Nadine Gordimer - Living in Hope and History - Notes from Our Century

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.