8 - 14 February 2001
Issue No.520
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 February 2001 Issue No.520 |
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Withdrawn from sale by the Ministry of Culture last month amid allegations of obscenity, Yasser Shaaban's Sons of a Romantic Mistake and Tawfiq Abdel-Rahman's Before and After have sharply polarised public debate. For supporters of the novels, freedom of expression is at stake; for opponents, public morals
Bursting at the seams
Abnaa Al-Khata' Al-Romansi (Sons of a Romantic Mistake), Yasser Shaaban, Cairo: General Organisation for Cultural Palaces (Literary Voices Series), July 2000. pp272
"I will say it for the last time, the story is not as serious as it seems." Thus remarks the intrusive narrator, the "fabulator", the character in the novel who is also the writer writing it but who is not to be confused with "the author," in Yasser Shaaban's (banned) novel, Sons of a Romantic Mistake. "Nothing is as inevitable as we imagine," he explains to a complicitous reader who shares in making the text. "The entire story consists merely in games, spectacles, delusions." Even so, on earlier pages in the novel, the same narrator had told his textual partners, his voyeuristic readers, that "I'm terrified of these games," namely those "political games" that led in the 1990s to some Egyptian teenagers being arrested for alleged "Satanic practices", and which have contributed to the present novel's being banned.
Edouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, an uncontested masterpiece of art, was considered bizarre and immoral by contemporary audiences. The painting was first exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863 (paintings "refused" for exhibition) and thus placed beyond the pale of art. The uproar it caused prefigured that which greeted Manet's portrait of Olympia, a prostitute, two years later -- a defining moment in modern art's vocation to challenge and disturb
"I reread Sons of A Romantic Mistake while still writing it," the narrator comments, "and found that it contained what could, in all simplicity, be taken to be evidence of Satanic worship [...], that they could reduce the entirety of the novel to 'sexual intercourse in places of death and in the presence of the dead' [...], and the scenes of sexual intercourse, they will consider scandalous and indecent [...] You and I my friend will become the talk of town, and even those who do not read will read us." This, the narrator realizes, will happen in spite of authorial intention, despite the assertion that "the story is not as serious as it seems."
So what really is happening in this novel heavily indebted to Czech novelist Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to which it makes reference? The starting point is "a relation" between "one who opens fire, one whose skull was pierced by a bullet, and one who got away because he slightly turned his head," a relation, then, between a sniper, a corpse, and one who got away. These three aspects of a single relation populate, together with the narrator writing the text, Sons of a Romantic Mistake. That is one answer to the question of what "is happening" in this text. Another would be to say that to set aside the novel's quiddity and its self-reflexive, explicitly fictionalising spirit, would be a false move. For the narrative -- hardly seamless, indeed perhaps over-ambitiously wearing its bursting seams on its sleeve -- is a text-in-process, or textual building site of construction and reconstruction, which holds few fixed meanings. The narrative, which begins at the end with the sniper's fire and the one who got away staring at the corpse in his coffin, is not presented as closed, or wrapped up once and for all, but rather, as unfolding, opening up, backtracking to where things really began in childhood, and, further back still, in the act of writing and reading.
The reader is positioned in a relation of chatty complicity with the writing and is directly addressed by the narrator, who freely exhibits his thought processes to a voyeuristic reader, reflects on the text-in-process, and subjects himself and his writings to literary and psychoanalytic criticism. Dream interpretation in the Freudian style is deployed, as are references to Roland Barthes, American movies and John Steinbeck. The male protagonists, caught up in a triangular relation, are shown wrestling with their mortality and sexuality, tormented by a Lacanian gap between desire and language, though slowly acquiring subjectivity enough to become three separate characters whose thoughts and actions may be separately described. Having acquired a measure of detail and a setting against which to come into focus, however, they then blur back into one another and into the shifting flux of the writing.
Once upon a time, in Cairo sometime between 1968 and 1972, the Sniper, then a medical student dabbling in poetry and radical politics, had sex with a colleague in the morgue, was arrested and tortured until he lost his mind, and was then consigned to a psychiatric hospital. There he begins to develop delusions of control, rapes patients, nurses and doctors alike. He is helped to escape by a doctor who, naked under her white coat, has sex with her patients, including with the Sniper himself. He then marries a woman who is his social superior, whose sexual preferences in turn bring about his impotence. Now he begins to have a recurrent dream. In this dream, he is looking through the sights of a gun from the top of the Cairo Television and Broadcasting Building, and shoots. This dream haunts him, and one day in front of the mirror he hears his own voice saying, "I want to become a sniper before I die." This, we are informed, is a decisive moment : "The action [of shooting] is all that is left for him if he is ever to feel capable of action and of self-realization," the narrator says.
Like the Sniper, the future corpse has what is called a "medical history." We learn about this through two documents, a letter and a poem, that his lover finds in his flat and that the narrator comments on. Not much comes out about the corpse's childhood; he appears mainly in the self-reflexive, middle section of the novel, during the course of which most of the writing's experiment with pronouns is carried out. He-corpse becomes I-corpse becomes I-narrator -- and back again. It is in this section that the text is most playful, broaching philosophical themes, rounding on language, repeating motifs and phrases and circling around chronology. The future corpse is a dreamer, a writer, a bit of a philosopher; he is, in short, rather similar to his future killer. He has trained himself to dream of ever stranger forms of death, he explains, and says he feels compelled to realize at least some of them. He plays dead, and is aroused by his lover, this ritual becoming a strange sort of game between them. He gets headaches every time he walks past the Television Building, realizing that this will be the scene of his death. One day as he walks past the Sniper fires.
To complete this strange ménage, there is the one who got away. This third part of the triangle was walking behind the corpse when the shot was fired, saving himself only by slightly turning his head. Like the Sniper, the one who got away had once been a medical student specializing in psychiatry; like the corpse, he is a bit of a philosopher, troubled since childhood by profound notions concerning the weakness of the will and of memory, as well as by less profound ones concerning defective testicles, and his parents' worries about whether he will ever become a "proper man." He has grown up, like the rest of his generation (and on this point the narrator has much to say), living vicariously through TV movies. His history has been marked by psychiatric disorder. Betrayed by a former lover, he suffers from paranoia, and, following attempts at self-castration, has spent time in a psychiatric hospital. He has now let himself go, and he prowls the streets in a heavy overcoat until narrowly escaping being shot.
The novel ends in the present tense on the psychiatrist's couch, the "him", the one who got away, becoming the "I" of the narrator in whose voice the story had begun. "I will turn off the television," this voice now says, "take the phone off the hook and say: 'Ladies and gentleman, the spectacle is over'".
For all its shifting, slippery pronouns, however, in general The Sons of a Romantic Mistake is marked by a single voice -- the precocious, terribly clever Kunderian male voice discoursing about the ins and outs of human sexuality and frailty. Inspected detachedly from lofty, god-like heights, human sexuality is a pathetically cliché-ridden thing -- perhaps even more so when it attempts drama with props as feeble as bowler hats, mirrors, black slips under tight-fitting red suits, nothing under nurse's white coat. Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being had compassion enough for the paltry, sad creatures who came into his writerly being to give them names and to mould them from idiosyncratic matter. It is true that Kundera's characters are -- even in their very attempt to avoid cliché and kitsch -- subject to the linguistic-human condition which entails that self-expression has "always already" happened elsewhere, that there is nothing whatsoever "original" or "unique" about anyone, especially in their most prized intimate, personal moments (of sex, grief, death, loss). Still, Teresa, Tomas, Sabina and Franz cannot easily be written off. They stay in the reader's memory.
The same cannot be said of the nameless characters of Yasser Shaaban's first novel. We may momentarily pity them, recognise facets of ourselves in them, but effortlessly love these anonymous creatures, allow them to dwell in the memory, we cannot. One follows the cleverly and challengingly woven threads of their narratives with the kind of alertness required of a game of solitaire. It is as difficult to leave the novel halfway as it is to gather the deck of cards before you have played the last hand. But having played the threads through to the last page, a hand turns the page, closes the lid of the book, leaving buried within it a body of text that has no ghost with which to haunt the psychic space it had for a brief readerly-writerly moment occupied.
A late beginning
Qabl wa Ba'd (Before and After), Tawfiq Abdel-Rahman, Cairo: General Organisation for Cultural Palaces (Literary Voices Series), September 2000. pp189
Qabl wa Ba'd belongs to a tradition of confessional writing that blends erotica with family history and respects few boundaries of structure, theme or style. In this sense it brings to mind Henry Miller, or closer to home, Raouf Mos'ad, the Sudanese-born Egyptian playwright whose first, full-length novel, Baidat Al-Na'ama, was published a few years ago in London. It is a novel that contains heavy overtones of European existentialism and of the intellectual milieu of 1960s Cairo. Finally, though, for all its experimental ambition and intellectual sophistication, one is left wondering whether Tawfiq Abdel-Rahman has written much more than a record of sexual frustration.
Suddenly, a senior civil servant and would-be writer embarks on a passionate affair with one of his secretaries, Qadriya, and begins a journal in which he documents the affair, recording the months leading up to his retirement. He announces that he intends to write his memoirs, disclosing intimate details of his sexual life as he does so, and he digs up earlier diaries written at various points in order to reconstruct the history of his life. Both protagonist and narrator of the novel, he throws together these elements with remarkable nonchalance, as, indeed, does Abdel-Rahman's book. Thus, the text is both disjointed and surprisingly short. Some chapters were apparently written at different times, with different purposes in mind, and, although the tone of the whole is generally consistent there are few attempts to overcome the novel's structural shortcomings. The love affair might be said in a loose sense to comprise the plot of the novel, but the narrator-protagonist's voice remains its sole unifying feature.
The author is a member of the literary generation of the Sixties, though he has remained silent up till now, and, like all the work produced by this generation Qabl wa Ba'd boasts both ambition and formal experiment. Yet the novel lacks the philosophical expansiveness and narrative thrust of the confessional tradition as the narrator places himself firmly within the sixties literary and intellectual climate. "It was after the 1956 Suez War, and discussions of Eisenhower's neo-colonialism and how it seeks to inherit imperialism went on in our circle in the buffet of the Faculty of Arts [at Cairo University] [...] We read Russian literature, Sartre and Camus. We admired Hemingway and Steinbeck, were surprised by Faulkner and the drama of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Bertolt Brecht grabbed our attention."
Indeed, much like other Sixties works, this novel betrays many of these same influences. In Chapter Seven, for example, the author is shown walking the streets alone and purposeless, an amalgam of the protagonists of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Camus's L'etranger: "I am beset by the feeling that I am a shadow and that the world around me is unrealistic and unreal." After stopping at a downtown bar for a brandy, he resumes walking. "On Nile Road there was a chilly breeze," he says. "The sky was black with only a few stars and a crescent like a woman's eyebrow," adding "I came upon this expression in a Chinese story published by Lotfalla Soliman" in the kind of self-ironising statement typical of Sixties narrative. Chapter Seven ends with a sexual encounter with a prostitute. Likened to "the whores of Dostoyevski," she produces in the narrator sentiments familiar from Sartre's La Nausea. "I tried to sleep with her, but I felt her organs becoming objects and my desire died away."
In general, Abdel-Rahman makes little attempt to distance himself from the thoughts and reactions of his narrator. He uses terse, first-person sentences with the deadpan uniformity of a press reporter, and while this might have worked for the dispassionate narrators of Hemingway and Camus, the voice of the narrator here lacks focus, the narrator's emotional involvement in what he describes even seeming to work against the book's existential purpose. For example at various points in the novel we are given extended, often boasful descriptions of the narrator's sexual encounters, but these, rather than placing those encounters, and the relation with another person that they bear witness to, in a properly existential perspective seem sometimes gratuitous. "After Qadriya left me yesterday, I felt that the adolescent who lived through the winter of 1951 was still in me... [And when] I woke up this morning I felt a strong desire to have sex with Qadriya, to feel all the curves of her body and to have the luxury of kissing her... But now I must forget this and get ready to go out."
Such scenes, which are graphically repeated, contribute little to plot development or to the development of a fuller sense of character and seem to be pursued for their own sake, occupying a larger portion of the book's 'personal papers' than any other event or theme. Early on in the book the narrator confesses, "I think a lot about sex. Is it because I am approaching 60 or because I am beset by doubts concerning my abilities?" Whatever the case may be, there are a lot of such thoughts in this novel, and take them out and there is little left apart from depressing family feuds and sociological documentation.
This latter material, though of interest, is also typical of the work of the sixties generation as a whole, and is therefore perhaps by now a little stale. Briefly, the narrator of Abdel-Rahman's novel comes from a well-to-do family, his father being a senior policeman and his mother coming from an old aristocratic family. Indeed, the brawls between his aristocratic mother and his father are the most entertaining parts of the novel. There are sociological details of the lives of the fellahin in the Delta town of Zaqaziq, as told from the viewpoint of the landowner, and of intellectuals in downtown Cairo. The narrator's mannerisms, eccentricities and often sexist mores form a persistent undertow to events. Yet while such details abound, they seem distracting, much like the erotic passages, or the occasional lists of newspaper headlines, or the lists of the contents of the narrator's wardrobe.
Putting all this to one side, the value of Qabl wa Ba'd is likely to lie not in its record of the views of the sixties generation, nor in its record of the sexual frustrations of a man nearing retirement, but in its account of loss. An early childhood image of absence and bereavement captures this central insight well. "My father works as a policeman," the protagonist remarks. "Every time a new cabinet comes to power -- it was only too often that cabinets changed then -- policemen would be shifted around the country. In the houses that we left, we would leave the nails on which we had hung pictures on the walls, and each picture would leave a lighter-coloured patch on the wall where it had hung, the rest of the wall getting darker with accumulated dust."
The novel opens in Ismailia, where the narrator works and meets Qadriya. By the time it closes, by his father's grave in Zaqaziq, he is retired and back with his wife in Cairo. The 'personal papers' of which this novel is composed are what is left of the protagonist's dream of writing a 'new literature' when he was a left-leaning university student and young intellectual.
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
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