File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0112, message 93


Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 02:14:59 -0800 (PST)
From: Marwan Dalal <dmarwan-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Said on Mahfouz


Al-Ahram Weekly
13-19 December, 2001

Cruelty of memory

http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/564/2sc1.htm

To have taken history not only seriously but also
literally is the central achievement of Mahfouz's
work, argues Edward Said
  
Before he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz
was known outside the Arab world to students of Arab
or Middle Eastern studies largely as the author of 
stories about lower-middle-class Cairo life. In 1980 I
tried to interest a New York publisher, who was then
looking for "Third World" books to publish, in putting
out several of the great writer's works in first- rate
translations, but after a little reflection the idea
was turned down. When I inquired why, I was told (with
no detectable irony) that Arabic was a controversial
language. 

A few years later I had an amiable and, from my point
of view, encouraging correspondence about him with
Jacqueline Onassis, who was trying to decide whether
to take him on; she then became one of the people
responsible for bringing Mahfouz to Doubleday, which
is where he now resides, albeit still in rather spotty
versions that dribble out without much fanfare or
notice. Rights to his English translations are held by
the American University in Cairo Press, so poor
Mahfouz, who seems to have sold them off without
expecting that he would someday be a world- famous
author, has no say in what has obviously been an
unliterary, largely commercial enterprise without much
artistic or linguistic coherence. 

To Arab readers Mahfouz does in fact have a
distinctive voice, which displays a remarkable mastery
of language yet does not call attention to itself. I
shall try to suggest in what follows that he has a
decidedly catholic and, in a way, overbearing view of
his country, and, like an emperor surveying his realm,
he feels capable of summing up, judging, and shaping
its long history and complex position as one of the
world's oldest, most fascinating and coveted prizes
for conquerors like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon,
as well as its own natives. 

In addition Mahfouz has the intellectual and literary
means to convey them in a manner entirely his
own--powerful, direct, subtle. Like his characters
(who are always described right away, as soon as they
appear), Mahfouz comes straight at you, immerses you
in a thick narrative flow, then lets you swim in it,
all the while directing the currents, eddies, and
waves of his characters' lives, Egypt's history under
prime ministers like Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa
El-Nahhas, and dozens of other details of political
parties, family histories, and the like, with
extraordinary skill. Realism, yes, but something else
as well: a vision that aspires to a sort of
all-encompassing view not unlike Dante's in its
twinning of earthly actuality with the eternal, but
without the Christianity. 

Born in 1911, between 1939 and 1944 Mahfouz published
three, as yet untranslated, novels about ancient Egypt
while still an employee at the Ministry of Awqaf
(Religious Endowments). He also translated James
Baikie's book Ancient Egypt before undertaking his
chronicles of modern Cairo in Khan Al-Khalili, which
appeared in 1945. This period culminated in 1956 and
1957 with the appearance of his superb Cairo Trilogy.
These novels were in effect a summary of modern
Egyptian life during the first half of the twentieth
century. 

 The trilogy is a history of the patriarch El- Sayed
Ahmed Abdel-Gawwad and his family over three
generations. While providing an enormous amount of
social and political detail, it is also a study of the
intimate relationships between men and women, as well
as an account of the search for faith of
Abdel-Gawwad's youngest son, Kamal, after an early and
foreshortened espousal of Islam. 

After a period of silence that coincided with the
first five years following the 1952 Egyptian
revolution, prose works began to pour forth from
Mahfouz in unbroken succession--novels, short stories,
journalism, memoirs, essays, and screenplays. Since
his first attempts to render the ancient world Mahfouz
has become an extraordinarily prolific writer, one
intimately tied to the history of his time; he was
nevertheless bound to have explored ancient Egypt
again because its history allowed him to find there
aspects of his own time, refracted and distilled to
suit rather complex purposes of his own. 

This, I think, is true of Dweller in Truth (1985)
translated into English in 1998 as Akhenaten, Dweller
in Truth, which in its unassuming way is part of
Mahfouz's special concern with power, with the
conflict between orthodox religious and completely
personal truth, and with the counterpoint between
strangely compatible yet highly contradictory
perspectives that derive from an often inscrutable and
mysterious figure. 

Mahfouz has been characterised since he became a
recognised world celebrity as either a social realist
in the mode of Balzac, Galsworthy, and Zola or a
fabulist straight out of the Arabian Nights (as in the
view taken by J M Coetzee in his disappointing
characterisation of Mahfouz). It is closer to the
truth to see him, as the Lebanese novelist Elias
Khoury has suggested, as providing in his novels a
kind of history of the novel form, from historical
fiction to the romance, saga, and picaresque tale,
followed by work in realist, modernist, naturalist,
symbolist, and absurdist modes. 

Moreover, despite his transparent manner, Mahfouz is
dauntingly sophisticated not only as an Arabic stylist
but as an assiduous student of social process and
epistemology--that is, the way people know their
experiences--without equal in his part of the world,
and probably elsewhere for that matter. The realistic
novels on which his fame rests, far from being only a
dutiful sociological mirror of modern Egypt, are also
audacious attempts to reveal the highly concrete way
power is actually deployed. That power can derive from
the divine, as in his parable Awlad Haritna (Children
of Gebelaawi) of 1959 in which the great estate owner
Gebelaawi is a godlike figure who has banished his
children from the Garden of Eden or from the throne,
the family, and patriarchy itself, or from civil
associations such as political parties, universities,
government bureaucracy, and so on. This isn't to say
that Mahfouz's novels are guided by or organised
around abstract principles: they are not, otherwise
his work would have been far less powerful and
interesting to his uncounted Arab readers, and also to
his by now extensive international audience. 

Mahfouz's aim is, I think, to embody ideas so
completely in his characters and their actions that
nothing theoretical is left exposed. But what has
always fascinated him is in fact the way the
Absolute--which for a Muslim is of course God as the
ultimate power--necessarily becomes material and
irrecoverable simultaneously, as when Gebelaawi's
decree of banishment against his children throws them
into exile even as he retreats, out of reach forever,
to his fortress--his house, which they can always see
from their territory. What is felt and what is lived
are made manifest and concrete but they cannot readily
be grasped while being painstakingly and minutely
disclosed in Mahfouz's remarkable prose. 

Malhamat Al-Harafish (1977), Epic of the Harafish,
extends and deepens this theme from Children of
Gebelaawi. His subtle use of language enables him to
translate that Absolute into history, character,
event, temporal sequence, and place while, at the same
time, because it is the first principle of things, it
mysteriously maintains its stubborn, original, if also
tormenting aloofness. In Akhenaten the sun god changes
the young, prematurely monotheistic king forever but
never reveals himself, just as Akhenaten himself is
seen only at a remove, described in the numerous
narratives of his enemies, his friends, and his wife,
who tell his story but cannot resolve his mystery. 

Nonetheless Mahfouz also has a ferociously
antimystical side, but it is riven with recollections
and even perceptions of an elusive great power that
seems very troubling to him. Consider, for instance,
that Akhenaten's story requires no fewer than fourteen
narrators and yet fails to settle the conflicting
interpretations of his reign. Every one of Mahfouz's
works that I know has this central but distant
personification of power in it, most memorably the
dominating senior figure of El-Sayed Ahmed
Abdel-Gawwad in the Cairo Trilogy, whose authoritative
presence hovers over the action throughout the
triology. 

In the trilogy his slowly receding eminence is not
simply offstage, but is also being transmuted and
devalued through such mundane agencies as
Abdel-Gawwad's marriage, his licentious behavior, his
children, and changing political involvements. Worldly
matters seem to puzzle Mahfouz, and perhaps even
compel as well as fascinate him at the same time,
particularly in his account of the way the fading
legacy of El-Sayed Abdel-Gawwad, whose family is
Mahfouz's actual subject, in the end still manages to
hold together the three generations, through the 1919
Revolution, the liberal era of Saad Zaglul, the
British occupation, and the reign of Fouad during the
interwar period. 

The result is that when you get to the end of one of
Mahfouz's novels you paradoxically experience both
regret at what has happened to his characters in their
long downward progress and a barely articulated hope
that by going back to the beginning of the story you
might be able to recover the sheer force of these
people. There is a hint of how gripping this process
is in a fragment called "A message" contained in the
novelist's Echoes from an Autobiography (1994): "The
cruelty of memory manifests itself in remembering what
is dispelled in forgetfulness." Mahfouz is an
unredemptive but highly judgemental and precise
recorder of the passage of time. 

Thus Mahfouz is anything but a humble storyteller who
haunts Cairo's cafés and essentially works away
quietly in his obscure corner. The stubbornness and
pride with which he has held to the rigour of his work
for a half-century, with its refusal to concede to
ordinary weakness, is at the very core of what he does
as a writer. What mostly enables him to hold his
astonishingly sustained view of the way eternity and
time are so closely intertwined is his country, Egypt
itself. As a geographical place and as history, Egypt
for Mahfouz has no counterpart in any other part of
the world. Old beyond history, geographically distinct
because of the Nile and its fertile valley, Mahfouz's
Egypt is an immense accumulation of history,
stretching back in time for thousands of years, and
despite the astounding variety of its rulers, regimes,
religions, and races, nevertheless retaining its own
coherent identity. Moreover, Egypt has held a unique
position among nations. The object of attention by
conquerors, adventurers, painters, writers,
scientists, and tourists, the country is like no other
for the position it has held in human history, and the
quasi-timeless vision it has afforded. 

To have taken history not only seriously but also
literally is the central achievement of Mahfouz's work
and, as with Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn, one gets the
measure of his literary personality by the sheer
audacity and even the overreaching arrogance of his
scope. To articulate large swathes of Egypt's history
on behalf of that history, and to feel himself capable
of presenting its citizens for scrutiny as its
representatives: this sort of ambition is rarely seen
in contemporary writers. 

Mahfouz's Egypt is a charged one, strikingly vivid for
the accuracy and humour with which he portrays it, in
a mode that is neither completely taken with great
heroes nor able to do without some dream of total
harmony of the kind Akhenaten so desperately strives
to keep but cannot sustain. Without a powerful
controlling centre, Egypt can easily dissolve into
anarchy or an absurd, gratuitous tyranny based either
on religious dogma or on a personal dictatorship. 

Mahfouz is now ninety years old, nearly blind, and,
after he was physically assaulted by religious
fanatics in 1994, is said to be a recluse. What is
both remarkable and poignant about him is how, given
the largeness of his vision and his work, he still
seems to guard his nineteenth- century liberal belief
in a decent, humane society for Egypt even though the
evidence he keeps dredging up and writing about in
contemporary life and in history continues to refute
that belief. The irony is that, more than anyone else,
he has dramatised in his work the almost cosmic
antagonism that he sees Egypt as embodying between
majestic absolutes on the one hand and, on the other,
the gnawing at and wearing down of these absolutes by
people, history, society. These opposites he never
really reconciles. Yet as a citizen Mahfouz sees
civility and the continuity of a transnational,
abiding, Egyptian personality in his work as perhaps
surviving the debilitating processes of conflict and
historical degeneration which he, more than anyone
else I have read, has so powerfully depicted. 



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of
your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com
or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com


     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005