Mahfouz's progeny: The Generation of the Sixties

The Generation of the Sixties is an ambiguous term, referring to a group of very different writers who began their careers in the late 1950s, inspired in part by the July Revolution, national independence and the accompanying dreams of (socialist) justice and freedom. The accomplishments of these authors, many of whom did not achieve wider recognition until the 1980s, is often viewed as the major development in modern Arabic literature following the work of second-generation pioneers of the literary renaissance, spearheaded by Youssef Idris, Yehya Haqqi and, of course, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. The Generation of the Sixties are, then, on many levels, beneficiaries of Mahfouz's literary heritage, and their perspective provides an insight into his work. Below, representatives of that quasi-movement tell their version of the story of how Mahfouz's presence invaded their life and work, affecting not only the books they wrote but their behaviour and thinking
Sonalla Ibrahim
"He has single-handedly done the work of a whole battalion of authors, producing far more than one has any right to expect a single writer to produce"
Insofar as the writing of the Sixties has been defined by the drive to break the old moulds in which Arabic literature had constantly found expression, I think of Naguib Mahfouz himself as a Sixties writer, no question about it. For what has distinguished the writers of the Sixties is a desire to renew and develop the forms of fiction, to introduce new mechanisms and approaches to the perennial questions of how to document a life or an era, and I think he not only participated in, but positively championed such a process. Certainly, since the Sixties, and notwithstanding his earlier achievements, he has consistently sought to reinvent and expand the space of narrative writing in Arabic. This is manifest in so many ways because Mahfouz also happens to be remarkably prolific. In fact I always say that he has single- handedly done the work of a whole battalion of authors, producing far more than one has any right to expect a single writer to produce.
As for his being a Sixties writer, well, when he employed interior monologue in Al-Liss wal- Kilab, for example, and he was the first to do so. He experimented. When he resorted to Sufi discourse, or when he married the novel to the epic in Al-Harafish and Awlad Haretna -- a narrative that covers many decades -- he was experimenting. The mere fact that he tackled religious and historical subjects head on is a significant proof of this. Now it is possible to speak of negative literary influence, too, in the sense that the existence of a writer whose work you may well admire, might force you to write in a different way. It is impossible to judge in the case of Mahfouz, but perhaps there is something of this in his relation to the Sixties writers. What cannot reasonably be doubted is that he expanded the possibilities of the novel immensely, giving us all the cue to transcend and innovate. He set writing free.
What separates him from the Generation of the Sixties has, I think, to do with the circumstances surrounding his formative years and the age to which he belongs, rather than anything artistic or literary. Of course, one cannot deny that his is a different vision. In some Sixties writers, for example, you find the very clear impulses of rebellion and dissent, whereas with him such sentiments have remained hidden, potential or latent. Sixties writers grew into their own in the shadow of the 1952 Revolution, after all; and many of them were wholly or partly against it. Radical changes were taking place in the political and social constitution of life the world over, and everyone felt an obligation to be part of this; the whole atmosphere was one of revolt and rejection. Mahfouz's formative years, by contrast, were informed by the 1919 Revolution, the Wafd Party and its essentially liberal democratic orientation, and the anti-colonial struggle. So the circumstances were very different, more sedate and sober in many ways, and his writing reflects this.
In Amam Al-Arsh, Mahfouz gave Nasser and Sadat equal credit in a way that I think many felt was superficial and unmerited. Compared to Sixties commentators, he smoothed over history, so to speak. Yet even from a purely political angle, Mahfouz had no major disagreements with the Generation of the Sixties, except perhaps for his evaluation of the Sadat era. If there is one thing that Sixties writers agree about, it is the destructive effect of this period on every facet of Arab life, especially in subsequent decades. Mahfouz, perhaps partly because of his initial misgivings about the Revolution and the Nasserist era, had almost no reservations about it and was sympathetic towards Sadat and his actions both in and outside Egypt. This is an indisputable point of contention, even though it was never in Mahfouz's nature to be vociferous or argumentative about politics; and so even this hardly caused any trouble between Mahfouz and Sixties writers. The point is, moreover, that from the time of Nasser onwards, Mahfouz felt alienated from the political environment in which he lived. Sixties writers, too, felt alienated from that environment. I think it was the same alienation, the same predicament, even if Sixties writers expressed it more forcefully in their lives and stressed it in their work. It may be unclear in Mahfouz, but it is there, he felt it, and in this sense he was in the same boat. So it was mainly a difference of tone and intellectual background (democracy instead of socialism), not really of essence.
My personal relationship with him was not strong, I wasn't a regular at his seminars the way writers like Gamal El-Ghitani and Youssef El- Qai'd were, only because I don't like to attend seminars. Yet I can tell that these differences had no abrasive effect on the whole. Having said that, though, it is worth noting that Mahfouz, unlike Sixties writers, always avoided confrontation with the powers that be. This may not be a bad thing in itself, and it certainly does not take away from his achievement in opening up the horizons of present-day Arabic writing and representing the Arabic novel in the most impressive way. Nobody but him deserved the Nobel Prize, and nobody has done more for Arabic literature. Now he has every right to a difference of opinion on the Arab-Israeli conflict, but regarding his present status as an international figure, one would have expected him to make some form of contribution, to wield his authority in some way in the aid of the Palestinians being massacred by the Israeli army. Unlike most he is in a position to address the international community, and in many cases one really misses his voice.
Ibrahim Aslan
"His consistency as a writer working, non-stop through the years, pursuing a continuous project and following everything through, which reflects a steadfast faith not only in the act of writing (as work and ritual) but in the reader"
The links between Mahfouz and the writers of the Sixties are powerful, if only because his is the most important literary achievement prior to those writers. No writing comes out of a void. Texts unwittingly preserve their heritage, the way human beings, whether as individuals or groups, preserve theirs. It is next to impossible to enumerate the various facets of Mahfouz's achievement. The one definite thing is that he is one of our most essential constituents. He also raised the profile of the novel, setting a standard for all that came after. This latter, however little it is actually discussed, is a crucial point. Because once the work of Mahfouz came into being, it was no longer the same for any aspiring writer, not one who really wants to achieve something, anyway. Now you had a standard to measure yourself by, to live up to. Suppose Naguib Mahfouz had never written: I don't believe the novel would have assumed half as much importance. And the achievement that we made as a generation, if achievement it is, well, it would not have been as significant. Because we would have had no standard to live up to.
When one says that Mahfouz contributed to establishing the Arabic novel, one really means that. In architecture, there are those who test out the environment and the soil prior to laying the foundations, to find out whether the project is viable. Before Mahfouz, this is all that had been done: attempts to gauge out the viability of the language and its domain. He constructed the first buildings, the first solid structures of modern Arabic fiction. Another point that cannot be stressed enough is his incredible, unwavering effort, his consistency as a writer working, non- stop through the years, pursuing a continuous project and following everything through, which reflects a steadfast faith not only in the act of writing (as work and ritual) but in the reader who awaits his books: the obligation he feels towards his audience. In this sense Mahfouz is a rare example of professional integrity.
To speak of Mahfouz's influence is not to speak of specific elements passed on from his writing. True influence takes place in subtle and unconscious ways. When you eat, you do not consciously analyse the constituents of your meals and how they might contribute to your physical make-up. Similarly, if reading is the writer's form of nourishment, then it is impossible to tell which of one's reading experiences provided which part of one's literary constitution; this does not mean that the influence is absent, quite the contrary. But it is spontaneous and unaware. I cannot speak for a whole generation, either, that would be too presumptuous. But, in the framework of chronology, at least, Mahfouz is a necessary link in the chain that leads to us. So, the history of Arabic literature notwithstanding, all I can say is that Mahfouz has remained an indispensable part of our consciousness.
For my part I feel a very strong sense of connection with him on the human level, and not necessarily in the context of writing. He is the product of the popular neighbourhood, of grassroots Egyptian life, a true ibn balad, in a way that few other writers are. From this angle I feel very close to him indeed, in fact he's the writer I feel the closest to. I knew Yehya Haqqi, for example. And even though he was fascinated with popular life and its multifold manifestations, even though he experienced and loved it, I always had the feeling that he was not a true product of that culture. Mahfouz is formed of that very clay. Perhaps I should emphasise that I in no way presume to place myself on a par with Mahfouz, but in terms of the connection with grassroots Egyptian life, I feel that we share something very deep and lasting and of immense (human and literary) value.
Literary value notwithstanding, it is only natural that there should be a difference between his writing and ours. When we started writing, he was already among the great men of letters who had, as they say, a mission to undertake. He possessed a vision, a concept that he wanted to communicate directly. Due to the times and my own constitution, by contrast, I've never presumed to have any such mission. Rather, I work towards a vision or a concept. When you have a clearly defined intellectual starting point, your work becomes simply the proof of that point. I happen to believe that artistic truth requires no proof and hence should not emanate from an idea in this way. I start with the faintest glimmer of a feeling, trying, through an expression of that feeling, to reach any form of knowledge. Like all established writers (classic in the positive sense), Naguib Mahfouz has an intellectual starting point and his work is the articulate dramatisation of a vision. I think this is the key difference between his writing and the writing of the Sixties: his is an ordered and well-organised world; ours is all about groping a way through.
And yet he remains constantly on my mind, his writing as well as his person. I haven't seen him since the time of the Riche seminars, but I am constantly aware of him even if I don't think about him. His project is the copybook of national consciousness, the notebook of a master, an ustaz. And when he received the Nobel Prize, I felt this was completely irrelevant to me. He is and remains what he is regardless of his effect on the rest of the world. The importance of the prize resides, rather, in that it made him known in other countries and cultures and contributed to the spread of Arabic literature. But for us, for me, no prize could affect the way I feel about Mahfouz. After all, I knew him personally at one point in time. I haven't seen him for years, but I never for a moment doubt that the friendliness we shared was heartfelt and real; his hearty, resonant laugh, too, I can recall at will.
Bahaa Taher
"The story of Isis and Osiris; the myths of rebirth, the conflict between two divinely distinguished brothers, the search for spiritual liberation and the dichotomy of the instinctive and the sublime inform all his greatest works"
In the heyday of the Generation of the Sixties, Naguib Mahfouz and Youssef Edris were the two venerable poles of the literary world; they were the brightest stars in a sky that afforded, so to speak, few celestial bodies. As aspiring authors we invariably loved and respected them both as writers and as human beings. Happily we had the opportunity to consort with them regularly, for Mahfouz in particular was very keen on younger writers and their work. But there remained a central issue in the midst of all this: even as we admired their work and looked up to their ongoing achievement, our objective was to go beyond it, to break out of what they had established. This was no doubt equally conditioned by outside circumstances. Historical realities were shifting and so, we thought, must literature. Thus you see a very distinct difference between, say, Sonalla Ibrahim's Tilka Al- Raiha and Mahfouz's Al-Qahira Al-Jadida, two novels about a new and transformed Cairo: in Mahfouz so much more is taken into account, the perspective encompasses society, culture and politics; in Ibrahim -- and this is not at all to say that the latter is any the worse for being so -- the perspective is deeply personal and self-oriented and thereby, from the objective standpoint, more lacking. Society, culture and politics are all attributes of the narrator's own, very specific predicament, so to speak.
At the personal level, Mahfouz had excellent relations with all of the Generation of the Sixties. In his Friday seminar at Café Riche he met with any number of writers who belong to that group, made friends with us and kept up with what we were publishing; and very often he made generous, and yet peculiarly incisive comments on what he read, congratulating the writer in question in passing. Although delivered in the most informal and the least presumptuous of tones, his commentary was most often not only perceptive but remarkably beneficial for those to whom he directed it. Mahfouz is, by the way, a first-rate reader and a first-rate listener; he was thus particularly suited to the role he so effortlessly took on. I can tell you that, of all the writers I've encountered, I haven't met a single one more eager to be involved in intellectual life, and particularly with younger writers who have not yet been recognised, than Naguib Mahfouz. He was unique in this. I even wrote an article in Al-Hilal in 1970 in which I complained that, except for Mahfouz, no established man of letters was willing to conduct any form of dialogue with my generation.
As for Mahfouz the writer, I discovered him as a university student in the mid-1950s. At that time his books were published only in limited editions (not until Youssef El-Sebai, in his capacity as Minister of Culture, began publishing Mahfouz in a series called Al-Kitab Al- Dhahabi, in 1955, were there popular editions of the latter's work), and I discovered him through a friend of mine who was subsequently to become one of Mahfouz's closest friends, Ibrahim Abul-Nasr. It was through him that I read Bidaya wa Nihaya and Khan Al-Khalili and Zuqaq Al-Madaq; as I say it was in the early realist works preceding the Trilogy that I first encountered Mahfouz. And since then, I have read everything he has written, from the earliest, ancient Egyptian novels to the last, minute short stories, which are as pure and beautifully distilled as anything I have ever read; so much so that, in a recent article in Al-Musawar, I chose the term "59 pearls" to refer to them. As you well know many writers in Arabic experiment with very short pieces like these, but when you read them you realise the difference; you notice that in the case of Mahfouz the tip of the iceberg really is supported by an immense, bottomless structure. However tiny, the pieces benefit from so much understanding of life and literature, so much experience in both, interconnected departments; they are true gems. Nobody but Mahfouz can do this.
And even though I've always been a great reader of his, I reread his opus again after he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, while I was living in Geneva, and I discovered that the intellectual roots of all that he has written are to be found in the ancient Egyptian novels, works like Radobis and Kifah Tiba. The mythology of ancient Egypt is central to his work, especially the story of Isis and Osiris; the myths of rebirth, the conflict between two (divinely distinguished) brothers, the search for spiritual liberation and the dichotomy of the instinctive and the sublime inform all his greatest works; and if you look deep into Al- Harafish or Awlad Haritna you will notice how predominant these ideas remained. This is a discovery I was very pleased with, after so many years of reading Mahfouz. But he is the kind of author whose work has this kind of potential: you discover things all the time.
No doubt, despite our drive to rid our work of his influence and that of Youssef Edris and Yehya Haqqi, Mahfouz left a mark on writers of my generation, and one that cannot be wiped out. Whether we like it or not, his many and varied contributions were seminal: he purified language of the tendency towards superficial rhetoric (exemplified in El-Manfalouti); he presented the novel and the short story as an intellectual work -- you can write a thesis on Naguib Mahfouz's philosophy based on a reading of his works; he conceived reality as something many-sided and complex, broadening the literary perspective enough for it to incorporate social, economic and political conditions; his characters are the first to have a multiplicity of motives. All this made it possible for writers like myself to conceive of our own, very different projects. But the point, as I said earlier, was how to do something different and new.
In Mahfouz the world holds together; it has purpose and meaning; the characters have specific motives and are perfect products (or representations) of their environment. In the writing of the Sixties, by contrast, all these elements are fluid; the novel is more of a question than an answer; and the sense of purpose and meaning is not always sharply defined or articulately shaped. So the idea was not so much to take over from Mahfouz or build on what he had founded. We wanted to produce works that would not be a continuation of Mahfouz's realism, because it was his early realist period that we first encountered and loved. And it was thus, I suppose, by removing all that held the world together in his fiction, that we managed to transcend a giant who, in being a role model to us, was also an inscrutable obstacle.
Mohamed El-Bosati
"He was very cagey about voicing opinions in public, particularly political opinions... he was constantly focused on his writing, nothing and nobody was going to interfere with his literary project"
I met Mahfouz before I started writing. I was only just setting out, a teenager, and he was well on his way to becoming an established man of letters. I first encountered his books while living in the countryside and planning on coming to Cairo to study. I read two of his works at this time, in editions called Al-Kitab Al- Dhahabi: Zuqaq Al-Madaq and Khan Al-Khalili; and I was so impressed with this achievement that, as soon as I arrived in Cairo, I determined to meet the man, a major decision this. I asked around to discover where to find him, where he spent his time and how to get there. I didn't contemplate approaching him at this stage. Eventually I made it to the terrace of Casino Safiya Helmi, where he held a weekly literary meeting in the company of friends. Stealthily, I sneaked a peek through the door, attempting to identify my man. He was sitting surrounded by friends with whom he was conversing in a cordial, relaxed way.
My first impression came as somewhat of a shock. I had never seen a picture of Mahfouz, and I had always imagined him to be a very dignified-looking and solemn character, like Tawifk El-Hakim, whose picture I had seen. Yet the person sitting at Casino Safiya looked incredibly easy-going. So, as I say, I peeked in, noticed how nonchalant and insouciant it all was and immediately fled the casino. A year passed, and in the interim I had read more Mahfouz. Eventually, with great difficulty, I urged myself on back to the scene of the first, silent sighting. At that time, you see, an author wielded not a little venerability. As a young man you really did think of the prospect of speaking to somebody like Mahfouz as an honour, it was a responsibility and it inspired fear. Nobody, not even the most ill- mannered among us, would think to answer an established author back, for example. Anyway, this time I managed to drag myself to his table. I was very cordially received, but I sat there stock still like a statute, not saying a word. It was all very silly and childish, of course, but when he noticed how anxious I was, Mahfouz began making jokes about it, to show me it was uncalled for; this took the edge off a little. And as I grew accustomed to the idea that I was talking to him, I found my voice.
Do you write? No.
Okay... do you read? Yes.
Excellent.
Why don't you tell us about what you've read and what you think about it, then, in this case.
And like a schoolchild reciting a litany, I blurted out the titles of all the books I had read, including Mahfouz's, of course. This induced another burst of laughter, and not a few comments. It was then, I think, that I first found out how funny Naguib Mahfouz can be and how excellent his jokes are. He is a true ibn nokta, in the sense that he can, in an instant, make you double over with laughter, without much effort on his part. Anyway, he encouraged me to speak, and invited me to come back to these gatherings, which eventually changed location, the most famous venue being Café Riche. In the time of Riche I had finally begun to write, and in the same cordial, nonchalant way he turned out to be incredibly supportive. In intellectual circles of the time, people knew to read only Youssef Edris, Yehya Haqqi and Mahfouz; other writers one approached with immense reluctance, promptly ejecting any effect they might have had. And so it was that I felt enraged when I saw a short story by Mahfouz in a magazine in which anyone could publish at the time, Al-Risala Al-Jadida; he was too good for this kind of forum. Yet he did not consider anything or anyone beneath him. He was a subtle mentor. When one of us published a story, he would laud this minor achievement: "Ya Ibrahim," he would cry, for example, "I read a story of yours the other day and it is very well constructed;" and if he did not like it he would say nothing at all, pretending he hadn't read it.
He was very cagey about voicing opinions in public, particularly political opinions, I think because he was constantly focused on his writing, nothing and nobody was allowed to interfere with his literary project. When Youssef Edris came out of prison, I remember, he said he would never let this happen to him again; the experience had threatened his ability to write, his motivation. And I think for a writer like Mahfouz, who was more aware than anyone of political conditions, writing was too valuable to risk through an involvement in politics; so, in the act of changing the course of Arabic writing, he never let himself slip into any of these ultimately petty conflicts. In fact nobody in the whole of Egypt knows anything at all about Mahfouz's political position: if you want to find out about it, you have to gauge it from his books; that is all. The idea was not to allow outside circumstances to distress or hamper him as a writer, which he saw as his principal role. In his books he could say everything he wanted in a way that did not undermine his stability and well-being. I seem to remember him saying that, on days on which he didn't write, he would have a fit of depression. Writing is his job.
Recommend this page
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor