A critical reading of linguistic deviations in Linda Obeid’s novel Marionette
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In her debut novel, published by Khotout Publishing and Distribution, Dr. Linda Obeid presents a narrative that can be described as an artistic and social survey of Jordanian society. She moves between village and urban neighborhoods and alleys, between the story of two happy lovers, the feelings of a woman deprived and tormented by her marital fate, and an intelligent university student who finds himself unjustly imprisoned.اضافة اعلان
The novel moves smoothly between the world of the poor and that of the wealthy, between extravagant affluence and stark hunger. The writer does not present these two worlds separately, but rather portrays them as intertwined and overlapping, sometimes close and at other times conflicting as though she were carrying a camera lens and running between two contrasting societies, explaining the suffering of the poor while recounting the lives of the wealthy.
Most of us know that Linda Obeid has become known through her short works for portraying chaos, horror, disgust and revulsion, alongside love, passion, contrast and aesthetic beauty elements that we have come to read with fascination in her writing.
But what surprised me most when reading Marionette was the density of its linguistic deviations that is, the departure of language from its familiar usage in order to create a new artistic image and give the text its distinctiveness and vitality. The novel, perhaps more than most literary genres, provides the space to employ such deviation because it allows the writer to reshape reality and make us see things in forms to which we are unaccustomed.
A person may turn into a thread, an eye into a heavenly cloud, a stone into a suffering creature, and a blender into a creature afflicted with dizziness and a headache. Here, language is no longer merely a tool for describing reality; it becomes a means of recreating it. It pierces the surface of things to reveal the emotions and sensations beneath them, and may even make inanimate objects speak and share in human suffering.
Dr. Linda Obeid wrote a dedication to me at the beginning of the novel that says: “Life is a puppet theater,” adding: “I was born a marionette for you; perhaps you will find in her something that resembles you and resembles us.”
She did not say that life is “a great stage,” as in the familiar Shakespearean phrase, but instead made it a puppet theater. A “marionette” is a puppet operated from above or behind by strings, wires or rods held by a puppeteer. This raises the question that accompanies the novel: Who holds the strings of us, the puppets, and moves us as they please?
This idea reminded me of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, particularly its central character Nora, as well as the similarity of the name “Linda” between the world of the novel and that of the play. But I do not want to burden the novel with more than it can bear; let us remain within Marionette and examine its particular world.
In this world, men and women worked hard, while in the “post-globalization” era, according to the narrator’s vision, they became puppets whose strings were controlled by the power of capital, which had taken over society and imposed its logic on the details of life.
From the opening pages, we are struck by the image of Marie Antoinette: “Only Marie Antoinette was hanged by the sash of her dress in a cold, distant city.” To me, this image sums up a judgment on a world of excessive wealth and opens the door to a question: Does the novel evoke the era of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, with its social contradictions that helped change the course of history, or does it evoke a contemporary age governed by the power of capital?
Marionette is a dark-skinned woman who appears to be a farmer or the daughter of a working-class environment. She works as an employee in a social class that seems foreign to Amman’s wealth. By chance, her manager chooses her to represent the company at a reception held inside a five-star hotel. She has never been inside such a luxurious hotel before.
The hotel’s hall and its glowing chandeliers amaze her, and her curiosity drives her to explore its spaces and discover the swimming pool and its affluent guests.
Here lies one of the novel’s aesthetic qualities: it rapidly transports us from a poor society living in zinc-roofed homes to Abdoun, Deir Ghbar and Dabouq through a group of narrators and voices. This multiplicity of voices allows us to see society from several perspectives rather than remaining confined to a single dominant narrator.
Thus, two worlds different in appearance and essence become intertwined, and the novel opens an imaginative tunnel between them, mixing what belongs together with what does not and placing the poor and the wealthy within a single narrative space.
As for me, I will devote myself to marveling at the linguistic deviations that fill the novel.
On page 16, the narrator says of a young girl being prepared by the women of the neighborhood for her wedding that night: “The women prepare the sugar paste and take turns peeling my skin again and again.”
The women mean to beautify the bride and remove her body hair, but the bride feels as though they are taking turns peeling her skin. Here, the expression shifts from a familiar beauty ritual to a sensation of suffering. The deviation lies not only in the image but also in the emotions: the women’s joy in beautifying the bride is contrasted with the bride’s suffering, as she perceives what is happening to her body as a repeated act of skinning.
Then comes the groom, waiting for the wedding rituals to be completed, and the narrator employs the language of victory and battle to depict the marital relationship. A contrast thus emerges between the language of love and marriage on one hand and the language of conflict and victory on the other.
The sun does not merely scorch people’s bodies; it reaches the bodies of the sidewalks as well. Here, the narrator personifies the sidewalk, turning it into a creature with a body that receives the heat of the sun. She does not merely describe the heat; she conveys its sensation to us and makes the stone a participant in the suffering of the person laboring beneath the sun.
This is one of the most beautiful aspects of deviation in the novel: sensation moves beyond the human being to reach the inanimate.
On pages 19 and 20, the narrator says: “The juice blender spins wearily... the man stares at the blender... the pink juice spins and spins... the juice in the blender is dizzy... and the blender dozes off after getting a little relief from its chronic headache.”
Here we enter another world of linguistic deviation. How did the narrator know that the blender was weary? How did she know that it suffered from dizziness and a headache?
She simply personifies the machine and transfers human emotions to it. The blender spins, and the juice spins with it, until spinning becomes a psychological state rather than merely a mechanical movement. Since dizziness in our lives is not simply a physical sensation but can also be a social and psychological condition, the blender becomes a miniature image of a confused society that spins in place, mixes things up and throws them into disorder.
Here, the meaning of deviation expands: people feel dizzy, stones feel the heat, and the blender feels weariness and a headache. It is as though suffering is no longer the exclusive domain of human beings but has extended to the objects surrounding them.
The narrator also says: “Do you know that wealthy people in this city monopolize France and take it with them wherever they go... The clothes are French, the perfumes are French, the fashion magazines are French, the etiquette instructions are French... even the water, Linda — our water that reaches the taps in our homes, which we drink and wash with — has become French.”
This is a satirical image of a class-based society, turning “France” itself into something that can be carried and consumed rather than merely a country. The sarcasm exposes the gap between a world that possesses everything and one that struggles for basic necessities.
On page 108, the narrator says: “I have afather with sad eyes and a striped shirt wide enough for me to push my head between its threads and hide.”
Here, linguistic deviation reaches a highly personal level. A daughter’s love for her father makes her shrink in her imagination to the point where she can push her head between the threads of his shirt. Rather than figuratively entering his heart, as is customary in the language of affection, she enters between the threads of his shirt, as though her body has become tiny fluff or a fine thread.
This deviation transforms love into an imagined physical act and makes the daughter shrink before the stature and place of her father in her heart.
She then says: “He looks at me with cloudy eyes.” The blue eyes thus move away from their realistic image to become a cloudy blue sky. It is an image that combines color and psychological state, transforming the eye into a space.
On page 112, she says: “And the city is a beautiful woman, completely enchanting.” Here, the city becomes a woman, and places become living bodies. It is a recurring technique in the novel: personifying places and inanimate objects and turning emotions into tangible images.
These deviations continue on pages 115 and 116, where the narrator says: “The car crosses the roads, dragging its feet with difficulty, while the roads look at them with sadness and astonishment.” The car drags its feet, while the roads look, grieve and express astonishment.
She then says: “The darkness is a large black spider peering from behind the window.” She also writes: “Amman is a captivating woman... its seven mountains stand proudly like a huge giant... the trees sway, and the grass spies on the stories of the road.”
Here, the system of linguistic deviation comes together: darkness becomes a spider, Amman becomes a woman, the mountains become a giant, the trees sway, and the grass spies. Nature as a whole is transformed into living creatures that share in the characters’ movements and emotions.
Perhaps this is the secret behind the appeal of Marionette: it does not merely tell us what happens; it makes us see it differently. The road is no longer simply a road, the stone is no longer simply a stone, the eye is no longer simply an eye, the blender is no longer simply a machine, and the city is no longer simply a place.
Everything in the novel is capable of transformation.
This is the essence of linguistic deviation: to move a word or an object from its familiar form into a new one, not merely to embellish an expression, but to expand our ability to feel and understand it.
Linda Obeid has turned language into strings that move the puppets of the novel, and perhaps she has made us, the readers, puppets as well. We move with the narrative from the poor neighborhood to the luxurious hotel, from the hot sidewalks to captivating Amman, from human beings to stones, and from reality to imagination before returning in the end to reality itself, but after seeing it through different eyes. This is where the value of the novel lies: it makes linguistic deviation a means of discovering reality, rather than escaping from it.
— Jordanian novelist and writer
Resource: Al-Ghad. Reporting: Sobhi Fahmawi
The novel moves smoothly between the world of the poor and that of the wealthy, between extravagant affluence and stark hunger. The writer does not present these two worlds separately, but rather portrays them as intertwined and overlapping, sometimes close and at other times conflicting as though she were carrying a camera lens and running between two contrasting societies, explaining the suffering of the poor while recounting the lives of the wealthy.
Most of us know that Linda Obeid has become known through her short works for portraying chaos, horror, disgust and revulsion, alongside love, passion, contrast and aesthetic beauty elements that we have come to read with fascination in her writing.
But what surprised me most when reading Marionette was the density of its linguistic deviations that is, the departure of language from its familiar usage in order to create a new artistic image and give the text its distinctiveness and vitality. The novel, perhaps more than most literary genres, provides the space to employ such deviation because it allows the writer to reshape reality and make us see things in forms to which we are unaccustomed.
A person may turn into a thread, an eye into a heavenly cloud, a stone into a suffering creature, and a blender into a creature afflicted with dizziness and a headache. Here, language is no longer merely a tool for describing reality; it becomes a means of recreating it. It pierces the surface of things to reveal the emotions and sensations beneath them, and may even make inanimate objects speak and share in human suffering.
Dr. Linda Obeid wrote a dedication to me at the beginning of the novel that says: “Life is a puppet theater,” adding: “I was born a marionette for you; perhaps you will find in her something that resembles you and resembles us.”
She did not say that life is “a great stage,” as in the familiar Shakespearean phrase, but instead made it a puppet theater. A “marionette” is a puppet operated from above or behind by strings, wires or rods held by a puppeteer. This raises the question that accompanies the novel: Who holds the strings of us, the puppets, and moves us as they please?
This idea reminded me of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, particularly its central character Nora, as well as the similarity of the name “Linda” between the world of the novel and that of the play. But I do not want to burden the novel with more than it can bear; let us remain within Marionette and examine its particular world.
In this world, men and women worked hard, while in the “post-globalization” era, according to the narrator’s vision, they became puppets whose strings were controlled by the power of capital, which had taken over society and imposed its logic on the details of life.
From the opening pages, we are struck by the image of Marie Antoinette: “Only Marie Antoinette was hanged by the sash of her dress in a cold, distant city.” To me, this image sums up a judgment on a world of excessive wealth and opens the door to a question: Does the novel evoke the era of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, with its social contradictions that helped change the course of history, or does it evoke a contemporary age governed by the power of capital?
Marionette is a dark-skinned woman who appears to be a farmer or the daughter of a working-class environment. She works as an employee in a social class that seems foreign to Amman’s wealth. By chance, her manager chooses her to represent the company at a reception held inside a five-star hotel. She has never been inside such a luxurious hotel before.
The hotel’s hall and its glowing chandeliers amaze her, and her curiosity drives her to explore its spaces and discover the swimming pool and its affluent guests.
Here lies one of the novel’s aesthetic qualities: it rapidly transports us from a poor society living in zinc-roofed homes to Abdoun, Deir Ghbar and Dabouq through a group of narrators and voices. This multiplicity of voices allows us to see society from several perspectives rather than remaining confined to a single dominant narrator.
Thus, two worlds different in appearance and essence become intertwined, and the novel opens an imaginative tunnel between them, mixing what belongs together with what does not and placing the poor and the wealthy within a single narrative space.
As for me, I will devote myself to marveling at the linguistic deviations that fill the novel.
On page 16, the narrator says of a young girl being prepared by the women of the neighborhood for her wedding that night: “The women prepare the sugar paste and take turns peeling my skin again and again.”
The women mean to beautify the bride and remove her body hair, but the bride feels as though they are taking turns peeling her skin. Here, the expression shifts from a familiar beauty ritual to a sensation of suffering. The deviation lies not only in the image but also in the emotions: the women’s joy in beautifying the bride is contrasted with the bride’s suffering, as she perceives what is happening to her body as a repeated act of skinning.
Then comes the groom, waiting for the wedding rituals to be completed, and the narrator employs the language of victory and battle to depict the marital relationship. A contrast thus emerges between the language of love and marriage on one hand and the language of conflict and victory on the other.
The sun does not merely scorch people’s bodies; it reaches the bodies of the sidewalks as well. Here, the narrator personifies the sidewalk, turning it into a creature with a body that receives the heat of the sun. She does not merely describe the heat; she conveys its sensation to us and makes the stone a participant in the suffering of the person laboring beneath the sun.
This is one of the most beautiful aspects of deviation in the novel: sensation moves beyond the human being to reach the inanimate.
On pages 19 and 20, the narrator says: “The juice blender spins wearily... the man stares at the blender... the pink juice spins and spins... the juice in the blender is dizzy... and the blender dozes off after getting a little relief from its chronic headache.”
Here we enter another world of linguistic deviation. How did the narrator know that the blender was weary? How did she know that it suffered from dizziness and a headache?
She simply personifies the machine and transfers human emotions to it. The blender spins, and the juice spins with it, until spinning becomes a psychological state rather than merely a mechanical movement. Since dizziness in our lives is not simply a physical sensation but can also be a social and psychological condition, the blender becomes a miniature image of a confused society that spins in place, mixes things up and throws them into disorder.
Here, the meaning of deviation expands: people feel dizzy, stones feel the heat, and the blender feels weariness and a headache. It is as though suffering is no longer the exclusive domain of human beings but has extended to the objects surrounding them.
The narrator also says: “Do you know that wealthy people in this city monopolize France and take it with them wherever they go... The clothes are French, the perfumes are French, the fashion magazines are French, the etiquette instructions are French... even the water, Linda — our water that reaches the taps in our homes, which we drink and wash with — has become French.”
This is a satirical image of a class-based society, turning “France” itself into something that can be carried and consumed rather than merely a country. The sarcasm exposes the gap between a world that possesses everything and one that struggles for basic necessities.
On page 108, the narrator says: “I have afather with sad eyes and a striped shirt wide enough for me to push my head between its threads and hide.”
Here, linguistic deviation reaches a highly personal level. A daughter’s love for her father makes her shrink in her imagination to the point where she can push her head between the threads of his shirt. Rather than figuratively entering his heart, as is customary in the language of affection, she enters between the threads of his shirt, as though her body has become tiny fluff or a fine thread.
This deviation transforms love into an imagined physical act and makes the daughter shrink before the stature and place of her father in her heart.
She then says: “He looks at me with cloudy eyes.” The blue eyes thus move away from their realistic image to become a cloudy blue sky. It is an image that combines color and psychological state, transforming the eye into a space.
On page 112, she says: “And the city is a beautiful woman, completely enchanting.” Here, the city becomes a woman, and places become living bodies. It is a recurring technique in the novel: personifying places and inanimate objects and turning emotions into tangible images.
These deviations continue on pages 115 and 116, where the narrator says: “The car crosses the roads, dragging its feet with difficulty, while the roads look at them with sadness and astonishment.” The car drags its feet, while the roads look, grieve and express astonishment.
She then says: “The darkness is a large black spider peering from behind the window.” She also writes: “Amman is a captivating woman... its seven mountains stand proudly like a huge giant... the trees sway, and the grass spies on the stories of the road.”
Here, the system of linguistic deviation comes together: darkness becomes a spider, Amman becomes a woman, the mountains become a giant, the trees sway, and the grass spies. Nature as a whole is transformed into living creatures that share in the characters’ movements and emotions.
Perhaps this is the secret behind the appeal of Marionette: it does not merely tell us what happens; it makes us see it differently. The road is no longer simply a road, the stone is no longer simply a stone, the eye is no longer simply an eye, the blender is no longer simply a machine, and the city is no longer simply a place.
Everything in the novel is capable of transformation.
This is the essence of linguistic deviation: to move a word or an object from its familiar form into a new one, not merely to embellish an expression, but to expand our ability to feel and understand it.
Linda Obeid has turned language into strings that move the puppets of the novel, and perhaps she has made us, the readers, puppets as well. We move with the narrative from the poor neighborhood to the luxurious hotel, from the hot sidewalks to captivating Amman, from human beings to stones, and from reality to imagination before returning in the end to reality itself, but after seeing it through different eyes. This is where the value of the novel lies: it makes linguistic deviation a means of discovering reality, rather than escaping from it.
— Jordanian novelist and writer
Resource: Al-Ghad. Reporting: Sobhi Fahmawi
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