Naguib Mahfouz and the Rise of the Arabic Novel

Naguib Mahfouz, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, is by far the best known and most prolific writer in the Arab world. He has been writing novels, short stories, plays and film scripts for more than 40 years now.

To suggest the extent of his contribution to modern Arabic literature, it may suffice to remember that the novel was barely a fledgling genre in Arabic when Mahfouz began writing fiction. Through his patient, methodical and farsighted cultivation he helped establish the novel as the major form of literary expression in modern Arabic literature. To reach the wider readership of the Arab world, he consciously chose to write in classical Arabic rather than in the particular vernacular of his native country. The Nobel Prize acknowledges the universal significance of Mahfouz’s fiction.

Born in 1911 to a low-ranking civil servant, Mahfouz grew up in Gamaliyya, a tradition-rich section of historical Cairo. The presence of two grand mosques, al-Azhar and al-Husayn, in the vicinity still attracts an endless flow of visitors to that section of the city during all hours of the day. Every year, during the mawlid (birthday) of Husayn, the saint of folk religion, hundreds of thousands of people from all over Egypt flock to these quarters to seek the saint’s blessing. Mahfouz spent the formative years of his life in these old quarters so thoroughly suffused with tradition and history.

When he was 6, his family moved to a more fashionable, though no less historical, quarter of Cairo, Abbasiyya, where he attended public elementary and secondary school. At age 19, he enrolled in the Department of Philosophy at Cairo University (then King Fuad University), from which he was graduated in 1934.

Mahfouz’s training in philosophy introduced him to the secular thought of major European thinkers such as Darwin, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. His interest in secular knowledge was further augmented by the influence of Salama Mousa, an Egyptian Copt of Fabian persuasion who was working energetically to disseminate Western secular views in the Arab lands. During the early ‘30s, Mahfouz published a number of articles expounding the views of these thinkers, but he soon realized that his was not the vocation of the essayist.

For a livelihood, Mahfouz found employment as a clerk in the civil service, where he worked in various governmental departments until his retirement in 1971.

In addition to studying Western philosophy and political thought, Mahfouz also read the major works of such Western writers as Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Kafka, Ibsen, Hemingway and Faulkner, among others. English has been Mahfouz’s linguistic window onto the world.

Mahfouz’s literary career began in the late ‘30s with the publication of his first collection of short stories, “The Whisper of Madness” (1938), and a historical trilogy that dramatizes events and characters from ancient Egyptian history. (The first volume of that trilogy was published in Salama Mousa’s journal al-Majalla al-Jadida .) At the time, Mahfouz viewed this trilogy as the cornerstone of an ambitious project in which he planned to cast in fictional form the bulk of the ancient history of his native land. For this purpose he reportedly carried out painstaking research for many years and amassed an enormous amount of historical information. Though the trilogy met with considerable critical acclaim, he suddenly lost interest in the project and dropped it altogether soon thereafter.

The second and far more crucial phase of Mahfouz’s literary career begins with the publication of his novel “New Cairo” in 1945. As its title suggests, the focus in this novel shifts to contemporary life in modern Egypt. Between 1945 and 1957, Mahfouz published seven more novels, all of which were written in the mode and style of social realism. The crowning achievement of this phase, and perhaps of his entire oeuvre, is the Cairene trilogy that Mahfouz wrote before the 1952 Revolution but did not publish until 1956/57.

Concern with social issues prevails in Mahfouz’s realistic novels, many of which bear the names of the very quarters of historical Cairo in which Mahfouz grew up, e.g. “Khan al-Khalili” (1946), “Midaq Alley” (1947), “Qasr al-Shawq,” (1956) and “al-Sukkariyya” (1957). His fictional characters come largely from the lower-middle-class stratum of Cairene society and many of them bear clear autobiographical marks. Many of Mahfouz’s plots enact a search for upward mobility in a society severely strained by socioeconomic stratification. The quest is seldom successful, but the plots often are. Telling familiar stories in ever-changing, freshly nuanced ways is a major characteristic of Mahfouz’s fictional edifice and a key to understanding his widespread popularity in the Arab world.

Since realistic fiction is ultimately referable to history, the aesthetic can never be profitably divorced from the political and social in Mahfouz’s fiction, no more than it can be in the work of any major Third World writer. As Fredrick Jameson has noted, fictional texts viewed within the context of the national quest of Third World societies for a distinctive political and cultural identity acquire the status of national allegories. This is not to say that such fiction is lacking in universal significance, only that the universal is packaged in a concrete particularity of local color and specific national setting.

How intimately related the aesthetic and the political are in Mahfouz’s outlook can be gathered from the following anecdote. At the advent of the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, Mahfouz gave up writing fiction for seven years. The reason, he later explained, was his conviction that, since the declared objective of the revolution was to cure the social ills that he was dramatizing in his fiction, his task as a novelist had become superfluous. It was only after he had become disillusioned with the rule of Nasser and his fellow officers that he resumed writing fiction in 1959.

The novel he wrote after this interruption brought him into a close brush with the religious establishment of Egypt. “Children of Gebalawi” (1959) treats allegorically the history of monotheism by drawing characters whose names and actions evoke the figures of God, Adam, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Considered sacrilegious and banned from publication in Egypt, the novel was eventually published in Lebanon. The Egyptian publishing house that has exclusive rights to publishing Mahfouz’s works in Arabic still omits mention of this novel in its listing of the author’s works.

Mahfouz’s fiction took yet another turn in the early ‘60s, this time an inward turn. The six novels and two collections of short stories he published between 1961 and 1967 deal with severe existential and spiritual crises in a hauntingly lyrical style. Modernistic narrative techniques such as the interior monologue, fragmented plots, disjointed time schemes and free association predominate in the fiction of this phase. The following passage from “Miramar,” published shortly before the outbreak of the 1967 war, captures the sense of impending disaster (projected on the sea) and reveals Mahfouz’s adroitness at weaving into artistic unity elements from the private and public domains. The monologue belongs to a bankrupt playboy whose aristocratic family the 1952 Revolution dispossessed of all but “a hundred feddans” of land and whose fiancee, “Miss Blue Eyes,” has just left him:

“Ferekeeko, don’t put the blame on me. The face of the sea is dark, mottled, blue from stifled wrath: There is unappeased rage in the ceaseless hammering of the waves. Revolution! Why not? To put you where you belong, you progeny of whores, to take all your money and push your noses in the mud. Sure, I’m one of you. And I know it. That, unfortunately, is something that can’t be changed. ‘No education,’ she said, ‘and a hazardous hundred feddans .’ That’s what Miss Blue Eyes said, as she slammed the door in my face and sat down behind to wait for the next prospective stud-bull to come along.”

Since 1967, Mahfouz has written 16 more novels and 10 more collections of short stories. These vary greatly in thematic and stylistic features and defy easy categorization. They include an epic, a novel in the traditional Arabic travel genre, a fictional autobiography, a variation on the Arabian Nights, a “Dialogue With Egypt’s Leaders: From Mena to Sadat,” and, only last year, a serialized novel in Egypt’s major newspaper, Al-Ahram . During a private conversation in Cairo last year, a leading writer of the younger generation confided to me a grudging recognition of Mahfouz’s amazing versatility and prolific output. “Before any younger writer sits down to write anything he must make sure that Mahfouz has not already written that novel. And if he is lucky and Mahfouz hasn’t done it already, that is still no guarantee that he will not have done so before the younger writer gets around to writing his.”

Editor’s note: Works by Naguib Mahfouz in English translation are available from two American publishers: Columbia University Press, 562 West 113 St., New York 10025, and Three Continents Press, 1636 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20009.