by Amitav Ghosh
It was a kind of rebirth: a moment when the grief of survival became indistinguishable from the joy of living.
THE HUMAN COMEDY IN CAIRO 1990
IN EGYPT, the news that the writer Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989 was greeted with the kind of jubilation that Egyptians usually reserve for soccer victories. Even though the fundamentalists sounded an ominous note, most people in Cairo were overjoyed. Months later everybody was still full of it. People would tell anecdotes about how the good news had reached Mahfouz. Swedish efficiency has met its match in Cairo's telephones: the news had broken over the wires before the committee (or whatever) could get through to Mahfouz. He was asleep, taking his afternoon siesta (no, it was early in the morning, and he just hadn't woken up yet), when his wife woke him and told him matter-of-factly that somebody wanted to congratulate him for winning the Nobel (no, it was she who wanted to congratulate him, didn't you see the story in...).
The stories were on everyone's lips: tales of national pride and collective hope. Mahfouz has a large following in Egypt and is personally popular: he is everybody's slightly eccentric but successful uncle, a modest, generous, kindly man who has spent over thirty years working as a civil servant. The rest of the Arab world was enthusiastic too, including the people of some countries who had their own favorite contestants (it had long been rumored that an Arab writer would soon win the prize). The award to Mahfouz was clearly a recognition of the achievements of Arabic literature, and even if it was several decades overdue, the Arab world in general responded to it with pride.
It would have been interesting, at that moment of elation, if some enterprising pollster had taken it into his head to put two questions to a representative sample of the reading public in the Arab world, the first question being "Do you think Naguib Mahfouz is the most interesting, innovative, or imaginative writer in Arabic today?" and the second, "Do you think that Naguib Mah-fouz is the most appropriate candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature in the Arab world today?" It is my guess that the answer to the first question would have been largely no, and the answer to the second would have been generally yes.
In the gap between that no and that yes falls the award itself, and the extraordinary power it carries in countries like Egypt and India—old civilizations trying hard to undo their supersession in the modern world. Once, in my own city of Calcutta, in the gaudy heat of May, stuck in a crowded bus in a traffic jam, I overheard an unexpectedly literary conversation. A sweat-soaked commuter, on his way back from a hard day's work, missed his grip on the overhead rail and dropped his briefcase on his toe. A dam seemed to burst: he began to complain loudly about the traffic, the roads, the fumes, the uncollected garbage. One of his neighbors turned to him and said sharply, "What are you complaining about? Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, and wasn't he from Calcutta?" At this very moment someone stuck in a bus or a share-taxi in Tahrir or Shubra or some other traffic-clogged part of Cairo is almost certainly saying the same thing about Mahfouz. Thus does Stockholm regulate the traffic in Calcutta and Cairo.
In the United States, Mahfouz met with another kind of approval on the occasion of his triumph. The second paragraph of the New York Times story on Mahfouz's Nobel, carried on the front page, quoted Israelis declaring Mahfouz's politics to be perfectly acceptable. His work, his concerns, and his subjects came a poor second to this other aspect of his newsworthiness.
For a prize of such power, the ordinary standards of judgment that apply to books are held in suspension. What matters is that the writer's work be adequately canonical, which is to say massive, serious, and somehow a part of "world literature." If Mah-fouz won on these counts, his was the victory of the decathlete, achieved by a slow accumulation of points rather than by a spectacular show of brilliance in a single event. To date, Mahfouz has written some thirty-five novels and twelve volumes of short stories, as well as several plays and screenplays; he is said to be widely read in philosophy and French literature; and he is credited with introducing absurdism and the stream-of-consciousness technique into Arabic literature. Whatever your opinion about any particular book of his, there can be no denying the weight of Mahfouz's contribution to modern Arabic literature. Thus the general popularity of the award.
2
Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911. His father was a minor functionary in the government, and he grew up in the heart of the old city, the crowded district that lies beyond the ancient university of Al-Azhar and the mausoleum of the Prophet's grandson, Sayidna Hussein. In the years of Mahfouz's childhood, it was an area where respectable families of modest means, struggling to put their children through school, lived above thriving little shops and businesses and looked out through their dusty windows at medieval mosques, hospitals, and religious schools. This is the world that Mahfouz has made peculiarly his own: a distinctively Cairene world of minor civil servants striving to make ends meet on their salaries, to push their children one rung higher on the civil service ladder while keeping up appearances against the pretensions of pushy grocers and arriviste café owners. No matter that this kind of person has moved out of the neighborhood (as did Mahfouz's family); their hopes and their anxieties remain much the same.
These are the people of Mahfouz's imaginative universes—a small, distinctive group within the tumult of modern Egypt. Rural Egypt, which occupied so much of the imaginations of Mahfouz's most illustrious predecessors and contemporaries, never intrudes on his world. Indeed, it is almost artificially excluded. His characters never even have friends or relatives in the countryside, as they almost certainly would in the "real" world. This needs saying, if only because Mahfouz's world is sometimes said to be a microcosm of Egypt. If this is so, it is surely only in that special sense in which the sans-culottes of Paris were somehow a little more "the People" than the peasants of the Midi.
Much of the interest of Mahfouz lies in his avenue of entry into the world of his characters. He takes the most secret, the least accessible, route: the family. Of course, the family is one of the territories the novel has most successfully claimed for itself everywhere; all around the world there are novelists who, like Mahfouz, build their books on families and their histories, on the endless cycle of birth, marriage, and death. But in Mahfouz's hands, in the world of his People, this invitation into the family has an extra dimension of excitement.
In Egypt, and more generally in the Arab world, as in many conservative, traditional societies, the family is a secret, curtained world, protected from the gaze of outsiders by walls and courtyards, by veils and laws of silence. To be taken past those doors, into the forbidden space of failed marriages and secret desires, the areas that lie most heavily curtained under the genteel ethic of family propriety—and to be introduced into this by the most public of artifacts, a printed book—is to prepare oneself for the pleasurable tingle of the illicit. And once past that curtain, Mahfouz's reader discovers, with guilty delight, a quiet murmur of furtive gropings, dissatisfaction, and despair that confirms everything he has ever suspected about his neighbors. This is Mahfouz's particular talent: he has a fine instinct for discovering the fears, the prejudices, and the suspicions of his People and serving them back to them as fiction.
In his hands, the intricacies of family relationships become a kind of second language, with which he demonstrates to his readers the dangers that lurk at the margins of their world. These are predicaments that they can all too readily imagine, since they form the nightmare other-life that gives their respectability its meaning. This is a world in which sisters become prostitutes to help their brothers become "respectable employees," where fathers who drink encounter their sons in brothels, where ambition is always unscrupulous and young men who look above their station come to a sticky end, where boys who are allowed to stay out too late are plunged "deep into sin and addiction" and eventually end up in a region that can only be described as Mahfouz's Underworld.
That underworld is a landscape often encountered i
n his work, always sketched with portentous hints and suggestions, a region of pure fantasy, dank with the "odor of putrefaction," whose inhabitants always drink themselves into stupors, smoke hashish, fondle bosomy singers, and traffic vaguely in drugs. It is through devices such as these that Mahfouz invites his reader to marvel at the decay of the world as it should be. It is a sentiment that his People are only too willing to take to heart, oppressed as they are by the prospect of poverty and social decline on the one hand, and on the other by the images of wealth that they associate with those who control money and power in their societies.
The predicament is not peculiarly Egyptian. I can think of at least two eminent writers in Calcutta whose plots and material are uncannily similar to Mahfouz's (though Mahfouz is the more skillful practitioner of the craft). This is the kind of fiction that grows out of the sensibility of literate, urban "salaried employees"—who, caught between a vast sink of poverty and tiny, impenetrable enclaves of wealth, begin to look for some kind of meaning and authenticity in what they see as their own traditions of respectable gentility. That is their cruelest delusion, for their gentility has very little to do with the traditions of Egypt or India, Islam or Hinduism, and everything to do with Victorianism.
Much of Mahfouz's work seethes with the indignation that grows out of this particular sensibility, indignation at the corruption that allows the unscrupulous to grow rich while decent people labor to earn an honest wage. But indignation is about all it is. Its sources are not interesting enough to give it the fire of real rage or even the anger of outraged morality. Mahfouz has written some quasi-mystical parables, but he is not essentially a religious writer. Indeed, the Arab thinker whose name occurs most frequently in his work is Abu'l 'Ala al-Ma'arri, a medieval freethinker and rationalist. And although Mahfouz has written political satires, he is not essentially a political writer either. In his books politics and history generally serve as part of the background and mise en scène.
If there is something suspect, in the end, even about Mahfouz's indignation, it is probably because it never appears to be turned against his People's own ethic of respectability. His mother figures are impossibly good and forbearing, and girls who leave the sanctuary of the home and go out to work all too often fall prey to temptation. At its best, Mahfouz's work has some of the texture and the richness of detail of the nineteenth-century masters whose influence he acknowledges—Balzac, Tolstoy, Flaubert—but even at its bleakest and most melancholy (as in The Beginning and the End), his writing never approximates real tragedy. Its pathos seems to spring almost entirely from a sense of violated gentility. Even for a writer with Mahfouz's skill, it is hard to create tragedy out of the scramble for respectability.
It is in the observation of the small details on which the edifices of respectability are constructed that Mahfouz is really acute about his society. What the foreign reader needs explained is the real meaning of what it is to be a "salaried employee" in Egypt, the importance of the baccalaureate examinations, what it is to be an eighth-grade functionary. These are arcane and peculiarly Egyptian details, although they have nothing to do with the Egypt of the pharaohs or Mamelukes, or with anything particularly exotic. But it is those details that make up the fabric of respectable middle-class life in Egypt, and it is Mahfouz's singular gift that he is able to transform them into the stuff of fiction.
3
The American University in Cairo Press has long been doing a difficult and thankless job in making good writing in Arabic available in English translation. With Mahfouz's Nobel Prize and the sale of rights to their translations, their efforts have been richly rewarded. It is to be hoped that more and still better translations will be forthcoming soon, so that a wider spectrum of modern Arabic writing will receive the kind of attention it deserves. The four novels published by Doubleday are revised versions of the original American University in Cairo translations. Two of them were written in Mahfouz's early "realistic" period. The Beginning and the End is the melancholy but compelling story of a family pauperized by a sudden death. Palace Walk is the first book of Mahfouz's Cairene trilogy, written in 1956–1957, in which each book is named after a street in the old city. The trilogy, which charts the history of a Cairene family during the period between the wars, is a chronicle of the changes that occurred in Egyptian society over that period.
Palace Walk sets the stage for the later books; it is a depiction of what went before the changes, so to speak. The central figure in the book is a patriarch of rather extreme convictions: he has never once, in their decades-old marriage, allowed his wife to leave the house. This is a condition with which she is entirely satisfied, for she reveres her husband, except for one small thing—she longs to visit the mausoleum of Sayidna Hussein, which is down the road. One day one of her sons persuades her to venture out. She does, and for her pains she is struck by a motorcar. (Why do such terrible things happen, in Mahfouz's work, to women who leave their houses?) Worse still, the wrathful patriarch, upon discovering her dereliction, packs her off to her mother's, where she languishes, wringing her hands, until he summons her back. In the end, however, the turmoil of Egyptian politics—the last part of the book is set in the period of the 1919 riots against the British presence in Egypt—catches up with the apparently invincible patriarch and leaves him a broken man.
The novel has the feel of the sort of stories people tell about the old days, when they want their children to marvel at how much the world has come on since then. In a sense, of course, it is exactly that: Mahfouz was a very young child in the years in which his book is set, and his family had already moved out of the old part of the city. There are some perceptive observations about the psychology of patriarchy—there is a wonderful scene, for example, in which the patriarch's son, a brave and ardent nationalist, finds himself reduced to a quaking heap by the tone of his father's voice. But the reader would be better able to savor those moments, perhaps, if Mahfouz's sympathy with the patriarch were not so patent, if the book were not so pervaded by nostalgia for a time when men were men.
The other two novels, The Thief and the Dogs (1961) and Wedding Song (1981), date from Mahfouz's later period, which was less realistic and more experimental, and they are, frankly, awful. When the spirit moves Mahfouz to be technically adventurous, it also tends to push him away from his accustomed material, leaving him stranded in various exotic enclaves of society. Wedding Song is set among a group of raffish theater people who drink, gamble, take drugs, and have sex (the underworld again). A particularly disreputable couple has a son who is an idealistic young man; appalled by the lasciviousness and the immorality of his parents' circle, he exposes them in a play before staging his own death. The Thief and the Dogs is about ... well, it's about an idealistic sort of fellow who becomes a thief because he is shocked by how rich some people are.
Unfortunately for Doubleday, and fortunately for English readers, the most delightful of Mahfouz's translated works, Midaq Alley, has long been available in a good translation by Trevor Le Gassick. It has recently been reissued by the Quality Paperback Book Club, and it is more worth reading than any of Doubleday's four. The novel is set in Mahfouz's familiar world—in a street in the old city—but it lacks the portentousness of some of his other work. It is written tongue-in-cheek, almost as self-parody, and it brims with moments of pure delight.
For instance: the homosexual café owner Kirsha—inevitably of dark and sullen aspect—is interrupted by his wife while entertaining a youth in his café. His wife marches up to the boy and screams, "Do you want to ruin my home, you rake and son of rakes ... Who am I? Don't you know me? I am your fellow-wife..." The boy escapes, and she turns upon her protesting husband and shouts, in a "voice loud enough to crumble the walls of the café," "Shut your mouth! You are the ... lavatory around here, you scarecrow, you disgrace, you rat-bag!" Among the awestruck spectators is the baker's wife, who regularly beats her husband. She turns to him now and remarks, "You're always moaning about your bad luck and asking why yo
u're the only husband who is beaten! Did you see how even your betters are beaten?" But eventually Kirsha has his say as well. "Oh you miserable pair, why on earth should the government punish anyone who kills off people like you?" His son declares that he wants to leave home and live in a place where houses have electricity. "Electricity?" retorts Kirsha. "Thanks be to God that your mother, for all her scandals, has at least kept our house safe from electricity!"
The inhabitants of this alley are a world away from the mythologized patriarch and his family on Palace Walk.
4
The Nobel Prize has had an unhappy consequence for Mahfouz. Soon after the announcement, possibly as a result of the Rushdie crisis, he began to receive death threats from Islamic fundamentalists. At issue was a book he wrote in 1959 called (in its English translation) Children of Gebelawi. It was an allegorical novel, in which three of the principal characters were said to represent the prophets Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. The 'ulema, the Muslim doctors of theology and religious law, declared Mahfouz's book to be offensive to Islam. The book was never published in Arabic in Egypt, and for a while Mahfouz stopped writing altogether. But there were more books in time, and the controversy was largely forgotten—until the threats began.
An epoch passed in the Middle East between the late fifties and the late eighties. There is a world of difference between a group of learned scholars pronouncing an anathema and the death threats issued by bands of young men barely out of college. The evolution of the Mahfouz controversy is one very small indication of how dramatically the Middle East has changed within the lifetime of his own generation.