Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

the miniaturization of people … the world is frequently taken to be a fixed federation of ‘civilisations’ or ‘cultures’, ignoring the relevance of other ways in which people see themselves, involving class, gender, profession, language, science, morals, and politics. This reductionism of high theory can make a major contribution, if inadvertently, to the violence of low politics … people are, in effect, put into little boxes … ignoring the many different ways — economic, political, cultural, civic and social — in which people relate with one another within regional boundaries and across them … the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of powerful categorisation. 137

Isn’t this one of the answers to the fundamentalists of faith and reason? As amply evidenced in his other writings, Amartya Sen is the last economist who could ever be accused of bypassing the fundament of the gap between rich and poor. This, his other aspect of human order, is a revelation of some of the methodology that maintains the great divide.

2006

‘What matters in the historical novel is not the telling of great historical events, but the poet’s awakening of people who figure in those events. What matters is that we should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical realities.’ 138

Naguib Mahfouz adds another dimension to what matters. Reading back through his work written over seventy-six years and coming to this trilogy of earliest published novels brings the relevance of re-experience of Pharaonic times to our own. The historical novel is not a mummy brought to light; in Mahfouz’s hands it is alive in ourselves, our twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the complex motivations with which we tackle the undreamt-of transformation of means and accompanying aleatory forces let loose upon us. Although these three fictions were written before the Second World War, before the atom bomb, there is a prescience — in the characters, not authorial statement — of what was to come. A prescience that the writer was going to explore in relation to the historical periods he himself would live through, in the forty novels which followed.

Milan Kundera has spoken for Mahfouz and all fiction writers, saying the novelist doesn’t give answers, he asks questions. The very title of the first work in Mahfouz’s trilogy, Khufu’s Wisdom : it looks like a statement but it isn’t, it’s a question probed absorbingly, rousingly, in the book. The fourth dynasty Pharaoh, ageing Khufu, is in the first pages reclining on a gilded couch as he gazes into the distance at the thousands of labourers and slaves preparing the desert plateau for the pyramid he is building for his tomb, ‘eternal abode’. Hubris surely never matched. His glance sometimes turns to his other provision for immortality: his sons. And in those two images Mahfouz has already conceived the theme of his novel, the power of pride against the values perhaps to be defined as wisdom. King of all Egypt, north and south, Khufu extols the virtue of power. Of the enemies whom he has conquered, declares: ‘… what cut out their tongues, what chopped off their hands, but power … What made my word the law of the land … made it a sacred duty to obey me? Was it not power.’

1 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Merlin Press, London, 1965.

His architect of the pyramid, Mirabu: ‘and divinity, my lord’. The gods are always claimed for one’s side. If the Egyptians both thanked and blamed them for everything, in our new millennium warring powers each justify themselves with the claim, God is on their side.

Mahfouz even in his early work never created a two-dimensional symbol, however mighty, always has taken on the hidden convolutions in the human personality. For Khufu, contemplating the toilers at his pyramid site, there’s ‘an inner whispering … Was it right for so many souls to be expended for the sake of his personal exaltation?’ He brushes away this self-accusation and accepts a princely son’s arrangement for an entertainment he’s told includes a surprise to please him.

There is that intermediary between divine and earthly powers, the sorcerer — representative of the other, anti-divinity, the devil? The surprise is Djedi, sorcerer ‘who knows the secrets of life and death’. After watching a feat of hypnotism, Khufu asks whether the man/woman has the kind of authority over the Unseen as over the mind of created humans: ‘Can you tell me if one of my seed is destined to sit on the throne of Egypt’s kings …’ What’s unspoken is that this is not an audience-participation TV show but a reference to the greatest political question of the times, succession to the reign of the Pharaoh.

The sorcerer pronounces: ‘Sire, after you, no one from your seed shall sit upon the throne of Egypt.’

Pharaoh Khufu is sophisticatedly sceptical. ‘Simply tell me: do you know whom the gods have reserved to succeed them on the throne of Egypt.’

He is told this is an infant newly born that morning, son of the High Priest of the Temple of Ra. Crown Prince Khafra, heir of the Pharaoh’s seed, is aghast. But there’s a glimpse of Khufu’s wisdom, if rationalism is wisdom: ‘If Fate really was as people say … the nobility of man would be debased … No, Fate is a false belief to which the strong are not fashioned to submit.’ Khufu calls upon his entourage to accompany him so that he himself ‘may look upon the tiny offspring of the Fates’.

Swiftly takes off a narrative of epic and intimacy where Mahfouz makes of a youthful writer’s tendency to melodrama, a genuine drama. The High Priest Monra has told his wife that their infant son is divinely chosen to rule as successor to the God Ra. The wife’s attendant, Sarga, overheard and she flees to warn Pharaoh Khufu of the threat. Monra fears this means his divinely appointed son will therefore be killed. He hides mother and newborn with the attendant Zaya on a wagon loaded with wheat, for escape. On the way to the home of the High Priest Khufu’s entourage encounters Sarga in flight from pursuit by Monra’s men; so Khufu learns the facts of the sorcerer’s malediction and in reward orders her to be escorted to her father’s home.

When Khufu arrives to look upon the threat to his lineage he subjects the High Priest to a cross-examination worthy of a formidable lawyer in court.

‘You are advanced in both knowledge and wisdom … tell me: why do the gods enthrone pharaohs over Egypt?’

‘They select them from among their [the pharaohs’] sons, endowing them with the divine spirit to make the nation prosper.’

‘Thus can you tell me what Pharaoh must do regarding his throne?’

‘He must carry out his obligations … claim his proper rights.’

Monra knows what he’s been led to admit. There follows a scene of horror raising the moral doubt, intellectual powerlessness that makes such over-the-top scenes undeniably credible in Mahfouz’s early work. Obey the god Ra or the secular power Khufu? There comes to Monra ‘a fiendish idea of which a priest ought to be totally innocent’. He takes Khufu to a room where another of his wife’s handmaidens has given birth to a boy, implying this is his son in the care of a nurse. With the twists of desperate human cunning Mahfouz knows so instinctively, the situation is raised another decibel.