Naguib Mahfouz: Achievements, Contribution, and Impact - Essay Example

Naguib Mahfouz: Achievements, Contribution and Impact By s s Educational 2,184 Words Introduction Naguib Mahfouz is today perhaps the most distinguished novelist in the Arab world, the result of winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988. His output includes more than thirty novels, along with a number of short story anthologies and plays (Lalami 2006, p.1). Several of his novels have been made into films, and many have been translated into foreign languages, especially English. His winning of the Nobel Prize has undoubtedly catapulted Mahfouz into a position of international literary renown. This discussion will attempt to analyze the life of Mahfouz as well as his works and the way he perceived the world. Considerable recognition will also be given to his contribution to the world of literature through his many successful works which will certainly never fade away even though he has passed. Background The story of Naguib Mahfouz is similar to the story of modern Egypt itself (Lalami 2006, p.1). Born in 1911 in the Gamaliya district of Cairo, Mahfouz observed the very last days of British colonial rule and Ottoman influence, the nationalist struggle of Saad Zaghloul, the supremacy of King Fuad and King Farouq, the military revolution of 1952, the establishment of the republic, Gamal Abdel Nasser's takeover in 1954, the Suez Canal disaster, the rule of Anwar al-Sadat, the Camp David accords of 1978 and finally the brutal dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak together with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism (Lalami 2006, p.1). A devoted reader, Mahfouz had a lifelong infatuation for the history of ancient Egypt, predominantly its pharaohs: Akhenaten, who rejected pantheism in favor of monotheism; Menenre II, who ruled briefly at the end of the sixth dynasty; Khufu, who built the great pyramid at Giza and Nefertiti, Akhenaten's wife and mother-in-law to Tutankhamen (Breasted 1912, p.56). The Work of Mahfouz Mahfouz published his earliest novel in 1939 (The Games of Fate), and since then has written thirty-two novels and thirteen collections of short stories (Allen 1982, p.17). In his old age he had preserved his prolific output, producing a novel every year. The novel genre, which can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, has no significant prototypes in classical Arabic writing (Allen 1982, p.26). Although this thrived in all kinds of narrative, none of them could be described as we recognize the term novel today (Hashmi 1986, p.19). Naguib, who was born to a middle-class family in one of the oldest quarters in Cairo, was to give a face to influential metaphors, in excess of a period of half a century, to the expectations and frustrations of his homeland. Readers have so often identified themselves with his work, a great deal of which has been adapted for the cinema, theater and television, that many of his characters become household names in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab region (Allen 1982, p.26). Alternatively, 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 backgrounds (Allen 1982, p.17). Views on Life Even though Mahfouz's novelistic methods have 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 (Allen 1982, p.17). Mahfouz appears 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 right up until his death. A sociopolitical vision of man's existence is at the very root of almost everything that Mahfouz has written. Even in a novel with a strong metaphysical claim such as "Al-Tariq" (The Way), the social message is appropriately 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 deliverance is the application of a positive and responsible effort to better his lot and that of others (Lalami 2006, p.1). The fact that Mahfouz has always been a socially committed writer with a deep concern for the difficulty of social injustice is an unquestionable reality. To him, individual decency is undividable from social morality. In other words, according to Mahfouz's moral code, those who only seek their own individual salvation are ruined; 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 unselfish motives, those who show concern for others and demonstrate a kind of awareness of their particular dilemma being part of a more general one. The Output of Mahfouz A study of Mahfouz's output shows his fiction to have progressed through 4 noticeable stages. The first (1939-44) includes three novels based on the history of ancient Egypt (Hashmi 1986, p.19). They provide a useful insight into the evolution of the then young new writer. Admittedly written under the influence of Sir Walter Scott's historical romances, the last of the three, "The Struggle of Thebes", is particularly interesting for the way in which the novelist brought history to bear on the political scene at the time (El-Enany 1993, p.195). The novel draws on the heroic struggle of the Egyptians and their patriotic Pharaohs to expel the Hyksos, as foreign ruling invaders, from their country (Atiyya 1991, p.3). The novel bore a relevance to Egyptian sociopolitical reality at the time that was all too obvious to be missed. Mahfouz had meant to write a whole series of novels encompassing the full history of Pharaonic Egypt; he even did the research required for such a monumental task (El-Enany 1993, p.203). In the event, and perhaps luckily for the development of the Arabic novel, he was willingly 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 (Atiyya 1991, p.3). 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 (El-Enany 1993, p.195). 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 (El-Enany 1993, p.203). 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 (Atiyya 1991, p.3). For his Trilogy, the peak of his realist or naturalist phase, the Egyptian people will forever stand in their great novelist's debt. 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, which met with instant wide acclaim and served to focus renewed attention on his previous work, Mahfouz fell uncharacteristically silent for a number of years (1952-59) - the Trilogy having been completed four years before its publication. Different theories exist as to why this happened. One theory held by Ghaly Shukri, a well-known Mahfouz scholar, is that by writing the Trilogy Mahfouz had brought the realistic technique to a point of perfection which he could not possibly surpass (Hashmi 1986, p.19). He thus needed a period of incubation in which to look for a new style. Whatever the reason, 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" as children of Gebe-lawi, was a unique metaphor of human history from beginning to the present day. "The Thief and the Dogs", published in 1982, is in a way like switching from a Dickens or a Balzac to a Graham Greene or a William Golding, so radical was the change that this style underwent in the third stage of his development. 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 (El-Enany 1993, p.203). 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, a pattern of evocative vocabulary and imagery binds the work together, 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 (El-Enany 1993, p.203). 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, to novels of direct social and political commentary (El-Enany 1993, p.212). Mahfouz himself was aware of the new turn his work had taken. In the mid-seventies Mahfouz was again searching for a new style (Atiyya 1991, p.3). 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 (El-Enany 1993, p.203). 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 (El-Enany 1993, p.212). But Mahfouz no longer wanted 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 includes (Hashmi 1986, p.19). While any talk of an organic unity in these works is precluded, the presence of what may be called a 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, before his death (Atiyya 1991, p.3). 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. Conclusion: The World of Mahfouz The image of the world as it emerges from the majority of Mahfouz's work is very gloomy, though not completely hopeless (Lalami 2006, p.1). 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. Conclusively, in Mahfouz's dark realm of the world there are only two bright spots. These consist of man's continuing struggle for fairness on the one hand and the promise of scientific progress on the other (Lalami 2006, p.5). Mahfouz creates a complicated pattern of verbal irony which he weaves into the very texture of the novel and maintains throughout (Simaika 2004, p.2). This pattern of verbal irony produces in the reader an awareness of the incongruity between the object and mode of expression, i.e. the realistic situation and the terms in which it is rendered. This awareness creates and sustains, all the way through, a sense of dramatic irony where the reader is, as it were, aware of a basic fact of which the protagonist is ignorant, namely that his obsession has misguided him (Simaika 2004, p.3). It is in the creation and containment of this pattern of verbal irony, and in the complete overthrow of the novelistic experience to a language order originally alien to it, that Mahfouz has achieved a feat unparalleled not only in his own work but probably in Arabic fiction in general (Charters 1995, p.848). . References Allen, R. The Arabic Novel: A Historical and Critical Introduction. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1982. Atiyya, A. ''Naguib Mahfouz and the Short Story,'' in Critical Perspectives on Naguib Mahfouz, Three Continents Press, Washington, D.C., 1991. Breasted, J. A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, 2nd Ed. N.Y.: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1912. Charters, A. Introduction to ''Half a Day'' by Naguib Mahfouz, in The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, 4th ed., Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1995, p. 848. El-Enany, R. Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 195, 203, 212. Hashmi, A. The Worlds of Muslim Imagination. Oxford University press: 1986. Lalami, L. Naguib Mahfouz: An Appreciation. The Nation: 2006. p.1. "Najib Mahfouz: Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1988." World Literature Today 63 (1989): p.5-9. "Naguib Mahfouz. The life of an Egyptian." Edinburgh and London: E & S Livingstone Ltd, 1966. Simaika, Y. "Naguib Mahfouz: the man who dedicated his life to literature", Watani International, 25 July 2004. Read More