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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 March 1999 Issue No. 420 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 March 1999 Issue No. 420
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Special Features Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The moral of the story
By Naguib Mahfouz
To me, a novel is a story through which characters are presented. Through the story and the characters, the outlines of a social, psychological, romantic or political problem appear. There is always an opinion behind a novel, at least behind the novel as I know it.
They say, however, that changes have come about: now, the important thing is the text in itself. How can this be? Unfortunately, I do not know, since I have been cut off from the pleasure of reading for a while, and so I have not followed these developments. So as far as I am concerned, a novel is still an idea, and a story, and people.
I can conceive, however, of a novel that does not tell a story, since several modern writers have dealt with a single situation, in which events do not follow a linear pattern of development. I can also imagine a novel without characters, peopled instead by names and meanings that have no psychological dimensions or specific personality traits. Yet I cannot even think of a novel without a cause, a work that is not driven by an idea -- unless we are talking about whodunits or mystery novels, where the plot is usually perfected to an extreme degree, and in which the characters are usually portrayed with incredible precision, but which do not go much further than that.
Literary works are quite different, and that is the difference between, say, Crime and Punishment, and Murder on the Orient Express. That is why Agatha Christie's books must end with the arrest and the resolution of the mystery, while Dostoyevsky, in fact, could take that event as his starting point.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
