Longing for Blue… Philosophical Sufism

The novel functions as a social instrument that engages with human and ethical values in a realist manner. The writer Jeremy Hawthorne defines the novel as: “An imaginative prose narrative of considerable length, depicting characters or events that represent real life in the past or present through a relatively complex plot.”

Although this definition appears to be a technical description of the novel, the literary work remains broader than any direct definition. It is an imaginative structure that borrows from reality its contours, and reshapes people, places, and events within an artistic vision in which truth and imagination intersect.

The reader of Nostalgia of the Color Blue encounters a shift in the value system of literary writing, manifested across several levels, most notably:

• ● Establishing a spiritual relationship between perceptions of existence and lived reality.
• ● The correspondence between fictional text and creative writing rooted in the local environment.
• ● The employment of epistemological capital derived from philosophy and sociology as disciplines connected to life and reality.
• ● A tendency toward contemplation and stillness in uncovering values the author wraps in a Sufi and spiritual-philosophical tone.
• ● An inquiry into the relationship between values and the universal self, and their fusion within the concept of creativity.

The narrator releases his ideas freely, creating a strong connection between what he writes and what he holds in terms of culture, experience, and social awareness. This is reflected in a narrative structure deeply tied to its local environment, with its customs, traditions, and social norms. The author’s creative culture generates an internal tension that leads him to invent language, imagery, and expression, relying on local idioms and historical narratives imbued with the scent of land and human labor.

The narrative text carries a clear semantic deviation in the opening scene of the novel, where it begins:

“A strong desire overwhelmed me to get to know him. I had left him since the early school years, but when news of him spread, this desire swept me away. I resolved to satisfy my curiosity about him, to go where he lives, and to see him again.”

Here we observe how the scene introduces a social value that appears contradictory on the surface but is profound in meaning: loyalty and nostalgia for the past. Curiosity, which may socially be perceived negatively, is reconfigured by the author into a positive human force through insistence on searching, going, and encountering.

The dialectic of encounter and observation unfolds within a subjective framework that reveals the author’s inclination toward a philosophy based on dialogue and contemplation. The text constructs a character with a structural dimension in behavior and thought.

While Sarayeddine may not fully adhere to strict structuralist standards, he succeeds in narrative expression and description in his treatment of social values such as loyalty and belonging. This is achieved through a character built upon internal monologue between an ideal fictional persona and a realistic one, while the link between them remains the continuous movement of searching for the self.

The author adopts an emotional mode that transports the reader into another world, removing them from everyday reality into a fictional narrative space. The interplay between narrative discourse and its engagement with real-world transformations allows the text to immerse itself in the study of reality, while linking textual shifts with a fantastical structure compatible with the creative condition and the author’s social and cultural intent.

Thus, the novel embodies a set of generative contradictions between realism and existentialism, between individual contemplation and social vision.

From another perspective, Nostalgia of the Color Blue aspires toward values beyond loyalty and belonging, as seen in the second scene of the novel:

“The truth of life is a coma, not a begging ecstasy, sought by one who stands in a remote dark corner of the absolute universe.”

Here Sarayeddine departs from traditional notions of value, entering into questions of absent truth grounded in contemplation and fantasy, approaching what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin referred to in his discussion of the relationship between truth and illusion in the novel.

The novel’s connection to lived reality does not exclude imagination and fantasy from the reading experience. One of the most important features of the novel is its ability to construct a world into which the reader can enter and engage, through the intertwining of the everyday with the imagined, and the real with the symbolic.

Sarayeddine’s imagination, his linking of narrative with philosophical accumulation, and his integration of history and its human and existential implications, place him within a space where the real and unreal overlap — a world saturated with mysticism, contemplation, and a quiet rebellion against dominant social norms.

Language and Values

The language of the novel is characterized by simplicity and clarity, avoiding lexical complexity, and relying on vocabulary close to everyday social life. This raises an important question:

• What is the writer’s relationship with his fictional characters?
• What is the nature of this relationship?
• Is it based on correspondence or identification?

All of these factors, individually or collectively, shape the relationship between the writer and his characters, bringing them closer or pushing them apart, and determining whether resemblance is possible or limited, depending on the extent to which the character approaches the writer’s lived or past reality.

At the same time, a form of correspondence may occur without full identity; however, a degree of similarity remains inevitable. As long as there is an author and fictional characters, there must be some connecting thread between them, even if not explicitly visible.

It appears that the author seeks, through this treatment, to affirm a partial correspondence between himself and his characters, speaking through their language, inhabiting their behavior, and intersecting with them in the value system they embody.

Through Sufi and contemplative references with social and historical dimensions, Sarayeddine constructs a fictional world grounded in human memory and spiritual depth, while maintaining a reflective distance.

His fictional persona carries a clear humanistic tendency, appearing closer to the image of a contemplative Sufi seeking spiritual and existential purity, attempting to merge reason and spirit within a calm philosophical vision.

This diversity is reflected in the literary text, which seeks to engage with social and human values through symbolic and contemplative language, culminating in the title itself Nostalgia of the Color Blue, with the color blue evoking meanings of serenity, stability, fidelity, wisdom, and spiritual purity.

In conclusion, Nostalgia of the Color Blue stands as one of the Arabic novels inclined toward a classical form, emphasizing an intellectual, philosophical, and unifying intentionality in its structure and vision. It draws on the legacy of the past while engaging with the questions of the present through a philosophical and Sufi treatment grounded in language, style, and contemplative vision in addressing social and human values.