Emil Habibi (1922-96) is one of the more typologically interesting figures in modern Arabic literature, in part because the obvious candidates — ILE, IEE, ILI — all have genuine claims on his profile.
The ILE hypothesis is tempting. His chief work, The Pessoptimist's, genre-mixing, its lateral paradox-holding, its Voltairean genealogy have ILE's Ne-Ti fingerprints. Edward Said described the novel as "a carnivalesque explosion of parody and theatrical farce, continuously unsurprising, shocking, unpredictable... an amalgam of something out of Aesop, al-Hariri, Kafka, Dumas, and Walt Disney", revealing the author's Ne-like manner of combining the uncombineable. The decision to stay in Haifa in 1948, sustaining an impossible position for decades without either breaking toward assimilation or retreating into purely symbolic opposition, has the quality of principled paradox-holding that ILE performs naturally. But Habibi's satire is warmer than that, more interested in the comedy of situation than in the exposure of systemic logical paradoxes.
"He said: shalom! So I replied with the English word “peace” confirming my humanity. He laughed at me and said salam, salam in Arabic".
The more likely type is IEE (another Ne-lead) with a slight ILI accent, with some situational darkening that any type might develop under fifty years of unresolved historical problem (IEE, by itself, in general, is usually a positivist type, strongly inverting the nominal "negativism" Reinin dichotomy).
IEE's satirical mode is distinct from both ILE and ILI. It is warmer than ILE's structural irony and far warmer than ILI's Swift-like cold exposure of human folly. The relevant comparison is Eldar Ryazanov rather than Swift or Voltaire: satire that is genuinely fond of its characters even while the system crushing them is exposed. Said, the main character of his novel, is an endearing fool — reviewers explicitly use that word — and Habibi maintains genuine warmth toward the character's confusion and incompetence throughout. Literary analysts state that he wrote a character readers find themselves rooting for despite everything, a man who fails at being a villain as thoroughly as he fails at being a hero, whose very incompetence at both roles becomes a kind of dignity.
The coexistence orientation reinforces IEE primary. Habibi seemed to have wanted connection and synthesis between Israeli and Palestinian culture in a way that goes beyond tactical calculation. His defense of accepting the Israel Prize extended into genuine expansive hope: "It is indirect recognition of the Arabs in Israel as a nation. It will help the Arab population strike roots in the land and win equal rights." This is IEE's characteristic optimism about cultural integration and what gestures of connection might actually achieve — the belief that the symbolic act has real transformative power in the human world.
The contrast with Ghassan Kanafani is revealing. Kanafani, arguably EIE, wrote in the mode of ruthless historical struggle and intransigent heroic sacrifice (and reflected it in his life, too, as a commando-with-a-pen), which Habibi's writing more deflated.
Habibi said explicitly that he only turned to literary work when "in melancholy." This reflects his ILI accent in which the long Ni vision of how things tend to go — rarely well, rarely as hoped — becomes available as creative material (in general, both IEE and ILI are pretty good at satire, especially when having accents on each other). ILI's characteristic relationship with time is one of patient, somewhat detached attention to the arc of events rather than immediate enthusiastic engagement with possibilities. This temporal patience shows in the Pessoptimist's structure: the novel doesn't rush toward resolution or possibility. It accumulates losses, each under different circumstances that are identical in their irrationality, moving with the slow rhythm of history repeating itself in slightly different costume.
The laughter in the Pessoptimist is the laughter of someone who has thought carefully about things and concluded that laughing is both the most honest response and the most bearable one. "Laughter is a very sharp weapon with only one edge. If all the prisoners laugh together at the same moment and continue to laugh, will the jailer then be able to laugh?"
The famous fish dialogue crystallizes the combination precisely. An Israeli boy asks who he is speaking to at the beach, and he answers "the fish." The old fish who were there when there were Arabs here understand Arabic. The young fish understand all languages. The seas have no borders. This is IEE's meaning-expansion — the larger frame within which the apparently irreconcilable might coexist. The image holds hope and loss in the same breath without resolving either into the other. IEE provides the warmth and the expansive gesture toward coexistence; the ILI accent provides the awareness that memory is what the old carry and the young inherit imperfectly if at all.
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