Dialogues of Naguib Mahfouz: Education for the soul By Mohamed Salmawy Salmawy: It is being said that the value of literature in modern life has declined in comparison with scientific achievement; that literature has become a minor thing, a thing people can do without. Mahfouz: The status of the novelist has declined no doubt, which is regrettable. But literature per se is indispensable. It cannot be supplanted with science or anything else. The function of literature in society is something that only literature can fill. There is no such thing as societies without literature. Wherever man is, there is literature. If you look at primitive societies, you'll find they too had literature, even if they were illiterate. In villages, people gather around the story-teller, listening intently to folk stories and to the exploits of heroes. I simply cannot imagine human life without literature. All that happened is that the vehicle of literature may be changing, from the story-teller to the printed book to the computer screen. What matters is the literature, not the vehicle through which it is delivered. Salmawy: What is the value of literature to man? Some people haven't read one novel in their lives, and yet they don't feel anything is missing. Mahfouz: Man is not only a body. Man is a soul, conscience and mind. Man does not live on bread alone, as Christ said. There is no one who is not exposed to literature. Some people don't like to read, or don't know how to read. But they still have access to literature, orally perhaps or visually, through cinema. Literature is necessary for man, for it refines him. It offers him things economy, politics and science cannot. Aristotle said that literature has a great influence on the soul of man, and he referred to that influence as catharsis. Literature cleanses man, refines his feelings, and makes him noble. Salmawy: So why the decline? Mahfouz: The decline is about us, not literature. When you give up something important, you are the loser, not the thing you're giving up. Perhaps society now is busy with other things, such as making a living. But literature is more than a luxury for wealthy nations. It is a human need. It is not true that some nations love literature and others don't. Human history has no record of people without literature. As for the declining status of the novelist, this is a local phenomenon. Abroad, writers have a high status in society, even though science and other fields of knowledge are quite advanced. Sartre, Arthur Miller, Alberto Moravia, Samuel Becket, Paulo Coelho and Gabriel Garcia Marquez all had a fair amount of recognition. You may notice that the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature is the star of all Nobel laureates. This is despite the fact that other prizes are important and the winners are people who deeply influenced our lives, saved lives, or made inroads in medicine, physics, chemistry, peace and economy. With the exception of the two Egyptians who won Nobel Prizes for physics and peace -- Ahmed Zuweil and Mohamed El-Baradei -- if you ask any of our intellectuals to name those who won the Nobel Prize for science, they would not know. But they remember who won in literature. The same thing happens abroad, because writers speak to the soul and heart. They influence people. They offer them comfort and spiritual enhancement. If the measure of a nation's progress is science, the measure of its civilisation is the writer. A nation that honours its writers is a civilised nation.
