Elia Lucien
Beirut, 1938
Lucien Elia first started painting in Lebanon, before studying painting and advertising in Paris and writing his first novel, Les Types (Types). Back in Lebanon in 1965 with the intent to stay only for six months, he worked in an advertising agency and was an art critic for a weekly journal. He did not set off for France again until 1969, and wrote a second novel there, The Failures of the Diaspora, one of the best testimonials ever written about daily life in Beirut. The difference with the journalist Andrei Bercoff, who was of Russian, Jewish, Spanish and Lebanese origins, was that Elia was close to the ordinary people of the Jewish quarter in Beirut, Wadi Abou Jamil.
His several experiences as an advertising designer, painter, journalist and writer illustrate that, despite his marginality, Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s was a place where individuals could fulfil their ambitions and personal expression beyond traditional social circuits. But he perceived Lebanese society as being against him, split by its own grievances.
His adventure was that of a young man of feeling and intelligence, of real and multiple talents, who was looking to succeed in life and instead had the feeling of being excluded from the society that surrounded him.
Fascinated by the past, he experienced that sorrowful feeling of a frozen time, of a world lost forever. He had to work through the internal destruction of this world, through its risks and dangers, in order to reach, if not recreation by writing, at least a satiric text with slightly forced epic accents, that is a rare description linked to reality, and which goes beyond the frills of Oriental tales. At the time, this ambition for reality was still new. It was not about realism, but quite simply about watching.
Any reading of the history of culture in Lebanon is more about identity than unity. In this country, far less fragmented than one might think, the rifts seem inevitable. All community expression becomes cultural, if culture is seen as encompassing vast fields and the forms and registers of its expression in this Lebanese frame. This applies to the history and teaching of theology, to the modalities of religious traditions, the variations of the relationship between the city and the practice of different professions, from literature to advertising billboards. Every approach implies the division of the country into seventeen communities and faiths, and the different activities among each of them impose the general direction. Nevertheless, the development of urban structures, and mostly of the capital, created spaces for dialogue and confrontation that progressively ended the confinement of the individual into his own community.
What could Elia do, at a time when his Jewish community was disintegrating? It was no question for him to save this communal reality on his own, even if that was his deepest desire. His response was The Failure of the Diaspora, which remains his best book, even if one feels its influences are a little too diverse, like a Céline policed by the literary big weights of the Jewish school of New York. “It disturbs me to be pulled to the Beirut’s” he would say. He did not want to deny, nor to regress. He illustrated a sociology of painting that did no longer obey determinism, but expressed a will to break tradition through experience and personal choices.