Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

THE DIALOGUE OF LATE AFTERNOON

I have visited Egypt three times in my life and have never met Naguib Mahfouz. The first times, 1954 and 1958, I had not heard of him or his work; by the third time, 1993, all his work available in English translation was deeply familiar to me and counted, in my canon, as part of the few great international contemporary literary achievements. In 1993 I had asked my kind hosts to arrange for us to meet, but in their zeal to make me welcome they planned for this to happen at a large gathering with other Egyptian writers, and Naguib Mahfouz, by temperament and in the deserved privacy of old age, does not attend such public events. My days in Cairo were few and there was not time to seek another opportunity. It does not matter. The essence of a writer’s being is in the work, not the personality, though the world values things otherwise, and would rather see what the writer looks like on television than read where he or she really is to be found: in the writings.

I am inclined to believe that a similar valuation may be applied to autobiography. The writer’s gift to fellow humans is his or her gifts, the bounty of the creative imagination which comes from no-one knows where or why. The persona of the writer is the vessel. Whether it is flamboyantly decorated by a life-style of excess in alcoholism, adventurism, sexual experiment, or whether it is sparsely chased by what appears to be domestic dullness, its content has been poured into the work; the truth of it is there. (Sometimes in spite of the author. .) Of course there are exceptions, but in general fiction writers who produce autobiographies are those whose autobiographies are better than their novels. Which has something to indicate about the limitation of their gifts. Let the biographers trace the chronology of life from the circumstances of the birth to the honoured or forgotten grave. What that span produced is already extant, transformed, freed from place and time.

The aphorisms, parables, allegories in the latest work of Naguib Mahfouz, Echoes of an Autobiography, have no dates appended. It’s of no account when he wrote them. The back-and-forth of a mind creating its consciousness expands and contracts, rather than roves between past and present, with a totality which is not merely memory. Indeed, with the wry humour that flashes through profundity in all his thinking, Mahfouz meets memory as ‘an enormous person with a stomach as large as the ocean, and a mouth that could swallow an elephant. I asked him in amazement, “Who are you, sir?” He answered with surprise, “I am forgetfulness. How could you have forgotten me?” ‘ The totality is comprehension of past and present experience as elements which exist contemporaneously. These pieces are meditations which echo that which was, has been, and is the writer Mahfouz. They are — in the words of the title of one of its prose pieces—‘The Dialogue of Late Afternoon’ of his life. I don’t believe any autobiography, with its inevitable implication of self-presentation, could have matched what we have here.

If the prose pieces in Echoes of an Autobiography have no dates they do each have a title, and these in themselves are what one might call the essence of the essence of Mahfouz’s discoveries in and contemplation of life. The preoccupations so marvellously explored in his fiction appear almost ideographically, the single word or phrase standing for morality, justice, time, religion, memory, sensuality, beauty, ambition, death, freedom. And all these are regarded through a changing focus: narrowing briefly to cynical; taking the middle distance of humour and affection; opening wide to reverence. Prompted by his own words — another title, ‘The Train of the Unexpected’—I take the liberty of paraphrasing myself in what I have remarked elsewhere of Mahfouz: he has the gift of only great writers to contemplate all the possibilities inherent in life rather than discard this or that awkwardness for consistency. The stimulus of his writing comes from the conflict of responses he elicits.

In ‘A Man Reserves a Seat’ a bus from a working-class suburb and a private car from a wealthy one set out for Cairo’s station at the same moment, and arrive at the same time, colliding in an accident in which both are slightly damaged. But a man passing between the two is crushed and dies. ‘He was crossing the Square to book a seat on the train going to Upper Egypt.’ As one reads this laconic concluding sentence, almost an aside, the title suddenly leaps out, heavy type, in all the complexity of the many meanings it may carry. I read it thus: rich and poor arrive at the same point in human destiny whatever their means. Even the man who travels with neither, seeking to pass between the two, cannot escape; you cannot reserve a seat in destiny. There is no escape from the human condition, the final destination of which is death.

Naguib Mahfouz is an old man and it would be natural for him to reflect on that destiny/destination, inescapable for believers and unbelievers alike. But those of us who know his work know that he always has had death in mind as part of what life itself is. We are all formed by the social structures which are the corridors through which we are shunted and it is a reflection of the power of bureaucracy, the Egyptian civil service as regulator of existence and the height of ambition for a prestigious career, that his allegory of death should be entitled ‘The Next Posting’. The question with which the allegory ends is one he may be asking himself now, but that he has contemplated for his fictional characters much earlier: ‘Why did you not prepare yourself when you knew it was your inevitable destiny?’ It is said — perhaps be has said, although he takes care to evade interviews and ‘explanations’ of his work — that Marcel Proust has influenced him. ‘Shortly Before Dawn’, ‘Happiness’, and ‘Music’ are disparate encounters in old age, where we shall not be recognizable to one another, as in the final gathering at the end of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, but the mood is un-Proustian in the compensation that something vivid remains from what one has lost. In ‘Music’ the singer has been forgotten but the tawashih music she sang is still a delight. Life takes up the eternal, discards the temporal.

Politics: almost as inevitable as death, in account of a lifetime in Mahfouz’s span and ours, children of the twentieth century. The morality of politics is intricately and inextricably knotted to the morality of personal relations in Mahfouz’s masterpiece, The Cairo Trilogy, and in some of his lesser works. In ‘Layla’ (the title is the woman’s name in a tale in Echoes of an Autobiography) sexual morality is another strand. ‘In the days of the struggle of ideas’ Layla was a controversial figure. ‘An aura of beauty and allurement’ surrounded her and while some saw her as a liberated pioneer of freedom, others criticised her as nothing but an immoral woman. ‘When the sun set and the struggle and ideas disappeared from sight. . many emigrated. . Years later they returned, each armed with a purse of gold and a cargo of disrepute.’ Layla laughs, and enquires, ‘I wonder what you have to say now about immorality?’ The essential question ‘When will the state of the country be sound?’ is answered: ‘When its people believe that the end result of cowardice is more disastrous than that of behaving with integrity.’ But this politico-moral imperative is not so easy to follow. In a political dispute (‘The Challenge’) a minister in government is asked, ‘Can you show me a person who is clean and unsullied?’, and the answer comes: ‘You need but one example of many — the children, the idiotic, and the mad — and the world’s still doing fine!’

Again, Mahfouz’s surprise about-face startles, flipping from biting condemnation to — what? Irony, cynicism, accusatory jeers at ourselves? Or is there a defiance there? The defiance of survival, if not ‘doing fine’ morally, then as expressed by the courtesan in ‘Question and Answer’ who says, ‘I used to sell love at a handsome profit, and I came to buy it at a considerable loss. I have no other choice with this wicked but fascinating life.’ In ‘Eternity’ one of the beggars, outcast sheikhs, and blind men who wander through Mahfouz’s works as the elusive answer to salvation, says, ‘With the setting of each sun I lament my wasted days, my declining countries, and my transitory gods.’ It is a cry of mourning for the world that Mahfouz sounds here; but not an epitaph, for set against it is the perpetuation, no choice, of this ‘wicked but fascinating life’.

At a seminar following a lecture I gave on Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy at Harvard a few years ago some feminists attacked his depiction of women characters in the novel; they were outraged at the spectacle of Amina, Al-Sayid Ahmad Abd al-Jawal’s wife, forbidden to leave the family house unless in the company of her husband, and at the account of the fate of the girls in the family, married off to men of Jawal’s choice without any concern for their own feelings, and without the possibility of an alternative independent existence. The students were ready to deny the genius of the novel on these grounds. It was a case of killing the messenger: Mahfouz was relaying the oppression of Amina and her daughters as it existed; he was not its advocate. His insight to the complex socio-sexual mores, the seraglio-prison that distorted the lives of women members of Jawal’s family, was a protest far more powerful than that of those who accused him of literary chauvinism.

In this present echo of the values of Mahfouz’s lifetime, woman is the symbol not only of beauty and joy in being alive but also of spiritual release. This is personified as, in celebration, not male patronage, ‘a naked woman with the bloom of the nectar of life’ who has ‘the heart of music as her site’. The Proustian conception (let us grant it, even if only in coincidence with Mahfouz’s own) of love as pain/joy, inseparably so, also has a Mahfouzian wider reference as a part of the betrayal by time itself, let alone any lover. Entitled ‘Mercy’, the apergu reflects on an old couple: ‘They were brought together by love thirty years ago, then it had abandoned them with the rest of expectations.’

Love of the world, ‘this wicked but fascinating life’, is the dynamism shown to justify itself as essential to religious precepts sometimes in its very opposition to them. The greed for life is admissible to Mahfouz in all his work; against which, of course, there is juxtaposed excess as unfulfilment. Yet how unashamedly joyous is the parable of’The Bridegroom’: ‘I asked Sheik Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih about his ideal among those people with whom he had been associated, and he said: “A good man whose miracles were manifested by his perseverance in the service of people and the remembrance of God; on his hundredth birthday he drank, danced, sang, and married a virgin of twenty. And on the wedding night there came a troop of angels who perfumed him with incense from the mountains of Qaf at the end of the earth.” ’

It is detachment that sins against life. When the narrator tells the Sheikh, ‘I heard some people holding against you your intense love for the world’, the Sheikh answers, ‘Love of the world is one of the signs of gratitude, and evidence of a craving for everything beautiful.’ Yet this is no rosy denial that life is sad: ‘It has been decreed that man shall walk staggeringly between pleasure and pain.’ Decreed by whom? The responsibility for this is perhaps aleatory, cosmic rather than religious, if one may make such a distinction? And there is the question of mortality, since nowhere in these stoic but not materialist writings is there expressed any belief in after-life, or any desire for it; paradise is not an end for which earthly existence is the means. This life, when explored and embraced completely and fearlessly by tender sceptic and obdurate pursuer of salvation Naguib Mahfouz, is enough. Mortality becomes the Sheikh’s serene and exquisite image: ‘There is nothing between the lifting of the veil from the face of the bride and the lowering of it over her corpse but a moment that is like a heartbeat.’ And after a premonition of death one night, all the Sheikh asks of God, instead of eternal life, is ‘well-being, out of pity for people who were awaiting my help the following day.’

If sexual love and sensuality in the wider sense of all its forms is not an element opposed to, apart from, spirituality, there is at the same time division within that acceptance, for life itself is conceived by Mahfouz as a creative tension between desires and moral precepts. On the one hand, sensuality is the spirit of life, life-force; on the other, abstinence is the required condition to attain spirituality.

It is said that Mahfouz has been influenced by Sufism. My own acquaintance with Sufism is extremely superficial, confined to an understanding that its central belief is that the awakening to the inner life of man is a necessary condition of fulfilment as a human being, while both the outer and inner realities are inseparable. Readers like myself may receive Sufism through the transmission of Mahfouz as, for precedent, anyone who is not a Christian may receive Christian beliefs in the Pensées: through Pascal. (And by the way, there is a direct connection there, between the paths of the Sufi and the Christian. Pascal: ‘To obtain anything from God, the external must be joined to the internal.’) Faith, no matter what its doctrine, takes on the contours of individual circumstance, experience, and the meditation upon these of the adherent. We therefore may take manifestations of Sufi religious philosophy that are to be discerned in Mahfouz’s thinking as more likely to be his own gnosis, original rather than doctrinal. There is surely no heresy in this; only celebration of the doubled creativity: a resplendent intelligence applied to the tenets of what has to be taken on faith.

If we are to take a definitive reading of where Mahfouz stands in relation to faith, I think we must remember what his most brilliantly conceived character, Kamal, has declared in The Cairo Trilogy. ‘The choice of a faith still has not been decided. The great consolation I have is that it is not over yet.’ For Mahfouz, life is a search in which one must find one’s own signposts. The text for this is his story ‘Zaabalawi’. When a sick man goes on a pilgrimage through ancient Cairo to seek healing from the saintly Sheikh Zaabalawi, everybody he asks for directions sends him somewhere different. Told at last he will find the saint (who is also dissolute: see unity-in-dichotomy, again) in a bar, the weary man falls asleep waiting for him to appear. When he wakes, he finds his head wet. The drinkers tell him Zaabalawi came while he was asleep and sprinkled water on him to refresh him. Having had this sign of Zaabalawi’s existence, the man will go on searching for him all his life—‘Yes, I have to findZaabalawi.’

The second half of the prose in the present collection is devoted to the utterances and experiences of another Sheikh, one Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih, who as his spokesman is perhaps Naguib Mahfouz’s imagined companion of some of the saintly sages in Sufi history, such as Rabi’a al-Adawiya (a woman) of Basra, Imam Junayd al-Baghdadi of Persia, Khwaja Mu’in’ud-Din Chisti of India, Sheikh Muzaffer of Istanbul. He is also, surely, Zaabalawi, and brother of all the other wanderers who appear and disappear to tantalize the yearning for meaning and salvation in the streets of Mahfouz’s works, offering and withdrawing fragments of answer to the mystery of existence, and guidance of how to live it well. This one, when first he makes his appearance in the quarter of Cairo invented for Mahfouz’s notebooks, is heard to call out: ‘A stray one has been born, good fellows.’ The essence of this stray one’s teaching is in his response to the narrator, Everyman rather than Mahfouz, who gives as his claim to join the Sheikh’s Platonic cave of followers, ‘I have all but wearied of the world and wish to flee from it.’ The Sheikh says, ‘Love of the world is the core of our brotherhood and our enemy is flight.’

One of the Sheikh’s adages is: ‘The nearest man comes to his Lord is when he is exercising his freedom correctly.’ Many of Mahfouz’s parables are of the intransigence of authority and the hopelessness of merely petitioning the powers of oppression. With the devastating ‘After You Come Out of Prison’ one can’t avoid comparison with Kafka, although I have tried to do so since Kafka is invoked to inflate the false profundity of any piece of whining against trivial frustrations. In answer to a journalist’s question, ‘What is the subject closest to your heart?’

Mahfouz gave one of the rare responses in his own person: ‘Freedom. Freedom from colonization, freedom from the absolute rule of kings, basic human freedom in the context of society and family. These types of freedom follow one from the other.’ This love of freedom breathes from every line in this book. It is imbued with what his character Kamal has called ‘a struggle towards truth aiming at the good of mankind as a whole. . life would be meaningless without that’ and with the tolerance Kamal’s friend Husayn has defined: ‘The Believer derives his love for these values from religion, while the free man loves them for themselves.’

Whatever your personal hermeneutics, it is impossible to read Mahfouz’s work without gaining, with immense pleasure and in all gratitude, illumination through a quality that has come to be regarded as a quaint anachronism in modern existence, where information is believed to have taken its place. I pronounce with hesitation: Wisdom. Mahfouz has it. It dangles before us a hold on the mystery. Mahfouz is himself a Zaabalawi.

— 1996