Naguib Mahfouz

Background
Born on December 11,1911, in al-Gammaliya, 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 then 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. 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. Readers have so often identified themselves with his work, a great deal of which has been adapted for the cinema, theater and television. 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.

Mahfouz had meant to write a whole series of novels encompassing the full history of Pharaonic Egypt. 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 obligation. 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, Mahfouz fell uncharacteristically silent for a number of years (1952-59) - the Trilogy having been completed four years before its publication. 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. 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, 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 that 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 Depicts 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 consist of man's continuing struggle for equality on the one hand and the promise of scientific progress on the other.