Dr. John Hart

John Hart

Citizens First Savings Bank

Opposing the council were Citizen Sign Code Committee Chairman John Hart and Co-chairman Jack Fitzgerald.

Whether absurd or ironically appropriate, this seemingly arbitrary world, where nothing is ever what it seems, is where visiting American professor Dr. John Hart seeks completion.Yes, this labyrinth so foreign to trust-where it's best to doubt even yourself-is where Dr. Hart seeks the truth about himself.
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By traveling to Jihadabad, Dr. Hart is perhaps looking to complete his version of the journey to Byzantium envisaged in Yeats' poem-a voyage to awaken his soul and achieve eternal artistic brilliance.
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To Dr. Hart, destruction inflicted by street fighting seems "scratches and dents to a man repeatedly wounded in his senses and in his heart."And so, while an external war rages all around, the trip to Jihadabad focuses on Dr. Hart's internal tug of war, a battle between passion and the mind.

Having just devoted five years to his research project on John Donne, Dr. Hart has siphoned the passion from his marriage into the academic, sterilizing relations with his wife and prompting her call for a divorce.
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Having lost touch with the sensual, Dr. Hart's body is not unlike the "dying animal" and "heart sick with desire" of Yeats' poem.

By contrast, Dr. Hart's American colleague, Baldazar Saintine, is a mysterious and carnal figure whose ubiquitous strength over the many females of Jihadabad and greater Asia Minor symbolizes the romance and virility that Dr. Hart has sacrificed to scholarship.Encountering each other for the first time, the contrast between Saintine's hearty vigor and Dr. Hart's erudite daintiness could not be more pronounced.Saintine identifies Hart as the "spinster scholar type," guilty of over-intellectualization.Silently scolding Dr. Hart for being "all mind and no passion," Saintine finds that Hart chokes everyone's "sense of play."

Just as Baldazar amasses ouds from the far-reaching corners of the Arab world, so does he work to bring the finest belly dancers of Asia Minor to the cabarets of Jihadabad.Coming from a women's college in New England to be draped with the girls of the Middle East, he satiates in his overzealous collection of women.A Don Juan of sorts, he sees himself as one who can awaken Arab women from hiding and a lack of appreciation of their bodies.

Despite his fame in the community, this "Yankee Chief" is not without his vices.In fact, both he and Dr. Hart experience a similar delirium of both desolation and isolation.Saintine's secret mission, "Project Caviar," for which he buys up massive amounts of U.S. dollars in exchange for a seemingly endless supply of gold coins, is not favored by Colonel Pasha, the leader of the revolutionary coup.In fact, this project, along with Saintine's involvement with local women, ultimately inspires the colonel's attempt to banish him.

As for Dr. Hart's isolation, his Harris Tweed sports coat and flannel trousers stick out amidst a sea of tribal head dresses and khaftans of sheiks.Upon his arrival, this world is so foreign to Dr. Hart that he mistakes Arabic numbers for bird scratchings and thinks of the city as a nightmare.Indeed, PaulieHart is used to books and academia, a predictable world over which he has relative control.His highly-researched and calculated poetic language is therefore contrasted with Jihadabad's language of indirection in which everything is defined by its attributes rather than its function.Let's face it: scholarship is less useful in a place where one gets to know things by smelling them.

Other than his outburst of love for 17th century English poetry, Dr. Hart enters the novel as a man of the mind.He searches for reconciliation with his family through his interactions with his students.Plucked from the library stacks, his pattern is to lose his own desires in the wants of others, to neglect self for all that is foreign.And, in this city, he is a foreigner indeed.

Yet, he transforms.

First, in a quite literal instance of foreshadowing, Dr. Hart is introduced as a possible replacement for Baldazar, which implies that he may develop Saintine's sense of passion as well.Next, Dr. Hart gradually adapts to the local culture.He is soon walking the streets smoking Jihadabad tobacco, having ditched the Harris Tweed for a Jihadabad-tailored suit and Jihadabad-cobbled shoes.The indistinguishable mix of past, present and future characteristic of Jihadibad becomes a way of life for Dr. Hart.On his final trip to the Alhambra Fez cabaret, he entering without being noticed, proclaiming that he finally understands the Jihadabadi.

We eventually surmise that this city, a place where one rediscovers the world "as a child might," could be the ideal spot for PaulieHart to regain his sense of passion and love.Although he seems rather disconnected from his emotions, they awaken when he comes into contact with Habibi, Saintine's cabaret dancer.

As Hart enters a phase of hedonistic delirium, the reader may wonder whether his transformation has not swung his pendulum too far in the opposite direction.As the swarm of muezzin sound and force of discharging jihad bombs thrust PaulieHart and the budding Habibi against each other, Hart touches catharsis and is able to release his pent-up emotions.Quite a contrast from the poetic love of the classroom, Hart wants to run away to the mountain village with Habibi.As the distinguished visiting professor proclaims his love for the seventeen-year-old belly dancer, he describes their love as absurd, uneasy and grotesque.

Demonstrating just how much he has strayed from a devotion to academia, Dr. Hart is ultimately kidnapped by his own students.In other words, those who he has been trained to serve and nurture treat him as an enemy.What's more, the university, a symbol of the pursuits of the mind, is mostly destroyed by the war.On the other hand, as for passion, Habibi rejects Hart's offer to run away and his life is described as an "open-armed embrace" of amot, or shame.Saintine returns and carries Habibi out of the cabaret with off-into-the-sunset style.It is as if he is carrying Hart's newfound sense of passion with him.This is Hart's moment of greatest desolation: he has seemingly lost both his mind and passion.

The struggle moves toward resolution when Dr. Hart awakens from his hedonistic slumber to find he possesses the sensibilities of a true artist, a "clarity and depth of feeling he has never known before."His students emerge from the bombed-out university buildings searching for him.In a charred amphitheatre full of students, the professor conducts one final class in which his art and love for poetry is in full form.As his students "feel his music and reverberate with him," Dr. Hart has finally reaches the degree of passion with which Saintine plays his oud.He is now a true artist, and has possibly found what he has been looking for in Jihadabad: the qualities that Yeats' saw in the lords and ladies of Byzantium.
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For example, his bowels churning, Hart heads for the "Jihadabadi john."And, of course, there is also irony too.At the moment when Hart is arguably most detached from all that pertains to academia, he looks for a heavy volume of Shakespeare as a weapon against his kidnappers.

Barba's character development also demonstrates complexity.Rather than giving us one image to play with, he hands the reader multifaceted descriptions of his characters.
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Dr. Hart's personal struggle for passion aside, Round Trip to Byzantium bears a larger political significance.After all, this is a novel in which the aspiring Citizen President of a Republic cancels a plebiscite and unleashes a counter-revolution to the revolution he actually initiated.Just before Dr. Hart makes his final exit to complete his round trip, destruction in Jihadabad is at a feverish pitch, and he feels as though he is experiencing the ultimate bomb, or even Armageddon.