From Shablanja to Macondo and Animal Farm A Comparative Study of the World of Elnadim’s Digital Satire and the Literary Worlds of Kafka, Orwell, and García Márquez

From Shablanja to Macondo and Animal Farm

A Comparative Study of the World of Elnadim’s Digital Satire and the Literary Worlds of Kafka, Orwell, and García Márquez

Methodological Introduction

The major literary worlds created by Franz Kafka, George Orwell, and Gabriel García Márquez—despite their divergent contexts and styles—belong to a single tradition:

the invention of a closed fictional world used as an instrument for dissecting power, rather than merely for storytelling.

Within this tradition, the world of Shablanja in Elnadim’s digital satire emerges as a contemporary Arab contribution. It draws on this global literary legacy, yet re-produces it through distinctly modern tools:

Bureaucratic satire

The breaking-news format

The everyday language of the state

I. Shablanja and Kafka: Power as a Faceless System

1. Kafka’s World: Opaque Authority

In The Trial and The Castle:

Power is invisible

Laws exist but remain incomprehensible

The individual is condemned without knowing the charge

Language is procedural, cold, and disorienting

Here, absurdity arises from:

The absence of explanation, not from overt violence.

2. Shablanja: Visible Power Without Meaning

In Elnadim’s world:

Power is fully visible

Official statements are linguistically clear

Justification is constant

Yet meaning is absent

The fundamental distinction is this:

Kafka depicts mysterious power

Elnadim depicts exposed power that is never held accountable

Kafka causes the reader to get lost inside the labyrinth,

while Elnadim allows the reader to see the labyrinth from the outside—with no exit in sight.

II. Shablanja and Orwell: The State Writing Itself

1. Orwell: Explicit Ideological Power

In Animal Farm and 1984:

Power rewrites history

Language is weaponized for control (Newspeak)

Lying becomes a central governing tool

There is a clear antagonist: the Party, Big Brother

Orwell:

warns, explains, and constructs a direct pedagogical allegory.

2. Elnadim: Beyond Warning

The world of Shablanja does not:

Warn

Explain

Explicitly condemn

Instead, it does something more dangerous:

It reproduces the discourse of power verbatim, without commentary.

Elnadim does not claim that power lies;

he allows it to speak until truth itself becomes absurd.

If Orwell is:

A writer of resistance

Then Elnadim is:

A writer of post-defeat dissection

III. Shablanja and García Márquez: The Village as a Complete Universe

1. Macondo: Magical Realism

In One Hundred Years of Solitude:

The village condenses Latin American history

The family stands in for the state

Absurdity is narrated as normal

Time is circular

Márquez employs:

Magical imagination to reveal historical violence.

2. Shablanja: Bureaucratic Realism

Shablanja contains:

No magic

No supernatural events

Everything is “official”

Everything is “legal”

Yet the result is:

A world that is entirely irrational.

Elnadim replaces magic with:

Official statements

Press releases

Meetings

International phone calls

If Macondo is:

A village where miracles occur

Then Shablanja is:

A village where catastrophes occur through proper procedures.

IV. Language as a World-Building Instrument

Writer

Nature of Language

Kafka

Ambiguous procedural language

Orwell

Ideological and didactic language

García Márquez

Mythic and poetic language

Elnadim

Satirical bureaucratic language

In Elnadim’s work, language is not a medium—it is:

The true protagonist of the text.

V. Shablanja’s Position in the Global Literary Map

The world of Shablanja:

Does not borrow ready-made symbols

Does not explain itself to the reader

Does not seek universality through simplification

Instead, it offers:

An authentically Arab model of modern power—translatable, but not domesticated.

Comparative Conclusion

If:

Kafka wrote the terror of bureaucracy

Orwell wrote a warning against totalitarianism

García Márquez wrote a mythology of historical violence

Then Elnadim writes:

Power practicing its daily triviality with complete confidence.

In this context, the world of Shablanja is not derivative of these literary universes,

but rather a late extension of them in an age after the collapse of grand illusions.

It is a world that declares:

We no longer need Big Brother… the mayor is enough.