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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

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Again, Mahfouz's surprise about-face startles, flipping from biting condemnation to—what? Irony, cynicism, accusatory jeers at ourselves? Or is there a defiance there? The defiance of survival, if not ‘doing fine' morally, then as expressed by the courtesan in ‘Question and Answer' who says, ‘I used to sell love at a handsome profit, and I came to buy it at a considerable loss. I have no other choice with this wicked but fascinating life.' In ‘Eternity' one of the beggars, outcast sheikhs, and blind men who wander through Mahfouz's works as the elusive answer to salvation, says, ‘With the setting of each sun I lament my wasted days, my declining countries, and my transitory gods.' It is a cry of mourning for the world that Mahfouz sounds here; but not an epitaph, for set against it is the perpetuation, no choice, of this ‘wicked but fascinating life'.

At a seminar following a lecture I gave on Mahfouz's
Cairo Trilogy
at Harvard a few years ago some feminists attacked his depiction of women characters in the novel; they were outraged at the spectacle of Amina, Al-Sayid Ahmad Abd al-Jawal's wife,
forbidden to leave the family house unless in the company of her husband, and at the account of the fate of the girls in the family, married off to men of Jawal's choice without any concern for their own feelings, and without the possibility of an alternative independent existence. The students were ready to deny the genius of the novel on these grounds. It was a case of killing the messenger: Mahfouz was relaying the oppression of Amina and her daughters as it existed; he was not its advocate. His insight to the complex socio-sexual mores, the seraglio-prison that distorted the lives of women members of Jawal's family, was a protest far more powerful than that of those who accused him of literary chauvinism.

In this present echo of the values of Mahfouz's lifetime, woman is the symbol not only of beauty and joy in being alive but also of spiritual release. This is personified as, in celebration, not male patronage, ‘a naked woman with the bloom of the nectar of life' who has ‘the heart of music as her site'. The Proustian conception (let us grant it, even if only in coincidence with Mahfouz's own) of love as pain/joy, inseparably so, also has a Mahfouzian wider reference as a part of the betrayal by time itself, let alone any lover. Entitled ‘Mercy', the apergu reflects on an old couple: ‘They were brought together by love thirty years ago, then it had abandoned them with the rest of expectations.'

Love of the world, ‘this wicked but fascinating life', is the dynamism shown to justify itself as essential to religious precepts sometimes in its very opposition to them. The greed for life is admissible to Mahfouz in all his work; against which, of course, there is juxtaposed
excess as unfulfilment
. Yet how unashamedly joyous is the parable of'The Bridegroom': ‘I asked Sheik Abd-Rabbih al-Ta'ih about his ideal among those people with whom he had been associated, and he said: “A good man whose miracles were manifested by his perseverance in the service
of people and the remembrance of God; on his hundredth birthday he drank, danced, sang, and married a virgin of twenty. And on the wedding night there came a troop of angels who perfumed him with incense from the mountains of Qaf at the end of the earth.” '

It is detachment that sins against life. When the narrator tells the Sheikh, ‘I heard some people holding against you your intense love for the world', the Sheikh answers, ‘Love of the world is one of the signs of gratitude, and evidence of a craving for everything beautiful.' Yet this is no rosy denial that life is sad: ‘It has been decreed that man shall walk staggeringly between pleasure and pain.' Decreed by whom? The responsibility for this is perhaps aleatory, cosmic rather than religious, if one may make such a distinction? And there is the question of mortality, since nowhere in these stoic but not materialist writings is there expressed any belief in after-life, or any desire for it; paradise is not an end for which earthly existence is the means. This life, when explored and embraced completely and fearlessly by tender sceptic and obdurate pursuer of salvation Naguib Mahfouz, is enough. Mortality becomes the Sheikh's serene and exquisite image: ‘There is nothing between the lifting of the veil from the face of the bride and the lowering of it over her corpse but a moment that is like a heartbeat.' And after a premonition of death one night, all the Sheikh asks of God, instead of eternal life, is ‘well-being, out of pity for people who were awaiting my help the following day.'

If sexual love and sensuality in the wider sense of all its forms is not an element opposed to, apart from, spirituality, there is at the same time division
within that acceptance
, for life itself is conceived by Mahfouz as a creative tension between desires and moral precepts. On the one hand, sensuality is the spirit of life, life-force; on the other, abstinence is the required condition to attain spirituality.

It is said that Mahfouz has been influenced by Sufism. My own acquaintance with Sufism is extremely superficial, confined to an understanding that its central belief is that the awakening to the inner life of man is a necessary condition of fulfilment as a human being, while both the outer and inner realities are inseparable. Readers like myself may receive Sufism through the transmission of Mahfouz as, for precedent, anyone who is not a Christian may receive Christian beliefs in the
Pensées:
through Pascal. (And by the way, there is a direct connection there, between the paths of the Sufi and the Christian. Pascal: ‘To obtain anything from God, the external must be joined to the internal.') Faith, no matter what its doctrine, takes on the contours of individual circumstance, experience, and the meditation upon these of the adherent. We therefore may take manifestations of Sufi religious philosophy that are to be discerned in Mahfouz's thinking as more likely to be his own gnosis, original rather than doctrinal. There is surely no heresy in this; only celebration of the doubled creativity: a resplendent intelligence applied to the tenets of what has to be taken on faith.

If we are to take a definitive reading of where Mahfouz stands in relation to faith, I think we must remember what his most brilliantly conceived character, Kamal, has declared in
The Cairo Trilogy
. ‘The choice of a faith still has not been decided. The great consolation I have is that it is not over yet.' For Mahfouz, life is a search in which one must find one's own signposts. The text for this is his story ‘Zaabalawi'. When a sick man goes on a pilgrimage through ancient Cairo to seek healing from the saintly Sheikh Zaabalawi, everybody he asks for directions sends him somewhere different. Told at last he will find the saint (who is also dissolute: see unity-in-dichotomy, again) in a bar, the weary man falls asleep waiting for him to appear. When he wakes, he finds his head wet. The drinkers tell him Zaabalawi came while he was asleep and sprinkled water on
him to refresh him. Having had this sign of Zaabalawi's existence, the man will go on searching for him all his life—‘Yes,
I have to findZaabalawi.'

The second half of the prose in the present collection is devoted to the utterances and experiences of another Sheikh, one Abd-Rabbih al-Ta'ih, who as his spokesman is perhaps Naguib Mahfouz's imagined companion of some of the saintly sages in Sufi history, such as Rabi'a al-Adawiya (a woman) of Basra, Imam Junayd al-Baghdadi of Persia, Khwaja Mu'in'ud-Din Chisti of India, Sheikh Muzaffer of Istanbul. He is also, surely, Zaabalawi, and brother of all the other wanderers who appear and disappear to tantalize the yearning for meaning and salvation in the streets of Mahfouz's works, offering and withdrawing fragments of answer to the mystery of existence, and guidance of how to live it well. This one, when first he makes his appearance in the quarter of Cairo invented for Mahfouz's notebooks, is heard to call out: ‘A stray one has been born, good fellows.' The essence of this stray one's teaching is in his response to the narrator, Everyman rather than Mahfouz, who gives as his claim to join the Sheikh's Platonic cave of followers, ‘I have all but wearied of the world and wish to flee from it.' The Sheikh says, ‘Love of the world is the core of our brotherhood and our enemy is flight.'

One of the Sheikh's adages is: ‘The nearest man comes to his Lord is when he is exercising his freedom correctly.' Many of Mahfouz's parables are of the intransigence of authority and the hopelessness of merely petitioning the powers of oppression. With the devastating ‘After You Come Out of Prison' one can't avoid comparison with Kafka, although I have tried to do so since Kafka is invoked to inflate the false profundity of any piece of whining against trivial frustrations. In answer to a journalist's question, ‘What is the subject closest to your heart?'

Mahfouz gave one of the rare responses in his own person: ‘Freedom. Freedom from colonization, freedom from the absolute rule of kings, basic human freedom in the context of society and family. These types of freedom follow one from the other.' This love of freedom breathes from every line in this book. It is imbued with what his character Kamal has called ‘a struggle towards truth aiming at the good of mankind as a whole . . . life would be meaningless without that' and with the tolerance Kamal's friend Husayn has defined: ‘The Believer derives his love for these values from religion, while the free man loves them for themselves.'

Whatever your personal hermeneutics, it is impossible to read Mahfouz's work without gaining, with immense pleasure and in all gratitude, illumination through a quality that has come to be regarded as a quaint anachronism in modern existence, where information is believed to have taken its place. I pronounce with hesitation: Wisdom. Mahfouz has it. It dangles before us a hold on the mystery. Mahfouz is himself a Zaabalawi.

—
1996

JOSEPH ROTH: LABYRINTH OF
EMPIRE AND EXILE

 

 

 

 

I
approach writing about Joseph Roth's work somewhat defensively. Pundits will say I have no right because I admit I have no German and cannot read it in the original. How could I deny this lack, a deafness to what must be the bass and treble of his use of language? But I believe I have understood him according to my time and background. A writer whose work lives must be always subject to such a process—that is what keeps the work alive.

Strangely, while I have been writing this, the wheel of Karma—or historical consequence?—has brought Roth's territory back to a re-enactment of the situation central to his work.

In Roth we see a society—an empire—in which disparate nationalities are forced into political unity by an over-riding authority and its symbol: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the personality of Emperor Franz Josef. There, the various grouped nationalities' restless rebellion, the rise of socialism
and fascism against royalism, led to Sarajevo and the First World War. After the Second World War the groups that had won autonomy were forced together again, if in a slightly different conglomerate, by another all-powerful authority and its symbol: the Communist bloc and the personality of Joseph Stalin. Now restlessness and rebellion, this time against the socialism that has not proved to be liberation, bring once again the breakup of a hegemony. Passages in Roth's work, about the Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, could with scarcely a change describe what has happened in Yugoslavia in 1991.

Roth: he looks out from a book-jacket photograph. Just the face in a small frame; it is as if someone held up a death mask. The ovals of the eyes are black holes. The chin pressed up against the black shadow of a moustache hides stoically the secrets of the lips. A whole life bronzed there. And there's another image in that face: the sight of the huge sightless eyes with their thick upper and lower lids dominating the width of the face has the mysteriously ancient gaze of a foetus, condemned to suffer the world.

‘Je travaille, mon roman sera bon, je crois, plus parfait que ma vie'
, Roth wrote. Prefaces to some translations of his books give the same few penny-life facts: born in 1894 in Galicia, served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War, worked as a journalist in Vienna, Berlin, and Prague, left for France in 1933, wrote fifteen novels and novellas mainly while a figure in émigré opposition to the Nazis, died in Paris an alcoholic in 1939. I failed to find a full biography in English. After having re-read all Roth's fiction available to me, I am glad that, instead, I know him the only way writers themselves know to be valid for an understanding of their work: the work itself. Let the schools of literary criticism, rapacious fingerlings, resort to the facts of the author's life before they can interpret the text . . .

Robert Musil, Roth's contemporary in Austro-Hungary, although the two great writers evidently never met, put into the mouth of his Ulrich: ‘One can't be angry with one's own time without damage to oneself; to know that Roth's anger destroyed him, one has only to read the great works it produced. The text gives us the man, not t'other way about. The totality of Joseph Roth's work is no less than a
tragédie humaine
achieved in the techniques of modern fiction. No other contemporary writer, not excepting Thomas Mann, has come so close to achieving the wholeness—lying atop a slippery pole we never stop trying to climb—Lukacs cites as our impossible aim. From the crude beginnings in his first novels,
The Spider's Web
(1923) and
Hotel Savoy
(1924), the only work in which Roth was satisfied to use the verbal equivalent of the expressionist caricaturing of a Georg Grosz or Otto Dix, through
Flight Without End
(1927),
The Silent Prophet
(1928?), and all his other works with, perhaps, the exception of the novellas
Zipper and His Father
(1928) and
Fallmerayer the Stationmaster
(1933), his anti-heroes are almost without exception soldiers, ex-prisoners of war, deserters: former aristocrats, bourgeois, peasants, and criminals all declassed in the
immorality
of survival of the 1914—18 war. This applies not only to the brutal or underhand necessity survival demands, but also to the sense that, in the terrible formulation of a last member of the Trotta dynasty, they had been ‘Found unfit for death'.

BOOK: Living in Hope and History
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