“Empire of the Machine”: Oil in the Arabic Novel Ellen McLarney Faced with the machine, the human being cannot maintain his equi- librium, until he himself nearly transforms into a machine. —Sayyid Qutb, “The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values” War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body. —Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto” If the internal combustion engine was the heart of the modern mili- tary machine, its lifeblood was oil. —Harold Williamson et al., The American Petroleum Industry Mechanization of human life is the main subject of the oil novel, a genre that charts the explosion of industrial production in remote regions of boundary 2 36:2 (2009) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2009-010 © 2009 by Duke University Press Translations from the original Arabic are generally mine or are adapted from the published English versions. Thanks to the Stanford Humanities Fellowship Program. Talks related to this paper were presented at the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University.