Rawi Hage’s story collection Stray Dogs combines passions of photography, fiction

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“There’s a part of me that thinks I failed as a photographer,” said Rawi Hage.

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If that’s the case, then photography’s loss has been literature’s gain. The career of the Lebanon-born writer has gone from strength to strength since his 2006 debut novel De Niro’s Game won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; his three subsequent novels were similarly garlanded, both at home and internationally.

“It’s something I was forced out of because I fell into the cracks between modernism and postmodernism,” said Hage, 57, in his Plateau apartment last week, recalling his alienation from the formal study of photography. “This was at a time when academia was taking a hold of art and making it much more ideological. And then, trying to make a living (in photography) was disastrous, so consciously or unconsciously, I changed medium, and writing has proved a bit more lucrative.”

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Hage’s winning streak continues with Stray Dogs (Knopf Canada, 201 pages, $29.95). His first book since the 2018 novel Beirut Hellfire Society is a numinous and compulsively readable (and re-readable) collection whose unity belies its extended writing lifespan — some of the stories are as much as 12 years old, while another cluster came in a recent burst of creativity. As has always been true of his work, a restless intellect, fired by philosophical inquiry, coexists comfortably with the instinct to tell a good old-fashioned yarn.

“These stories are an attempt to reconcile the mediums of writing and photography,” Hage said. “And because photography is so multifaceted, the short-story form is very suited to write about it.”

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For all its thematic coherence, Stray Dogs is remarkably wide-ranging in its settings and treatments. In Instructions for the Dance, a penurious Polish immigrant parlays a flair for one-man street theatre into a successful line in wedding photography. Bird Nation presents a kind of alternative history of modern-day Lebanon as a place driven by peer pressure and status obsession. The Veil evokes life in an authoritarian state so convincingly that the clammy panic of the unjustly detained protagonist becomes palpable for the reader.

In The Fate of the Son of the Man on the Horse, a humble apartment in Montreal’s Little Italy becomes the nexus for an intricate two-continent narrative involving Sophia Loren and Mussolini, all in the space of 20 pages. Oh, and it was a photograph of the screen siren that once hung in a real-life Montreal shop window that served as the story’s kernel.

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Hage’s concerns come together especially fruitfully in The Duplicates, featuring a hermitic McGill University archivist who insists that a photographic negative (“something that cannot be seen, only revealed,” in Hage’s description) is every bit as legitimate an artistic entity as the finished photograph. A question to Hage about that character and his obsession leads, in the most organic of ways, to a disquisition on the origins of the form.

“Nobody knows who invented photography. It seemed to burst out in various places at roughly the same time, and it appears it wasn’t so much a need as a desire. It helped that it coincided with the Enlightenment in Europe, a movement that was anti-religion. The transcendent wasn’t so dominant anymore. The notion of the passing of time became much more devastating. So (photography) was a way of holding time, or freezing reality. In (The Duplicates) I think I was thinking of that notion of death and loss, of trying to preserve every minute.”

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The archivist’s concurrent love of photographic negatives and mechanical engineering can stand neatly for something that has always distinguished Hage’s work: a syncretic melding of impulses and passions that some might think irreconcilable.

“We are a specialized society, and I think some kinds of erudition are not appreciated anymore,” he said. “My approach to photography in this book is mainly a historical one, which means I can write about it without being discredited. Besides, we’ve seen where centuries of tradition and study and practice of photography have ended up — in a selfie and a swipe. It’s a commodity now. Capitalism has prevailed.”

Does Hage relate to his character’s belief that all the great art has already been made — that we’re essentially in an age of shrinkage?

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“It’s an impression that everyone who gets to a certain age is going to feel,” he said. “That sort of nostalgia is inevitable. The challenge is to not judge the young, to not judge what’s happening now.”

Photography, it should be noted, is not the only recurring theme in Stray Dogs. God and religion pop up with some frequency, too.

“Well, I’m an atheist who’s fascinated by religiosity,” said Hage. “I’m from a part of the world where three major religions have their origin, and there are particular cultures that can’t be understood without understanding the grip and the presence of religion.”

What about the notion of legacy? Does Hage think much about his work’s future life?

“Legacy is an overrated idea,” he said. “It’s an indulgence, and those who write to create a legacy are fooling themselves. Every meaningful work is ultimately about how insignificant we are.”

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In the past two years, lockdown and relative immobility have meant a hiatus in international postings and residencies for Hage, and subsequently more time together at home in Montreal with his similarly peripatetic writer partner, Madeleine Thien — who, he said, “has fallen back in love with the city.” Hage’s current writing project, a book that began as an attempt at autobiography but has morphed into something he is understandably reluctant to talk about, is well underway.

Meanwhile, old passions die hard.

“I’m a street photographer,” Hage said. “It’s still my first love. I walk and take photographs, and I enjoy it more now.”

Which leads to something else that has been on Hage’s mind. Something that has never really gone away.

“Frankly, my dream is to publish a book of my photography — black and white, like in the old days. That would be a pleasurable thing to do.”

AT A GLANCE

Stray Dogs is available on Tuesday, March 1.

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