(1905-1992)
With dozens of novels to his name, collections of short stories, fully-fledged studies of his work in book form, an increasing number of doctoral theses, and an enormous number of articles in literary and academic periodicals (in English and other languages), Naguib Mahfouz can rightfully claim the title of the best-known and most studied Arab novelist in the Anglophone world. This is hardly surprising, as Mahfouz enjoys a similar status in his own language, in which he has been by far one of most popular serious novelists, all his novels having seen several reprints in different editions.
His Background
Born in 1911, Mahfouz is the grand old man of Arabic fiction, enjoying the affection and reverence of both critics and a vast readership.
He published his first novel in 1939 and since that date has written thirty-two novels and thirteen collections of short stories. In his old age he has maintained his prolific output, producing a novel every year.
The novel genre, which can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, has no prototypes in classical Arabic literature. Although this abounded in all kinds of narrative, none of them could be described as we understand the term "novel" today. Arab scholars usually attribute the first serious attempt at writing a novel in Arabic to the Egyptian author Muhammad Hussein Haykal. The novel, called "Zaynab" after the name of its heroine, and published in 1913, told in highly romanticized terms the story of a peasant girl, victim of social conventions. Soon after, writers like Taha Hussein, Abbas Al-Aqqad, Ibrahim Al-Mazini and Tawfiq Al-Hakim were to venture into the unknown realm of fiction.
Waiting for his Advent
The Arabic novel, however, was to wait for another generation for the advent of the man who was to make it his sole mission. Naguib, who was born to a middle-class family in one of the oldest quarters in Cairo, was to give expression in powerful metaphors, over a period of half a century, to the hopes and frustrations of his nation. Readers have so often identified themselves with his work, a great deal of which has been adapted for the cinema, theater and television, that many of his characters become household names in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. On the other hand, his work, though deeply steeped in local reality, appeals to that which is universal and permanent in human nature, as shown by the relatively good reception his fiction has met in other cultures. In English and other languages, since the appearance in 1966 of his first translated novel Midag Alley, he has been widely read.
Phases of Action
A study of Mahfouz's output shows his fiction to have passed through 4 distinguishable stages.
The first (1939-44) comprises three novels based on the history of ancient Egypt. They provide a useful insight into the germination of the then budding young talent. Admittedly written under the influence of Sir Walter Scott's historical romances, the last of the three, "The Struggle of Thebes", is particularly interesting for the way in which the novelist brought history to bear on the political scene at the time.
The novel draws on the heroic struggle of the Egyptians and their patriotic Pharaohs to expel the Hyksos, as foreign ruling invaders, from their country. The novel bore a relevance to Egyptian sociopolitical reality at the time (British occupation and a ruling aristocracy of foreign stock) that was all too obvious to be missed.
Mahfouz had meant to write a whole series of novels encompassing the full history of Pharaonic Egypt; he even did the research required for such a monumental task. In the event, and perhaps luckily for the development of the Arabic novel, he was voluntarily deflected from his intended course and the scene of his next novel, "A New Cairo" (1945), was placed in the raw reality of its day. This marks the beginning of the second stage in the novelist's career, which culminated in the publication in 1956-57 of his magnum opus, "The Cairo Trilogy". The novels of this phase include six titles, of which three are English translation, i.e. "Midag Alley", "The Beginning", and "The End", and Volume 1 of the Cairo Trilogy ("Palace Walk"). In this period of his writing, the novelist studied the sociopolitical ills of his society with the full analytical power afforded him by the best techniques of realism and naturalism. What emerges from the sum total of these novels is a very bleak picture of a cross section of Egyptian urban society in the twenty or so years between the two World Wars.
A work which stands by itself in this phase is "The Mirage" (1948), in which Mahfouz experimented for the first and last time with writing a novel closely based on Freud's theory of psycho-analysis. For his Trilogy, the peak of his realist/ naturalist phase, the Egyptian people will forever stand in their great novelist’s debt. For without this colossal saga novel, in which he gives an eyewitness account of the country's political, social, religious and intellectual life between the two wars, that period of turmoil in their nation's life would have passed undocumented.
After writing the Trilogy, which met with instant wide acclaim and served to focus renewed attention on his previous work, Mahfouz fell uncharacteristically silent for a number of years (1952-59) - the Trilogy having been completed four years before its publication.
Different theories exist as to why this happened. One theory held by Ghaly Shukri, a well-known Mahfouz scholar, is that by writing the Trilogy Mahfouz had brought the realistic technique to a point of perfection which he could not possibly surpass. He thus needed a period of incubation in which to look for a new style. Whatever the reason, when Mahfouz serialized his next novel in the Cairo daily Al-Ahram in 1959, his readers were in for a surprise. The people of "Our Quarter" (available in English) as children of Gebe-lawi, was a unique allegory of human history from beginning to the present day.
"The Thief and the Dogs" (available in English), published in 1982, is in a way like switching from a Dickens or a Balzac to a Graham Greene or a William Golding, so radical was the change that this style underwent in the third stage of his development. No longer viewing the world through realist/naturalist eyes, he was now to write a series of short powerful novels at once social and existential in their concern. Rather than presenting a full colorful picture of the society, he now concentrated on the inner working of the individual's mind in its interaction with the social environment. In this phase his style ranges from the impressionistic to the surrealist, a pattern of evocative vocabulary and imagery binds the work together, an extensive use is made of the stream of consciousness, or to use a more accurate term in the case of Mahfouz, free indirect speech. On the other hand, while the situation is based on reality, it is often given a universal significance through the suggestion of a higher level of meaning.
Just as his realistic novels were an indictment of the social conditions prevailing in Egypt before 1952, the novels of the sixties contained much that was overtly critical of that period. In the years following 1967, his writing ranged from surrealist, almost absurd short stories and dry, abstract, unactable playlets, to novels of direct social and political commentary. Mahfouz himself was aware of the new turn his work had taken. In the mid-seventies we find Mahfouz again searching for a new style. It would appear that, having been diverted by national traumatic events from the course he had embarked on in the early sixties, he was no longer able to return to it. Or it may be that in his old age, with a life's experience behind him, he felt at last that he could Arabicize the art of the novel. For it is since then that we observe the sporadic emergence of a number of novels which justify the proposition of a fourth stage in his literary development(which has yet to be studied). What is remarkable about the novels of this stage, of which we can count five, is their departure from the norms of novel writing as they evolved in Europe over the last two centuries; these are the norms which conceive of the novel as a work of indivisible unity which proceeds logically from a beginning to a middle to an end. But Mahfouz no longer wants any of that. He now harks back to the indigenous narrative arts of Arabic literature, particularly as found in the Arabian Nights and other folk narratives in which Arabic literature abounds. While any talk of an organic unity in these works is precluded, the presence of what may be called, for the lack of a better term, a cumulative unity producing a total effect of sorts, is undeniable. It is this form that Mahfouz has been experimenting with for the last ten years or so in novels like The Epic of the Riff-Raff", "The Nights of "The Thousand and One Nights" and others. In his evocation of both the form and the content of these classical Arabic narrative types, and his utilization of them to pass judgment of the human condition past and present, Mahfouz appears to open endless vistas for the young Arab novelist to find a distinct voice of his own.
Views of life
Although Mahfouz's novelistic technique has passed, as we have seen, through recognizable stages, one cannot say the same about his world view, the main features of which can be traced back to his earliest works. Mahfouz appears indeed to have sorted out the main questions about life at an early juncture of his youth and to have held on the answers he arrived at ever since, age and experience serving only to deepen and broaden but hardly to modify them.
A sociopolitical view of man's existence is at the very root of almost everything that Mahfouz has written. Even in a novel with a strong metaphysical purport like "Al-Tariq" (The Way), the social message is aptly woven into the texture of the work: man is not meant to spend his life on Earth in a futile search and his only true hope of salvation is the exertion of a positive and responsible effort to better his lot and that of others.
That Mahfouz has always been a socially committed writer with a deep concern for the problem of social injustice is an incontestable fact. To him individual morality is inseparable from social morality. In other words, according to Mahfouz's moral code, those who only seek their own individual salvation are damned; to him nirvana is, as it were, a distinctly collective state. On the other hand, characters who are saved in Mahfouz's work are only those with altruistic motives, those who show concern for others and demonstrate a kind of awareness of their particular predicament being part of a more general one.
How he Pictures the World
The picture of the world as it emerges from the bulk of Mahfouz's work is very gloomy indeed, though not completely despondent. It shows that the author's social utopia is far from being realized. Mahfouz seems to conceive of time as a metaphysical force of oppression. His novels have consistently shown time as the bringer of change, and change as a very painful process, and very often time is not content until it has dealt his heroes the final blow of death. To sum up, in Mahfouz's dark tapestry of the world there are only two bright spots. These consists of man's continuing struggle for equality on the one hand and the promise of scientific progress on the other; meanwhile, life is a tragedy.
Mahfouz creates an intricate pattern of verbal irony which he weaves into the very texture of the novel and maintains throughout.
This pattern of verbal irony engenders in the reader an awareness of the incongruity between the object and mode of expression, i.e. the realistic situation and the hyperbolic terms in which it is rendered. This awareness creates and sustains, all the way through, a sense of dramatic irony where the reader is, as it were, cognizant of a basic fact of which the protagonist is ignorant, namely that his obsession has misguided him. It is in the creation and sustainment of this pattern of verbal irony, and in the complete subjugation of the novelistic experience to a language order originally alien to it, that Mahfouz has achieved a feat unprecedented not only in his own work but probably in Arabic fiction altogether.
This is the way "Respected Sir" opens:
"The door opened to reveal an infinitely spacious room: a whole world of meanings and motivations, not just a limited space hurried in a mass of details. Those who entered it, he believed, were swallowed up, melted down. And as his consciousness caught fire, he was lost in a magical sense of wonder. At first, his concentration wandered. He forgot what his soul yearned to see - the floor, the walls, the ceiling: even the god sitting behind the magnificent desk. An electric shock went through him, setting off in his innermost heart an insane love for the gloriousness of life on the pinnacle of power. At this point the clarion call of power urged him to kneel down and offer himself in sacrifice. But followed, like the rest, the less extreme path of pious submissiveness, of subservience, of security. Many childlike tears he would have to shed before he could impose his will. Yielding to an irresistible temptation, he cast a furtive glance at the divinity hunched behind the desk and lowered his eyes with all the humility he possessed. Hamza Al-Suwayfi, the Director of Administration, led in the procession. "These are the new employees, Your Excellency", he said, addressing the Director General. The Director General's eyes surveyed their faces, including his. He felt he was becoming part of history."
This is the way it ends:
"Empty words of encouragement were hateful to him, and he resigned himself to the fact that taking up his new position was a dream. He was also resigned to the fact that position was a dream.
He was also resigned to the fact that fathering children was another dream. Yet, who knew? What hurt him most was that everything went on without any attention being paid to him: appointments, promotions and pensionings, love, marriage, and even divorce, political conflicts and their feverish slogans, the succession of day and night. Down there, he could hear the cries of hawkers announcing the approach of winter. Maybe it was as well that the new tomb out there in the sunlight had given him such pleasure."
In critics' eyes:
"Mahfouz's work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical. The Nobel Prize acknowledges the universal significance of his fictions" - Los Angeles Times Book Review.
"In "Respected Sir", Mahfouz retells a familiar theme - vaulting ambition - in a powerful and religious metaphor. Othman Bayyumis' humble origins do not stop him from coveting the Director-Generalship of the governmental department he has entered as an archives clerk. It is a vision that becomes a lifelong pursuit, superseding all other interests or people in his life. What is essentially a prosaic experience becomes - in Mahfouz's hands - a beautifully crafted story of an exalted and arduous holy quest."
"Palace of Desire" starts as follows:
"Al-Sayyid Ahmed Abd Al-Jawad closed the door behind him and crossed the courtyard of his house by the pale light of the stars. His step was lethargic, and his walking stick sank into the dusty earth whenever he landed on it wearily. He felt on fire and craved cold water so he could wash his face, head, and neck and escape, if only briefly, from the July heat and from the inferno in his belly and head. Cheered by the thought of cool water, he smiled. When he entered the door leading to the stairway, he could see a faint light coming from above. It flowed along the wall, revealing the motion of the hand that held the lamp. He climbed the steps with one on the railing and the other on his stick. Its successive steps had long ago acquired a special rhythm which identified him as easily as his features. Amina was visible at the head of the stairs with the lamp in her hand. On reaching her, he stopped to regain his breath, for his chest was heaving. Then he greeted her in his customary way."
And ends:
"The best qualities of his personality came from Sa'd's guidance and leadership?
Yasin stopped once more to open the door. Then he held out his hand to Kamal. After shaking hands with him, Kamal remembered something that had slipped his mind for too long.
Embarrassed that he had forgotten, he told Yasin, "I pray to God that you'll find your wife has given birth safely". Starting to leave, Yasin replied, "God willing. And I hope you sleep soundly." "
Critical acclaim:
"Palace of Desire" is, like its predecessor, a grand novel of ideas... a marvelous read" - Washington Post.
"His towering strength as a writer is his luminous specificity. All the magic, mystery and suffering of Egypt in the 1920s are conveyed on a human scale“ - New York Book Review
"A splendid achievement”" - Kirkus Review
"The Egyptian novelist is above all a master storyteller" - San Francisco Chronicle.
"In "Palace of Desire", we see the intricate and complex tragedy of patriarchy working itself out through succeeding generations" - Chicago Tribune
"Adrift on the Nile" has this beginning:
"April, month of dust and lies. The long, high-ceilinged office, a gloomy storeroom for cigarette smoke. On the shelves, the files enjoy an easeful death. How diverting they must find the civil servant at work, carrying out, with utterly serious mien, utterly trivial tasks. Recording the arrival of registered post. Filing Incoming mail. Outgoing mail. Ants, cockroaches, and spiders, and the smell of dust stealing in through the closed windows.
"Have you finished that report" the Head of Department asked. Anis Zaki replied indolently. "Yes", he said. "I've sent it to the Director General. The Head gave him a piercing look that glinted glassily, like a beam of light, through his thick spectacles. Had he caught Anis grinning like an imbecile at nothing. But people were used to putting up with such nonsense in April, month of dust and lies. The Head of Department began to be overtaken by an odd, involuntary movement. It spread through all the parts of his body that could be seen above the desk - slow and undulating, but visibly progressing. Gradually, he began to swell up. The swelling spread from his chest to his neck, to his face, and then over the entire head. Anis stared fixedly at his boss."
And this end:
"Do you consider yourself a model of victory?" he asked her. "Among those who are going down, there are some surpass themselves in the attempt." She began to speak about hope. He looked out the Nile. The night fluttered its wing, and its secrets were scattered like the stars. Her words died to a whisper echoing in the slumber of his dream. Before long, he knew, the dark waters would part to reveal the head of the whale. She said to him, "You are no longer with me." He said, and he was talking to himself, "The cleverness of the ape is the root of all misfortune. He learned how to walk on two legs, and his hands were free."
"That means that I should leave." "And he came down from the apes paradise in the trees to the forest floor." "One last question before I go, Do you have a plan for the future, if things get difficult." "And they said to him: "Come back to the trees, or the beasts will get you." "Do you have the right to a pension if God forbids - you are actually dismissed?" "But he took a branch in one hand and a stone in the other and set off cautiously; looking away down a road that had no end."
Praise:
" A probing novel of spiritual emptiness. Noble Laureate Mahfouz writes hypnotic prose, by turns romantically lyrical and tartly astringent" - Publisher Weekly.
"Its subtle portrayal of class alienation evokes the author's major achievement, the Cairo Trology" - Boston Globe.
"Quietly, disturbingly incisive about modern Cairo's uneasy truce between old way and new" - Kirkus Review.
"Mahfouz's novels provide a voice for his culture" - Denver Post
First part of "Journey of Ibn Fatouma":
"Life and death, dreaming and wakefulness; stations for the perplexed soul. It traverses them stage by stage, taking signs and hints from things, grouping about the sea of darkness, clinging stubbornly to a hope that smilingly and mysteriously renews itself. Traveler, what are you searching for? What emotions rage in your heart? How will you govern your natural impulses and capricious thoughts? Why do you guffaw with laughter like a cavalier? Why do you shed tears like a child?"
Last part:
"The man agreed to undertake the task, so I made him a present of a hundred dinars and we recited together the opening chapter of the Quran to seal the agreement. After that, freeing myself of my misgivings, I made ready for the final adventure with unabated determination. With these words ends the manuscript of the voyage of Qindil Muhammad Al-Innabi, known as Ibn Fatouma. No history book makes any mention further of this traveler. Did he complete his journey or did he perish on the way? Did he enter the land of Gebel? How did he fare there? Did he stay there till the end of his life, or did he return to his homeland as he intended? Will one day a further manuscript be found describing his last journey? Knowledge of all this lies with the Knower of what is unseen and what is seen."
High lauding:
"A morality play extolling the virtues of tolerance and understanding." - Los Angeles Times
"The Journey of Ibn Fatouma is captivating in its simplicity." - Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Mahfouz's pithy parable mocks the hypocrisy of nations that wage war and maintain empire in the name of brotherhood and freedom." - Publisher Weekly
"A slender, magical parable of idealism and compromise through a stylised Middle East odyssey." - Kirkus Reviews
"A dreamy fable ... the artful mood of langour and Mahfouz's exactness of expression ensures that it will be well received." - Booklist
"As enchanting a tale as any he has written." - Library Journal
Final note:
In awarding the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature to Naguib Mahfouz, the Swedish Academy of Letters noted that "through works rich in nuance - now clearsightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous - (Mahfouz) has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind."
Mahfouz is the author of more than thirty novels.
"He is not only a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola and a Jules Romains." - Edward Said, London Review of Books
But above all he is an Egyptian lover of the River Nile and one with endless quests. His special concern is the grassroots in people, life and facts.
Egypt State Information Service
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