a genre of its own.”62 Al-Shidyāq might have agreed with this characterization. As he warns in his prefatory poem, his art is “an orphan” and “unique”; “so be well disposed toward it,” he begs his reader (0.4.5). In this verse description (and anticipatory list of complaints) of Leg over Leg, he identifies what might be the central difficulty in characterizing it: it appears as if he “pieced it together and cobbled it up by hand” (0.4.2). It might not be categorizable because it is pieced together from many genres and literary modes, as it contains passages in verse (madīḥ, hijāʾ, ghazal, rithāʾ), prose (with passages that imitate or make reference to historical writing, sermons, aphorisms, ethnographic writing, linguistic studies, and philosophical critiques), and prosody (it includes four original maqāmāt, as well as other passages written in rhyming prose, or sajʿ). Alongside these Arabic exemplars, he includes sections translated from European authors, such as the travel narratives of Chateaubriand and Lamartine, and original passages written in “the Frankish way” (1.7.5). And he intersperses in these lists (many quoted, as Humphrey Davies notes in his Afterword, from Al-Qāmūs), anecdotes, and typographical jokes which punctuate the text.
In cobbling together this multigeneric work, he renders no mode privileged over any other. Instead, he incorporates all into his narrative archive, to praise and discredit equally. As a result, there is no stable position of narrative authority in Leg over Leg, a fact perhaps announced by the work’s title itself. In a text abounding in sexual puns and innuendos, “leg over leg” could refer to an intimate union of limbs or the detached posture of an armchair academic. Moreover, this single phrase signals the linguistic and structural play built into all aspects of the work: “al-sāq ʿalā l-sāq” also appears within the text in a list of the conventional topoi of courtship narratives, which interrupts the very courtship story that the narrator is trying to telclass="underline"
It is the custom of my fellow writers sometimes to go back and leap over a period of time and connect an event that happened before it to an event that happened after it. This is called analepsis (tawriyah), that is, “taking backward (warāʾ).” They also may start by mentioning everything about the protagonist, from his first whisperings into his beloved’s ear until his reappearance as a married man. In the course of this, the author will relate such long and tedious matters as how his face paled and his pulse raced when he met her, how he was reduced to a tizzy and felt ill while he waited for her answer, how he sent her an old woman or a missive, how he met with her at such and such a time and place, and how she changed color when he spoke to her of the bed, of drawing her close, of embracing, of leg over leg, of kissing, of kissing tongue to tongue, of intercourse, and the like. (3.4.1)
The “and the like” that mockingly ends this list opens it up to parodic criticism, gesturing simultaneously toward infinite substitutability on the one hand and the impossibility of precise equivalence on the other — signaling both the mechanisms and limits of representation that will be explored throughout the text (which reaches the absurd in the secondary reading of the title, “The Turtle in the Tree”). Thus al-Shidyāq, in his display of mastery over these genres, also leads the reader through a series of generic parodies, anatomizing literary forms — interrupting his maqāmah to talk about the limitations of sajʿ (likening it to walking with a wooden leg), interrupting his protagonist’s poetry with literary-critical commentary, or (as above) disrupting the narrative episodes to discuss the conventions of the narrative discourse.
Furthermore, these interruptions, digressions, and lists create an endless leg after leg of narrative, where text seems to generate only more text. This itself points to the work’s operative hermeneutic mode: it is contiguity, not equivalence, that serves as the driving force behind meaning. It is by the juxtaposition of events, characters, and even adjectives that the plot, as nonlinear as it is, moves forward (or sideways, which is often the case). Al-Shidyāq even goes so far as to reject explicitly the very notion of equivalence, in the form of synonymity, in its opening pages. He writes:
In addition, I have imposed on the reader the condition that he not skip any of the “synonymous” words in this book of mine, many though they be (for it may happen that, on a single road, a herd of fifty words, all with the same meaning, or with two meanings that are close, may pass him by). If he cannot commit to this, I cannot permit him to peruse it and will not offer him my congratulations if he does so. I have to admit that I cannot support the idea that all “synonyms” have the same meaning, or they would have called them “equi-nyms.” (1.1.7)
As al-Shidyāq points out here, the Arabic root for “synonym,” r-d-f, does not necessarily connote equivalence. The verbs derived from it can mean to pile up in layers, to become stratified, to flock, to throng, to form a single line, or to follow one after another. Or, to put one foot after another, follow leg upon leg, as another reading of al-sāq ʿalā l-sāq allows.63 Thus does Leg over Leg, in its very title, “lay bare the device,” as Victor Shklovsky wrote of Tristram Shandy.64
Leg over Leg, then, might be more precisely characterized as meta-generic — as al-Shidyāq seems to comment on genre more often than he writes in a generic mode. Yet his interruptions of literary convention are not only a commentary on style; they are also the foundation of his larger social and political critiques. The linguistic authority that al-Shidyāq undermines is always tied to political authority: he lampoons emirs for their misguided overconfidence in grammatical studies, satirizes Maronite priests for their hypocritical lack of scholarly goals — when staying at a monastery and in need of a dictionary to compose poetry, he inquires after a copy of the Qāmūs, Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb Fīrūzābādī’s lexicon, and is given answers about jāmūs and kābūs, or buffaloes and nightmares — ridicules Protestant missionaries for their inability to communicate with their congregations in their native language, and criticizes Orientalist scholars for their errors in translation (he devotes an entire appendix to correcting the errors found in the works of the French scholars he came into contact with in Paris). Yet his attacks on ecclesiastical authority should not be seen solely in light of his well-known disagreements and injuries. His position against ecclesiastical authority is more than a reaction to his brother’s treatment in Lebanon, just as his critiques of Orientalist scholarship are more than simply a reaction to his reported failure to find an academic post in Europe.65 Both are part of a sustained critique of institutionalized interpretations of sacred texts, canonical works of literature, and even social conventions — and especially of any person who blindly accepts them. Instead, al-Shidyāq subtly suggests skepticism — based on individual perception and self-improving study — as the guiding principle for spiritual enlightenment, political leadership, judicial decisions, and moral principles, as well as for scholarly research. Or, as his narrator tells us early on: “Observe, then, how people differ with regard to a single word and a single meaning!” (1.2.7) The linguistic indeterminacy that reigns in Leg over Leg—with simple definitions of words seeming to collapse under the weight of his lists of subtly differentiated synonyms — does not establish him as the ultimate linguistic authority as much as it shows that language itself is the key to dissidence. It is not a coincidence, in this sense, that his protagonist’s name also means “he who distinguishes.”