The Cruelty of Memory by Edward W

Edward W.
Said NOVEMBER 30, 2000 ISSUE

Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth
by Naguib Mahfouz, Translated from the Arabic by Tagreid Abu-Hassabo
Anchor, 168 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Amam al-Arsh [Before the Throne]
by Naguib Mahfouz
Cairo: Maktabit Misr, 207 pp.
Adrift on the Nile
by Naguib Mahfouz, Translated from the Arabic by Frances Liardet
Anchor, 167 pp., (out of print)
Taht al-Mazella [Under the Shelter]
by Naguib Mahfouz
Cairo: Maktabit Misr, 207 pp.
Palace Walk: The Cairo Trilogy Part 1
by Naguib Mahfouz, Translated from the Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins, by Olive E. Kenny
Palace of Desire: The Cairo Trilogy Part 2
by Naguib Mahfouz, Translated from the Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins, by Lorne M. Kenny, by Olive E. Kenny
Sugar Street: The Cairo Trilogy Part 3
by Naguib Mahfouz, Translated from the Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins, by Angele Botros Samaan
Children of Gebelaawi
by Naguib Mahfouz, Translated from the Arabic by Philip Stewart
Passeggiata, 497 pp., $17.00 (paper)
The Harafish
by Naguib Mahfouz, Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham
Echoes from an Autobiography
by Naguib Mahfouz, Translated from the Arabic by Denys J ohnson-Davies
Miramar
by Naguib Mahfouz, Translated from the Arabic by Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud
Passeggiata, 156 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Font Size: A A
The Cruelty of Memory by Edward W. Said | The New York Review of ... https://vpn.nacs.uci.edu/+CSCO+00756767633A2F2F6A6A6A2E616C...
1 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
Before he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz was known outside the Arab
world to students of Arab or Middle Eastern studies largely as the author of picturesque
stories about lower-middle-class Cairo life. But even to them he did not seem to have a
style or perspective of his own, partly because the few translations available were very
uneven in quality and partly because he did not (and still doesnt) have one translator (and
hence one voice) who made it a lifes project to keep producing Mahfouzs prose
masterpieces in English versions.
In 1980 I tried to interest a New York publisher who was then looking for third world
books to publish in putting out several of the great writers works in first-rate translations,
but after a little reflection the idea was turned down. When I inquired why, I was told (with
no detectable irony) that Arabic was a controversial language. A few years later I had an
amiable and, from my point of view, encouraging correspondence about him with
J acqueline Onassis, who was trying to decide whether to take him on; she then became one
of the people responsible for bringing Mahfouz to Doubleday, which is where he now
resides, albeit still in rather spotty versions that dribble out without much fanfare or notice.
Rights to his English translations are held by the American University in Cairo Press, so
poor Mahfouz, who seems to have sold them off without expecting that he would someday
be a world-famous author, has no say in what has obviously been an unliterary, largely
commercial enterprise without much artistic or linguistic coherence.
To Arab readers Mahfouz does in fact have a distinctive voice, which displays a
remarkable mastery of language yet does not call attention to itself. But in English he
sounds like each of his translators, most of whom (with one or two exceptions) are not
stylists and, I am sorry to say, appear not to have completely understood what he is really
about. I shall try to suggest in what follows that he has a decidedly catholic and, in a way,
overbearing view of his country, and, like an emperor surveying his realm, he feels capable
of summing up, judging, and shaping its long history and complex position as one of the
worlds oldest, most fascinating and coveted prizes for conquerors like Alexander, Caesar,
and Napoleon, as well as its own natives. In addition Mahfouz has the intellectual and
literary means to convey them in a manner entirely his ownpowerful, direct, subtle. Like
his characters (who are always described right away, as soon as they appear), Mahfouz
comes straight at you, immerses you in a thick narrative flow, then lets you swim in it, all
the while directing the currents, eddies, and waves of his characters lives, Egypts his-tory
under prime ministers like Saad Zaghloul and Mustapha el Nahas, and dozens of other
details of political parties, family histories, and the like, with extraordinary skill. Realism,
yes, but something else as well: a vision that aspires to a sort of all-encompassing view not
unlike Dantes in its twinning of earthly actuality with the eternal, but without the
Christianity.
2 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
here is no way for the English-speaking reader to know that Dweller in Truth
(Akhenaten seems to have been added by the US publisher) is a fairly late book (1985) or
that in its pharoanic subject matter it is a reversion to Mahfouzs earliest phase as a
novelist. (Rumor has it that the addition was made so that the book could be sold to tourists
at the Pyramids.) Born in 1911, between 1939 and 1944 Mahfouz published three, as yet
untranslated, novels about ancient Egypt while still an employee at the Ministry of Awqaf
(Religious Endowments). He also translated J ames Baikies book Ancient Egypt before
undertaking his chronicles of modern Cairo in Khan al-Khalili, which appeared in 1945.
This period culminated in 1956 and 1957 with the appearance of his superb Cairo Trilogy,
completed in 1952. These novels were in effect a summary of modern Egyptian life during
the first half of the twentieth century.
The trilogy is a history of the patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-J awad and his family over
three generations. While providing an enormous amount of social and political detail, it is
also a study of the intimate relationships between men and women, as well as an account of
the search for faith of Abd al-J awads younger son, Kamal, after an early and foreshortened
espousal of Islam.
After a period of silence that coincided with the first five years following the 1952
Egyptian revolution, prose works began to pour forth from Mahfouz in unbroken
successionnovels, short stories, journalism, memoirs, essays, and screenplays. Since his
first attempts to render the ancient world Mahfouz has become an extraordinarily prolific
writer, one intimately tied to the history of his time; he was nevertheless bound to have
explored ancient Egypt again because its history allowed him to find there aspects of his
own time, refracted and distilled to suit rather complex purposes of his own. This, I think,
is true of Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth, which in its unassuming way is part of Mahfouzs
special concern with power, with the conflict between orthodox religious and completely
personal truth, and with the counterpoint between strangely compatible yet highly
contradictory perspectives that derive from an often inscrutable and mysterious figure.
ahfouz has been characterized since he became a recognized world celebrity as either a
social realist in the mode of Balzac, Galsworthy, and Zola or a fabulist straight out of the
Arabian Nights (as in the view taken by J .M. Coetzee in his disappointing characterization
of Mahfouz in these pages ). It is closer to the truth to see him, as the Lebanese novelist
Elias Khoury has suggested, as providing in his novels a kind of history of the novel form,
from historical fiction to the romance, saga, and picaresque tale, followed by work in
realist, modernist, naturalist, symbolist, and absurdist modes.
Moreover, despite his transparent manner, Mahfouz is dauntingly sophisticated not only as
an Arabic stylist but as an assiduous student of social process and epistemologythat is,
the way people know their experienceswithout equal in his part of the world, and
1
2
3 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
probably elsewhere for that matter. The realistic novels on which his fame rests, far from
being only a dutiful sociological mirror of modern Egypt, are also audacious attempts to
reveal the highly concrete way power is actually deployed. That power can derive from the
divine, as in his parable Awlad Haritna (Children of Gebelaawi) of 1958, banned by the
Egyptian authorities until only a few years ago, in which the great estate owner Gebelaawi
is a godlike figure who has banished his children from the Garden of Eden or from the
throne, the family, and patriarchy itself, or from civil associations such as political parties,
universities, government bureaucracy, and so on. This isnt to say that Mahfouzs novels
are guided by or organized around abstract principles: they are not, otherwise his work
would have been far less powerful and interesting to his uncounted Arab readers, and also
to his by now extensive international audience.
Mahfouzs aim is, I think, to embody ideas so completely in his characters and their actions
that nothing theoretical is left exposed. But what has always fascinated him is in fact the
way the Absolutewhich for a Muslim is of course God as the ultimate power
necessarily becomes material and irrecoverable simultaneously, as when Gebelaawis
decree of banishment against his children throws them into exile even as he retreats, out of
reach forever, to his fortresshis house, which they can always see from their territory.
What is felt and what is lived are made manifest and concrete but they cannot readily be
grasped while being painstakingly and minutely disclosed in Mahfouzs remarkable prose.
Malhamat al Harafish (1977) (Epic of the Harafish) extends and deepens this theme from
Children of Gebelaawi. His subtle use of language enables him to translate that Absolute
into history, character, event, temporal sequence, and place while, at the same time,
because it is the first principle of things, it mysteriously maintains its stubborn, original, if
also tormenting aloofness. In Akhenaten the sun god changes the young, prematurely
monotheistic king forever but never reveals himself, just as Akhenaten himself is seen only
at a remove, described in the numerous narratives of his enemies, his friends, and his wife,
who tell his story but cannot resolve his mystery.
Nonetheless Mahfouz also has a ferociously antimystical side, but it is riven with
recollections and even perceptions of an elusive great power that seems very troubling to
him. Consider, for instance, that Akhenatens story requires no fewer than fourteen
narrators and yet fails to settle the conflicting interpretations of his reign. Every one of
Mahfouzs works that I know has this central but distant personification of power in it,
most memorably the dominating senior figure of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-J awad in the
Cairo Trilogy, whose authoritative presence hovers over the action three generations after
his death.
In the trilogy his slowly receding eminence is not simply offstage, but is also being
transmuted and devalued through such mundane agencies as Abd al-J awads marriage, his
licentious behavior, his children, and changing political involvements. Worldly matters
seem to puzzle Mahfouz, and perhaps even compel as well as fascinate him at the same
3
4 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
time, particularly in his account of the way the fading legacy of al-Sayyid Abd al-J awad,
whose family is Mahfouzs actual subject, in the end still manages to hold together the
three generations over fifty years, through the 1919 Revolution, the liberal era of Saad
Zagloul, the British occupation, and the reign of Fuad the First during the interwar period.
The result is that when you get to the end of one of Mahfouzs novels you paradoxically
experience both regret at what has happened to his characters in their long downward
progress (as when, in the Cairo Trilogy, one grandson of Abd al-J awad goes to prison as a
Communist, the other as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood) and a barely articulated
hope that by going back to the beginning of the story you might be able to recover the
sheer force of these people. There is a hint of how gripping this process is in a fragment
called A message contained in the novelists Echoes from an Autobiography (1994):
The cruelty of memory manifests itself in remembering what is dispelled in
forgetfulness. Mahfouz is an unredemptive but highly judgmental and precise recorder of
the passage of time.
hus Mahfouz is anything but a humble storyteller who haunts Cairos cafs and
essentially works away quietly in his obscure corner. The stubbornness and pride with
which he has held to the rigor of his work for a half-century, with its refusal to concede to
ordinary weakness, is at the very core of what he does as a writer. What mostly enables
him to hold his astonishingly sustained view of the way eternity and time are so closely
intertwined is his country, Egypt itself. As a geographical place and as history, Egypt for
Mahfouz has no counterpart in any other part of the world. Old beyond history,
geographically distinct because of the Nile and its fertile valley, Mahfouzs Egypt is an
immense accumulation of history, stretching back in time for thousands of years, and
despite the astounding variety of its rulers, regimes, religions, and races, nevertheless
retaining its own coherent identity. Moreover, Egypt has held a unique position among
nations. The object of attention by conquerors, adventurers, painters, writers, scientists, and
tourists, the country is like no other for the position it has held in human history, and the
quasi-timeless vision it has afforded.
To have taken history not only seriously but also literally is the central achievement of
Mahfouzs work and, as with Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn, one gets the measure of his literary
personality by the sheer audacity and even the overreaching arrogance of his scope. To
articulate large swathes of Egypts history on behalf of that history, and to feel himself
capable of presenting its citizens for scrutiny as its representatives: this sort of ambition is
rarely seen in contemporary writers. As for the prominent figures who shaped Egypts
history, they too are subject to Mahfouzs severe gaze. For in a remarkable, as yet
untranslated, book that appeared in 1983, Amam al-Arsh (Before the Throne), Mahfouz
does no less than bring Egypts rulers up before a court of eternal judgment consisting of
Osiris on a golden throne with Isis and Horus on either side of him: the three are to assess
the qualities of the major actors that Mahfouz considers responsible for making Egypt what
5 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
it is.
Apparently written out of the same desire to excavate Egypts distant past as Akhenaten,
Before the Throne starts out with the trial of Menes, the countrys founding father, and,
dealing with quite a few celebrated figures along the way, comes right up to Gamal Abdel
Nasser and his successor, Anwar al-Sadat, whose assassination occurred a short time before
the book appeared. What is peculiar about this exercise is that it was undertaken at all, as if
the novelist felt it a part of his narrative, and his personal obligation, to examine in one
deep breath the people who created Egypts history.
Not only does the book attest to Mahfouzs ambition, it also reveals the continuity he sees
in what might appear to have been only a long series of disjunct episodes. And that he
should imagine the sequence in terms that connect despotic pharaohs with revolutionary
men of the people such as Sadat, Nasser, and Mostapha Nahas, along with Ottoman
khedives like Mohammed Ali and Ismail, Coptic patriarchs, Sufi women, poets, and
courtiers, further reveals Mahfouzs profound concern, not to say rivalry, as its jealous
chronicler, with authority. The early figures called to account remain in the court chamber
for the testimony of their successors, whom they occasionally question, denounce, praise,
or otherwise discuss. What results then is a dense texture of the strands that make up
Egypts historical personality as interwoven by its great figures through the ages.
t is worth noting parenthetically that since the early 1960s a debate has been occurring
over the true nature of Egypts cultural personality; the debate continues to this day. It was
originally stimulated by Nassers pan-Arabism, which, according to writers like Lewis
Awad and Mahfouz himself, resulted in mutilations of Egypts non-Arab history by
solecisms (introduced by Arab nationalist enthusiasts) such as Arab history, Arab
socialism, and so on. Later the debate was joined by Islamic parties and individuals who
thought that what ought to be stressed was Egypts Muslim character, since al-Azhar, the
oldest learned Muslim institution devoted to sunnah, or orthodoxy, still flourishingis, after
all, in Cairo.
In fact, for the past several months a very intense continuing controversy has been
provoked by a novel by the Syrian writer Haidar Haidar, A Banquet for Seaweed, which
some people vociferously consider unfit to be cir-culated in Islamic Egypt, on grounds of
blasphemy and obscenity (principally). The debate over Egypts mission, its essence and
cultural identity, has not died down, which is one reason why Mahfouzs work is so central
both to Egyptians and to other Arabs.
Not surprisingly, therefore, in Before the Throne, only Gamal Abdel Nasser comes in for
rough treatment at the hands of his judges and witnesses. Ramses II, for example, tells
Nasser of his admiration and sense of kinship with him as a great leader, but regrets that
whereas his own Egypt was a major power, Nassers was a small country not up to the
4
6 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
large ambitions he had for it. Nasser is criticized by Menes for sinking Egypts unique
destiny into pan-Arabism. Coming from Menes, sovereign over its unified North and
South, this is a serious charge. No less serious is the impassioned denunciation by
Mostapha al-Nahas, the countrys last major politician under the monarchy, a man known
for his and his wifes opulent taste and sometimes ostentatious corruption. Mahfouz not
only allows him a place among Egypts great men, but also has him attack Nasser for his
abrogation of human rights, his destruction of the intellectuals, the avant- garde of Egypts
people, by humiliating and dehumanizing them, his corruption of education, his
destruction of the public sector, his disastrous military campaigns, all of which led (in one
of Mahfouzs finest phrases) to empty myths deposited on a hill of ruination.
When Nasser responds, somewhat weakly I think, that at least he was able to shake up the
country as well as the other Arab nations and move them from a condition of defeat, Nahas
is again on the attack: Would that you had been more modest in your ambitions, he says,
and opened your country to reform and progress, remembering that developing the
Egyptian village is more important than world revolution, that scientific research is more
important than the Yemen campaign. Osiris closes the hearing by recognizing Nasser
paradoxically as the first of Egypts leaders to have really cared for its people, but after
saying that, the great god allows him only a conditional place among the immortals until
the unspecified time comes to pass final judgment on all his deeds in an appropriate court.
ahfouz concludes this revealing book of personal judgments on Egypts politics
throughout history with Sadats trial, an altogether more benign affair at the outset than
Nassers. Two things deserve notice here. One is that Akhenaten suddenly interjects
himself into the discussion by assuring Sadat that he and the assassinated modern pharaoh
shared the same dedication to peace and, alas, the same accusation of perfidious treachery.
Second is a heated debate between Sadat and Nasser, a semi-bantering, semi-bitter
back-and-forth staccato dialogue that has the two men engaged as former co-conspirators
and comrades in arms as well as totally opposed rulers of modern Egypt. Only someone as
familiar with Egyptian speech as Mahfouz and also as much a master of Arabic literary
prose could have pulled this scene off so amusingly, and at the same time, so earnestly:
Gamal Abd al-Nasser asked him: How could it be of such little importance to you to
fashion so treacherous a position out of my legacy?
Anwar al-Sadat answered: I was forced to take such a position since my politics were
in their essence a correction of the mistakes that I inherited from you.
Nasser: But I delegated [the presidency] to you with my approval as a supporter and a
friend.
Sadat: It is unjust to hold a person responsible for a position taken during a period of
black terror in which a father feared his son and a brother feared his own brother.
7 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
Nasser: The victory you achieved is only the result of my long preparation.
Sadat: There was no way for a defeated person such as yourself to realize victory, but
I gave the people back their freedom and dignity, then I led them to a sure victory.
Nasser: Then you compromised everything on behalf of a demeaning peace and you
tore apart the unity of the Arabs while condemning Egypt to isolation.
So Sadat said: I inherited a nation hovering on the edge of the precipice of oblivion at
a time when the Arabs would not give me a real helping hand. So it became clear that
they neither wanted us dead nor strong so that we would continue to prostrate
ourselves begging for their money. No, I didnt hesitate to make my decisions.
Nasser: So you exchanged a giant who has always supported us for a giant who has
always been a hostile enemy.
Sadat: I went to a giant who had a real solution. [Later] events confirmed my belief.
Nasser: You rushed headlong into the infitah [Sadats opening up of Egypt to
unrestricted private and foreign investment] to the point where you submerged the
country in a wave of inflation and corruption. As much as Iprovided security for the
poor in my era, you provided security for the rich and the thieves.
So Anwar al-Sadat stated: I worked for the good of Egypt but the opportunists worked
behind my back.
Much the same examination as in Before the Throne is at the heart of the somber
Akhenaten, in which Mahfouz also reverts to the Rashomon-like procedures of his earlier
masterpiece about Alexandria, Miramar (1967). Miramar takes place in a pension where
Zahra, an attractive provincial woman, works as a maid, lusted after by the men who live
there. Each of the narrators is a man personifying some aspect of Egypts political
spectrum during the late years of the officers revolution of the early 1950s. Hence, we are
presented with the narrative of a Wafdist, a disenchanted socialist, a Nasserite opportunist.
In Akhenaten a young man, Meriamun, and his father are drifting south along the Nile and
pass a deserted city. Intrigued by what he sees, the young man learns just enough from the
older man to decide to seek out the truth about the city, its deceased ruler, and his now
isolated widowed queen. He does so by getting the main participants in Akhenatens story
to tell him their version of what happened. Meriamun then explains why he undertakes his
quest: For Father himself had a passion for knowledge and recording the truth, a fact that
made our palace a gathering point for men of both worldly and religious affairs. The
problem with this sentence is that recording the truth is the translators interpolation,
8 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
which (admittedly in a small way) alters the somewhat retentive leanness of Mahfouzs
own prose.
ow I should say immediately that I am not, and never will be, a translator, but the one
thing that came up whenever I compared the Arabic with the English version of Akhenaten
is the many libertiesmost of them explications or interpolationsthat have been taken
with the original. What has always struck me about Mahfouz is not only the lapidary
quality of his writing in Arabic but also the luxuriant possibilities of meaning, which he
always leaves unstated, packed in under the words, so to speak. In the passage quoted
above the translator has taken an unnecessarily obtrusive step forward at exactly the point
where the Arabic simply leaves off. The words for had a passion for in Arabic are
changed peremptorily by the translator from Mahfouzs original, more passive phrase
meaning was embedded in, or rooted in and anchored in, which allows him to imply
a comparison between the old mans sedentary life and the sons itinerant search for
knowledge in the rest of the novel.
In any case, armed with letters of introduction, the young narrator, Meriamun, proceeds to
interview all the principal figures (the last of whom is Nefertiti, Akhenatens surviving
wife) in the young kings tragedy, his disastrous reign of peace, the various priestly,
military, and palace intrigues that surrounded him and finally seem to have left him to
perish bewildered, alone, and most probably betrayed. In many ways Akhenaten is the
exact opposite of Conrads Kurtz, a figure of light as opposed to darkness. (Heart of
Darkness is one of the works that Mahfouz speaks of with unqualified admiration.) The
enigmatic king is recalled by his relatives, courtiers, generals, siblings, policemen, artists,
and priests in response to the questions of the importunate Meriamun, who gives us his
impressions but not always his conclusions. The material itself is both rich and often
confusingly complex, a contrapuntal mixture of themes and counterthemes turning on such
questions as whether Akhenaten and his mother were lovers, whether Nefertiti was a
power-mad schemer or a devoted consort, and whether the king was saner or sicker than
most, which compound, elaborate, deepen, and enhance Akhenatens mystery.
The heart of that mystery is whether Akhenaten was a great monotheistic visionary, whose
belief in the one ineffable god and the gospel of peace was ahead of and too much for its
time; or whether he was a weak, manipulative, and incompetent heretic (which, as someone
who banished all the other gods, he seemed to followers of the god Amun, for instance)
who let Egypt sink into the civil dissension that threatened its unity and even its borders.
Yet, to return for a moment to Before the Throne, the difference between the mysterious
pharaoh and Sadat (who seems to be paired with his ancient predecessor in Mahfouzs
mind) is that whereas the pharaonic ruler claimed to have been serving a deity, Sadat did
no such thing and remained instead a flamboyant egoist. Thus for Mahfouz the fascination
in this ancient episode is not only that we can never know the main character, but that this
characters search for an even more distant truth makes him harder still to fathom.
9 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
n Akhenaten the authority, and even the integrity, of Egypts identity is either carried on
or, as several of the hostile witnesses believe, it is threatened. In either case, power, its
maintenance and its decline, is central to the novel, principally because Akhenaten himself
does not know how to use it to advance his cause. I dont think that Mahfouzs task as
novelist is made easier by his almost certain knowledge that Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and
Tutankhamen, Akhenatens young successor, are the three most famous characters from
ancient Egyptian history, first of all because so much is known about them, and second
because, more than Amenhotep I, Ramses II, or Thutmose IV, they have an appealing
humanity that has made them the favorites of contemporary interpreters. One example of
what I mean is the movie The Egyptian (1954), starring Michael Wilding as Akhenaten,
Gene Tierney as Nefertiti, and Victor Mature as Akhenatens childhood friend Horemhab.
This was a Hollywood film that made a great impression on me when I saw it in Cairo as a
young man many years ago, even though I grew up surrounded by the lore, the real sites,
and the imposing objects of ancient Egypt. The conflict between spirituality and worldly
power was well, if sometimes hokily, staged in that film.
More recently, Tut has been represented in opulent exhibitions all over the West, and
Akhenaten too has gotten his share of attention in sev-eral shows (including one earlier this
year at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts ) that highlight and even domesticate the kings
city, Amarna, as well as the peculiarly elongated, softly adipose, and distinctly effeminate
figurative style of his reign. A new book on Tutankhamen by Christine El Mahdy goes
strenuously in the other direction by saying that Akhenaten did not really have an original
religious vision, and was most probably gay, a thought that seems not to have crossed
Mahfouzs mind.
Some other matters need to be mentioned here. One is Mahfouzs fascination with the
sheer mechanics of the way information is transmitted and how in the process historical
time is transmuted into the details (always clear but always inconclusive)of everyday life.
For him language is designed not just to convey information but to show the inexorable
distortions that are revealed in words by character, passion, material interest, and identity.
After having listened to Akhenatens enemies and his friends, Meriamun finally meets his
wife, Nefertiti, who was closest of all to Akhenaten: there is every expectation that she will
resolve matters by revealing her husband to be the eager searcher for the truth Meriamun
believes him to be. She confesses to having left him in order to save his life (perhaps, she
thought, the ecstatic pharaohs indecision about acting forcefully to save the country from
invaders might be overcome if she were to leave his sideas a result, he might take
action).
But even Nefertiti will never know the final truth about her husband and can only rely on a
terse report that the heretic died alone, of illness, even though he may have been
murdered. All the testimonies are therefore shimmeringly ambiguous, without
5
6
10 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
confirmation, except that everyone who has encountered him thinks that Akhenaten felt his
faith and could neither completely convey it to others nor make it survive his own reign.
Yet otherwise all the testimony, including his own, is a misrepresentation of some sort, as if
with each transmission and declaration the truth recedes at the same time that the Pharaohs
power diminishes. The more his passion claims him, the less powerful a ruler he becomes,
and the conviction he tries to convey grows more esoteric. Locked up within himself,
elusivein human terms it comes more and more to resemble death.
few common views emerge from the various narratives given to Meriamun by such
personages as Tiye, Akhenatens powerful Nubian mother, who is said to be his lover; Ay,
Nefertitis father; Toto, the chief epistler; Meri-Ra, the high priest of Akhenatens One and
Only God; and Maho, chief of police for Akhenaten. Most impressive for all of them is
Akhenatens total conviction in his invisible and silent god. He is adamantly unwilling to
allow the other, traditional gods any place in Egypt. These beliefs are given lyrical
utterance in the various ecstatic hymns he is reported as singing to his increasingly
personal, as well as distant, god.
Another is his absolute dedication to peace, his refusal to use force or violence, his desire
to irradiate his kingdom with love. Mahfouz gives no indication at all that he approves of
Akhenatens incompetence as a ruler and, in fact, to judge the Pharaoh from Mahfouzs
other works, he seems to feel not only no evident compassion but a tinge of scorn along
with the admiration he has for Akhenatens religious fervor. Still another motif is the mild
Pharaohs absolute disregard for worldly symbols and authority; this will finally cost him
the support of his friend Haremhab, a great military man who late in Akhenatens reign
takes his power away from him.
hat clearly concerns Mahfouz, however, is that there is a radical irreconcilability
between Akhenatens generous and strict beliefs and the maintenance of Egypts coherence
as a state and as an idea while he is its ruler. The trouble is that Akhenaten allows no
compromises at all, and refuses to have anything to do with politics. So is he a saint or, in
fact, a dangerous man, a man willing to sacrifice the good of his country (e.g., by refusing
to defend its borders) for his beliefs?
The novel allows no completely satisfying answer except to underline and deepen the
dilemma, in the process removing it from the realm of epistemology to that of worldly
history. (The word for this world as opposed to the other world recurs frequently in the
Arabic: al-dunia.) Mahfouz suggests that the best and most elevated ideas can never
override the animosities and rivalries, the vested interests of history, not because noble
ideas are not powerful enough, but because there isnt uncomplicated, unpeopled time
enough to let those ideas work their redemptive or healing power. The other problem is that
al-dunia requires some sort of centralized order to keep it from the whirling disorder
11 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
1
2
3
Mahfouz sometimes elicits in his later stories and novels, for which he often blames the
intelligentsia.
A group of novels set in the period from 1967 to the mid-1980s depicts such a situation,
notably Tharthara fawq al-Nil (Adrift on the Nile) and Taht al-Mazalla (Under the Shelter).
The former is about some friends who have gathered on a Nile houseboat around Anis
Zaki, a government clerk who has lost his wife and daughter. Like him, his friends live in a
world of narcotic intoxication and wordy frustration; they are involved in a car accident in
which a peasant is killed but no one has the courage to report it. The spirit of Under the
Shelter, a set of six stories and five plays, is best described as expressionist. The title story
depicts people standing aimlessly under a bus shelter, passively watching all sorts of
bizarre occurrences (orgies, heads rolling in the dust, car accidents, etc.) with no central
theme or purpose.
So Mahfouzs Egypt is a charged one, strikingly vivid for the accuracy and humor with
which he portrays it, in a mode that is neither completely taken with great heroes nor able
to do without some dream of total harmony of the kind Akhenaten so desperately strives to
keep but cannot sustain. Without a powerful controlling center, Egypt can easily dissolve
into anarchy or an absurd, gratuitous tyranny based either on religious dogma or on a
personal dictatorship.
ahfouz is now eighty-nine years old, nearly blind, and, after he was physically
assaulted by religious fanatics in 1994 because of his moderate position on Rushdies The
Satanic Verses, is said to be a recluse. What is both remarkable and poignant about him is
how, given the largeness of his vision and his work, he still seems to guard his nineteenth-
century liberal belief in a decent, humane society for Egypt even though the evidence he
keeps dredging up and writing about in contemporary life and in history continues to refute
that belief. The irony is that, more than anyone else, he has dramatized in his work the
almost cosmic antagonism that he sees Egypt as embodying between majestic absolutes on
the one hand and, on the other, the gnawing at and wearing down of these absolutes by
people, history, society. These opposites he never really reconciles. Yet as a citizen
Mahfouz sees civility and the continuity of a transnational, abiding, Egyptian personality in
his work as perhaps surviving the debilitating processes of conflict and historical
degeneration which he, more than anyone else I have read, has so powerfully depicted.
Fabulous Fabulist, The New York Review, September 22, 1994.
Elias Khoury, Mahfouz: The First Arab, in Mawaqif, Vol. 57 (Winter 1989).
I have found Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning by Rasheed el-Enany (Routledge, 1993) very useful. It is the most comprehensive work
on Mahfouz in English.
12 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM
4
5
6
See Max Rodenbecks article on this subject, Witch Hunt in Egypt, The New York Review, November 16, 2000, and Sabry Hafez, The
Novel, Politics and Islam, New Left Review, Vol. 5, Second Series (September-October 2000), pp. 117-141.
Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen, November 14, 1999-February 6, 2000.
Tutankhamen: The Life and Death of the Boy-King (St. Martins, 2000).
1963-2014 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
13 of 13 5/20/2014 12:57 AM

The Cruelty of Memory by Edward W

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

The Cruelty of Memory by Edward W

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Edward W.

Said NOVEMBER 30, 2000 ISSUE

Anda mungkin juga menyukai