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  • Carlos Fuentes — Stockholm’s Loss, His Life and Work the World’s Gain

    Posted on by David
    Carlos Fuentes, 1928 - 2012

    I.

    Four years ago my brother almost died of a bacterial infection. When his roommate found him, what little of him was conscious had been gutted by delirium. As we began to guess that Death, poker-faced to the end, did not have the winning hand, I asked my brother if he wanted me to bring him books. Pure projection on my part. Anyone who desires to live will surely want to read. He must have said yes, or I must have thought he did, because the next day I brought him books to borrow. Because I did not know how to lend him actual strength. However much my brother and I may have wanted to be there for each other, we have not been. Every so often, Extraordinary Circumstance attempts to play matchmaker for us, but as soon as it leaves the room, we drift.

    My brother is a serious reader. Strange that we have never been able to make of this more than a passing interest between us, like strangers noticing each other wearing identical shoes. But, once in a while, books make handy offerings. Flouting the daunting impassivity of the vital signs monitor glittering overhead, I laid two books in his hands, one short, one long. The first, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, I had not yet read myself, but I told him Sam had, and had loved it. The second, “one of the best I’ve read in recent years,” was Christopher Unborn. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, avatar of all fecundity, and Carlos Fuentes. I looked for signs of interest, satisfied myself that they were there, then took the books off the bed cover where he’d let them rest and set them on the stand next to his bed, pushing aside cards, flowers, and a teddy bear, given by those who knew him better. As I walked past the nurses’ station towards the elevators it felt good to have left him in the care of these great Latin Americans; I was quite sure the restorative powers of their works far outstripped my own.

    I hadn’t so much read Carlos Fuentes’ book as shredded it, paper flung and flying from my canines until every bit had been consumed. The wealth of that book, a literary billionaire if ever there was one, its boggling complexity of thought paired with sheer sensual delight, a voluptuous braininess if you will, would make a powerful infusion, I knew. Enough to raise the three-days dead. Enough for my brother.

    He is angry, my brother. Some of it I understand. Much of it I share. Most of it I would not presume upon. Fuentes, if Unborn signifies, was angry too. His black and flowing anger at what corruption had done to the Mexico he loved must have made his pen hot to the touch. At once knotted and panoramic, Christorpher Unborn – Cristóbal Nonato – with its sinewy orphans, its vamps and dictators, floods and revolutions, mountains of shit and histories of blood, must surely be one of the most coruscating satires in modern fiction. A supreme example of what anger, undammed and channeled, can produce. I wanted that. I wanted that for my brother.

     

    II.

    Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal. Monstrous the first vertebrate that succeeded in standing on two feet and thus spread terror among the beasts still normally and happily crawling close to the ground through the slime of creation. Astounding the first telephone call, the first boiling water, the first song, the first loincloth.

    —Terra Nostra

     

    III.

    “Sad news: Carlos Fuentes died.”

    When Sam’s text came through five days ago I was sitting at my favorite coffee house, immersed in Patrick White: A Life, David Marr’s biography of my current literary addiction. Months had past since my last thought of Fuentes. Not since last October, Nobel season. And before that, not since Sam brought home Destiny and Desire, his last book published in English, from the Border’s dissolution sale.  As Christopher Unborn has as its unlikely narrator a fetus waiting to be born on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, so in this last book, we are addressed from the tongue-biting mouth of a decapitated head. Artemio Cruz narrated his story from the vantage of his last moment in life.  Something in Fuentes was drawn to these far boundaries of existence, needed, somehow, to crash them, as if what he had to say could only be said if common understandings were dissolved at the outset. Time, after all, is passing.

    Fuentes’ Nobel Prize had been ripening for years in that Northern grove, its luster outshining many of those which dropped before it. Including that of Mario Vargas Llosa. I was dismayed when two years ago the Nobel went to the Peruvian. Not because I thought him undeserving. Only that Fuentes was more deserving. Llosa is, without question, a great writer, but what of his matches the shear myth-making weather system of Terra Nostra, the evocation of the uncanny of Aura, the summation of a history of revolution as found in The Death of Artemio Cruz, the volcanic heart of Christopher Unborn?

    Now, Fuentes has died. His Nobel still hangs, no less bright for having never been given. Those tenders of literary reputations in Stockholm won’t touch it. It burns their hands.

     

    IV.

    You will never again see those faces you saw in Sonora and Chihuahua, faces you saw sleepy one day, hanging on for dear life, and the next furious, hurling themselves into that struggle devoid of reason or palliatives, into that embrace of men which is broken by other men, into that declaration, here I am and I exist, with you and with you and with you , too, with all hands and all veiled faces: love, strange, common love that wears itself out on itself. You will say it to yourself, because you lived through it and you didn’t understand it as you lived it.

    —The Death of Artemio Cruz

     

    V.

    My brother has not returned Christopher Unborn. I even asked him to bring it with him when, a few weeks ago, we had dinner together. “I even set it by the door before I came,” he apologized. “No worries,” I said. “Nothing urgent.” As we chewed our restaurant food along with his recent, failed, engagement to a girl who could never have shared in his reading. I don’t know why he hasn’t given it back. I don’t know why he left it at home that night. And since I don’t know, I’m free to imagine. Let Fuentes be with him awhile longer. As long as necessary.

    Fuentes? Now more than ever.

     


    Fuentes, Carlos Novelists Should have won 📎and tagged

  • As Patrick White turns 100, why is no one reading him?

    Posted on by David
    Patrick White, 1912 - 1990

    The time has come to speak of Patrick White, whose centenary on May 28th, is fast upon us.  I will try to keep this post fairly short because I am currently in such a snit of idolatry that I won’t have anything especially coherent to say. I will simply put forth that, for me, Patrick White ranks along side Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Saul Bellow as one of the greatest novelists to write in English in the twentieth century. Hyperbole? You decide:

    The woman winding wool held all this enclosed in her face, which had begun to look sunken. It was late, of course, late for the kind of lives they led. Sometimes the wool caught in the cracks of the woman’s coarse hands. She was without mystery now. She was moving round the winding chairs on flat feet, for she had taken off her shoes for comfort, and her breasts were rather large inside her plain blouse. Self-pity and a feeling of exhaustion made her tell herself her husband was avoiding her, whereas he was probably just waiting for a storm. This would break soon, freeing them from their bodies. But the woman did not think of this. She continued to be obsessed by the hot night, and insects that were filling the porcelain shade of the lamp, and the eyes of her husband, that were at best kind, at worst cold, but always closed to her. If she could have held his head in her hands and looked into the skull at his secret life, whatever it was, then, she felt, she might have been placated. But as the possibility was so remote, she gave such a twist to  the wool that she broke the strand.

    —The Tree of Man

    Here is the Whiteian sublime. The physicality he evokes signifies without strain: note her too large breasts, elected from, we gather, a panoply of attributes waxing too large in her plain life. And how about that biblical ninth sentence, gathering into her obsessions the hot night, insects filling the porcelain lamp shade, the eyes of her husband, and finally  something vast and forsaken at her core. Of course, we realize upon reaching the end of this passage, which feels more like a perimeter than a terminus, how obvious, the strand of wool will break, lacking, as it does, the heart’s resilience. Whole chapters could be written plucking the riches from the limbs of this passage. And, in a fictional output comprised of some six thousand pages of such passages, this one is more or less garden variety, making the oeuvre of Patrick White one of the most valuable gardens in modern literature.

    Which begs the question, why is no one reading him? Why am I practically the only one I know who has even heard of him (apart from those few of my friends who politely let me blather encomiums)?  His oeuvre has received sufficient critical attention to persuade me that I am not alone in my admiration. But even those who speak highly of him tend to refer to him as “the most important figure in Australian letters,” or “the first to put Australia on the literary map.” Three cheers for post-White Aussie writers. But White himself is so much more than the down-underwriter of his country’s literary life. He is a world writer in every sense, and should be spoken of in the same terms we reserve for José Saramago, Thomas Mann, Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer. Why isn’t he?

    In my search for answers I’ve been reading his books like mad, reading criticism, trolling the internet, and talking with friends. A distillation of what I’ve found comes down to these four points:

    1. Patrick White is a high modernist, making him unfashionable in a post-modern world. As far as I can tell, what this means is that he followed Joyce, Woolf, Pound, and their ilk, in the belief that the old assurances provided by religion, society, and political designations, could no longer bear the weight of modern life and thought. These writers saw a sharp division between literary art and more accessible, or popular, writing. Their books are frank about their difficulties. White has been criticized for the density of his “mannered” or “poetic” prose, his “clotted images”, and fragmented sentences. Naturally, this will limit his readership, but it cannot, on its own, account for his enduring obscurity. His writing is dense, but not daunting. Most of the best of Faulkner is much more difficult. We don’t call Samuel Beckett unfashionable just because no one writes like him now.

    2. Patrick White is too pessimistic, too dark, and what he asks us to consider about human nature – ourselves included –  is beyond the pale for most readers.  I concede this may be so. Many readers have commented on the “shock of recognition” which assails them on nearly every page. But this laying bare, this “truth telling”, to use a rather hackneyed term, this “vivisection”, to use a Whiteian term, is solidly within the purview of the artist. Do serious readers really find the meanness of Nabokov so much more edifying? Does one turn to Eugene O’Neill for a little cheer-up? If White is too relentlessly grim, how, then, make sense of the ever-rising star of Cormac McCarthy, who throws a dense, gorgeous, ball of modernist prose at the violence at the heart of the void? (White’s biographer, David Marr, has said, perhaps too felicitously, that McCarthy could be “up before Media Watch on charges of plagiarism by spirit.) While we’re at it, why don’t we, for the sake of our constitutions, leave Shakespeare on his increasingly dusty shelf while we get a little spiritual r&r.

    Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris in the kitchen

    3. Patrick White was gay. This seems to be the pet gripe of educated gay men of a certain generation, who, to compensate for their admitted fragility in the world, draw strength from being “the only gay in the village.”

    4.  Patrick White was Australian, making him peripheral to the bossier entities of the literary world. This argument is, sadly, the most persuasive. It grieves me to think that literature may be subject to the same laws as cynical politics: if a country fails to find ascendance in the consciousness of a more established block, it could drop off the map altogether and the privileged parties would be none the wiser. Sam, my partner, has a different take. “There is just so much literature,” he says. His point being, if you are looking to expand your knowledge of even just the essential modern writers, would it occur to you to look to a country known mainly for kangaroos, English convicts, a rather flamboyant strain of machismo, the world’s largest Gay Pride parade, one famous piece of architecture, and an accent often invoked in comedy? Of course there is great writing coming out of that lonely desert of a continent, or at least the thin portion of it strung along its Eastern cost, but its not where most of us would go looking for it. All the same, I would think the fecund sub-genre of post-colonial literature would be happy to hold up Patrick White as one of its shining lights. Can it really come down the banality that Naipaul, Walcott, Gordimer, Coetzee, and Rushdie hale from politically sexier homelands? But then, how to account for Les Murray, widely considered one of the three or four greatest poets currently writing in English. He’s Australian.

    None of these explanations finally compel. Factoring in the idea that depth and brilliance in a body of work ought to outweigh whatever might be put in the opposing balance – an apparently fanciful notion in which I persist –  here is one further explanation:

    5. Ignorance of Patrick White and his work has, quite simply, become a habit. A bad one, I might add.

    As with racism, car crashes, and other absurdities, I find Patrick White’s obscurity hard to live with. My question – why is no one reading him? – is not rhetorical, but an honest plea for responses. Someone, please tell me.

     


    English language laureates Novelists White, Patrick You weren't going to forget about this one, were you? 📎and tagged

  • Transcending Allegory: William Golding’s THE SPIRE (part 2)

    Posted on by David

    I began my previous post, “Transcending Allegory: William Golding’s The Spire (part 1)”, with a quick rundown of the pitfalls of allegory, how it can grab a narrative by its throat, twist it about, and force it to kiss its own rectitude, and how it can make for lifeless characters whose only function is to represent a particular moral principal.  Ever since publishing Lord of the Flies William Golding has regularly born the charge of failing to miss the banana peel at the edge of the allegorical pit. I then wrote about how The Spire (1964), his fifth published novel, is read by some as confirmation of this criticism (It is, after all, about building a “spire”, wink wink.), making his career, at least up to that point, a possible subject for an allegory about the “folly of good intentions”. Then I shared my own experience of actually reading it, how I had expected its flaws to skitter over the pages like medieval demons over the doorstep of a lost soul. But after two careful readings, I was unable to make any of the complaints adhere. Instead, I found it magnificent. Which means that if someone where to write an allegory about the virtue of “just appraisal” or “the giving of second chances”, the author might invent a character named “Snotnose, a reader with a blog”, and relate his comedown and subsequent redemption through a reading of Golding’s The Spire.

    Salisbury Cathedral, visible from Golding’s window at Bishop Wentworth’s School for Boys, where he taught from 1939 to 1961 (with five years off for wartime service in the Royal Navy), was the inspiration and model for the catheral in THE SPIRE. Salisbury Cathedral’s 404-foot spire is the tallest in Great Britain.

    One of the ways Golding uses, and then transcends, allegory is through his portrayal of his protagonist.  Jocelin is dean of a medieval English cathedral for which he believes God has commanded him to construct an impossibly tall spire. Like most who claim this kind of direct connection with God, he comes across as thoroughly glazed, eyes never dropping lower than the mid-distance. Lacking the gravitas of, say, Noah, he is dependent upon his position of authority to counter all challenges to this vision. His most vocal opponent is Roger Mason, his master builder, who recognizes the insanity of pressing onward and upward with the great stone phallus known to all, save Jocelin himself, as “Jocelin’s Folly”. Jocelin traps him with a narcissist’s acumen for detecting the weaknesses of those within his orbit. First, he cuts off the possibility of other, better, work for Roger and his men. Then, more deviously, he allows an affair to bloom between Roger and Goody Pangall, wife of an impotent and crippled verger. “She will keep him here,” he rationalizes.  The affair has the double function of allowing him to distance himself from from his own stifling and stifled sexual desire. He treats the liaison, ultimately a lethal one, with a kind of willed blindness, perhaps his most salient attribute. As building progresses, and the menace of disaster looms ever larger, Jocelin proves a virtuoso of the blind eye turned. The cost of building materials, the alienation of his clergy, his spiritual duties to his “flock”, the paganism of the workmen, the mental dissolution of Roger, his own misbegotten position, even a case of human sacrifice in which the victim is walled into the foundation of the cathedral (an event Golding conveys with masterful ambiguity), all of it goes unmarked by the obsessed dean.

    Golding uses his creation as would an allegorist, disallowing him that final measure of freedom, to fidget about and exhibit incongruities, that is the hallmark of  more lifelike fictional characters. A more flexible and far-ranging novelist, like Patrick White, creates characters who are buffeted by the winds of their own consciousnesses, apparently separate from the author’s, and who experience such vicissitudes of circumstance and event that they can’t help but respond with vicissitudes of their own, emerging as essentially dignified agents, however flawed, of their own lives. By contrast, one never senses that, in the process of writing this book, Golding ever woke up wondering what stunt that crazy Jocelin was going to pull next. Rather, he brings his character into sharp focus solely through the lens of his sin. Pride, the deadliest of the famous seven, is referenced into everything he does, says, or thinks.  But the sin itself, and any moralistic stance towards it, is not really Golding’s subject. More, it is the impetus to sin, and in The Spire the impetus is multiform, a miasma of sexual repression, physical disease, narcissistic scaffolding, spiritual fragility. Golding is willing to trade a measure of “realism” for a more concise and dramatically useful embodiment of these complex dynamics. Jocelin is guilty of pride, but is not Pride himself. He is more a figure from Greek myth than medieval allegory.

    Mythic though he may be, Golding is too sophisticated a writer to allow a single reading of Jocelin. On the one hand, he is a narcissistic demon, oblivious to the lives he destroys. Golding’s rendering of him as such is subtle. To the criticism, mentioned in the previous post, that Golding has “seriously underwritten” his novel, showing characters and their settings in mere outline, I rejoin that he has, with a remarkably steady hand, drawn his readers into his protagonist’s consciousness. The Spire is what Wayne Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction) describes as a third-person narrator-agent novel, a third person novel whose central character so influences the action that he functions nearly as a first-person voice. Through the sparsity of the setting, and those outlines and gestures which pass for people, we see the world as Jocelin sees it. That is, we see the attenuation of all that does not immediately come to bare on his God-haunted vision.

    On the other hand, Jocelin is the portrait of an artist. He confronts the modern Western reader with one of our culture’s most cherished archetypes: the Visionary. We are gluttons for stories about the artist-hero who, against all odds and opposition, and unlike most of us, remains true to his or her vision, seeing it through to its triumphant completion. (No matter how clear-eyed our world view, there is always a little Ayn Rand lurking behind a polyp in our soul.) While Jocelin brings destruction, not least of all to himself, he is also the agent of creation. His sin may be pride, but his virtue is a kind of simplicity, a singleness of purpose that any true artist must exhibit. Whatever is demonic in him, his faith is genuine, and it is It is not, I think, a spoiler to say that at the end of the novel, having undergone a highly ambivalent redemption in which he is, paradoxically, shorn of this very faith, together with his “vision”, Jocelin dies, but —his spire still stands.

    I hope Golding sent at least an expensive bouquet of flowers to whoever talked him out of his original title, An Erection at Barcester, for he would have done his own vision a grave disservice.

    “Round about the year 1200, Bishop Poore was standing on a hill overlooking the confluence of the local rivers, according to legend, when the mother of Jesus appeared to him, told him to shoot an arrow and build her a church where the arrow fell. The arrow flew more than a mile and fell in the middle of a swamp. There, with complete indifference to such things as health, foundations, access and general practicability, the cathedral was built. Eighty years later, with a technological gamble which makes space travel seem child’s play, the builders erected the highest spire in the country on top of it, thousands of tons of lead and iron and wood and stone. Yet the whole building still stands. It leans. It totters. It bends. But it still stands…a perpetual delight, a perpetual wonder.” —William Golding, “An Affection for Cathedrals”

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  • Transcending Allegory: William Golding’s “THE SPIRE” (part 1)

    Posted on by David

    Allegory, the use of symbolic figures or actions to convey abstract, often moral, principles or ideas, can, in the hands of a skillful writer, add a layer of meaning to a narrative. But, how skilled that writer must be lest characters shed flesh and blood and become mere signifiers, “Truth” or “Avarice” in all but name. How subtle, lest every action, every gesture become a schoolyard tattler pointing a righteous finger at its own meaning.  When allegory infects a narrative’s structure, it becomes as false and awkward as “asset enhancing” underwear, worn to trick the eye into thinking there is something there when there isn’t. The Victorian bustle is perhaps the most famous example, worn by women of all shapes and sizes as an “allegory” of their own sexual identity. William Golding has often been faulted for being an allegorist, a designer of literary bustles.

    “Le Stryge”, Charles Meryon’s 1853 etching of one of Violloet-Le-Duc’s gargoyles perched on a balustrade of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which Golding acknowledged as one of the inspirations for the “ravonlike” egoism of Dean Jocelin.

    One need read no further than the title of The Spire to suspect confirmation of this criticism.  If the novel turned out to be about nothing other than what the cover claims, then we could already assume the author has used his Everyman quill to give us a good medieval talking to. At its most mundane, a spire is an allegorical piece of architecture. Even without invoking Freud, it is a symbolic declaration of power, void of function apart from its meaning. And when the bespired  building is a Christian cathedral, the allegorical gruel thickens. The general upward thrust of the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe, and of their spires in particular, was intended to lift the people’s eyes upward, releasing their attention from the ground where they labored, and into which their lives were headed, and to remind them of the direction their souls would take at the end of a life of obedience to the church. The higher the spire, the wealthier the diocese, or the more wealthy it was perceived to be, and therefore, the more favored by God.

    And then, so sorry, there is Freud.

    I read The Spire (1964), William Golding’s fifth published novel, the first time at least, with an ear out for what could be problematic. So primed, the problematic obliged. Jocelin, Golding’s protagonist, is the quintessential out-of-touch clergyman with, oh dear, a divine vision. He believes God has ordered him to build a four hundred foot spire on the cathedral of which he is dean. Can you say, “Pride”? Only, guess what, the building has foundations barely sufficient to support itself as it is, spireless. A spire, we are told, must “go down as far as it goes up,” surely the moral of something or another. The master builder, Roger Mason (Can’t fault the name. People in the middle ages were often identified by their trades), digs a deep pit at the church’s crossing to prove to Jocelin the lack of adequate foundations. Not only is his point made, but, it turns out, the earth creeps; the church – wait for it – has been built on shifting sands. Already there is enough portent here to tempt even the greatest writer’s heavy hand. But then, how about those four pillars on which the weight of the tower will rest. They are far too narrow. Joceline attributes all arguments against building the spire to Roger’s lack of faith and forces his vision towards completion. As it rises, ludicrous, priapic, and the pressure on the pillars increases, they being to “sing”, emitting a high pitched “eee”. And then they begin to bend, as solid stone should never do. As it turns out, their apparent solidity is the common illusion of ashlar stone, that is, a veneer of  squared, “dressed” stone fronting rubble. To top it all off, so to speak, the obsessed Dean is observed at one point holding the model of the spire close,  and stroking it. Oh, honestly!

    Another common criticism of Golding is that he is ill-adept at depicting complex adult human relationships. The Spire could be read as corroborating evidence. The characters who flicker in and out of Joceline’s line of vision are composed of outlines, gestures. Father Anselm, Joceline’s tight-lipped confessor, is little more than a posture. Goody Pangall, wife of the crippled and impotent cathedral servant, and the object of Joceline’s insufficiently sublimated lust, is finally reduced to a tuft of red hair. The setting, too, is narrow, almost amputated. There is, we deduce, a town, with townspeople, but when rains threaten to wash the town away, the sense of emergency seems purely theoretical, and a reader may even be a bit surprised that there is a place in the world Golding has evoked for rain to fall, apart from the roof of the nave. Event is similarly sparse in its rendering. Golding offers barely a hint of the religious activity native to any active cathedral. As the spire rises, we are shown dust, snapshots of progress, but no sweat, a minimum of muscular exertion. All this haunting lacuna prompted one critic to describe the book as “seriously underwritten.”

    So, if one is predisposed to dismiss this novel, one need not look far for reason. I found myself unable to do so.

    Within the first dozen pages, I believed I had the novel pegged. The consistently taut and beautiful prose notwithstanding, I knew where this story was going and could see no prospect for surprise. Yet, following the trail of those fascinatingly poised and pointed sentences, I kept on, and found that, page by page, the narrative never went where I thought it would, at least not quite, and in the end, not at all. So that months later, needing a brief respite from The Brother’s Karamozov, I opened The Spire again, this time setting aside my reservations and allowing for one of two possibilities:

    A. that I might have bad taste and be easily manipulated by heavy handed symbolism and shameless allegory, or

    B. that Golding, whatever his limitations, might just have known what he was doing after all.

    I read with growing fascination as Dean Jocelin’s mania transformed him from a blind narcissist into a gargoyle (quite literally; a craftsman, dumb and smiling, carves his beaky visage to be placed on each of the four corners of the tower), which, in the end, cracks open to reveal a deeply flawed and broken human being. I tried rolling my eyes a little when the rains brought forth the smell of corruption from the open earth at the crossing where the tombs of long forgotten bishops had been disturbed, but found it somehow unsatisfying, as if caught in my own caginess rather than Golding’s. The singing pillars, in spite of their admittedly underlined reference to the fall awaiting the sin of Pride, nonetheless evoked a very real and hypnotic sense of menace. The play of Light (sun bursting through the stained glass windows) and Dark (the pit, human sacrifice) blurred in the cathedral’s dust-laden atmosphere.

    In the end, it turned out that I had read, for a second time but as if for the first, a complex novel, not at all “underwritten”, whose final ambiguity enables it to transcend the sum of its frequently allegorical parts. Unlike with a bald faced allegory, such as Lord of the Flies, I emerged from The Spire unsure what to think, wondering just what had happened here, but having been deeply moved.

    I don’t frequently reread books.  In my next post I will say more about why, this time, I am glad I did.

    Have you read The Spire? Any other of Golding’s novels? I would love to hear your thoughts.


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  • Naguib Mahfouz turns 100, and the “Egyptian People” Receive His Centennial Honor

    Posted on by David
    Naguib Mahfouz, 1911 - 2006

    Listen to how one rebel defends revolution in Egypt:

    “History remembers the elite, and we were from the poor — the peasants, the artisans, and the fishermen. Part of the justice of this sacred hall is that it neglects no one. We have endured agonies beyond what any human can bear. When our ferocious anger was raised against the rottenness of oppression and darkness, our revolt was called chaos, and we were called mere thieves. Yet it was nothing but a revolution against despotism, blessed by the gods.”

    These are the words of Abnum, leader of a revolution which boiled up at the end of Egypt’s Old Kingdom (circa 2125 B.C.E.). That is, they are the words of a character named Abnum, presented as the historical leader of an uprising, which may or may not have actually happened, against a despotic King during the waning years of Egypt’s Old Kingdom. Rather, to say it as it is, they are the words of Naguib Mahfouz, given to his character, Abnum, in his short novel, Before the Throne.

    Perhaps you would have believed me if I had said that these words had risen steaming from the throats of angry Egyptians pressing into Tahrir Square earlier this year? This month? This is how Mahfouz’s translator and biographer Raymond Stock reads them:

    “Change “thieves” to “foreign agents,” make the revolt not one of just the poor, but of people from all classes and walks of life, replace “gods” with God, and we are in Cairo’s Tahrir Square of the last few months.”

    He wrote Before the Throne in 1983, five years before winning the Nobel Prize, two years after the assassination of president Anwar al-Sadat. In the novel, scores of Egypt’s leaders, from the First Dynasty through Mubarak, are brought before the Court of Osiris to defend their actions. The book is a rarity among Mahfouz’s thirty five published novels, an overt ideological statement. Perhaps, considering all he had witnessed in his already long life, he felt it was time.

    Like Odysseus Elytis and Czeslaw Milosz, two of the three other Nobel laureates who, were they living, would have celebrated their 100th birthdays this year, Mahfouz lived through an era of great national upheaval. He was born in Cairo’s comfortable, middle-class Gamaliya district durning the final years of British colonial rule and under the waning influence of the Ottoman Empire. In 1919, at the age of seven, he witnessed nationalist protesters gunned down in the street right in front of his home. He lived through the reign of King Fuad, first ruler of the newly sovereign Egypt, and that of his son, King Farouq, who was deposed in the coup of 1952 which presaged the establishment of the republic and of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s takeover in 1954. He lived through the bombing of Cairo by France and Britain in collusion with Israel during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, only to become a supporter of the 1978 Camp David Accords, the gesture of reconciliation with Israel which sealed the fate of Sadat. Mahfouz’s vocal position on the Accords led to massive boycotts of his novels throughout the Arab world. In the last two decades of his life, he, along with the rest of Egypt, lived under Hosni Mubarak’s brutal and corrupt American supported military dictatorship, and saw the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. In 1994, this fundamentalism got him in the neck, literally, when he was stabbed by two men on his way to one of the coffeehouse’s he loved to frequent.  The attack was intended to exact revenge for his novel, Children of Gebelawi, written three and a half decades earlier, in which he portrays God, Adam, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad as ordinary people, mere mortals operating in a Cairo neighborhood.

    Who doesn’t wish he had lived to see his centenary, a year for Egypt like no other in recent memory. Regarding the January 25th revolution which toppled Mubarak, his daughter, Faten Mahfouz, told the American University in Cairo Press, ” I think he would have been happy, like most Egyptians, including all intellectuals. A lot of people had been suffering.”

    Since 1996, the Mahfouz Medal for Arabic Literature has been awarded to the best contemporary novel in the Arabic language which is not also available in English translation. As part of the Award, the winning book is translated into English.  The award is given on December 11th, Mahfouz’s birthday.  Today, in a surprise move, the award was given, not to a person or a book, but to a curious but vital abstraction: “the revolutionary literary creativity of the Egyptian people.”

    In announcing the prize, committee member Samia Mehrez said, “Over the past year, Egyptians have articulated their ownership of space, body and language through a myriad of creative, performative and cultural practices whose semiotics, aesthetics and poetics have not only inspired sister uprisings worldwide but have also created sustaining solidarities throughout the world.”

    In future posts, I will share with you certain questions about Mahfouz that have arisen for me, and my personal experience of reading his novels.  But for now, I leave you with this You Tube portrait of the man whom many credit with creating the Arabic novel.  Please watch it.  I think you will find it fascinating.

     


    Mahfouz, Naguib Novelists 📎and tagged