One comes away from the strong political overtones in Everyman with the open truth that subservience, sexual connotations aside, is a betrayal of human responsibility. The strength of resistance derives from even further back within us than the drive towards freedom. Terminal Everyman’s memory of a sensuous experience, relived, invokes the glory of having been alive even while ‘eluding death seemed to have become the central business of life and bodily decay his entire story’.
Was the best of old age … the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow’s shaft, rode them all the way in to where his rib cage scraped against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells … and he hustled to his feet … and went lurching through the low surf … into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the obstinate fact of the future.
Another ecstasy. Not to be denied by mortality. Philip Roth is a magnificent victor in attempting to disprove Georg Lukács’s dictum of the impossible aim of the writer to encompass all of life.
2006
Faith, Reason and War
Although I was involved in the struggle against apartheid as an active supporter of the banned African National Congress, I should like to concentrate on another aspect of war: that of the war against writers. War against the word. My own personal experience as a writer and the continuing war, much graver, deadly, as it threatens the very lives of journalists and writers in current conflicts. Recently, journalists have been taken hostage in wars in a number of countries, particularly that of international involvement in Iraq. Before this, a journalist was killed in one of these countries after an unspeakable ordeal as hostage.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech last year, laureate Harold Pinter said ‘a writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed.’ There is, of course, a long history from ancient times of action against writings judged as religious heresy. The Catholic proscribed list continues to exist. But in modern times the banning of books generally has been on grounds of sexual explicitness, while heresy has been invoked as a transgression against political correctness. Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley’s Lover come to mind immediately on the first count – sex – and may I be forgiven for recalling a personal experience as a footnote among the fate of many books banned on the second ground, political heresy. On this ground the South African apartheid regime banned three of my novels in succession.
Works banned on political counts, preventing their distribution and sale, and more drastically those outlawed by public burning, apparent acts of reason, are in fact actions perpetrated by faith of another kind – not religious but ideological. An ideology passionately held becomes a faith by which its adherents live and act. Hitler’s purity of race, Stalin’s pursuit of elimination of a class – only two examples of the means of eliminating freedom of expression in the name of political ideologies, exalted to a faith. Each self-appointed as salvation against the existence of the other in humankind. Faith and reason: one had become accustomed to acceptance that these apparent opposites were in fact one, a symbiosis in the bannings of literature decreed by oppressive political regimes. You have only to read the country-by-country reports by PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee.
Then came an action against a writer inconceivable in modern times: our time. An edict of death was pronounced on a writer. Salman Rushdie. The grounds were religious heresy in a novel. ‘I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until religion came after me’, Salman Rushdie says. ‘Religion was part of my subject, of course … nevertheless … I had to confront what was confronting me and to decide what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously, repressively and violently stood against me. At that time it was difficult to persuade people that the attack on The Satanic Verses was part of a broader global assault on writers, artists, and fundamental freedoms.’136 The faith that authorised this assault was a religious one: Islam. Nothing on the scale of a death fatwa has been invoked in respect of other writers who have been declared offenders on charges of religious or political heresy, sexual explicitness, though banned or imprisoned. Actions outrageous enough. The death sentence pronounced upon Rushdie was indelible writing on our wall by the hand of fundamentalisms that in our contemporary world threaten and operate not only against freedom of expression, but in many other areas of contemporary life.
How is one to approach, not specific conflict-by-conflict, depredation-by-depredation, the causes deeper and beyond these acts of fundamentalism in its hydra-head manifestations? And what guidance can one contemplate towards a possible solution? Amartya Sen offers a convincing analysis, with the consequence of a guidance for us to consider, in what he cites as
the miniaturization of people … the world is frequently taken to be a fixed federation of ‘civilisations’ or ‘cultures’, ignoring the relevance of other ways in which people see themselves, involving class, gender, profession, language, science, morals, and politics. This reductionism of high theory can make a major contribution, if inadvertently, to the violence of low politics … people are, in effect, put into little boxes … ignoring the many different ways – economic, political, cultural, civic and social – in which people relate with one another within regional boundaries and across them … the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of powerful categorisation.137
Isn’t this one of the answers to the fundamentalists of faith and reason? As amply evidenced in his other writings, Amartya Sen is the last economist who could ever be accused of bypassing the fundament of the gap between rich and poor. This, his other aspect of human order, is a revelation of some of the methodology that maintains the great divide.
2006
Naguib Mahfouz’s Three Novels of Ancient Egypt
‘What matters in the historical novel is not the telling of great historical events, but the poet’s awakening of people who figure in those events. What matters is that we should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical realities.’138
Naguib Mahfouz adds another dimension to what matters. Reading back through his work written over seventy-six years and coming to this trilogy of earliest published novels brings the relevance of re-experience of Pharaonic times to our own. The historical novel is not a mummy brought to light; in Mahfouz’s hands it is alive in ourselves, our twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the complex motivations with which we tackle the undreamt-of transformation of means and accompanying aleatory forces let loose upon us. Although these three fictions were written before the Second World War, before the atom bomb, there is a prescience – in the characters, not authorial statement – of what was to come. A prescience that the writer was going to explore in relation to the historical periods he himself would live through, in the forty novels which followed.
Milan Kundera has spoken for Mahfouz and all fiction writers, saying the novelist doesn’t give answers, he asks questions. The very title of the first work in Mahfouz’s trilogy, Khufu’s Wisdom: it looks like a statement but it isn’t, it’s a question probed absorbingly, rousingly, in the book. The fourth dynasty Pharaoh, ageing Khufu, is in the first pages reclining on a gilded couch as he gazes into the distance at the thousands of labourers and slaves preparing the desert plateau for the pyramid he is building for his tomb, ‘eternal abode’. Hubris surely never matched. His glance sometimes turns to his other provision for immortality: his sons. And in those two images Mahfouz has already
conceived the theme of his novel, the power of pride against the values perhaps to be defined as wisdom. King of all Egypt, north and south, Khufu extols the virtue of power. Of the enemies whom he has conquered, declares: ‘… what cut out their tongues, what chopped off their hands, but power … What made my word the law of the land … made it a sacred duty to obey me? Was it not power.’
1 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Merlin Press, London, 1965.
His architect of the pyramid, Mirabu: ‘and divinity, my lord’. The gods are always claimed for one’s side. If the Egyptians both thanked and blamed them for everything, in our new millennium warring powers each justify themselves with the claim, God is on their side.
Mahfouz even in his early work never created a two-dimensional symbol, however mighty, always has taken on the hidden convolutions in the human personality. For Khufu, contemplating the toilers at his pyramid site, there’s ‘an inner whispering … Was it right for so many souls to be expended for the sake of his personal exaltation?’ He brushes away this self-accusation and accepts a princely son’s arrangement for an entertainment he’s told includes a surprise to please him.
There is that intermediary between divine and earthly powers, the sorcerer – representative of the other, anti-divinity, the devil? The surprise is Djedi, sorcerer ‘who knows the secrets of life and death’. After watching a feat of hypnotism, Khufu asks whether the man/woman has the kind of authority over the Unseen as over the mind of created humans: ‘Can you tell me if one of my seed is destined to sit on the throne of Egypt’s kings …’ What’s unspoken is that this is not an audience-participation TV show but a reference to the greatest political question of the times, succession to the reign of the Pharaoh.
The sorcerer pronounces: ‘Sire, after you, no one from your seed shall sit upon the throne of Egypt.’
Pharaoh Khufu is sophisticatedly sceptical. ‘Simply tell me: do you know whom the gods have reserved to succeed them on the throne of Egypt.’
He is told this is an infant newly born that morning, son of the High Priest of the Temple of Ra. Crown Prince Khafra, heir of the Pharaoh’s seed, is aghast. But there’s a glimpse of Khufu’s wisdom, if rationalism is wisdom: ‘If Fate really was as people say … the nobility of man would be debased … No, Fate is a false belief to which the strong are not fashioned to submit.’ Khufu calls upon his entourage to accompany him so that he himself ‘may look upon the tiny offspring of the Fates’.
Swiftly takes off a narrative of epic and intimacy where Mahfouz makes of a youthful writer’s tendency to melodrama, a genuine drama. The High Priest Monra has told his wife that their infant son is divinely chosen to rule as successor to the God Ra. The wife’s attendant, Sarga, overheard and she flees to warn Pharaoh Khufu of the threat. Monra fears this means his divinely appointed son will therefore be killed. He hides mother and newborn with the attendant Zaya on a wagon loaded with wheat, for escape. On the way to the home of the High Priest Khufu’s entourage encounters Sarga in flight from pursuit by Monra’s men; so Khufu learns the facts of the sorcerer’s malediction and in reward orders her to be escorted to her father’s home.
When Khufu arrives to look upon the threat to his lineage he subjects the High Priest to a cross-examination worthy of a formidable lawyer in court.
‘You are advanced in both knowledge and wisdom … tell me: why do the gods enthrone pharaohs over Egypt?’
‘They select them from among their [the pharaohs’] sons, endowing them with the divine spirit to make the nation prosper.’
‘Thus can you tell me what Pharaoh must do regarding his throne?’
‘He must carry out his obligations … claim his proper rights.’
Monra knows what he’s been led to admit. There follows a scene of horror raising the moral doubt, intellectual powerlessness that makes such over-the-top scenes undeniably credible in Mahfouz’s early work. Obey the god Ra or the secular power Khufu? There comes to Monra ‘a fiendish idea of which a priest ought to be totally innocent’. He takes Khufu to a room where another of his wife’s handmaidens has given birth to a boy, implying this is his son in the care of a nurse. With the twists of desperate human cunning Mahfouz knows so instinctively, the situation is raised another decibel.
Monra is expected to eliminate his issue. ‘Sire, I have no weapon with which to kill.’ Khafra, Pharaoh’s seed, shoves his dagger into Monra’s hand. In revulsion against himself the High Priest thrusts it into his own heart. Khafra with a cold will (to remind oneself of, much later) has no hesitation in ensuring the succession. He beheads the infant and the woman.
There is another encounter, on the journey back to Pharaoh’s palace, another terrified woman, apparently pursued by a Bedouin band. Once more compassionate, he orders that the poor creature with her baby be taken to safety – she says she was on her way to join her husband, a worker on the pyramid construction. Mahfouz, like a master detective-fiction writer, lets us in on something vitally portentous his central character, Khufu, does not know; and that would change the entire narrative if he did. The woman is Zaya. She has saved the baby from Bedouin attack on the wheat wagon.
Mahfouz’s marvellous evocation, with the mid-twentieth-century setting of his Cairo trilogy139, of the depth of the relationship between rich and aristocratic family men and courtesans, pimps, concurrent with lineal negotiations with marriage brokers, exemplifies an ignored class interdependency. His socialist convictions that were to oppose, in all his work, the posit that class values, which regard the lives of the ‘common people’ as less representative of the grand complex mystery the writer deciphers in human existence, begins in this other, early trilogy. The encounter with Zaya moves his story from those who believe themselves to be the representatives of the gods, to the crowd-scene protagonists in life. The servant Zaya’s desolation when she learns her husband has died under the brutal conditions of pyramid labour, and the pragmatic courage of her subsequent life devotedly caring for baby Djedef, whom she must present as her own son, opens a whole society both coexistent with and completely remote from the awareness of the Pharaoh, whose desire for immortality has brought it about. The families of his pyramid workers have made in the wretched quarter granted them outside the mammoth worksite Pharaoh gazed on, ‘a burgeoning low-priced bazaar’. There Djedef grows to manhood. Zaya, one of Mahfouz’s many varieties of female beauty, has caught the eye of the inspector of the pyramid, Bisharu, and does not fail to see survival for herself and the child in getting him to marry her. Mahfouz’s conception of beauty includes intelligence; he may be claimed to be a feminist, particularly when, in later novels, he is depicting a Muslim society where women’s place is male-decreed: a bold position in twentieth-century Egypt, though nothing as dangerous as his criticism, through the lives of his characters, of aspects of Islamic religious orthodoxy that brought him accusations of blasphemy and a near-fatal attack by a fanatic.
Djedef chooses a military career; his ‘mother’ proudly sees him as a future officer of the Pharaoh’s charioteers. While his putative father asks himself whether he should continue to claim this progeniture or proclaim the truth? But that once again would be a different novel and the one whose heights Mahfouz is mounting will not have the pyramid inspector determine a route.
Pharaoh Khufu has been out of the action and the reader’s sight; it almost seems the author has abandoned the subject of Khufu’s wisdom. But attention about-turns momentously. As Djedef rises from rank to rank in his military training, Pharaoh has the news from his architect: the pyramid is completed, ‘for eternity it will be the temple within whose expanse beat the hearts of millions of your worshippers’.
Fulfilment of Khufu’s hubris? Always the unforeseen, from Mahfouz. Khufu has gone through a change. He does not rejoice, and when Mirabu asks, ‘What so clearly occupies your mind, my lord?’, comes the reply, ‘Has history ever known a king whose mind was carefree … is it right for a person to exult over the constructi
on of his grave?’
As for the hubris of immortality: ‘Do not forget the fact that immortality is itself a death for our dear, ephemeral lives … What have I done for the sake of Egypt … what the people have done for me is double what I have done for them.’
He has decided to write ‘a great book’, ‘guiding their souls and protecting their bodies’ with knowledge. The place where he will write it is the burial chamber in his pyramid. If the wisdom claimed for the Pharaoh in the book’s title has appeared to be intended to be ironic, it now proves to have been the counter-line of tension only a writer of subtle strength may hold between himself and the reader.
There are more changes of identity, outward ones.
The first notes in Mahfouz’s recurrent theme of that other power, sexual love, life-enhancing or destructive, is heard in army commander Djedef’s passion for a peasant girl who really is a princess.
Crown Prince Khafra’s professed love for his father is really an impatience to inherit the throne.
Mahfouz puts Khufu’s wisdom to what surely is the final test of any such concept: attempted parricide. The horror is foiled only by another: Djedef killing Khufu’s own seed, Crown Prince Khafra. What irony in tragedy conveyed by vivid scenes of paradox: it is the sorcerer’s pronouncement that is fulfilled, not the hubris of an eternal abode. Djedef of divine prophecy is declared future Pharaoh with the seemingly unattainable princess as consort, after a moving declaration by a father who has seen his own life saved – only by the death of his son. He calls for papyrus: ‘that I may conclude my book of wisdom with the gravest lesson that I have learned in my life …’ Then he throws the pen away. With it goes the vanity of human attempt at immortality; Khufu’s wisdom attained.
Telling Times Page 77