Egyptian Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz sculpted characters not
just in his novels but also in the minds of his readers. Cinema also helped
him. No Arab novelist has had more films made based on his novels. As a result,
his written words and the films that different filmmakers have made of them
allowed Mahfouz to imprint his characters deep in the Arab imagination.
اضافة اعلان
There is a kind
of dictatorship in talent. Mahfouz did not leave his readers with options about
how to think about his characters. They are free to judge, of course. But they
are also given all the details, from the externals (decisions, actions, choices
and how they are made and carried out) to the internals (the why of what
happens, typically delivered gradually in Mahfouz’s trademark internal
monologues).
Although these
internal expositions are difficult to portray in moving pictures, filmmakers
have been faithful to this Mahfouz-esque way of revealing the layers of his
characters. Mahfouz did not even leave readers with words and phrases they were
familiar with, even if they were native Arabic speakers with adequate exposure
to Egypt’s different verbal registers. He invented “speaking flows” for his
characters, not just styles of talking that actors could adopt in portraying
the characters in films. These flows were intended to show in all their rawness
how his characters thought.
Many of
Mahfouz’s characters became synonymous with certain themes, transcending collections
of phrases and coming, in the Arab collective consciousness, to encapsulate
certain meanings. Certain characters, as Mahfouz formed them, became associated
with certain emotions, say melancholy for a lost era (in the novel Miramar for
example), or suppressed anger coming to the surface as pleasure-seeking
nihilism (in Chatter on the Nile).
Whereas for many
of his international readers, Mahfouz was the creator of a universe of
Egyptianness that they could sail into, stopping at different constellations,
the Cairo Trilogy, for example, or even black holes of grief (such as Autumn
Quail), for his Egyptian and probably also many Arab readers, Mahfouz was a
creator of characters that are primarily understood as concentrations of
themes.
His success was
colossal, and yet at the moment when Mahfouz had all the freedom he could wish
for in order to write what he wanted in the way that he wanted he stopped
making characters. In fact, he banished them completely from his writings.
This freedom was
important to him, but it had been long in coming. Mahfouz began writing
seriously in the 1940s when his favorite political party, the Wafd, was in open
disagreement with former king Farouk. During the rule of former president Gamal
Abdel-Nasser, in the 1950s and 1960s, Mahfouz was careful about what he wrote.
While he published arguably his deepest socio-political work in these decades,
he did so without antagonizing the powers that be. By the 1970s and early
1980s, age was taking its toll.
The Nobel Prize
for Literature came in old age. With it came a financial windfall for a man
with two daughters who, like all Egyptian men of his generation, was concerned
about the cost of finding “al-gehaz” (their dowries). With the Nobel Prize also
came Mahfouz’s untouchability by any censor or critic. Who would dare criticize
the work of the only Arab author ever to achieve such a prestigious
international accolade?
Mahfouz’s “dreams” were intentional dives into an ocean of meanings, out of which he selected, put together and then put forward what he wanted his readers to think of as his last words.
Freedom also
came after a knifing in the neck. Asked what he thought of the 22-year-old who
attempted to kill him in the 1990s because he had heard Muslim sheikhs denounce
his writings as heretical, the 82-year-old Mahfouz said he wished the young man
in question had read his work and thought about it for himself.
In these
precious years until his death roughly a decade after the attack, Mahfouz
stripped his ideas from his characters. He soared away from his beloved Cairo,
with its political, societal and emotional complications. Instead, he flew
inside himself, seeing in the internal what is external, connecting his own world
of ideas with what he imagined was a cosmos of ideals. In these years, Mahfouz
wrote of the beyond and of what many critics saw as an old man’s reflections on
death. But his beyond was more than abstractions abut the end of life, for
Mahfouz’s words were as much about beginnings as they were about endings.
He consistently
chose to label many of his writings of this last period “dreams”. But their
coherence, direction and subtle confidence were far from the vagueness,
circularity and beguiling fluidity of dreams. Mahfouz’s “dreams” were
intentional dives into an ocean of meanings, out of which he selected, put
together and then put forward what he wanted his readers to think of as his
last words.
His insistence
on making these dreams devoid of any key characters, including himself, could
not be anything but intentional. In contrast to his works over the previous six
decades, in this last period Mahfouz pushed ideas and ideals to the forefront,
allowing them to penetrate his readers’ minds without any coating of the flesh
of characters or circumstances. Just before waving goodbye, or perhaps au
revoir, the old man made sure that his last thoughts, his last words, carried
nothing but their innate meanings.
This direct aim
at meaning might have been a reflection of where Mahfouz found himself in this
last stage of his life. Perhaps, freed from the shackles of navigating
society’s politics and norms and freed from the need to create for a living, he
had found an easier way to long-sought meanings. Instead of unfolding meanings
through the protracted journeys of complex characters in novel form, he found
that going directly towards the desired ends paid off more quickly and
effectively.
Some think of
these last works by Mahfouz in a Roman Catholic sense, seeing in them his
admission of an earlier sin of omission. It was as if those last words were his
way of saying what he could not have said in the earlier six decades. However,
this is not true. Mahfouz had earlier been cautious, but that was not the
point. What he had said in the previous six decades and in the long journeys of
characters whose lives he had laboriously laid out in front of us in his novels
had been necessary for Mahfouz himself and was also necessary for those who
read his later work to arrive at understanding the new direct routes he was
taking. In a way, the long journeys had been a process of growth for Mahfouz
that was necessary for the directness that was to follow.
An old saying
says that books take on lives of their own after publication. This will happen
to Mahfouz’s last collections of reflections and dreams. Although these later
works are now generally treated as separate from his novels, I think they will
come to be seen as the seal of his literary output. Perhaps in his own way, Mahfouz
was following the Islamic schools of gnosis that have sought to subtly educate
before raising the eyes to heaven with the mantra “O Omniscient, I have been
informed.”
Tarek Osman is the author
of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
A version of this article appeared in print in the February 6, 2020, edition of
Al-Ahram Weekly.
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