SOURCE: “From ‘Naguib Mahfouz's Critics,’” in Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition, edited by Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar, Syracuse University Press, 1993, pp. 144–71.

No contemporary Arab man of letters has managed to preoccupy our literary mentality as much as Naguib Mahfouz. His multilayered fictional world, with its complex set of relations and its elusive symbols, provokes unending arguments, lays the groundwork for interminable problems, and stimulates ongoing critical efforts aimed at discovering that world's constituent elements. As long as this fictional world remains a bearer of meaning, a generator of signification, it produces seemingly inexhaustible analytical activity, commentary, and interpretation. On their performative level, these activities may be identical, or they may be in conflict—they may differ or agree in terms of their goal or perspective, yet in the end they present us with a complex posture of commentaries and interpretations. In other words, they present a posture characterized by complexity, variety, and richness as much as by discordance, opposition, and contradiction.

Luwis ‘Awad has spoken of a “chorus of critics” that rings out with hymns of praise whenever Naguib Mahfouz publishes a new work; rivers of interviews and articles flood the newspapers, the magazines, and the radio waves. “I have never known a writer,” he said,

who has remained, throughout a good part of his literary career, so submerged, so undermined and neglected, for no obvious reason—and before whom all the avenues of glory have, again for no obvious reason, opened up all at once in the past five years—none except Naguib Mahfouz. Nor have I ever known a writer so well received by the right, the center, and the left—whose works are appreciated by traditionalists and modernists, and by those in between. Naguib Mahfouz has become in our country an established literary or artistic institution, like those many lofty institutions we read about without really knowing what goes on inside. Tourists may come, or be brought over, to view this institution along with the hallmarks of our modern civilization; yet even more wondrous, this institution, which is Naguib Mahfouz, is not only a government institution, drawing sustenance from official recognition, but a popular institution that people talk about spontaneously in cafés, at home, and in ordinary literary gatherings.¹

Luwis ‘Awad said this in March 1962, more than twenty years ago. What can be said now, after all these years? Mahfouz's writing has gone on, and the admiration he receives has never flagged. Even when admiration for him was contested by opposing voices, we find its intensity has increased with the passing of the years. Thus, we now find before us more than twelve books in Arabic on Naguib Mahfouz and a huge number of books that discuss the Arabic novel or Arabic literature in general. We also find many special issues on Mahfouz in widely distributed periodicals and a noticeable collection of M.A. and Ph.D. theses on him, as well as innumerable articles not yet compiled in books. Add to all this a collection of plays, radio and television serials based on his novels or short stories—presenting us with more than one perspective on the interpretation of the same author—and two books by Hashim al-Nahhas, Najib Mahfuz ‘ala al-shasha (Naguib Mahfouz on the Screen) and Yawmiyyat film (The Diary of a Film), based on Al-Qahira al-jadida (The New Cairo). Were we to focus our study on Arabic criticism only, leaving aside criticism in or translated from foreign languages—and there is much of it (really worth a separate study)—we would encounter a unique quantitative and qualitative critical posture that has never been accorded to any other Arab novelist in our modern age.

In this unique situation the result of that single-minded vision that sees no one but Naguib Mahfouz in the novel, Tawfiq al-Hakim in theater, and Yusuf Idris in the short story? Single-mindedness may be a reason, but a partial one. The amount of writing on Tawfiq al-Hakim or Yusuf Idris or both has never approached either in quality or quantity that vast body of writing on Naguib Mahfouz. The increasing amount of writing, however, does not necessarily mean increased clarity; it may, on the contrary, render ambiguous what is normally considered clear and self-evident. As much as each new writing, or new reading, dispels ambiguities in the text and unfolds the intricacies of its codes, it draws attention to more ambiguities and hints at various other obscurities. It also stimulates more and more writing. The world of Naguib Mahfouz thus remains, in spite of all that has been written about it, in need of yet more disclosure and consequently of more writing and reading. Indeed, it may be said that the reason behind the unique status of Naguib Mahfouz's fiction is its inherent ambiguity. But what about the poetry of, say, Adonis (‘Ali Ahmad Sa‘id)? Is not his long poem Mufrad bi-sighat al-jam' (Singular in plural form) more ambiguous than the most ambiguous of Mahfouz's stories, those stories that were described once as mere “riddles and mysteries”? Yet does the available commentary on Adonis amount to even one-tenth of what has been written on Naguib Mahfouz?

The fictional world of Naguib Mahfouz is so complex, encompassing historical and realistic narrative, containing the partially symbolic that may infiltrate the dominant tone of a realistic work and the general symbol whose manifold meanings lead to more than one interpretation or become unified and revert to allegory. His fiction contains within itself different schools and trends, ranging from critical realism to existential realism to socialist realism, and including naturalism, surrealism, and the absurd. It is as if the fictional world of Naguib Mahfouz were a museum exhibiting all the doctrines and trends the novel has known or a laboratory containing all the theories and methodologies known to criticism, starting with historicism and ending with structuralism.

Leaving aside the comprehensive aspects of Mahfouz's world, it may also be said that his various heroes and heroines represent different sectors and character types of Egyptian society in their development and maturation from the 1919 coup d'état up to the infitah [literally, “openness” to the West]. Indeed, those protagonists exhibit a search for something better, a desire for redemption from the past. Their heated and enthusiastic protests, often sharp and relentless, reflect an audacity in attempting to reach at roots and a sincerity in unveiling the real cause behind the tragedy of Egyptian society. It is as though those protagonists, gathered in one fictional world, presented a well-polished mirror in which society could see its real reflection—“the auspicious future behind the restless present and the speedily waning past.”²

The world of Naguib Mahfouz reflects contradictory and complex circumstances—the social factors and historical traditions that worked hand in hand in defining the psychology of the sons of the petite bourgeoisie.³ Mahfouz depicts the identity crisis of those characters and the consequent indecisiveness and contradiction in their attempts at solving the problems of freedom and justice without forsaking their dream of the “eternal revolution.” How often they quote, in this respect, Kamal ‘Abd al-Jawad's remark in al-Sukkariyya. “I believe in life and people. I find myself obliged to follow their ideals as long as I believe that they are true, for to shrink from this is cowardice and escapism, just as I find myself obliged to revolt against their ideals when I believe that they are false; for to shrink from this is treachery. This is the meaning of eternal revolution.”⁴ And how often they identify Kamal ‘Abd al-Jawad with Naguib Mahfouz, an identification that leads to the notion that Naguib Mahfouz has excelled over his peers by virtue of his “awareness of the reality of cultural and historical circumstances, the nature of the social forces and their conflicts, and evolutionary movements in Egyptian society.”⁵

As for renovating intellectual content, the fiction of Naguib Mahfouz achieves a middle vision—and we are a nation of the middle—and in this respect it achieves an intellectual blend to which all the contending intellectual factions in the Arab world may be drawn. It is useful, in this context, to recall what Jafar, the storyteller, says in Qalb al-layl (Heart of the Night) about his intellectual project: that it is based on a philosophical stance, a social ideology, and a style of government. This project then becomes the basis for a political order that is “the legal heir of Islam, of the French Revolution, and of the Communist Revolution.”⁶ But if Naguib Mahfouz's fiction refers to this political order, it could indeed make him a writer “well received by the right, the center, and the left, by traditionalists and modernists, and by those in between,” as Luwis ‘Awad said. Such a project provides each faction with a portion of what pleases it and lures it into accepting this fictional world in the hope of gradually winning it over. Such an interpretation would lay a foundation for conflicting motives behind critical approaches to the world of Naguib Mahfouz. It would also bring to light those repeated attempts, on the part of some critics, to exert control over this world or to capture it in place within a certain intellectual system or systems. No matter how enticing this interpretation may be, it still circumscribes Mahfouz's world, transforming it into an “intellectual document,” while it raises doubts concerning the validity of such unanimous admiration among the various factions.

The critics' responses to the world of Naguib Mahfouz are widely discordant and chaotic. Luwis ‘Awad writes: “Naguib Mahfouz to me is one of those few writers in the literary histories of the East and the West who makes my blood boil whenever I read him, and I wish I could beat him soundly. And yet, at the same time, whenever I read Mahfouz, he makes me live for some time among the glories of man, and I say to myself, ‘There is no art above this art, no summit higher than this highest of all summits.’”⁷ The critic's response, in this context, is clearly contradictory because it vouchsafes the positive and the negative, both admiration and rejection.

Such a multitude of critics, however, can never form a “chorus,” to use Luwis ‘Awad's term. A “chorus of critics,” if it really existed, would have to adhere to a unified orchestration to guide its performance and to make their voices agree. The critics of Naguib Mahfouz lack such harmony. The voice of Muhammad Mandur, for example, will not harmonize with the voice of ‘Abd al-‘Azim Anis, even though both speak about a petite bourgeoisie. Mandur's sympathies are with a class that “still clings to many of the highest virtues of humanity, particularly the sanctification of the family and the readiness to sacrifice for its sake,”⁸ while ‘Abd al-‘Azim Anis's position demonstrates suspicion, restlessness, and a belief in the absence of leadership. While Mandur draws on the pronouncements of Gustave Lanson, ‘Abd al-‘Azim Anis draws on various other pronouncements, mixing Christopher Caudwell with Roger Garaudy.⁹ Moreover, the voice of Mandur can never harmonize with that of Luwis ‘Awad, even when it comes close. And neither voice will harmonize easily with the voice of Yahya Haqqi, who follows the trail of the man in the artist, and who attempts to interpret his own feelings toward the artist he discovers. Those voices will not harmonize with Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim (whose voice differs considerably in tone from his Fi al-thaqafa al-Misriyya [On Egyptian Culture, 1955; with ‘Abd al-‘Azim Anis] and his introduction to al-Anfar [Individuals] or Qisas waqi‘iyya [Realistic Stories, 1956], and which differs in degree in Ta‘ammulat fi ‘alam Najib Mahfuz [Meditations on the World of Naguib Mahfouz, 1970]).

What a distance there is between all those voices put together and that of Sayyid Qutb (the first critic to discuss Naguib Mahfouz, who initiated a debate about him with Salah Dhuhni over Kifah Tiba [The Struggle of Thebes], in al-Risala 44 and 45, 1944) or that of Ahmad ‘Abbas Salih (in his writings on al-Sarab [The Mirage] in al-Adib al-Misri, 1950, and on Naguib Mahfouz in general in al-Sha‘b, 1959, and al-Katib, 1966). Further, the notion of Anwar al-Ma‘addawi (the second critic to allot to Naguib Mahfouz a considerable introduction), whose readings stress “psychological performance,” differs from Rashad Rushdi's conception of Eliot's “objective correlative.” And Rashad Rushdi is, in turn, far from Latifa al-Zayyat. (Among the unmistakable paradoxes are her translation and analysis of the first complete collection in Arabic of T. S. Eliot's essays, which discordantly, adopt Lukács's pronouncements, and Rushdi's incessant talk of “the objective correlative,” which he forgets all about when it comes to application.

It is possible to add even more names of Egyptian critics to this list, yet the names are so many that one is apt to imagine that there has never been a critic in Egypt who has not written on Naguib Mahfouz.¹⁰ If we broadened the circle to include the rest of the Arab world, the voices would become even less harmonious, and the “chorus” would disappear altogether: the “road” to the world of Naguib Mahfouz would be transformed and Mahfouz's creations metamorphosed into a “tale without a beginning or an end.”

Considering its complexity and contradictions, the criticism of Naguib Mahfouz is an exemplary case for literary hermeneutics and metacriticism. This is a critical tradition that acknowledges both conflicting interpretations and internal inconsistencies in its critical pronouncements, giving rise to a need for further revision. The fictional works of Naguib Mahfouz say, in their own way, something about a world from which they are derived and to which they return. Then critics come along: one group relates these texts to a particular world; another group to a second world; and a third may make them transcend any particular world, thus shutting them up and denying them immanent reference to whatever is external to them. All such critics make different pronouncements about how the texts “speak.” Once we step into such a framework of diversity, difference, and discord among pronouncements on how the texts “speak,” the need for revision arises.

Revision here is founded on that kind of meditation that may discover some underlying systems to harmonize this discord. Revision is also based on a consideration of the internal relations of each system and on the recognition of its elements, just as it considers its compatibility with systems other than itself. Again, revision is based on the careful observation of how close, or how alien, such systems are to the texts of Naguib Mahfouz. This last revisionary activity, however, cannot take place unless we consider the texts of Naguib Mahfouz as constituting another system, independent of the critical systems. Such a revisionary process may imply, at first sight, that one word in the critical vocabulary can have two totally different meanings, neither of which can be grasped in itself without first referring it to its context. Consequently, one term may signify two conflicting elements, one in each system.

A critic may come along, Edward al-Kharrat for example, and tell us that “the art of Naguib Mahfouz is not fundamentally a realistic art” and that his characters—especially grandparents and parents—are “fixed major types that belong to the greater human types” because they “surmount all the spheres of reality.”¹¹ Another critic, such as Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim, may equally assert the contrary, that the art of Naguib Mahfouz is drawn to those realistic spheres more than we can imagine and that his characters represent “mature social types” in whom individual psychological features blend into intellectual and social evolutionary processes.¹² We thus find ourselves confronted with a situation in which critical pronouncements about the same literary utterance contradict each other, and so we must compare the critics' use of terminology.

The two critics use the term type to mean two totally different things. (It is also important to notice that both use the same term synonymously with archetype in more than one place.) Type (namat), according to Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim, is a fundamental concept in the discourse of “realistic” criticism.¹³ According to Edward al-Kharrat, however, type is a concept in discourse on myth, where the term archetype plays a vital role in the quest for the different manifestations of universal human images, something close to the submerged symbols in the human collective unconscious.¹⁴ It is possible to relate the opposition between the two meanings of the term to the conflict between two systems, in which the same term plays different roles. It is also possible to explain the opposition in terms of a certain inaccuracy in employing the term—that is, by saying that the two critics unfortunately use the same Arabic word for different foreign terms. In either case, we are bound to realize the need for a revisionary circle, so lacking in our critical activity, the circle of metacriticism and hermeneutics.

If we bypass terminology and move to the motivating value judgment behind the formation of type, we might be able to pose a group of questions about the way Naguib Mahfouz's art, according to al-Kharrat, transcends “the spheres of reality,” and about the way this same art, according to al-‘Alim, is bound by those very spheres. Al-‘Alim, who incorporates Marxist aesthetics, will not accept an art that indulges in the symbols of the ritualistic collective unconscious, apart from the spheres of reality, for this would mean an estrangement of reality and a falling away from realism. Al-Kharrat would cast angry looks at any art that indulges in realism without appeasing his craving for metarealism.

Such questions would naturally lead us to the constituent elements of two opposed systems of critical discourse and thereby afford us the opportunity to examine these two systems at the level of application. This opportunity would further lead us to review the evidence the two critics use to vindicate their opposed views of the relation between that same art and the spheres of reality. In the same vein, an examination of the two critics' logical structure would require us to examine the integrity of their principles, their ability to enable a system to explain most or all of the elements in the texts of Naguib Mahfouz.

We may examine al-Kharrat's concept of type based on statements of Jung, Frazer, and Northrop Frye, and that of al-‘Alim, in whose understanding of type many ideas are assembled, starting with Engels and ending with George Lukács on “reflection.” This step will enable us to determine how precise each concept is and how far it can function as a decisive critical tactic. Then we can pose other questions. Does type function as a general critical tactic, or does it succeed only with some texts and not with others? Why should the presence of type be the condition for a value judgment in the first place? Does it have to be type alone or should the other elements that constitute the critic's system also be taken into account? We can also question why al-Kharrat saw—in the same passage—something other than what al-‘Alim was able to see. And if both critics draw on Western critical discourse, why did al-‘Alim choose to adhere to the concepts of “realistic” criticism while al-Kharrat chose those of myth? Is it because of a difference in temperament or cultural mold, or is it because of a difference in social perspective and, subsequently, class position and affiliate on between the two critics? Furthermore, if we leave aside the critics and shift to the relationship of their critical discourse to the texts of Mahfouz we may also ask whether the opposition between the two concepts of type—as a constituent element—originate in the critics' systems, or if the literary utterance itself—Mahfouz's text—invites and indeed encourages such opposition in critical discourse. Which of the two critical discourses is closer to the literary discourse, or text?

If Edward al-Kharrat considers discourse [qawl] to be a mute voice, semi-unified, as it came to be defined in the 1960s, we should look for the reasons why the voice of al-Kharrat's discourse, despite his persistence and constant modification, is indeed mute. Then we find ourselves on the fringes of a struggle between ideologies—with both its deeper and its more superficial forms—reflected in the struggle of the critical discourse over the literary discourses. The struggle of the critical discourse, furthermore, corresponds to and reflects internal struggles at the various levels of Mahfouz's texts. These texts are undoubtedly not unilayered; nor are their relationships fixed. They have multiple centers and conflicting levels.

Critics are bound to ask such questions, explicitly or implicitly, before formulating their discourses on a literary work. But once critics have spoken out and their discourses are found to contradict, oppose, parallel, agree with, or even complement the discourse of colleagues, the entire critical discourse must undergo revision.

No other critical discourse is more persistent in its need for revision than the critical discourse on Naguib Mahfouz. Every time Mahfouz publishes a work, a torrent of studies and commentaries begin to flow, and as soon as he creates a symbol, such a variety of interpretations begin to cluster around it that both work and symbol turn into disputed territory over which critics fight like the Karamazov brothers. The revisionist's job in Mahfouz's case is not an easy one. They should not play the role of father Yanaros in Kazantzakis's The Fratricides and attempt a reconciliation between Marx and Christ;¹⁵ nor should they array themselves in judicial garments and start issuing convictions and acquittals. They should, in effect, search out any constituent elements, the relationships among which would create systems out of the apparent chaos of accumulated critical discourses. (Even though such a revision would normally claim to be unprejudiced, it must, of course, stake out a position toward its subject of study, or it would dissolve behind the illusion of pure objectivity or false practicality.)

Whatever the consequence of this revision, it should help reorganize the processes of reading a literary text. Just as this revision helps to deepen the reading processes and to enhance their development, it unveils—through the study of a particular case—the underlying conflicting systems, the totality of which forms what we call contemporary Arabic criticism. Such revision also discovers those basic spheres in which the contemporary Arab critic orbits, and which define his discourse, and guide his exposition of the literary discourse, and thereby govern his interpretation of the literary text.

The world of Naguib Mahfouz consists, on an empirical level, of a group of texts: his novels and short stories. No matter how numerous these texts may be, they form a meaningful context, a set of relations between constituent elements that permeate all the texts to such a degree that they become one major text. This one major text is characterized by a kind of internal regularity that does not undermine the variety represented by the multiple levels of the individual texts themselves. This internal regularity does not prevent the existence of conflicting elements in the totality; nor does it contradict the obvious manifestations of any particular text.

From this perspective, The Thief and the Dogs is compatible with al-Karnak, just as both are compatible with al-Qahira al-jadida (The New Cairo) or Abath al-aqdar (The Absurdity of the Fates). All these texts, furthermore, fit into one major net of relations that connects them with other texts, such as “The Trilogy,” Kifah Tiba (The Struggle of Thebes), or Children of Gebelawi. The distinctions among these texts are not so radical that they would shift us from one kind of totality to a contradictory one. The distinctions are typical of those differences that would exist among the various manifestations of a single totality activated within one system, a system that does not overrule the unique characteristics of all the works. If we draw a metaphor from contemporary syntactic studies, we can say that the various literary texts of Naguib Mahfouz are only surface structures set up and sustained by a deeper unifying structure that makes the particular texts one and the same text, with an internally regulated system.

Some critics of Naguib Mahfouz sense the presence of this system and refer to it with various names, such as “the vision of Naguib Mahfouz” or “the revelation of Naguib Mahfouz,” just as they call it “the fictional world of Naguib Mahfouz,” “the world of Naguib Mahfouz,” and so forth. Some associate the name with positive qualities, some with negative qualities. Some get carried away with metaphorical language and speak of an “aesthetic architecture” or “unity of rhythm,” or “basic features” or “fixed structures.” Yet whatever the name or metaphor, it indicates an understanding of a kind of “self-created system” that is the true cause of the totality or its underlying structure. Furthermore, their recurrent metaphors, borrowed from various fields (e.g., architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry), are attempts at capturing this elusive system from beyond the surface of varied texts. Thus “architecture” conforms, semantically, with “unity of rhythm,” and both confirm the existence of “basic features” and “fixed structures” that function as the constitutive elements of a totality made up of relations. This totality is “the fictional world” or whatever “vision” or “revelation” that world produces.

The difference between the words vision and revelation marks a difference in critical conceptions of the elements making up the world of Naguib Mahfouz. “Vision” leads us to “reality” and lands us on the shores of “realism,” as can be seen, for example, in ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr's Najib Mahfuz: al-ru ‘ya wa al-adat (Naguib Mahfouz: The Vision and the Means). “Revelation” leads us to the “symbol” and brings us into the presence of the “absolute”—for example, in the way George Tarabishi explains in Allah fi rihlat Najib Mahfuz al-ramziyya (God in the Symbolic Journey of Naguib Mahfouz). Both words herald the realization of a “unified world” and make us feel that it has a system of some sort. Thus we hear one critic say:

The fictional world of Naguib Mahfouz is a world unto itself, nearly the equivalent of the society outside. Its elements are causally related, each element deriving its own relative value from its relationship with the other parts, and its byways and back alleys lead onto its main street. All its events are regulated in a fixed frame that allots each event its due significance. In such a world, a personal whim may converge with a political treaty; for all that surrounds us has merged with a network of intellectual signs and ready-made stimulations.¹⁶

We hear another critic say:

The basic features of the world of Naguib Mahfouz have already taken shape. This is not to charge it with stagnation. No. For how transcendent is the variety of this world, how fertile and how deep is its unceasing renovation! And yet it is, in truth, a homogeneous world and remains as such from the first pulse set in motion in the first work till the last of his unpublished work, and even, in my opinion, in works not yet written. There are in this world major centers, fixities, and basic frameworks that compose its movement and that, no matter how renewed, evolved, developed, and deepened in thought, method or style, embrace a fundamental, integrated artistic vision—despite their continual development—from the beginning till that end that abides in many long years of deep and gratifying creativity.¹⁷

If we move beyond the surface level of the secondary metaphors or similes used in the above quotations (“byways,” “back alleys,” “first pulse,” “fixed frame,” “converge,” etc.) to the semantic core that magnetizes all those similes and metaphors, we find ourselves close to the system of which I have been speaking, without quite penetrating its code. The first quotation contains a hidden evaluative tone that sneaks into the sentences and that ascribes to the fictional world certain negative qualities, such as strict formalism leading to automation, but the second quotation contains an evaluative tone that is conveyed by impressionistic excitement (“how transcendent,” “how deep”) and that assigns this fictional world positive qualities (unity and variety). Both quotations assertively credit the world of Naguib Mahfouz with “internal regularity,” suggesting that the texts of Naguib Mahfouz proffer “an integrated vision of human life in whose integrity we are able to meditate on the constant and changing elements.”¹⁸

Such quotations bring us nearer to the primary function of Mahfouz's critics: that of viewing Mahfouz's texts as a whole, governed by a definite system with constitutive elements, manifold centers, and conflicting levels that relate the many axes of his world and bring the levels of his vision into harmony. A critic's understanding of this function is a realization of the principle that attributes aesthetic value to the notion of “unity in variety.” But unity in this sense is not the unity of spatially contiguous parts, works temporally consecutive, or texts externally accumulated. It is a unity that would lead those critics aware of it to the system lying behind all the texts of Naguib Mahfouz. We try to penetrate the surface of accumulated texts to the foundation of this unity without getting distracted by variety, and end up with compartmentalization. Instead, we should perceive variety in relationships that lead us to the “living unit” of a system, marked by restlessness rather than stagnation. In this way, unity emerges not as the sum of parts but as the result of combined relations, both among elements of a single text and among elements in all the texts.

The problem is that critics of Naguib Mahfouz stray from this primary function more often than they strive to attain it. It is not difficult to see how critics yield to a partial point of view, evolutionary and historical only in a narrow sense. Thus the texts are divided up and made spatially consecutive without merging into a regulatory, unified system.

One of the simplest forms of this partial point of view is the assumption of two totally different stages through which the texts of Naguib Mahfouz have passed. These two stages may be called realism and neorealism, or the static and the dynamic. Such a division implies contradictory conceptual dimensions on the diachronic plane, a radical change in temperament from one extreme to the other.

This division (which blurs the distinction between levels of the same system) places a group of Mahfouz's novels (such as al-Qahira al-jadida, Khan al-khalili, and The Beginning and the End) on a remote island opposed to another island of novels different in nature, topography, and inhabitants (such as The Thief and the Dogs, al-Tariq [The Path], and The Beggar). Apparently, we have no bridge to connect the two islands. There is no harm in pursuing the idea that the first island is an orderly, systematic, shipshape environment where everything fits in with everything else as in the architectonics of an arabesque—where everything is based on recording, description, and cold observation in which the passing of time is much like the falling away of the leaves of a calendar, one by one, hour by hour. We may further imagine the first island to be inhabited by “creatures who are stiff … cold, giving the impression that they resent excitement, and the second island to be tumultuous, roaring with motion, violence, and deep, exploding volcanoes, a setting where time and place commingle, an island inhabited by fiery creatures who speak a dense language in which, as Yahya Haqqi has said, behind every other word there is more than one possible meaning. We do not object, either, when another critic, Raja' al-Naqqash, repeats the same axiom, drawing on the artist and major critic Stephan Zweig, and tells us that the creatures of the first island, the static ones, move about “within the limits of the natural systems of their movement … without haste,” while the inhabitants of the second island, the dynamic ones, “bolt out shouting and yelling, consumed with fire in the arena of their whimsical passions”; they are “martyrs and suicides.”¹⁹

If the inhabitants of the first island in Naguib Mahfouz's fiction remind us of Tolstoy's characters, the dwellers of the second remind us of Dostoevsky's characters—if we are to believe Raja's al-Naqqash. And why not believe Yahya Haqqi when he suggests:

Artists can be classified according to temperament, I maintain, into two major types … : the dynamic type whose works reflect the glare of battles, and the static type that survives battle unaffected, free of excitement and revolt. Laying one stone on top of another patiently in the manner of an architect … Naguib Mahfouz, may God preserve him for us, is a perfect testimony to the difference in characteristics between the two types … for we encounter both types in him, and in both he has reached the degree of perfection in artistic expression.²⁰

But if we believe Yahya Haqqi or Raja' al-Naqqash, there is a sharp division in the works of Naguib Mahfouz. His texts fall into two groups forming two isolated islands, two consecutive stages, which implies two contradictory temperaments for Naguib Mahfouz the man. Naguib Mahfouz would then be transformed into a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with the important difference that Dr. Jekyll first unifies with his staticism, which lasts for a while and then dies only for Mr. Hyde to be resurrected in his stead, with his dynamism, or with “the whip with which he lashes his characters,” to use Raja' al-Naqqash's phrase.

The comparison between the static and the dynamic is intelligent and amusing. It is related, as a critical project, to the symbolic opposition with which critics explain differences in the temperaments of writers and to the formations of paradigms that oppose, for example, Apollo to Dionysus, cold intellectuality to blazing emotion, or clarity (the sun) to ambiguity (the moon). Yet such symbolic classifications, though amusing, “are too abstract and schematic to be of much help in the stylistic study of particular texts or authors.”²¹

This oppositional duality, if we consider again its manifestations in the texts of Naguib Mahfouz, is dangerous because, on one level, it makes us fancy, as do Yahya Haqqi and Raja' al-Naqqash, a sharp sense of change in the writer's vision of his world, as if it were an alternation from one vision to its opposite. On a second level, it diverts us from following the immediate struggle of the fictional world by making us track only the external successive alternation. On a third level, it diverts us from the fictional text to mere temperament. And on a fourth level, it directs us more toward the differences among the groups of texts than toward their similarities. As a result, we falsify the text instead of helping to realize its possibilities, dividing the fictional world instead of preserving its unity.

We may grant that a certain transformation takes place in the texts of Naguib Mahfouz, moving us from the static to the dynamic, if we wish to retain the two terms of Yahya Haqqi. Yet this transformation comes through, on the one hand, in the form of internal changes within one system and, on the other hand, like a struggle that breaks out among various diachronic and consecutive levels, in both individual and multiple texts at once. Hence, we can observe this struggle and these changes in all the texts of Naguib Mahfouz both in their horizontal and vertical succession. And what takes place in all the texts, as a totality, also takes place in each text separately. We are not confronted with “the static” in “The Trilogy” and then “the dynamic” in The Thief and the Dogs, but we encounter both in both texts. The difference between the two works does not come about because of an “artistic shift” from one school to another opposing school or because of the “historical overthrow” of one vision in favor of another. It is a difference in the way internal transformations and immediate struggles in one system manifest themselves, and this takes place within each text separately. These statements do not mean that history should be canceled out or that the transformations taking place in a writer should be denied; but they do require viewing the historical position and artistic transformations holistically, not partially, so that we do not divide the artist into compartments or force him to move from one position to another (without his really moving). They mean viewing his texts, in their totality, as a significant system, the significance of which cannot be grasped except through the unity of its texts (as a system).

It is important to realize the synchronicity of the relationship between the static and the dynamic and also to realize its development through time. The static, as a quality that comprises levelness and pairedness is not an absolute contrary utterly cut off from the quality of the dynamic. Nor are the two qualities transformed into attributes experienced in tension in the same text. This is why Luwis ‘Awad was able to realize a certain kind of tension—which he called an abyss or a chasm—terming it “the classicism of form” and “the romanticism of content” in The Thief and the Dogs. He also perceived in “The Trilogy” the same tension between classical form and what it hides behind its perfected façade, a content that is “as remote as it can be from classicism.”²² Similarly, Mahmud al-Rabi‘i has identified a conflict between dialogue and monologue in The Thief and the Dogs, as well as a conflict between the linguistic units that constitute the text's diction—that is, between the surface and depth of consciousness within it. He pointed out the necessity of simplifying those linguistic units in dialogue while complicating them as much as possible when dialogue shifts back to monologue. He also hinted at the necessity of polishing the diction and of trimming it on the outer surface while giving it free rein and power on the level of interiority.²³

The two qualities, from this perspective, are but attributes of two different levels belonging to the same system. The manifestations of the relationship between these two levels are subject to regular transformations that take place within one comprehensive context. Hence, the static and the dynamic can be opposed, intersecting, or converging, on one axis or on many axes. In the final analysis, it all depends on the internal transformations taking place within one text; namely, the works of Naguib Mahfouz as a totality. As long as this one total text harbors fixed, unchanging elements, the attribute of regularity is present and that of totality takes shape. It is not the regularity of, say, a “wall” in a building but it is a regularity of levels and efficient fulcra in “the language” (al-lugha).

This partial point of view takes up even more dangerous forms than the dualistic form of the dynamic and the static. It is possible to observe these forms when we consider the literary trendiness imposed on the texts of Naguib Mahfouz. Considered from such an angle, his works are grouped in stages. The first stage starts with Abath al-aqdar (The Absurdity of the Fates) and ends with Kifah Tiba (The Struggle of Thebes); the second stage starts with al-Qahira al-jadida and ends with al-Sukkariyya; the third stage starts with Children of Gebelawi and ends with Tharthara fawq al-Nil (Chatter on the Nile); and so on. These stages succeed one another historically, starting with the first published work of Naguib Mahfouz and ending with his last one, as if the measure for these stages were succession in time, which would parallel another succession of sequential literary trends.

Each stage should be endowed with the attributes not of only one trend but of many discordant ones. The first stage, for instance, can be classified as romantic historicism, illusory vision, or correspondence to reality. It can also be labeled the historical stage solely. Or if the conditions of its membership can be expanded, it can include, besides historicism, “the struggle for liberation,” just as it can also be placed, finally, under the label of “symbol within the frame of history.”²⁴ As for the second stage, it can be described as critical realism, social realism, photographic realism, or naturalism (as Luwis ‘Awad contends), or it may extend beyond realism (according to Edward al-Kharrat). Each stage is thus thought over and over until its texts are fit for accumulation and ready for insertion under three trends as remote from each other as naturalism is from critical realism.

Our present concern is not so much with the chaos of classifications as it is with the process of classification itself and its threat to the unity of texts. Emphasis on stages and on such methods of classification generates the same limited point of view. It fractures the living unity that holds the texts together and transforms it into accumulated heaps lined up horizontally, along which critics pass, as a train passes through one station after another. In such a case, it is only natural that critics will decline to linger at any group of texts not immediately situated on the lines of their railway, that is, at any group of texts that does not fit easily into their classificatory schema. Even if they do linger over these texts, the critics' concern will be to situate them: either they force them in under the same stage (consider the case of al-Sarab [The Mirage], located in the social stage) or they ignore their formal attributes altogether or flatten them by confusing, say, representation in Children of Gebelawi with symbols that get in the way. All that matters to these critics is that the texts should be piled into outwardly similar heaps, so that the historiographic journey of Naguib Mahfouz's work may proceed smoothly and the heaps of his texts may disembark, as travelers do, each at a different station. As long as the critics are concerned primarily with the differences in succession, they ignore similarities and look at the works only as an essence manifested in the “now.”

What Fatima Musa says, for instance, will not differ in essence from what ‘Ali Shalaq says. Musa maintains that Naguib Mahfouz “started off with the historical novel, which represents the romantic stage … then moved to the realistic stage … and, having exhausted the possibilities of the contemporary realistic novel, … he passed over to a new stage, which can be called metarealistic.”²⁵ To both critics the texts accumulate into horizontally successive heaps; Naguib Mahfouz starts under a certain label, then moves on to another, then passes over a stage to a new one. But what are the persistent elements and the internal relations of the collective texts, and what is the vertical dimension in “the evolutionary stages of fiction”? All these questions must disappear when the texts are divided among piles forming disjointed islands and stations. Yet this disjunction will not prevent us from pointing out some styles that have progressed by discovering their roots in the past.

If we return to the logic of the division, we have to ask whether one novelist's work can be classified under all these categories, all these labels, and yet remain sound. Would these diverse labels (realistic, naturalistic, etc.) end up estranging the novelist's texts, transforming them into something like a dervish's rags? And if we consider that terms like realism are distillations of different systems, would it imply—if we accepted all these terms, the way they are applied to Mahfouz's works—that Mahfouz's career leads to one of two possibilities: a welter of discordant systems (in which case his works would lack value because they would lack cohesion); or a shifting, novelistic vision that sees the world in turn as do the realist (critical-documentary), the naturalist, the existentialist, and the absurdist (in which case his mind would lack soundness)? In that case it is not useful to say that “none of our writers compares with Naguib Mahfouz in his critical understanding of literary theories and his application of them in his works.”²⁶ If this statement were true, Naguib Mahfouz would turn into a critic or a man of letters who writes novels based on all the available measurements and theories.

This division of Mahfouz's texts into stations through which critics pass is not just the result of a partial point of view. It is also the result of a historiographic rather than a historical point of view, one that looks at the works of a writer as things that develop with time. From this perspective, each movement made by the texts of Naguib Mahfouz would be a forward movement involving more craftsmanship and maturity in this worldview, as if he had started off as a child with Abath al-aqdar, grown into boyhood in “The Trilogy,” reached maturity in Children of Gebelawi, and become a wise old man in Malhamat al-harafish. This upward, evolutionary movement of Naguib Mahfouz may stumble a little or waver, yet it persists in its ascent on the ladder of evolution.

If we distance ourselves from the above fallacy of evolution, we discern its lack of a historical perspective, its tendency to measure a writer in years or according to the succession of his works, independent of any other measurements. Moreover, this point of view usually presupposes a starting point for the evolution: a zero point where the least evolved of all creatures reside. Yet this point is of no value except as a mere beginning. Consequently, the starting point has to denote the lowest literary point on the ladder of evolution and thus on the ladder of value. The end point on the scale, therefore, has to be the highest position on the ladder of evolution and, consequently, on the ladder of value. Following this logic, the texts of Naguib Mahfouz end up being arranged temporally according to a sequence based on a hierarchy, at the bottom of which reside the romanticism of Abath al-aqdar, whereas at its top there is the realism—or metarealism, according to some critics—of “The Trilogy.”

The first consequence of such classification and subclassification—the trap into which the “realist” critic falls once lured by the novelist—is a descent from the “realism of comprehensive revolution” to “the heart of the night,” where certainty does not amount to the 50 percent Abdallah speaks about in “Harat al-‘ushshaq” (“Lovers' Alley”) from Hikaya bi-la bidaya wa la nihaya (1971). The metarealist critic faces this dilemma when he is cunningly lured by the novelist into taking a seat in al-Karnak's café. Would the first, realistic critic disavow his previous position? Would the second, metarealist critic accuse Naguib Mahfouz of regression? Possibly they would. But the category of evolution would then be transformed into something vague and would thus become suspect.

The second consequence will be the problem of internal classifications for Naguib Mahfouz's evolving texts. Critics have given the basic stages names and made them into grades, one on top of the other. But what about the internal subclassifications within each grade? Here we might pause at the work of ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, whose book on Naguib Mahfouz, despite the enormous efforts he exerted in it, furnishes us with a clear example of the pitfalls of such an evolutionary point of view. This book, Najib Mahfuz: al-Ru‘ya wa al-adat (Naguib Mahfouz: The Vision and the Means), presents us with an unfailing duality in which vision appears in sharp opposition to is means. Then both form another opposition to the duality of form and content, an opposition that leads us step by step to a definition of content that molds and then imposes form, then to a definition of form that follows by necessity and influences content. The content nonetheless remains separate and stands by itself. It is a vision, or the off-spring of a vision, whose roots begin to form during the stage of childhood (and can easily be derived from Mahfouz's statements about his own boyhood), roots that sprout and develop in the stages that follow. These roots will remain as the constant elements of this vision, where nothing changes except some minor parts that do not affect the whole, or some aspects of the means that become its container.

If we shift from this opposition of vision and means to the fictional texts of Naguib Mahfouz, we find them in a state of evolution on a ladder whose rungs represent various kinds of vision. (A fatalistic illusory vision exists here, an individualistic vision there, and finally, a realistic vision.) Naguib Mahfouz started with the lowest rung, in Abath al-aqdar and Radubis, and then moved up to the stage of connection with reality in Kifah Tiba—which in effect is a dispatch from ancient Egypt to modern Egypt—and then to al-Qahira al-jadida, which touches reality. Then Naguib Mahfouz further developed toward realism in Khan al-khalili and al-Sarab, and finally consummated his development with the realism of Midaq Alley and The Beginning and the End.

If we inquire about the real distinction between “connection with reality” and “toward realism” and ask whether this distinction bears any differential significance, the only answer we find is this meticulous care to classify the rungs of the ascending ladder from the lowest to the highest—that is, from illusory vision to realistic vision. Still, one will be quite surprised at the paradox toward the end of the book where the realism of Naguib Mahfouz turns out to be, in truth, an ethical idealism in which fate represents “the most influential of factors on action and characterization, while drive or instinct represents the influencing factor next to fate in importance.” Nothing remains for the social factor in the realistic stage, except a “marginal role, despite what many researchers have maintained.”²⁷

If we return to the first presupposition of Badr's al-Ru‘ya wa al-adat, namely, the integrity of Mahfouz's vision, we find this integrity shattered and distributed over the rungs of the ladder of evolution, among the categories “illusory vision,” “connection with reality,” “toward realism,” and “realism,” which in the end gets lost. Moreover, the fictional world itself is divided among an antecedent vision, a content, and a form, or a vision that is a content separate from “form.” This division leads to a rupture of the relationship between vision and means and to the formation of a duality of opposites between constants and variables. If we accept the constants, we would deny Mahfouz's evolution, and the variables to mere incidental transformations in the vision.

Yet we do not encounter just a single vision in Naguib Mahfouz's works, but numerous evolving visions; otherwise, such oppositions as those set up between illusory vision and realistic vision would appear totally nonsensical. And if we accept Mahfouz's evolution, we must accept the validity of variables and deny the constants. Nonetheless, the constants would still remain as solid and as unaffected as blocks of stone, for Naguib Mahfouz has never experienced “a radical upheaval leading to a shift from one extreme to the other. All that happened was that his vision became deeper and more profound.”²⁸

In either case, however, the struggle between constants and variables has disappeared, and the relationship between them has become more vague than ever. What is constant in the first case emerges in the second more like a Hegelian spirit that exists before the texts and manifests itself in them through the ascending rungs of vision: illusory, idealistic, and realistic. Then the constant becomes an absolute, which had been there since the days of his youth (which can be derived from Mahfouz's first statements, if not from his novels). This constant enables visions to replace one another, as train stations do before the eyes of a traveler. The variable in the second case becomes biological states that evolve, in stages, like a chimpanzee that has become a man. Each stage then has a different vision, with conceptual categories as distinct from one another as the head of the monkey and that of the human being. The constant then disappears altogether. And while vision in the first case turns into an absolute that is different from its graded manifestations in those piles of texts, the visions in the second case, become content clothed in different forms. If we recall the assumptions that content is directly associated with situation and that content is fundamental to vision, the result is an abundance of situations in the texts of Naguib Mahfouz or, rather, breakdowns that threaten the totality of these texts, which indeed will cause the whole totalizing system to scuttle away.

The text in itself cannot be described as constant or restricted to a single, solid meaning. It can become, in Edward Said's words, “a network of often colliding forces,” but a text also “in being a text is a being in the world.”²⁹ Because the text exists in the world, it is only logical for its meaning to be reproduced for the benefit of the world. It is logical, too, that the interaction of its internal forces not take place in complete separation from a reader who, in his turn, exists in the world. The text is originally the result of an immediate contact between author and medium in a definite world. And once the author releases the text and allows it to circulate, it engages itself in other processes of production for the benefit of the world in which it now exists. Insofar as the text is attributed to its author, it is also attributable to those who have contributed to the production of its meaning.

We may dive into even deeper waters and turn to the epistemological and ontological nature of the text. As object, the text exists independently of our consciousness, starting with its printed pages and words, all the way through the signifiers contained in its pages. The text is therefore an object of knowledge manifested in a particular ontological entity. The independent existence of the text, however, harbors a paradox that does not destroy its independence but still delimits it. It thereby defines the processes of reading. It is an independent existence inasmuch as it is an object of knowledge. And this independence naturally influences the reader who perceives it. This perceiving reader, in turn, interferes by shaping the object of his perception (namely, the text) and thereby helps in determining its ontological and epistemological dimensions.

Hence, the text is at the same time independent of and tied to is reader. It remains both influencing and influenced, acting and acted upon. The production of meaning, then, becomes a process in which text participates as the primary agent of production and the reader, in the last analysis, takes part as a secondary agent. This process is then called a reading, as long as the reader does not, under any circumstances, sacrifice the read text, and as long as this text remains fundamental in directing the reading process.

Were the case to be reversed and the secondary to become primary, reading would then disappear and even turn into something negative. It would deteriorate gradually into mere reduction on the part of the perceiver who will neither read nor reduce. The logical outcome of such a reversal is the destruction of the text's independence and its transformation into an exhibition of political or social concepts or into an occasion for reviewing religious deliberations. The critical task would then shift from reading to a cluster of impressionistic processes that would start with a discussion of the work's effect on the psyche—consider it as a “psychological performance,” to use Anwar al-Ma‘addawi's term—pass through the process of extracting a group of ideas, and isolating them from the text, then end up focusing on religious or political reveries that, in effect, enable us to identify the critic and not the text. In all such cases, we fall away from reading and edge closer to reduction.

If we take all the above into consideration, we find ourselves faced with a twofold position on the criticism of Naguib Mahfouz, a position that oscillates between reading and reduction. Reading is thus a performance of the text and a production of its meaning. It is so definitely both that it makes reading into an articulation of the text, whereas reduction is an articulation of the critic speaking through text. Therefore, reduction is not a process in which text “articulates” but one in which the text is interrogated. Reading is a process of interacting levels in which the text achieves its internal struggle among the various elements whose relationships constitute its system. It is also a process in which the system of the read text contends with that of the perceiving reader, without either of them replacing the other, and in which both systems fall under the influence of larger and more comprehensive systems that intervene as influential factors in the reading process.

We thus identify three interacting levels in the reading process. The manner in which interactions occur among these levels and the outcome of their interactive relationships will distinguish one reading from another. These readings become types that can be described and analyzed. Reduction as a process is a different matter. In it the first level of the text dwindles until nothing is left apart from the critic's system—nothing but his or her critical theory or literary norms corresponding to a larger system (or a world view)—so that there arises, out of the correspondence, this process of interrogating the text to make it conform with the critic's system.

Still, whether it is a case of reading or reduction, the text always contains a constant drift from inside to outside—that is, from the inner world of the text—that actual domain in which reading, or reduction, is effected—to other extratextual terrain. It follows that the movement in the reading process never ceases to alternate between the text's inner system and other outer systems until meaning has been produced. On the contrary, movement in the reductive process is a direct one, and although it may have more than one direction, it remains predestined, starting from the same point to which it returns, with neither mediation nor complexity.

The drift from inside the text to its outside is natural as long as the text by its very nature as a linguistic artifact, makes reference to the world.³⁰ Because each reading of the text must eventually relate to or interact with something outside the text, it becomes possible to admit that reading, though not innocent, does not negate the autonomous nature of the text. But there are two faces to reading's noninnocence: a negative one that relates to reduction and a positive one that relates to the act of reading itself. The positive aspect is associated with the reader's self, which functions actively in perceiving the text as an independent object of knowledge. It is also associated with the clash between readings, whereas the negative aspect amounts to denying the text's autonomy, thus immersing it in the chaos of reductions and the consequent negative implications of interrogating the text.

Among Mahfouz's critics, this interrogation of the text begins to manifest itself the moment they disregard the complex mediations between the text and the world, when they marginalize the relationship between signifier and signified or confuse the richness of signification and the poverty of intent. Then we find the text transformed into an intellectual document that becomes a testimony to the intentions of Naguib Mahfouz and a symptom among the signifying symptoms of his thought systems. The critic then describes not literary texts but ideas translated in an imaginative language. Such being the case, it is no wonder then to find critics speaking of “Naguib Mahfouz the politician” or searching for “national sentiments in the literature of Naguib Mahfouz,” “Egyptian national history in‘The Trilogy,’” “the crisis of political consciousness in Autumn Quail,” or even “singing and singers in the literature of Naguib Mahfouz.”³¹

The searcher for Naguib Mahfouz the politician will pause before Sawsan Hammad's speech in al-Sukkariyya and expound on its straightforwardness and gravity—the cunning of the plot and the elusive manner in which it expresses its opinion. This searcher or interrogator would then identify what Sawsan Hammad says with Naguib Mahfouz, and her statements become a pact by which Naguib Mahfouz has abided ever since he started writing and which expresses his opinions and thoughts. Naguib Mahfouz would emerge from the outset as a political writer, with a clear, historically defined opinion, a solid social position, and an intellectually comprehensive view, no matter how much it may appear to be clothed in narrative artifice or hidden in the cunning folds of his art. There would be no objection to such statements if they were the project of research carried out by a historian who manipulates the literary text, as a document, for definite historical rather than for literary purposes. Yet the literary text would end up being arrested and accused directly, charged with an emphasis on the image of the middle classes rather than that of the working and peasant classes in the course of Egypt's revolution.

Once we are involved in such a process of interrogation, it follows necessarily that we step into the circle of rectifying judgment based on the authority of secondary references, on the thought systems of the critic or interrogator himself. Here we oscillate between the negative and the positive as we begin to face inconclusive oppositions and contradictions. We shall find, on the negative side, one critic saying, “Naguib Mahfouz is the writer of the petite bourgeoisie, but he does not articulate the new social forces striving for self-assertion.” Therefore, Naguib Mahfouz “commemorates the tragedy of his own class, beyond which he cannot see.”³² In the same vein, we find another critic saying that Naguib Mahfouz views the world mechanically and that his view “reduces the world to some fixed laws, the discovery of which, it is claimed, would lead to the understanding of this world.” This critic concludes that Naguib Mahfouz “hits the surface but not the core” and that “besides not watching for movement and its incessant contradictions, he does not try to put the question in its correct, or possible, formulation and to ask why instead of how.” We are thus bound to find in the characters of Naguib Mahfouz “residual traces of the bourgeois mentality that fancies intellect as separated from science, science from intellect … both from man, and everyone from particular cultural circumstances.”³³ All such statements lead us to a particular system of thought.

Yet it is possible for this same thought system to breed another opposing perspective leading to a judgment of positive value. Then we hear Mahfouz called “the best among writers to understand the middle class, the ablest in articulating its problems and exhibiting the intricacies of its life, enabled by his insight into its reality and deep understanding of its contradictions.”³⁴ He becomes the writer who “intelligently perceived the nature of the middle class,” or rather, “the truth of his own cultural and historical circumstances” and “the nature of the social forces and their struggles and evolutionary movement in Egyptian society.” By so doing, Mahfouz enables us to “approach social phenomena perceptively and soundly.”³⁵ We also find, in the same vein, other descriptive terms relating to “the progressivism of the idealist thinker,” designating his “radical” and “humanitarian” thinking. All are articulated with positive intentions.

We find a critic looking at the same document that was previously devalued and viewed negatively, confirming it positively, and claiming that the works of Naguib Mahfouz embrace “a significant progressivism in an oriental society whose passive dependency has grown out of proportion.” We find in the texts of Naguib Mahfouz “premises of a humanitarian credo whose progressively democratic role no one can deny, in an oriental, otherworldly society whose history knows no radical, democratic revolutions.”³⁶ Yet we can still discern some opposition, even on this positive level. One critic may tell us about Naguib Mahfouz “the materialist, socialist writer,” but another will not hesitate to say to Naguib Mahfouz himself in the pages of periodicals, “The transition in your political history was from the Wafd to Marxism.”³⁷

This last conflict soon leads to another contradiction, for the intellectual implication of Mahfouz's text can always be viewed from within a different system. We find Sayyid Qutb on the positive side, praising Naguib Mahfouz for the ethical religious content of his Khan al-khalili, which would make the novel an example of a type of thinking that believes in the sarcasm of fate, “the sarcastic fate towering over all,” that fate that “does not even take up a serious countenance in the moments of bitterest irony” because one “reads the story and then puts it down to open up the greater story of humanity, the story of impotent humanity in the hands of mighty fate.”³⁸ In this context, Sayyid Qutb captured one symptom out of many in the same novel and wrenched out of it an ethical value—the same value that made him say about Kifah Tiba, “Had it been in my power, I would have put it into the hands of every young man and woman: I would have printed and distributed it in every house for free.”³⁹ This same value induces Sayyid Qutb to affirm that “the critic in the Arab East rises not to reform the measures of art alone but to reform those of ethics also.”⁴⁰ Indeed, it will induce him to salute Naguib Mahfouz for this inclination in al-Qahira al-jadida to “uphold principles at any cost, and to debase self-indulgence, social and ethical deterioration, filth and loose morality.”⁴¹

As we move within the framework of this ethical system to the negative side, we find critics who reproach Naguib Mahfouz for harassing his characters and invariably exposing them to the curses of life so much so that any sense of hope or note of optimism is almost extinguished. It is as if there were a curious enmity between Naguib Mahfouz and his characters. “I do not know the origin of this enmity within him,” says Muhammad Fahmi. “He treats them [his characters] so severely that even those rare sparks of happiness and contentment in his stories soon fade away unable to dispel the severity and gloom of their atmosphere.”⁴²

The same ethical system repeats itself once more, on the positive side, after many long years. We once more hear statements that are but a continuation of the formal elements lurking in Sayyid Qutb, yet in more depth and profundity, in Muhammad Hasan ‘Abd Allah's al-Islamiyya wa al-ruhiyya fi adab Najib Mahfuz (Islam and spiritualism in the literature of Naguib Mahfouz). This book came out as an attempt to “reconstitute the logic of its writer's presuppositions by viewing recourse to God as man's only possible, even fated, solution in the face of the mysteries he was unable to resolve.”⁴³ Hence, with such an attempt, Naguib Mahfouz is brought back to the domain of Islam, having almost been expelled from it. Yet the ethical problem persists. The search after the infinite is placed in opposition to the finite, and belonging is placed in opposition to uprootedness.

Thus the process of interrogating the text proceeds in search for “the religious character and the spiritual touch” (‘Abd Allah, 19) and tells us accordingly that Qur'anic sources “are more influential and more deeply presented in Abath al-aqdar than in its Greek mythological sources” (35). The Struggle of Thebes likewise yields “many of the features characteristic of religious life” (55). And in the profound ending to Midaq Alley, readers are made to pause before Radwan al-Husayni, the character who represents “the pious self-obligation on the part of the able toward the needy, the sound in mind and body toward the abnormal and disabled, and the disabled and the safely guided toward the misguided” (112). The stature of ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Shawkat then rises above that of Ahmad Shawkat, “for he is the productively fertile one whereas the latter is impotent and sterile” (184).

If such is the case, we should not be surprised that ‘Abd al-Wahab 'Ismail (in Mirrors) represents Sayyid Qutb himself. Yet ‘Abd Allah does not let the matter pass without setting up a new trial, for Naguib Mahfouz could have enriched this character “by looking at him from a humanistic standpoint. Even if he were against prejudice, the way he deals with this character betrays his prejudice against him” (131). Yet when Naguib Mahfouz's heart softened and the universe shrank before his eyes, “his spiritual inner tendencies truly took over, and he soared up high—a tragic bard bemoaning human destiny and ridiculing the vanity of man—finite, mortal man” (192). ‘Abd Allah's statements are not so different from those of Sayyid Qutb on fate in Khan al-khalili, an affinity that shows us that we are dealing with the constituent elements of one and the same system;

Regardless of the obvious ideological contrast, the search after the petit bourgeois issues and the search after spiritual values are in fact two facets of one and the same process, the process of interrogating the text. Inasmuch as this process destroys the unique autonomy of Mahfouz's texts, it also exposes them to distortion and causes them to lose that which is most intrinsic to literary texts, their literary nature. Such a process contributes in more than one way to the negative view of literature as mimesis, by reinforcing the implicit assumption that literature imitates ethical values at one time and social events at another. A critic speaking of spiritual values will not then differ from another telling us about the social issues of the petite bourgeoisie. In fact, neither critic will differ from Taha Husayn when he speaks of Midaq Alley as “a massive gospel” of great value because “it is a perfect sociological study, carried out as sociologists might have done through field-work, portraying the society under study accurately and investigating it thoroughly.”⁴⁴

If we finally move from this interrogation of spiritual values, bourgeois affiliations, and well-researched sociological studies, we find that the text-document transforms with each interrogation—in the manner of Ovid's transformed creatures—so that its generator, Naguib Mahfouz, becomes at once an idealist, a materialist, and a reactionary. Then, on the one hand, his idealism becomes a humanitarian tendency and a mystic socialism; on the other hand, it becomes scientific socialism and Marxism. As for his progressive and reactionary tendencies, they are manifested in the uncovering of the contradictions of a particular class. What we get in the end, or even before the end, is nothing but the chaos of reductions.

I suppose, then, that this intellectual interrogation of meaning represents a fundamental component of all the extratextual systems in which the criticism of Naguib Mahfouz moves. This element may also lead us to be aware of structures in which certain traditionally inherited thought-forms wrestle with one another. And within them proponents of manifest meaning fight with the proponents of hidden meaning over the intent behind the text, and its plurality. The distortion of meaning leads to other thought-forms in the same structures of awareness. Certain forms of belief wrestle with one another and demand interpretation to fill in the gap between them and the text and to achieve a certain degree of congruity that will bestow on them a multidimensional validity. As far as these forms return us to the innermost depths of tradition, they also relate us to other contemporary forms of commitment.

This element of interrogation makes us aware that the criticism of Naguib Mahfouz cannot be viewed separately from the struggle between systems of belief outside it. It also leads us to a major dilemma that still confounds the critic of Naguib Mahfouz: how to achieve a balanced relationship between his reading self and the object of his reading. Such a problematic must be discussed in another place, for we have to start with an analysis of the types of reading, and I have yet to analyze all those types. In the course of that analysis will emerge the other, positive side of the complex tangle of commentaries, explications, and interpretations that constitute criticism on Naguib Mahfouz—the complexity, richness, and variety wrapped up within it.

Notes

1. The essay from which this chapter was drawn was originally published in Arabic as “Qira‘a fi nuqqad Najib Mahfuz: mulahazat awwaliyya” Fusul 1, no. 3 (Apr. 1981): 161–79. Translated with permission.

2. Luwis ‘Awad, Dirasat fi al-naqd wa al-adab (Studies in Criticism and Literature) (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anglu-Misriyya, 1964), 345–46.

3. ‘Ali al-Ra‘i, Dirasat fi al-riwaya al-Misriyya (Studies in the Egyptian Novel) (Cairo: al-Mu‘assassa al-Misriyya al-‘Amma, 1964), 254.

4. The first noticeable manifestations of the petite bourgeoisie in Mahfouz criticism appeared in 1954 in both the periodical al-Risala al-jadida and the newspaper al-Misri with Abd al-‘Azim Anis, who later wrote Fi al-thaqafa al-Misriyya (On Egyptian Culture) (1955), and Muhammad Mandur, who later wrote Qadaya jadida fi adabina al-hadith (New Issues in Our Modern Literature) (Cairo, 1958). The same elements later become the basis for full-length studies, as Ghali Shukri's al-Muntami (The Committed) (Cairo: Akhbar al-Yawm, 1964).

5. Naguib Mahfouz, al-Sukkariyya (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1957); trans. in Hamdi Sakkut, The Egyptian Novel and Its Main Trends: 1913–1952 (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, 1971), 137. The statement in fact originates with Kamal's nephew Ahmad [eds.].

6. Sabri Hafiz, “al-Ittijah al-riwa‘i al-jadid ‘ind Najib Mahfuz” (“The New Direction of Naguib Mahfouz's Fiction”) al-Adab (Nov. 1963): 19.

7. Naguib Mahfouz, Qalb al-layl (Heart of the Night) (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1975), 131.

8. ‘Awad, Dirasat, 346.

9. Mandur, 73.

10. Kamal Yusuf (whom I do not know, unless it is a pen name) has revealed some of the aspects in which ‘Abd al-‘Azim Anis was influenced by Roger Garaudy in an important essay entitled “Nuqqaduna al-waqi‘iyyun ghayru waqi‘iyyin” (“Our Unrealistic Realist Critics”), Al-Risala al-jadida (June 1956): 14, 17. Meanwhile, Christopher Caudwell's three books: Illusion and Reality, Studies in a Dying Culture and Further Studies in a Dying Culture have had a marked influence on early Arab realist writing. Perhaps their influence is obvious in Luwis ‘Awad's Fi al-adab al-Inglizi (On English Literature) (Cairo: al-Hay‘a al Misriyya li al-Kutub, 1950).

11. I should like to acknowledge how indebted I am to the valuable bibliography published by our colleague Ahmad Ibrahim al-Hawari in Masadir naqd al-riwaya fi al-adab al-‘Arabi al-hadith fi Misr (Sources of Criticism of the Novel in Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt) (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1979).

12. Edward al-Kharrat, “‘Alam Najib Mahfuz” (“The World of Naguib Mahfouz”), al-Majalla (Jan. 1963): 27.

13. Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim, Ta‘ammulat fi ‘alam Najib Mahfuz (Meditations on the world of Naguib Mahfouz) (Cairo: al-Hay‘a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma li al-Ta‘lif wa al-Nashr, 1970), 64.

14. The history of the term type in realistic criticism starts with what Engels wrote to Margaret Harkness in 1888: “Realism to my mind implies, besides truth of details, the truthful reproduction of typical circumstances.” See Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 46. The term was then tossed around among critics of realism until it reached full maturity, as a seminal concept, in the writings of George Lukács; and so it remained until it was obviously shaken by Brecht's attack, which was supported by Walter Benjamin.

15. The “archetype” or al-namudhaj al-awwal, or al-mithal as translated by Magdi Wahba (Mu ‘jam mustalahat al-adab/A Dictionary of Literary Terms: English, French, Arabic [Beirut: Libraririe du Liban, 1974], 29), goes back to the Cambridge School of Comparative Anthropology and Jung's psychology. Jung's definition of the term was “the primordial image” or “archetype,” “an institution … or a process repeated throughout history, when fantasy manifests itself freely; thus it is a mythological institution. If we subject these archetypes to careful inspection, we shall discover in them the effects of typical experiences. They are psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same type.” Obviously these archetypes are not the products of one individual, but of all ancestors; and they are inherited as a priori determinants of individual experience. See Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934; reprint, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), 8. And inasmuch as this criticism relates “symbol” and “archetype,” it distinguishes between “symbol” and “representation” and connects the former to myth on the basis that it merges into the archetype to project a different instinctive, universal image or to designate certain types of human behavior indicative of certain primeval forms of belief. For various applications of this criticism, see John B. Vickery, ed., Myth and Literature: Contemporary Theory and Practice (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1969), trans. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra as al-Ustura wa al-ramz (Baghdad, 1973).

16. See Nikos Kazantzakis, The Fratricides, trans. Athena Gianakas Dallas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964).

17. Ibrahim Fathi, al-‘Alam al-riwa‘i ‘ind Najib Mahfuz (The Fictional World of Naguib Mahfouz) (Cairo: Dar al-Fikr al-Mu‘asir, 1978), 6.

18. al-‘Alim, 6.

19. ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, Najib Mahfuz: al-ru ‘ya wa al-adat (Naguib Mahfouz: The Vision and the Means) (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa li al-Tiba‘a wa al-Nashr, 1978), 9.

20. Raja' al-Naqqash, “Udaba' mu‘asirun” (“Contemporary Writers”), Kitab al-Hilal (Feb. 1971): 183–84.

21. Yahya Haqqi, 'Itr al-ahbab (The Aroma of Lovers) (Cairo: Matabi' al-Ahram, 1971), 84–85.

22. See Stephen Ulmann, “Style and Personality,” in Contemporary Essays on Style, ed. G. A. Love and M. Payne (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1969), 161.

23. ‘Awad, Dirasat, 361.

24. Mahmud al-Rabi‘i, Qira‘at al-riwaya: namadhij min Najib Mahfuz (Reading the Novel: Excerpts from Naguib Mahfouz) (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1974), 15–16.

25. See, respectively, Nabil Raghib, Qadiyyat al-shakl al-fanni ‘ind Najib Mahfuz (The Question of Artistic form in Naguib Mahfouz) (Cairo: al-Mu‘assassa al-Misriyya al-‘Amma li al-Ta‘lif wa al-Nashr, 1967), 17–18; Taha Badr, 151–52; al-‘Alim, 25–26; ‘Ali Shalaq, Najib Mahfuz fi majhulihi al-ma‘lum (Naguib Mahfouz in His Unknown Known) (Beirut: Dar al-Masira, 1979), 146; Sulayman al-Shatti, al-Ramz wa al-ramziyya fi adab Najib Mahfuz (Symbol and Symbolism in the Writings of Naguib Mahfouz) (Kuwait: al-Matba‘a al-‘Asriyya), 29–30.

26. Fatima Musa, Fi al-riwaya al-‘Arabiyya al-mu‘asira (On the Contemporary Arabic Novel) (Cairo: al-Anglu-Misriyya, 1972), 27.

27. Haqqi, 106.

28. Badr, 451.

29. Ibid., 72.

30. Cf. Edward Said, “The World, the Text, and the Critic,” in Textual Strategies, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), 161–88; later included in The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 31–53.

31. See Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1976), 36–37.

32. See, respectively, Ibrahim ‘Amir, “Najib Mahfuz siyasiyyan min thawrat 1919 ila Yunyu 1967” (“Naguib Mahfouz the Politician: From the 1919 coup d'état to June 1967”), al-Hilal (Feb. 1970): 26–27; Fuad Duwwara, “al-Wijdan al-qawmi fi adab Najib Mahfuz” (“National Emotional Life in the Literature of Naguib Mahfouz”), al-Hilal (Feb. 1970): 100–109; Jalal al-Sayyid, “Tarikhuna al-qawmi fi Thulathiyyat Najib Mahfuz” (“Our national history in The Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz”), al-Katib (Jan. 1963): 70–79; Hilal Ghunaymi, “Azmat al-wa‘i al-siyasi fi qissat al-Summan wa al-kharif” (“The Crisis of Political Consciousness in Autumn Quail”), al-Katib (Jan. 1963): 24–31; Kamal al-Najmi, “Ma' al-ghina' wa al-mughanin fi adab Najib Mahfuz” (“Singers and Singing in the Literature of Naguib Mahfouz”), al-Hilal (Feb. 1970): 128–35.

33. Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim and ‘Abd al-‘Azim Anis, Fi al-thaqafa al-Misriyya (On Egyptian Culture) (Cairo: Dar al-Fikr al-Jadid, 1955), 154, 166.

34. Ahmad ‘Abbas Salih, “Qira‘a jadida li Najib Mahfuz” (“A New Reading of Naguib Mahfouz”), al-Katib (Feb. 1966): 64–67.

35. ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Subhi, “al-Shakhsiyya al-ijabiyya fi adab Najib Mahfuz” (“Positive Characters in the Literature of Naguib Mahfouz”), al-Katib (Jan. 1963): 64.

36. Hafez, 19, 21.

37. George Tarabishi, Allah fi rihlat Najib Mahfuz al-ramziyya (God in the Symbolic Journey of Naguib Mahfouz) (Beirut: Dar al-Tali‘a, 1973), 66, 130.

38. Raja' al-Naqqash, “Bayn al-Wafdiyya wa al-Marksiyya” (“Between the Wafd and Marxism”), al-Hilal (Feb. 1970): 40.

39. Sayyid Qutb, Kutub wa shakhsiyyat (Books and Characters) (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Risala, 1946). See also al-Risala (17 Dec. 1945): 1366.

40. Sayyid Qutb, “Kifah Tiba li Najib Mahfuz” (“The Struggle for Thebes by Naguib Mahfouz”), al-Risala (2 Oct. 1944): 892.

41. Sayyid Qutb, “Khawatir mutasawiqa” (“Coherent Ideas”), al-Risala (27 Nov. 1944): 1044.

42. Sayyid Qutb, “al-Qahira al-jadida” (“New Cairo”), al-Risala (30 Dec. 1946): 1441.

43. Muhammad Fahmi, “Zuqaq al-midaqq” (“Midaq Alley”), al-Muqtataf (Dec. 1947).

44. Muhammad Hasan ‘Abd Allah, al-Islamiyya wa al-ruhiyya fi adab Najib Mahfuz (Islamism and Spiritualism in the Literature of Naguib Mahfouz) (Cairo: Dar Misr li al-Tiba‘a, 1977), 450.

45. Taha Husayn, Naqd wa islah (Criticism and Reform) (Beirut: Dar al-'Ilm li al-Malayin, 1956), 118.