Respected Sir

Naguib Mahfouz

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

AN ANCHOR BOOK

PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

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ANCHOR BOOKS, DOUBLEDAY, and the portrayal of an anchor are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This English translation was originally published in Great Britain by Quartet Books Limited, a member of the Namara Group, in 1986.

The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Quartet Books Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maḥfūẓ, Najīb, 1911–

[Ḥaḍrat al-muḥtaram. English]

Respected sir / Naguib Mahfouz; translated by Rasheed El-Enany. —1st Doubleday ed.

p. cm.

Translation of: Ḥaḍrat al-muḥtaram.

I. Title.

PJ7846.A46H2413 1990 89-25703

892′.736—dc20

ISBN 0-385-26479-8

ISBN 0-385-26480-1 (pbk.)

eBook ISBN 9780525431671

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION: AUGUST 1990

RRC

v4.1

Dedication

For Wafaa, Sonia, and Nadine

Acknowledgment

I am deeply grateful to my colleague Mr. G. Balfour-Paul CMG, for his meticulous and painstaking revision of my translation, a task which he undertook with the patience and thoroughness of a scholar coupled with a poet’s sensitivity for words.

Translator’s Introduction

With eleven novels including the present one to his name in English translation,1 one collection of short stories,2 two full-fledged studies of his work in book form, an increasing number of doctoral theses, and an enormous number of articles in literary and academic periodicals (all in English), Naguib Mahfouz can rightfully claim the title of the best-known and most studied Arab novelist in the English-speaking world. This is hardly surprising, as Mahfouz enjoys a similar status in his own language, in which he has been by far the most popular serious novelist, not only in his native Egypt but all over the Arabic-speaking world, all his novels having seen several reprintings in different editions.

Born in 1911, he is the grand old man of Arabic fiction, enjoying the affection and reverence of both critics and a vast reading public. He published his first novel in 1939 and since that date has written thirty-two novels and thirteen collections of short stories. In his old age he has maintained his prolific output, producing a novel a year.

The novel genre, which can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, has no prototypes in classical Arabic literature, which abounded in all kinds of narrative, though none of them could be described as a precursor of the novel as we understand the term today. The Arabic novel is thus a direct descendant of European influence and Arab scholars usually attribute the first serious attempt at writing a novel in Arabic to the Egyptian author Muhammad Husayn Haykal. The novel, called Zaynab after the name of its heroine, and published in 1913, told in highly romanticized terms the story of a peasant girl, victim of social convention, who withers away and finally dies of unfulfilled love. Like many first attempts, the novel suffered from many artistic flaws. Thus Haykal, a well-known author and politician of his day, shyly (he first serialized the novel in a newspaper under a pseudonym) opened the door to serious writers of his generation to try their hand at this new and suspicious art form! Soon after, writers like Taha Husayn, ‘Abbas al-‘Aqqad, Ibrahim al-Mazini, and Tawfiq al-Hakim were to venture into the unknown realm of fiction.

The Arabic novel, however, was to wait for yet another generation for the advent of the man who was to make it the sole mission of his life and at whose hands it was to reach maturity. Naguib Mahfouz, who was born to a middle-class family in one of the oldest quarters in Cairo, was to give expression in powerful literary metaphors, over a period of nearly half a century, to the hopes and frustrations of his nation, whose modern life has been a long act of unceasing turbulence. So much did his readers identify with his work (a great deal of which was adapted for the cinema, the theater, and television) that many of his characters became household names in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. On the other hand, his work, though deeply steeped in local reality, appeals to that which is universal and permanent in human nature, as shown by the relatively good reception that his fiction has met with in English and other languages since the appearance in 1966 of his first translated novel, Midaq Alley.

The study of Mahfouz’s output shows his fiction to have passed through four distinguishable stages. The first (1939–44) comprises three novels based on the history of ancient Egypt. Though by no means works of outstanding literary merit, they provide a useful insight into the germination of the then budding young talent. Admittedly written under the influence of Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances, the last of the three, namely The Struggle of Thebes, is particularly interesting for the way in which the novelist brought history to bear on the present political scene at the time. Drawing on the heroic struggle of the Egyptians under their patriotic Pharaohs to expel from their country the Hyksos, the foreign invaders who had ruled it for two hundred years, the novel bore a relevance to Egyptian sociopolitical reality at the time (British occupation and a ruling aristocracy of foreign stock) that was all too obvious to be missed.

Mahfouz had meant to write a whole series of novels encompassing the full history of Pharaonic Egypt; he even did the research required for such a monumental task. In the event, and perhaps luckily for the development of the Arabic novel, he was voluntarily deflected from his intended course and the scene of his next novel, A New Cairo (1945), was placed in the raw reality of its day. This marks the beginning of the second stage in the novelist’s career, which culminated in the publication in 1956–57 of his magnum opus, The Cairo Trilogy. The novels of this phase include six titles, of which three are in English translation, i.e. Midaq Alley, The Beginning and the End, and Volume I of The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk). In this period of his writing, the novelist studied the sociopolitical ills of his society with the full analytical power afforded him by the best techniques of realism and naturalism. What emerges from the sum total of these novels is a very bleak picture of a cross section of Egyptian urban society in the twenty or so years between the two world wars. A work which stands by itself in this phase is The Mirage (1948), in which Mahfouz experimented for the first and last time with writing a novel closely based on Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. For his Trilogy, the peak of his realist/naturalist phase, the Egyptian people will forever stand in their great novelist’s debt. For without this colossal saga novel in which he gives an eyewitness account of the country’s political, social, religious, and intellectual life between the two wars, that period of turmoil in their nation’s life would have passed undocumented.

After writing The Trilogy, which met with instant wide acclaim and served to focus renewed attention on his previous work, Mahfouz fell uncharacteristically silent for a number of years (1952–59), The Trilogy having been completed four years before its publication. Different theories exist as to why this happened. One, endorsed by the novelist himself, is that the social reforms introduced by Nasser’s revolution of 1952 made the type of social criticism he had hitherto voiced in his novels redundant. Another theory, held by Ghali Shukri,3 a well-known Mahfouz scholar, is that by writing The Trilogy Mahfouz had brought the realistic technique to a point of perfection which he could not possibly surpass. He thus needed a period of incubation in which to look for a new style. Whatever the reason, when Mahfouz serialized his next novel in the Cairo daily al-Ahram in 1959, his readers were in for a surprise. The People of Our Quarter, available in English as Children of Gebelawi, was a unique allegory of human history from Genesis to the present day. In it the masters of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are stripped of their holiness and represented, in thin disguise, as no more than social reformers who strove to the best of their ability to liberate their people from tyranny and exploitation. Another character in the allegory stands for science, which is shown to have supplanted religion and at whose hands the demise of God is eventually effected. Like most of Mahfouz’s novels, Children of Gebelawi ends on a note of gloom, though not without a flicker of hope. In this case the gloom is the corruption of ‘Arafa (science) and his alliance with the oppressive powers which finally destroy him, while the hope is in his last notebook, which contains the formulas for progress and happiness. The last scene is one of humanity frantically searching in a heap of rubbish for the promise of its salvation.

To lay down The Trilogy or Children of Gebelawi and pick up Mahfouz’s next novel, The Thief and the Dogs (available in English), published in 1962, is, in a way, like switching from a Dickens or a Balzac to a Graham Greene or a William Golding, so radical was the change that his style underwent in the third stage of his development. No longer viewing the world through realist/naturalist eyes, he was now to write a series of short powerful novels at once social and existential in their concern. Rather than presenting a full colorful picture of society, he now concentrated on the inner workings of the individual’s mind in its interaction with the social environment. In this phase his style ranges from the impressionistic to the surrealist, a pattern of evocative vocabulary and imagery binds the work together, and extensive use is made of the stream of consciousness or, to use a more accurate term in the case of Mahfouz, free indirect speech.4 On the other hand, while the situation is based on reality, it is often given a universal significance through the suggestion of a higher level of meaning.

Just as his realistic novels were an indictment of the social conditions prevailing in Egypt before 1952, the novels of the sixties contained much that was audaciously critical of Nasser’s Egypt. However, the defeat of the Arabs in the war with Israel in 1967 and its aftermath proved a shattering experience for Naguib Mahfouz from which, it would not be an invalid assumption to make, his work has never completely recovered. In the years following 1967, his writing ranged from surrealist, almost absurd short stories and dry, abstract, unactable playlets to novels of direct social and political commentary with no great literary merit, such as Love under the Rain (1973) and The Karnak (1974). Mahfouz himself was aware of the new turn his work had taken. He wanted to get his views across to the reader at a time of crisis in as simple and straightforward a way as possible; of his disposition at the time he admits to an interviewer that he was prepared to write a novel that would die the moment its occasion had passed.5 This passionate concern of the writer for the loss of direction that his nation has suffered can be seen to have survived into the eighties in There Only Remains One Hour (1982), which is a kind of condensed saga novel giving an account of the failure of successive generations of leaders and their adherents to bring peace and prosperity to Egypt, and also in The Day the Leader Was Murdered (1985), which describes the life of the Egyptians during the Sadat era.

In the mid-seventies we find Mahfouz again searching for a new style. It would appear that, having been diverted by national traumatic events from the course he had embarked on in the early sixties, he was no longer able to return to it. Or it may be that in his old age, with a life’s experience behind him, he felt at last that he could Arabicize the art of the novel. For it is since then that we observe the sporadic emergence of a number of novels which justify the proposition of a fourth stage in his literary development (which has yet to be studied). What is remarkable about the novels of this stage, of which we can count five, is their departure from the norms of novel writing as they evolved in Europe over the last two centuries; these are the norms which conceive of the novel as a work of indivisible unity which proceeds logically from a beginning to a middle to an end. But Mahfouz no longer wants any of that. He now harks back to the indigenous narrative arts of Arabic literature, particularly as found in the maqama form and in The Arabian Nights and other folk narratives in which Arabic literature abounds. While any talk of an organic unity in these works is precluded, the presence of what may be called, for the lack of a better term, a cumulative unity producing a total effect of sorts is undeniable. It is this form that Mahfouz has been experimenting with for the last ten years or so in novels like The Epic of the Riff-Raff The Nights of “The Thousand and One Nights” and others. In his evocation of both the form and the content of these classical Arabic narrative types, and his utilization of them to pass judgment on the human condition past and present, Mahfouz appears to open endless vistas for the young Arab novelist to find a distinct voice of his own.

Although Mahfouz’s novelistic technique has passed, as we have seen, through four recognizable stages, one cannot say the same about his worldview, the main features of which can be traced back to his earliest works. Mahfouz appears indeed to have sorted out the main questions about life at an early juncture of his youth and to have held on to the answers he arrived at ever since, age and experience serving only to deepen and broaden but hardly to modify them.

A sociopolitical view of man’s existence is at the very root of almost everything that Mahfouz has written. Even in a novel with a strong metaphysical purport like al-Tariq (The Way), the social message is aptly woven into the texture of the work: man is not meant to spend his life on earth in a futile search for an apparently apathetic God and his only true hope of salvation is in the exertion of a positive and responsible effort to better his lot and that of others. That Mahfouz has always been a socially committed writer with a deep concern for the problem of social injustice is an incontestable fact. To him individual morality is inseparable from social morality. In other words, according to Mahfouz’s moral code, those who only seek their own individual salvation are damned; to him nirvana is, as it were, a distinctly collective state. On the other hand, characters who are saved in Mahfouz’s world are only those with altruistic motives, those who show concern for others and demonstrate a kind of awareness of their particular predicament being part of a more general one.

The picture of the world as it emerges from the bulk of Mahfouz’s work is very gloomy indeed, though not completely despondent. It shows that the author’s social Utopia is far from being realized in his country and in the world at large. What further augments the bleakness of the human condition in Mahfouz’s worldview is the fact that in addition to social oppression and the individual’s moral frailty, man’s toil is also thwarted by an even more destructive power: time. Mahfouz seems to conceive of time as a metaphysical force of oppression. His novels have consistently shown time as the bringer of change, and change as a very painful process, and very often time is not content until it has dealt his heroes the final blow of death. To sum up, in Mahfouz’s dark tapestry of the world there are only two bright spots. These consist of man’s continuing struggle for equality on the one hand and the promise of scientific progress on the other (deliverance from above is out), but meanwhile, life is a tragedy. It is interesting to listen to what the novelist himself has to say on the subject:

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.

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