As long as life ends in disability and death, it is a tragedy. As a matter of fact, the definition of tragedy applies to nothing more than it does to life…Even those who see it as a crossroad to the hereafter will have to accept that the first part of it is a tragedy; even though it might turn out otherwise when seen in its entirety. But the tragedy of life is a complex rather than a simple one. For when we think of life as merely existence, we tend to see it only in the abstract terms of existence and nonexistence, but when we think of it as social existence, we discover in it many artificial tragedies of man’s own making, such as ignorance, poverty, exploitation, violence, brutality…etc. This justifies our emphasis on the tragedies of society, because these are tragedies that can be remedied and because in the act of remedying them we create civilization and progress. Indeed, progress might ameliorate the disaster of the original tragedy [i.e. death], and might even conquer it altogether.6

Like many of his novels, Respected Sir was first serialized in the Cairo daily al-Ahram and later published in book form in 1975. The novel thus pertains to Mahfouz’s third stage outlined above. The story of the rise and fall of a petty government clerk, however, can in itself hardly make for compelling reading, but Mahfouz manages to make it exactly that. How he achieves this is a question for which the present translator would like to venture an answer without wishing to influence the opinion of the reader, who should perhaps refrain from reading the rest of the introduction until he has read the novel itself.

The opening passage of the novel represents anything but an objective description of the Director General’s office. It is rendered in highly inflated prose which clearly reflects the magnitude of the impression it makes on the protagonist. In other words, the language here is psychological rather than realistic and its terms of reference lie almost solely within the character’s mind rather than in the real world outside. This hyperbolic use of language characterizes the prose of the whole novel and is found on almost every page of it. Thus while the experience of the novel is a fairly mundane one mainly portraying the rise and fall of a self-made, ego-centered careerist, it is told in extremely heightened language. The vocabulary used in the extract above and throughout the novel is religious. It is deliberately used by the author to transfer what is essentially a prosaic experience to a much higher plane. Thus, throughout, the protagonist’s professional ambition is presented in vocabulary and imagery which evoke an exalted and arduous religious quest, as though the attainment of the position of Director General were a sacred mission, ordained by divine will, for the sake of which no sacrifice was too dear.