Before he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz was known outside the Arab world to students of Arab or Middle Eastern studies largely as the author of picturesque stories about lower-middle-class Cairo life….
To Arab readers Mahfouz does in fact have a distinctive voice, which displays a remarkable mastery of language yet does not call attention to itself. I shall try to suggest in what follows that he has a decidedly catholic and, in a way, overbearing view of his country, and, like an emperor surveying his realm, he feels capable of summing up, judging, and shaping its long history and complex position as one of the world’s oldest, most fascinating and coveted prizes for conquerors like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, as well as its own natives.
In addition Mahfouz has the intellectual and literary means to convey them in a manner entirely his own–powerful, direct, subtle. Like his characters (who are always described right away, as soon as they appear), Mahfouz comes straight at you, immerses you in a thick narrative flow, then lets you swim in it, all the while directing the currents, eddies, and waves of his characters’ lives, Egypt’s history under prime ministers like Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa El-Nahhas, and dozens of other details of political parties, family histories, and the like, with extraordinary skill. Realism, yes, but something else as well: a vision that aspires to a sort of all-encompassing view not unlike Dante’s in its twinning of earthly actuality with the eternal, but without the Christianity.
Born in 1911, between 1939 and 1944 Mahfouz published three, as yet untranslated, novels about ancient Egypt while still an employee at the Ministry of Awqaf (Religious Endowments). He also translated James Baikie’s book Ancient Egypt before undertaking his chronicles of modern Cairo in Khan Al-Khalili, which appeared in 1945. This period culminated in 1956 and 1957 with the appearance of his superb Cairo Trilogy. These novels were in effect a summary of modern Egyptian life during the first half of the twentieth century….
To have taken history not only seriously but also literally is the central achievement of Mahfouz’s work and, as with Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn, one gets the measure of his literary personality by the sheer audacity and even the overreaching arrogance of his scope. To articulate large swathes of Egypt’s history on behalf of that history, and to feel himself capable of presenting its citizens for scrutiny as its representatives: this sort of ambition is rarely seen in contemporary writers….
Month: August 2006
Ken Loach and Boycott
Standout British filmmaker joins boycott of Israel
(Daily Star staff)
Ken Loach, the critically acclaimed British filmmaker who won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has lent his support to the cultural boycott of Israel, according to a personal statement issued late last week….
Loach won the Palme d’Or for “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” set in the Irish War for Independence. He is one of the UK’s most controversial directors, in no small part because he is a die-hard leftist. Previous films include “My Name is Joe,” “Bread and Roses,” “Hidden Agenda” (which examined the British government’s “shoot to kill” policy during its troubles with the IRA) and “Land and Freedom” (which explored the political rhetoric at play during the Spanish Civil War and offers probably as complex and critical an insight into notions of resistance as Jean-Luc Godards’ “Ici et Ailleurs,” about Palestinian fighters in the early 1970s) “Hidden Agenda” and “Land and Freedom” won smaller awards at Cannes.
fiction and social justice
Nouvo Noir: Mystery and detective fiction is increasingly concerned not just with solving the crime, but with digging into the injustices of society
Today, such themes may be less common in mainstream best-sellers, but they are alive in well in popular genre fiction – especially in the areas of crime fiction and mystery….
Making It Real — Lessons for Art
Dahr Jamail interviews Ray McGovern:
I like to refer to what my four-year-old granddaughter said when she saw me on TV. When it was all over she went to my daughter and said, “Mommy, that was grandpa. That means the other people are real too.” Now, that’s sort of cute on the surface, but think about what that means. If you don’t know someone in the picture, the other people aren’t real too. And we’re deprived even of the pictures of the carnage that’s going on in Iraq, and now in Lebanon. And we have to fess up to that and realize that unless we get our hearts involved in this, as well as our minds, we’re not going to be able to stand up and do our duty as American patriots and face down this situation and say to our government, “Enough. Enough. No more carnage. Bring our troops home from Iraq. And reign in this Israeli government that is using your helicopter gun ships, your fighter-bombers, your tanks, etc.”
Upton Sinclair and Chris Bachelder
Brief overview of Upton Sinclair’s life and work.
Ryan Bigge reviews US!
Jay Parini reviews US! — “a lark of a novel” by Chris Bachelder:
“Sinclair was the ultimate muckraker, the scourge of capitalists and greedy politicians, and a vibrant man of the left, when there was a left. Now he’s at the centre of a larky novel by Chris Bachelder. With his first novel, the inimitable Bear v Shark, Bachelder stepped unabashedly into the limelight, full of postmodern pizzazz. He has put his cleverness, and his unusual narrative skills, to good use in US! – a romp of a book (the word “novel” almost doesn’t stretch to include such a work) in which the great muckraker comes alive, again and again, dug up by his admirers, who need him desperately. Alas, he is assassinated again, too – over and over.”
“Indian” Mascots
Oliver Stone, 9/11, and the Big Lie
Oliver Stone, 9/11, and the Big Lie
By Ruth Rosen
When World Trade Center ended, I left the theater tense, my muscles aching. The superb directing and acting, coupled with still hardly imaginable scenes of death and destruction, had sent painful muscle spasms up my back, evoked tears, and left me, yet again, with searing and indelible images of that hellish morning.
I felt disoriented in the bright sunlight of a Northern Californian afternoon. As my mind regained its critical faculties, however, another kind of shock set in. I suddenly realized that Oliver Stone’s movie reinforces the Big Lie — endlessly repeated by Dick Cheney, echoed and amplified by the right-wing media — that 9/11 was somehow linked to Iraq or supported by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein….
Political Poetry, Political Novel — US, Middle East, Mexico
Politics in Art by Hank Kalet — the Middle East and political poetry:
“We live in an age when it’s hard / to write about basic things / like a kiss or eating cheese,” Mr. Weiseltier writes in “Cheese.”
The accumulation of small details in his poems is set against the larger world of violence, one that perpetuates itself, violence begetting violence, a cycle that he refuses to fall into – “don’t dare say / that my blood permits you to justify your wrongs.”
In 2020, Politics as Unusual — review by Yvonne Zipp
Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico’s greatest living writer, has created a corrosive satire [the novel, The Eagle’s Throne] set in 2020. The Mexican president has angered the United States by denouncing its invasion of Colombia. In retaliation, US President Condoleezza Rice has wiped out Mexico’s communication systems, cutting the country off from the rest of the world. (Even the carrier pigeons have been poisoned.)
Social Issues in Fiction
Otto Penzler with some thoughts on popular fiction:
Charles Dickens, most of whose books involve murder, kidnapping, blackmail, robbery, and other crimes, wanted to change society; his novels were more instrumental in shining light on the wretched state of the poor in Victorian England than all the pamphleteers, speech-makers, and journalists of the era combined. Irritated with anti-Asian racism, Earl Derr Biggers created Charlie Chan, a wise and likable Chinese-Hawaiian policeman. John le Carré has in recent work attempted to show that Western democracies were as morally depraved as Eastern Communist regimes. Carl Hiaasen, for all the humor in his novels, has been on a mission to identify the catastrophic damage being done to Florida’s environment.
Impact of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
Gary Younge
It is difficult to think of a book, let alone a novel, that has forced the state to respond in such a comprehensive manner. And yet, while Sinclair was delighted with both sales and fame, it was not quite the response that he intended. He had dedicated the book to the “Workingmen of America” and had set out to make an emotional appeal to the nation over the plight of the working poor and the prospects of a socialist alternative. Instead he had generated a public panic about food quality. “I aimed for the public’s heart,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
The Jungle was very much a novel of its time – an era of mass migration, US military expansion and rapid economic and technological transformation. It earned its place in the US literary hall of fame not for its aesthetic qualities but for its practical effects. Thanks to its polemical style, formulaic narrative and, at times, propagandistic language, it has more currency as a work of literary journalism than of great fiction.
Those publishers who discarded the manuscript had underestimated not only the potential breadth of its appeal, but the political and journalistic context that made that breadth possible. Middle-class Americans, concerned that the concentration of capitalism in a few hands would leave them at the mercy of trusts and monopolies, began to revolt.
The social commentator Randolph Bourne described it as a period when “a whole people” woke up “into a modern day which they had overslept . . . they had become acutely aware of the evils of the society in which they had slumbered and they snatched at one after the other idea, programme, movement, ideal, to uplift them out of the slough in which they had slept”.
These concerns gave birth to the Progressive movement, which found its literary expression in a more aggressive and socially responsive style of journalism.
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See also:
by Tony Christini
Stand-Up Comedy and Social Change — Robert Newman Reviews his Reviews
From “Two Thumbs Down“
by Robert Newman
What significance that Tony Blair confessed to Jon Snow that he had never heard of Mossadegh, the elected Iranian prime minister we overthrew? If things have disappeared down the memory hole then it must be with good reason.
But I think that, rather than do gags about 1066, Nelson, Napoleon – virgin territory though that is for the comedian – it’s more exciting to talk about the Black Panthers. Not only am I interested in history from below, but I was also flukey enough when researching the show to have direct access to unpublished first-hand oral accounts of the Black Panthers from which I quoted directly. Also, the Black Panthers just happen to be the most important social movement of the 1960s; FBI chief J Edgar Hoover described them as “the single greatest threat to the internal security of the United States”. That’s pretty amazing, I think.
In No Planet B – The History of the World Backwards, I wanted to explore what the Panthers might have achieved were it not for the FBI’s murderous campaign against them. And I wanted to explore that because I believe such grassroots revolutionary movements are the only political force that can stop climate change, because capitalism has no Plan B. Again, abstruse stuff of purely academic interest, as happily all such urgent imperatives only exist way over yonder on Planet B.
The Cultural Front — Alan Wald interview — Radical Novel Reconsidered
The Legacy of the Cultural Front: An Interview with Alan Wald
“Alan Wald teaches at the University of Michigan and is the author of seven books including, Writing from the Left and Exiles from a Future Time. He is a member of the editorial boards of Science & Society and Against the Current. He also edited The Radical Novel Reconsidered series published by the University of Illinois Press, which includes Burning Valley by Philip Bonosky.”
A Practical Policy 