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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 103-122 The Pangs of Birth Preamble The history and sociology of science inform us that scientific paradigms change. According to Thomas Kuhn’s internalistic theory, paradigmatic changes result from a crisis within the dominant paradigm that is the result of its inability to explain or account for certain anomalies and irregularities that gradually become the Achille’s Heel of the paradigm and eventually result in its downfall. A new paradigm arises to become the substitute of the previous one until it falls victim to its own anomalies and irregularities. Such paradigmatic shifts or revolutions are internalistic in the sense that they take place within the institutions of science and are due to causes internal to these institutions and paradigms. Many sociologists and historians of science tend to see this process as a part of a much larger context within which paradigmatic shifts are not solely the result of internal crises of the paradigm, but are also impacted upon by external, non-scientific, influences and determinants. Some more recent interpretations see in these complicated processes a confluence of the two, where a crisis within the paradigm is mostly determined or caused by internal factors, while the choices of specific theoretical alternatives (out of the many available and competing ones) is determined by external factors. Such a schema (though rather abstract and in need of interrogation and theoretical sharpening) would apply well to the social sciences and the humanities whose ties to the external factors are manifestly much stronger than those of the “natural sciences.” It is only pertinent to keep this in mind so as to be aware (and hopefully critical) of the conditions and context surrounding the rise of some paradigms relating to the study of the public sphere and civil society during the past two decades. This paper, for instance, discusses urbanity and the public sphere in the early works of Najib Mahfuz and in a text by `Abd al-Rahman Munif, yet it remains suspicious and critical of those dominant theories that fetishize the “newly discovered” paradigms of civil society and the public sphere finding in them the panacea for all problems that face today’s world. This has to be stated [end page 103] clearly at the outset, as the purpose of this paper tends more toward the descriptive rather than the prescriptive, toward a critical appropriation rather than an acceptance of theoretical pronouncements and generalized conclusions. And although the following possesses a very limited empirical value (or lack thereof) if seen from the limited and the limiting empiricist perspective in the social sciences, yet it is exactly this that makes the study of such texts interesting and fruitful. I hope to show that these texts lay bare some of the basic assumptions and deepest ideas that remain generally unsaid and unexamined in many an empirical study. The constitutive periods of a modern public sphere in the Arab Levant are rather controversial with respect to both their dating and their components. One of the many reasons for this is that discussions of the public sphere are heavily implicated with the discussions and theories of modernity and modernization. Another possible complication arises from the “unevenness” of the social, economic, political, and cultural shifts and changes generally associated with modernization or integration within the world economy. And despite the abundance of certain kinds of textual and non-textual materials for study, these materials have not been utilised with the needed rigour. We also need to add that there are further problems in these texts that arise from some cultural peculiarities in the area. One such peculiarity is the general reticence to indulge in the private sphere, especially in the written medium. Whereas one finds in many cultures, especially in the West, the rich traditions of letter writing and journals or memoirs which include detailed information and reflections on both private and public affairs, one rarely finds such materials in the Arab culture of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. It is even rarer to make such materials available for researchers. Even in autobiographical and semi-autobiographical texts we notice the abundance of information and reflections on such matters as intellectual development and interaction with public affairs, but rarely glimpses into the private thoughts and feelings of the individual person. This does not only apply to the autobiographies of public figures, but also to those who tended to be more literary minded like Taha Husayn. It becomes clear why an autobiography like that of Luwis `Awad aroused such uproar when it was published in 1989. As both the private and the public spheres seem to be implicated with each other or even stand in an algorithmic relation to each other, such a fund of sources remains unavailable for researchers. Herein is one of the ways in which literary texts can fill in some gaps in our understanding of these processes. I will approach the texts from the perspectives of literary and rhetorical studies in an attempt to extrapolate some regularities that betray, both [end page 104] directly and indirectly, manifestly or latently, some of the basic assumptions and constructive principles of the texts. I will also resort in some cases to anthropological readings that utilise some of the insights of linguistic and literary studies as these have accumulated a rather venerable and useful tradition of reading texts culturally. One of the basic purposes in the analysis of the texts is to use the assumptions, constructive principles, and macro-constraints as guides in reconstructing conceptions of reality that dominate the works themselves and that can be seen as analogical to those conceptions of reality being represented in the works. One of the oldest and most venerable examples of such an approach (though by now seen as very problematic) is Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. But our purpose and methods here are rather different from his: here the attempt is made to reconstruct conceptions of reality based upon extrapolating what A. Gurevitch calls the basic categories of a culture. The Early Novels of Najib Mahfuz The early realistic novels of Mahfuz differ among themselves in many ways; but as they possess a large number of common features, they merit a group-discussion. al-Qâhirah al-Jadîdah, Zuqâq al-Midaqq, Khân al-Khalîlî, and Bidâyah wa-Nihâyah were published between 1945 and 1949. As to the trilogy (Bayn al-Qasrayn, Qasr al-Shawq, al-Sukkarîyah), Mahfuz started working on the novel in 1945. It took him about two years to develop the overall structure and themes. He started writing in September 1947 and finished around April 1952. The work was divided into three parts and was not published until 1956 (the first volume) and 1957 (the second and the third). And although Mahfuz was already known as one of the fine novelists in Egypt, this work was immediately recognized as the most important novel written not only in Egypt but in the whole Arab world. In what follows, I will concentrate on the Trilogy but will give examples from the other early novels too. The titles of most of these novels are very telling being place names in Cairo. This is not only indicative of the centrality of place in the novels (place, especially Cairo, has been central to Mahfuz’s works) but provides a kind of a counterbalance to the other more dominant aspect in the novels which is time. This gains greater importance in the Trilogy which, despite its pronounced and manifest realism, contains some high modernist elements or even macroconstraints. Because this may sound strange to those who know Mahfuz’s work during this period and which is generally considered totally realistic in the sense of the 19th century, it necessitates some further elaboration. [end page 105] In 18th and 19th century, realistic narrative place was mostly an accessory to the narrative world with the purpose of providing the setting. In the hands of later realistic novelists place became the setting that represented the mental states of characters or of moments in the movement of the plot. Mahfuz constructed place as a function of narrative. Place carries the ambience and flavour of the narrative act. It blends smoothly with images and symbols central to the unfolding of narrative. It is very difficult to describe the Trilogy by any word other than that it is encyclopedic (in the ordinary sense of the word). It brings together a huge fund of social, political, economic, and anthropological materials and blends them within the fabric of the life of a middle class Egyptian family throughout three generations. In many ways this is a novel about history as much as a family saga. The history is that of twentieth-century Egypt and the saga is of a family which is a part of that history and is emblematic of it. Having said this, the greatness of the novel does not lie in its depiction of Egypt’s history as much as in the ability of the author to write this history without in any way forcing it on the plot nor turning the individual characters into representatives of the different historical forces. To the contrary, history seems to flow from the richness of the characters and their psychological, intellectual and social characteristics and traits. But in the same vein as not being reducible to history, the novel cannot be reduced to psychology or ideology or politics. It possesses all that but is reducible to none. The first part of this encyclopaedic family saga, entitled Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk), covers the period between October 1917 to April 8, 1919, while the second entitled Qasr al-Shawq (Palace of Desire) covers the period between the summer 1924 to August 23rd, 1927. The third part entitled al-Sukkariyah (Sugar Street) covers the period from January 1935 to the summer of 1944. The early novels of Mahfuz include a whole repertoire of details. These details were traditionally considered not essential to the movement of the story, but mere ornaments. Realistic novels are based on what has been called the motivation of action which involves “accounting for” in terms of natural causality. These two characteristics pull in opposite directions, but throughout the development of realism, motivation started to gain the upper hand. Motivation, that is, involved by then the weaving of those details, formerly considered inessential to the story, into the chain of causality. These works, then, (but especially the Trilogy) are characterized by a change from what Tomashevsky called artistic or compositional motivation (based on traditional conventions) to realistic motivation (based on what happened earlier or on account of chance). The story became then (to [end page 106] paraphrase W. Martin) pushed by its past. Randomness and causality, accident and inevitable destiny had to be balanced or silhouetted as Marshall Brown called such juxtaposition in realistic fiction. Another constructional regularity in Mahfuz’s early fiction is the continuous, systematic, and even stubborn use of a specific set of materials that are associated with what Barthes called “the real.”[1] This material “requires no justification because it seems to derive directly from the structure of the world” (Culler 1975: 140). Such material can be either what humans take for granted about themselves, such as having bodies and minds, being able to think, imagine, dream, remember, feel pain and joy, become sick, and lastly die; it may be one of those natural phenomena like day, night, seasons, clouds, rain, storms, or wind, or it may consist of references to particular entities that are considered to be generally known like names of cities, countries, or important historical figures and incidents. All these are usually conceived to function as a part of what has been termed the setting of the story. But they do also have another function, which is related to what David Lodge was referring to when he defined realism as “the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely to description of similar experience in non-literary texts of the same culture” (Lodge 1977: 25). This implies that realism does not necessarily imitate “reality,” as much as it adopts the standards and strategies of those non-literary discourses that describe experience in words, claim to be, and are socially acknowledged as being, “true representations” of the actual world. Realistic texts, therefore, closely approximate other texts that have acquired the legitimacy of representation in order to claim their own legitimacy. All forms of realism utilize these elements in order to provide credence and authenticity, thereby naturalizing discursive conventions.[2] A less privileged status than the materials associated with the real, is assumed by cultural specific stereotypes and accepted knowledge. Mahfûz uses these materials abundantly, and can be described as the master of not only using Egyptian cultural codes, but also more specifically the urban Cairene codes of which he shows a profound knowledge. Following the classification of such materials by Martin into two classes (1986: 67-8), I will discuss in more detail their appearance in the works of Mahfûz, as they play such an important role in the crystallization of the realistic tradition in the Arabic novel. They are: 1. Practices that make up our social world. These are called by Barthes action sequences (1968) and by Schank and Abelson (1977) scripts or plans. These practices are mixtures of sequences of causally related and socially conventional behaviour like customs, rituals, modes of socially sanctioned patterns. They include in Mahfûz’s fiction prayer at home, going [end page 107] to the mosque on Fridays, series of activities associated with cooking and housekeeping for women, behaviour patterns and clichés in ceremonies like marriages, funerals, etc., rituals of eating where men eat at a table but have to follow a certain order based upon seniority, while the women serve them as they have already eaten in the kitchen, the ritual of the mother and her daughters joined by some of her sons over coffee and the gossip associated with that, the kids and the mother hiding things from the despotic father and many others. These practices constitute a massive store of information about reality that Mahfûz used either by describing them in detail (such as in the first 200 pages of Bayn al-Qasrayn with the breakfast scene being the most prominent example), or by mentioning one or two elements only, and thereby invoking the whole sequence without going into the details. Such practice occurs in the latter parts of the same novel or more extensively in the shorter novels (especially Zuqâq al-Midaq and Khân al-Khalîlî). But Mahfûz used these practices in three different ways. One is the kind of script or plan that Schank and Abelson call instrumental, where actions are prescribed, i.e., where the conventional series is followed to the letter. The second is what Schank and Abelson call a “situational script,” namely, one that involves choices and contingencies related to the situation, in the sense that social conventions allow for more than one course or series of actions. In Khân al-Khalîlî for instance, Ahmad keeps facing the choice between reading and going to the cafe, an activity that was conventional for people of his age and status. The third has been termed “personal scripts” or plans that arise from shared knowledge of goals and ways of achieving them but that allow the individual in question a much wider range of choices and alternative courses of action. Though these are more complex, they still follow patterns that are related to the character of the person. They are, in a sense, predictable if one knows the character well enough, since they are based on choices between alternatives that are available to the person in question. In other words, they are like the traditional Christian interpretation of God’s omniscience of the future despite the insistence on man’s freedom. In al-Qâhirah al-Jadîdah Mahjûb’s choices, as an opportunist, are based upon what we get to know about the corruption of society from his perspective, which determines his ways of achieving his goals. But there are many junctures at which possible alternatives offer themselves and in which he writes the scripts and signs them with his own signature. In the Trilogy, Ahmad `Abd al-Jawwad and his son Yasin can be taken as examples of these personal scripts. Ahmad chooses to spend two lives, one as a very conservative and strict father, and another life filled with merriment, women, and whiskey. Both kinds of life are socially sanctioned for a person of his status, yet certain rules have to be followed for each and most importantly one is not allowed to mix one life with another but has to keep them [end page 108] separate. When he decides to quit his second life after the death of his son Fahmi, this decision is one that is commensurate with his character. And when he returns to that life later, he quits again because he discovers that he is no longer the same man and has also gotten older. Yasin’s behaviour is also commensurate with his character which makes him commit transgressions when it comes to women. 2. The storehouse of cultural stereotypes, proverbial expressions, ethical maxims etc. that are based upon cultural generalizations. These are so abundant in Mahfûz’s novels that one need not enlist any, as each description of a cafe or a street (as in Zuqâq al-Midaq) or of certain characters (Mu`allim Nûr in Khân al-Khalîlî or Mu`allim Nûnû in Zuqâq al-Midaq) can be quoted as an instance of this. Mahfûz does yet another thing when invoking these elements, as they are sometimes refuted through daily practice, thereby achieving one of the forms of realistic irony. We also find in Mahfûz’s realistic fiction what was termed in critical theory as the naturalization achieved through the conventions of the literary genre (Culler 1975: 145ff). In his case one aspect gains prominence, namely access to the consciousness of characters as one of the primary conventions on which his narratives are founded. A lot can be said about this, but I will single out one point here. Mahfûz digested the novel as a realistic genre at its stage of full development. He recognized that no single point of view (in the ordinary sense of the term and not in the old technical sense of who narrates) is adequate for the representation of reality. So his omniscient narrator allows us to see events from different points of view (without resorting to the multiple-form of narration as he later did in such novels as Mîramâr) by recognizing that each character claims to be uniquely in possession of truth, therefore, many points of view, especially those of the main characters, are depicted in their variety (their voices are felt or perceived rather than directly heard). This accounts for the centrality of free indirect discourse and free indirect speech, which, in the Arab world, was one of the important innovations of Mahfûz’s novels. To return to the issue of allowing characters to depict their own point of view, one can discern here the underlying assumption of the high realistic attitude (read modern), complicit with traditional liberalism, that reality can be known only through consensus, which is the expression and mediation of different perspectives as they are revealed through the passage of time. This explains what has been described as the objectivity of Mahfûz, i.e., his ability to depict despicable characters with as much sympathy as lovable or adorable ones. Yet as much as liberalism is essentially bounded by the political, and would halt its consensus ideology when it comes to interrogate its basic principles and to erode them, or when this same ideology is applied [end page 109] to other spheres such as the economic, so does the consensus end when it reaches the voice of the author/narrator, who functions like a benevolent despot. This author/narrator does not become democratic. Another common aspect is the centrality of place. Action and incidents usually occur in specific and well described spaces with clear boundaries. Most of the action in Zuqâq al-Midaq takes place in the alley and its houses, shops, and cafe. Forty of the seventy one chapters of Bayn al-Qasrayn take place in the family house and twelve in the father’s shop. In the second part of the trilogy, Qasr al-Shawq, thirteen chapters take place in the father’s house, three in his shop, and eight in al-`Abbasîyah palace. In the third part, al-Sukkarîyah, twelve chapters take place in the father’s house and twelve in the house in al-Sukkarîyah.[3] In the second and third parts of the Trilogy, we get a wider variation of places with the new characters who are introduced. But these places are bound and confined; they are restricted spaces (one exception is to be found in some parts of the third part where streets become places for characters to meet and take walks). This restriction of space helps provide a frame for the movement of the characters, but it also limits the manoeuvrability of the narrative, which is compensated for by resorting to complex temporal organization and techniques on the one hand, and memory and recollection on the other. Space in the novels of Mahfûz restricts the movement but provides condensation. This is exactly what is needed in a fictional world that is not idealistic, romantic, or heroic. It is that of the ordinary man, and is, therefore, ordinary. But because it is constructed as ordinary, it assumes the power of the “natural place” or “habitat” of the characters, so that whenever one leaves the place one belongs to, disequilibrium occurs (Aminah’s “unauthorized” visit to the Husayn mosque and her accident), and the character starts to fall (Hamîdah in Zuqâq al-Midaq is the best example of this). So place has also another function which is symbolic, and a study of this aspect would necessitate a study of the whole geography of Mahfûz’s Cairo. Suffice it to say that place in the novels of Mahfûz is always described, but rarely in elaborate detail. One can notice the strategy of one of the oldest tricks of realism, by which the description of one section or part of a place, immediately allows the reader to recognize it and complete the picture. On the other hand, temporal organization is carefully structured and reinforced by constant references to historical data or facts, most of which are commonly known. In the trilogy, ages of characters, seasons, months, times, etc. are meticulously calculated as has been noted by some critics.[4] Incidents in the novel are associated with specific moments in Egypt’s history like the 1919 revolution, the Wafd party, Sa`d Zaghlul (the leader [end page 110] of the Egyptian national movement and of the Wafd party). The husband and two sons of `Aishah (Ahmad `Abd al-Jawwad’s younger daughter) die on the same day of the death of Sa`d Zaghlul and the Trilogy reproduces verbatim the text of the petition signed by millions of Egyptians demanding freedom for its exiled leaders. But due to the restrictions of space discussed earlier, we discern a complex usage of external, internal, and mixed analepses, to use Genette’s terms. On the other hand prolepsis, which is common to realism in general, is rarely encountered in these early novels by Mahfuz. With respect to narrative time one finds generally a lot of ellipses, some descriptive pauses, and very little summary. Scene (in Genette’s sense) is encountered mostly in dialogue. Endings, on the other hand, tend to be mostly open. Characters in Mahfûz’s novels usually act in accordance with the shared set of assumptions about unity, causality, origin, and end. And whenever generations are found, as in the Trilogy, succession serves as an earthly counterpart for the mythical or religious conception of time. All these aspects betray a specific conception of the subject. Mahfûz in the Trilogy was not the first Arab novelist to introduce the modern individual subject, but it is here that we find the constitution of the fictional individual subject not merely as an ideological or ideational concept but as a nexus of the discursive strategy based upon the regularities mentioned above. This individual subject is taken to be a complex entity constituted by the interaction of a multiplicity of forces and tensions such as heredity, social environment (family, class, culture, geography) and personal experience in relation to the social world, i.e., the interaction of the personal with the public. The construction of a character is, within such a paradigm, a process of fitting all these elements in such a way as to provide an explanation or motivation for the kind of actions and reactions the character does and shows. If this is done meticulously and carefully, the character becomes credible and convincing. `Abd al-Rahman Munif In contrast to Mahfuz’s novels, `Abd al-Rahman Munif’s Sirat Madinah: `Amman fi al-Arba`inat (1994. English translation by Samira Kawar as Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman, 1996) is not a work of fiction, but rather a work based upon a reconstruction of the memories of a place. Although the memories are presented through the multiple perspectives of a child growing into adulthood, yet they never become memoirs or first person reminiscences. Even the form of narration is not that of the first person but of the third person who always refers to the young boy. In one way the [end page 111] memories are filtered through the mind of the boy, but the author/narrator is omnipresent. This writing strategy reinforces the referential function of the text by playing the game of objectivity. The author/narrator assumes the position of the historian who narrates a story with the authority of the eyewitness as well as that of the detached observer. But the text immediately betrays what the historian Paul Veyne has called constitutive imagination (1988). The end result is a combination of fragments of memory with some historical and archival research, which is all reconstructed through the logic and the ideological perspective of the adult Munif. The book is organized around two grids. One is represented by the boys’ schooling which gives us the opportunity to visit the different kinds of educational establishments in Amman during the forties. We see the different types of traditional Kuttabs side by side with modern schools, both public and private. This grid provides for an interesting perspective coupled with a perforated temporality. The other grid is that of the seasons where the city and its transformations is at the centre and not the boy. Analogous to the first grid which juxtaposes the old with the new, the Kuttab with the modern school, this second grid which is based upon a natural concept (seasons) groups together the old with the new through vivid descriptions of the peoples’ struggle with nature. Life, according to these sections, was still dominated by nature, though not completely embedded within it. Dormant during the winter (unless a flood occurs), people come back to life in the spring. Within the purview of these two grids many aspects of the social, political, and cultural life of Amman during the forties are treated. Munif provides vivid descriptions of roads, buildings, streets, and quarters. He discusses the presence (or scarcity) of radios, cars, and refrigerators. Reading small-scale newspaper publishing (`Abd al-Ra’uf Mango) and the arrival of magazines and newspapers published in other Arab countries are highlighted. Munif also allots a fairly sizable space to the market, exchange, and the coexistence of natural and money economy. He also describes the economic activities of the population, especially agriculture. As pertains to material culture the emphasis is on food and clothing. These are examined in great detail and contextualized as cultural and status symbols (of which the tarbush or fez is the best example). In all these descriptions the traditional and the modern coexist side by side with one dominating the other in a certain sphere and vice versa. The ethnic, religious, and social diversity of the population is highlighted and is sometimes used to juxtapose attitudes and cultural and social mores. The Circassians exemplify the spirit of cooperation, organization, and communitarian work in contradistinction to the Arabs who do not seem to be capable of working together as a group. [end page 112] This biography of the city is filled with such a rich amount of information concerning the social and daily lives of people in Amman during the forties. It provides a fairly detailed glimpse into many aspects of life, mostly public rather than private. Yet, like the early works of Mahfuz, it can be read in a way that provides for criteria to examine the concepts of the private and the public sphere and their changes and transformations during the period. The Public and the Private Spheres The public sphere has been theorized by scholars like Habermas as a force of the rising bourgeoisie (albeit one that was constituted within the cultural salons of the enlightened aristocracy) against the authority of the upper classes and as questioning the legitimacy of such an authority by resorting to what was seen as public and rational discourse. However scholars within this paradigm neglect to highlight that the public sphere was constituted at the same time as a space against the lower classes and their “culture” (never acknowledged as such) and stressing exclusionary practices based upon literacy, education, and a normative taste based upon literate traditions in the literary and aesthetic spheres. Hohendahl (following Habermas) emphasizes the literary public sphere as well as the political. The rules and practices of rational discourse automatically exclude the illiterate lower classes from joining in the cornucopia of words. In tandem with this, the public sphere is seen as a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can, in principle, be critical of the state (and the upper classes) but also of tradition (a double-edged weapon against both the upper and the lower classes). Such a concept of the public sphere, though interesting and fruitful, is the product of a theoretical conceptualization that grasps the public sphere as an antinomy to both the state as well as the private sphere. The private sphere is grounded (foundationally and ideologically) in the subjective (both ontologically and epistemologically), while the public sphere is grounded in the inter-subjective, thereby giving the communicative dimension such a central role. As far as the other opposition, the public sphere in these theorizations is juxtaposed with the specific historical situation of the absolutist state in some parts of Europe. These aspects of the theorizations of the public sphere prove important in helping to discern some of the differences between the constitution of the public sphere that served as a model for these theorizations and the formation of the public sphere in some other historical and cultural contexts like the ones described by Mahfuz and Munif. [end page 113] The Public and the Private in Mahfuz and Munif It would be very difficult to discern in Mahfuz, but more so in Munif, a fully autonomous subject that is aware of its own monadic existence, and, therefore, of a private sphere constituted around such a subject/individual. Let us examine the manifestations of the private and the public based upon our previous analysis of the texts. The first thing that we notice is that the private public dichotomy is absent. What we have can be described more conveniently by resorting to the image of a continuum where the private and the public assume different spaces and where there are no pre-determined borders but a lot of inter-penetration and continuous shifting. What adds to the complexity of such a continuum is that most of the spaces neither belong to what one might call the private nor the public but to what may be termed as the semi-private and the semi-public. In Zuqaq al-Midaq life in the alley lies in this shaded area of the semi-private. The small community within the walls of the alley does not constitute a public sphere – it is too tight and traditional. This community is linked with the outside world (where the laws and rules of the new modernized and commodified society are) which brings the corruption and destruction to the people in the alley. What people in the café know is not qualitatively different from what is known behind the doors of the houses and apartments. Different matters may be discussed in the café and certain other issues will remain unspoken (though known). Private life seems to extend to the café as exemplified, for instance, by Kirshah (the owner of the café who has homosexual relations with young men and whose wife comes to the café in order to stop him by exposing his affairs and male lover, although almost everybody in the café as well as the alley know of his affairs). The alley and the café are public spaces from within the perspective of the people in the alley, but do not constitute a public sphere. They are mere extensions of the semi-private. It also takes a big leap of imagination to think of the world outside the alley as constitutive of a public sphere. It is the machine that destroys people by turning them into commodities. In the Trilogy, the relation between the private and the public is much more complicated and more dynamic. This is the result of the temporal extent of the plot and its reflection within the overall structure of the Trilogy and its characters. We start with two private spheres, a domestic private and a non-domestic private. Ahmad `Abd al-Jawwad is able to create two spheres in his life and separate them from each other. His second life is private but cannot be said to belong totally to the private sphere. He meets with Zubaydah in her house with his friends, but also sees her at his store where she visits him. His ability to keep the two lives [end page 114] separate is more associated with his authority, power, and money, rather than with any intrinsic characteristic or attribute of any one of these two lives or privacies. This interpenetration of the private and the public (whether from the perspective of an ideal type in the Weberian sense from the theoretical considerations based upon European societies) is not so much an aberration as much as a norm when seen from the perspective of a society in which a modern subject/individual has not been constituted yet. The basic urban social unit in the works of Mahfuz is the family (embedded to a larger or lesser degree in the small community as in Zuqaq al-Midaq). Individuals who head families (from a financial perspective) like Ahmad `Abd al-Jawwad in the first two parts of the Trilogy or Ahmad `Akif in Khan al-Khalil do not manifest any kind of autonomy as subjects despite their economic power, and their identity remains an integral part of that of the family. The family of Ahmad `Akif (and Ahmad himself) is witness to the tragedy that befalls a lower middle class urban family that is forced to go through the machineries of modernization. Ahmad makes all his sacrifices for the family, especially to help his brother Rushdi to get the higher education he was deprived of, only to end up by losing everything including his brother who dies of tuberculosis. In al-Qahirah al-Jadidah the young student Mahjub `Abd al-Dayim who descends from the rural poor and who has illusions about studying at the university and becoming a part of the urban modern life ends up not only by betraying his sick parents, but also by becoming virtually a pimp for his wife. The road to such an end was paved by a basic idea of modern capitalism, namely that money breeds money which breeds success and power. The traditional ties, such as the one between Mahjub and Salim transforms itself into a new kind of ties based upon mutual material interests. The family of Ahmad `Abd al-Jawwad in the Trilogy is probably more integrated into the modern economy and more well-to-do. Ahmad wants to enjoy a modern life (he drinks good and expensive whiskey) but wants to remain the head of a family ruled by traditional values. He is the past within the bounds of his home, and the present when with his friends. He assumes the posture of the serious and never-smiling man at home to become the jovial and lively man with his friends and Zubayda. And although he can completely shield the women in his family from exposure to that same modern life and public spaces (the girls rarely go out unless they are accompanied by their father and mother, and the mother, Aminah, is prohibited from going anywhere without her husband – even when visiting her mother – and faces a great punishment when she goes with her little son Kamal to visit al-Husayn Mosque which is not very far from where they live). But exposure, or should I say contamination, with public spaces is forbidden. We soon discover that the moment the males [end page 115] in the family are exposed to public spaces (Fahmi and Yasin for example), they are sucked beyond rescue. They also seem to gradually destroy that Wall of China constructed by Ahmad between the private family sphere and the public spaces of the outside world. The transformation of the private sphere of the family of Ahmad `Abd al-Jawwad is the result of the invasion of the private sphere by the public sphere. Yasin (his oldest son) has already started following his father into the public spaces of nightlife, though in different ways as his means are limited. But Fahmi entered a different kind of a public space, the university. Not only is the university a modern establishment of learning, but it was during that period one of the few public spaces in which deliberation and discussion of public affairs took place. The deliberation was not always rational. The university was not only a public space for deliberation, it was also (and perhaps more importantly) a public space for action. Herein lies one of the important differences between the public sphere in many European countries and that nascent public sphere in a country like Egypt. Whereas discourse – political, philosophical and otherwise – dominated the public sphere in most periods in the paradigmatic European models, it was discourse and action that dominated those in places like Egypt. There was urgency for action, sometimes with tragic results, but it was action. Fahmi dies, and his death in a demonstration shows that the public sphere has forced itself into the most protected of all sanctuaries, the private sphere of the family. The path chosen by Kamal who becomes a teacher but tries his luck at journalism too, is too long to be summarized here. It suffices to mention that with the third generation, public discourse becomes the dominant family discourse and issues of public life dominate the relations between the surviving members of the family. The infiltration of the public into the private is also expressed symbolically as in the death of `Aishah’s husband and the two sons on the same day of the death of Sa`d Zaghlul. The national (public) tragedy becomes a personal (private) tragedy. Based upon this we can say that, in the works prior to the Trilogy, the old private sphere was continuous with the restricted social life of the small community and would somehow collapse in the world of Mahfuz if it opens up to the larger modern world. There were public spaces, like the café and the alley and its stores. But such public spaces did not constitute a public sphere as they were extensions of the private sphere, ranging on the continuum between what may be called the semi-private and the semi-public. The whole space encompassing the private, the semi-private and the semi-public was glued together by the life of the small community which was not composed of autonomous individuals. The absence of such [end page 116] autonomous individuals made it impossible to have strict borders separating the private from the public and that no such notions were possible or conceivable. In the fictional world of the Trilogy, such a separation is present. Yet its presence is due to the authority of Ahmad `Abd al-Jawwad. As long as he is in control (and we discover soon that he is not in complete control), the private is separated from the public. This, we find out, is merely the appearance of things and not their reality, and is also applicable selectively, to the women and children of the house. The continuum of the private, semi-private and semi-public is present, but as the community is not the basic unit but the family, the formation of the autonomous individual is budding. It has not bloomed, and in Majhfuz’s fictional world it never does. The death of the first candidate to become an autonomous modern individual (Fahmi) is emblematic and foresees what is to come. His death takes place within the public space that constructs him as a modern autonomous individual who believes in science and progress. From Fahmi’s death the gradual, but steady, constitution of autonomous male individuals is characterized by the presence of two important elements. One is the important role played by education and literature, which leads directly to journalism and writing. This is the closest these individuals come to a public sphere in the Habermasian sense. Journalism here did not mean reporting the news. Journalism was specifically essayistic journalism, the kind of journalism performed by a series of luminaries of Egyptian modern culture from Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, through Taha Husayn, `Abbas Mahmud al-`Aqqad, and Muhammad Husayn Haykal to the generation of Luwis `Awad. The journalistic essay was the genre adopted by most Egyptian intellectuals to achieve their objective of transforming society. They were reformers who wanted to change society through education. And their medium was the journalistic essay which was able to reach a relatively large audience. The social transformative project of these intellectuals was grounded in a modernising aesthetic that emphasized deliberative discourse and rational argument. The second element that played a role in the constitution of these autonomous individuals is the centrality of political discourse (and action) as a necessary corollary of the public sphere. In that sense the public spaces did not function as societal institutions performing a certain role and fulfilling specific social needs, but became the centres in which public debate assumed the form of public action. Schools and universities were not only learning institutions that constructed autonomous individuals as thinking subjects, but also institutions that constructed autonomous individuals as political subjects. Even mosques and places of worship performed such a double function early on. But this phenomenon soon led [end page 117] to the development of more radical versions of societal change. These versions were associated with a different kind of aesthetic which can be dubbed the political aesthetic. Going back to Munif’s Amman, we note some similarities with the public sphere in Mahfuz. Yet here the public sphere is not juxtaposed to the private (which is rarely invoked), but is presented selectively through a double vision, that of the child and that of the author. Public spaces like schools gain the same characteristics we saw in Mahfuz’s fictional world. But the formation of a modern public sphere is not described in any detail, nor is the development of the child into an autonomous individual more than alluded to. We see the child in the initial stages of constitution as a modern individual/subject. But he is soon presented to us as if developing naturally and instinctively. And this process is, of course, dominated by the political. It may be maintained that the book in not about the boy but about the city, which is true only to a certain extent. The book is about both. And their constitution (one as a modern subject and the other as a modern public space) is described analogically, which is one possible way of interpreting the relation between the two grids that organize the work. If in the case of Mahfuz, the formation of the public sphere is presented through the prism of human experience and the constitution of these experiencing individuals (which is why we have the constant reference to its connection with the private sphere), in the case of Munif what is emphasized is the appropriation of space. It is the ways in which space is occupied by objects, individuals, activities, etc. It is also how people or powerful groups or individuals dominate the production and organization of space through socially sanctioned means. But it is also how new systems of organizing and producing space come into existence. This is best exemplified in those sections in which Munif describes the relations of the community with space as one of symbiosis despite the cruelty of nature sometimes (and that of the people at other times), but then goes on to show the transformation of the city and its expansion. With this came not only the development of public spaces and a public sphere (which is not examined beyond the schools), but also the development of territorial imperatives based upon private ownership of land. It may not be farfetched to say that Munif’s conception of space is closer to that of the Aristotelian topos, while that of Mahfuz is closer to the Platonic chora. Invoking Greek concepts, however, invokes the ideas of Hannah Arendt who attempted to theorize the relation between the private and the public in a way rather different, and I should say more flexible and open, from that in the mainstream sociological traditions. Most of her insights, derived from Greek and Roman thinkers, are useful in trying to come to grips with the ideas of the public sphere in the works under consideration. [end page 118] Her invocation of the concept of pater familias or dominus that rules the private sphere in a more-or-less despotic manner without any limitations (especially in a slave owning society as that of the Greeks) seems a fit description to the situation, or at least to the intentions of Ahmad `Abd al-Jawwad during the initial phases of the Trilogy. We can consider the processes of encroachment of the polis on the private domestic sphere thereby diminishing its jurisdiction to be analogical to what happened to the family of Ahmad `Abd al-Jawwad. And although we can find many other minor analogies, yet some aspects and strains of the relation between the public and the private in our texts remain different. In order to come to grips with these issues, we need to review in more detail the representations of place and I will use the Trilogy again as my prime example. We have the following division of chapters based upon the location and place: A quick glance at this list testifies to a quantitative shift from a centeredness of action within domestic spaces towards a wider selection of spaces, many of which are public. This is more pronounced in the third volume which orbits around Kamal. The streets, the cafés, the university, the magazine, as much as the public park and the bar, differ from the controlled places in the first volume. This in itself shows the greater importance of public spaces in the lives of characters and with it the greater diversity of exposure to public life. But such a quantitative criterion, though significant, does not take into account an aspect that was detailed earlier which is the encroachment of the public into the private sphere. Any comparative examination of the chapters that take place in the house of Ahmad in the first volume with chapters that take place in the same house in the third volume will show that, whereas the topics discussed and the actions and activities with which people are concerned in the first volume belong mostly to the private sphere of life, those that form the material of discourse in the third volume are a combination of private and public issues including politics and religion. In that sense the shift toward the greater centrality of public issues is not only testified by the shift in places of action, but more pronouncedly in the qualitative shifts in the character and substance of the action taking place within those self same places. This qualitative change was not a one-way street. We notice another, and maybe less pronounced, impact of the encroachment of the public sphere onto the private, which manifests itself most prominently at the discursive level. This is the adoption of modes of discourse in the public sphere derived from or whose reference is the private sphere. This can be understood in two different ways. One is the tendency of some of the radical discourses associated with the political aesthetic to permeate all [end page 119] aspects of society, which generalizes the totalitarianism of the pater familias (though now this is depersonalized and ideologized). The second is to see this as the continued dependence of the discourses in the public sphere on the traditional discourses of which those in the private sphere could be best subsumed and which testifies to the problematic constitution of the public sphere itself. If one were to conclude this discussion of the public sphere and its formation as it is portrayed in these texts, one could say that the texts do not actually represent a formation of a public sphere as is described in many scholarly works which examined the formation of public spheres in western societies (especially European societies since the 18th century). A public sphere was being somehow constituted if one considers such a sphere to be a constellation of public spaces. What played a greater role, at least according to these texts, was the formation of discourses on public affairs that were constituted within the public spaces but soon permeated or even invaded the private spaces, thereby changing the latter to become (to different degrees) sites of the tensions and struggles within these public discourses with all the negative and positive impact they may have had (and this depends upon one’s perspective). One result of this was that it helped transform the traditionalism of the private spaces to differing degrees. Such an intrusion of public and political discourses universalized these discourses and made them inseparable from both the public and the private spheres. In more than one way these texts help us discern how public and political discourses with their concomitant conceptions of reality were constituted in Arab societies of the first half of the 20th century as well as give us some clues as to why the same characteristics survived, possibly until today, with all the problems and obstacles they may have caused to the formation of institutions of civil society.
[1]. See “L’effet de reel,” in Barthes (1984: 162-74). [2]. This aspect of realistic fiction has been discussed in detail by Culler (1975: 131-60), and Martin (1986: 57-80). I have relied heavily on the latter work in my discussion of realism. [3]. This count is based on that of Ceza Qâsim (1985), which has been corroborated by me. The issue of place has been studied by many critics, yet very little has been attempted to situate space/place within the overall discursive strategies in Mahfûz’s novels. [end page 120] [4]. The two best studies of the temporal organization in some of Mahfûz’s works are those of Qâsim (1985) and Najjâr (1985).
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