Al-Ahram Weekly Online 13 - 19 September 2001 Issue No.551
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Next month sees the publication by Everyman's Library of a single-volume edition of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, a first in the English-language publication of the Nobel laureate's work. To mark the occasion we publish below Sabry Hafez*'s new introduction to the Trilogy, a landmark in modern Arabic literature

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Representing the nation

The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz, Everyman's Library (Contemporary Classics), October 2001

Naguib Mahfouz, is the first, and as yet the only, Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. One cannot think of a better text, than his magisterial Cairo Trilogy to be the first Arabic literary work to appear in the canonical Everyman's Library. The novel itself is a work of masterly narrative invoking echoes of the great novels of Balzac, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Dickens and even Dostoevsky. Its scope, richness, and place in the history of modern Arabic literature are unrivalled and justify its primacy. It is a novel whose range of issues, literary value, philosophical weight, dexterity of style, originality of insight, variety of characterisation and tragic intensity are unmatched by any other novel of its time and culture. In addition it is a novel full of humour and vitality.

It is one of those rare works that provides its reader with a deep insight into its culture, society and people. As such it is more capable than other Arabic novels of introducing its culture to a wider reading public, largely unfamiliar with its manners, norms and customs. By the time one finishes reading this monumental and highly enjoyable novel, one is enriched many times more than by reading numerous volumes on Egypt's modern history, society and culture. It succeeds in lucidly inscribing the physical appearance, memorable atmosphere and the vibrant rhythms of Cairo's life into the very texture of its narrative and offers insights into the reality and psyche of its people to its readers. Let us turn first to the context in which it emerged and its author before talking about this fascinating novel.

In 1911 two unconnected events took place and proved to be crucial for the future of the Arabic novel: one in the Quartier Latin in the heart of Paris, the other in the popular quarter of Gammaliyya in the buzzing centre of old Cairo. In Paris, while studying for his doctorate in law, Muhammad Husain Haykal (1888-1956) completed Zaynab, the novel that is considered by many to mark the birth of the Arabic novel. In Gammaliyya, in the heart of Cairo, Naguib Mahfouz was born on the 11th of December, only three weeks before the end of the year. For many years, Mahfouz used to overlook these three weeks and claim that he was born in 1912, the year of Zaynab's publication in Cairo. Zaynab presented the rural aspects of the Egyptian character and opened the way for numerous narrative works on the countryside. Mahfouz's urban upbringing in the culturally rich and densely populous quarter of Gammaliyya qualified him to shift the emphasis from the country to the city, construct Egypt's urban novel, and bring this newly emerging genre to full maturity. Furthermore, he succeeded in putting this novel on the world literary map, winning for it a wider readership and international recognition

Mahfouz was born into the heart of the middle class. His father was a high-ranking civil servant, and provided his family with a comfortable, urbane life. His home was in Cairo's lively commercial district that was also rich in historical monuments and cultural festivities. As the youngest son of a large family, four sisters and two brothers, he enjoyed the attention and affection of everyone and relished his happy childhood in Gammaliyya. His vivid recollections of old Cairo were an everlasting source of inspiration for his work, from his early novels up to his last one, Echoes of an Autobiography, 1995.

The novel is considered by many to be the epic of the urban middle class. Mahfouz's Cairene origins equipped him for the role of scribe of this teeming metropolis to which he devoted his life and prodigious work. As a young boy Mahfouz witnessed the 1919 revolution whose major events took place in Cairo, and some of its confrontations with the British in the very square in which he lived. The strong association between the rise of the novel and the awakening of the national consciousness made his experience of this major national event one of the vital developments of his literary education, and a rich source of inspiration for his Trilogy. Mahfouz's literary education was not attained at home: his home had no library, and his father did not read literature; it was acquired through popular storytelling by the bard of the coffee-house next to their home.

Zeinab Abdel-Hamid, A Street in Khan El-Khalili

When he went to Cairo University in 1930 he studied philosophy and was an avid reader. His university years coincided with the economic crisis and political repression of the unstable minority governments in Egypt at the time. The University was a hive of political activity and Mahfouz was a liberal Wafdist -- the Wafd was the majority party at the time, working to end British occupation of the country. He was aware of all the other political movements at the time, particularly the Leftists and Muslim Brothers, whose exponents appear in many of his novels, as well as emerging from the heart of his family saga, The Trilogy.

On graduation, in 1934, he worked for the University, contemplated postgraduate study and even registered for a PhD in philosophy with Sufism in Islamic philosophy as the topic of his research. His first publications were a series of philosophical essays in cultural journals, but he soon abandoned this academic endeavour and embarked on a literary career. Yet philosophical concepts and spiritual and Sufi preoccupations pervade his literary work. One of the marginal but memorable characters of Cairo's Trilogy is Mutawali Abd al-Samad, the clown of the piece in the Shakespearean sense. He is the perpetual voice of calm and premonition in the best tradition of Sufism, representing the timeless spirituality that dwells in the world of Gammaliyya.

I make the link between the birth of Mahfouz and that of the Arabic novel because this literary genre was unknown in Arabic literature before the twentieth century. This is rather ironic in a culture that produced one of the most fascinating and influential narrative texts, The Arabian Nights. But, for centuries, this narrative gem, which is a potent arch-text in the work of contemporary writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garc’a Màrquez, Salman Rushdie, John Barth, and Umberto Eco, was frowned upon, and relegated to the ranks of popular culture. This did not prevent it from firing the imagination of the young Mahfouz and inspiring him to become the storyteller of his society, the new Shahrazad of Arabic narrative. The thirty years between the birth of the Arabic novel and Mahfouz's first work can be seen retrospectively as preparing the grounds for the arrival of the master par excellence of this genre in Arabic literature.

The intervening works of Taha Husain (1889-1973), Ibrahim al-Mazini (1890-1949), Mahmud Tahir Lashin (1894-1954) and Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898-1987), significant as they may be, succeeded only in rooting the conventions of the genre in Arabic culture and acquainted the reader with its rubrics. They were all works of limited scope, restricted interest and artistic shortcomings. Yet their role in establishing the new genres (the novel, drama and the short story) cannot be overlooked. They convinced the reading public of their relevance, value and significance. Aware of the pioneering nature of their work, these writers diversified their literary endeavour and, with the exception of Lashin, did not dedicate themselves to one genre. In contrast, Mahfouz devoted himself almost entirely to the novel. After a few years of what may be considered apprenticeship in the genre of the short story, he devoted himself entirely to the novel for twenty-five years, before dividing his energy between the two genres for the rest of his career. In his prolific career, he published more than thirty novels and fifteen collections of short stories.

Mahfouz's literary career began with articles and short stories published soon after his graduation. In 1938, he published his first book, Hams al-Junun (Whispers of Madness), a collection of short stories. In 1939 he left the world of academia, opted for an undemanding civil service job and published his first novel, 'Abath al-Aqdar (Absurd Fates). This and the following two novels were historical works written as part of a grand project to employ the narrative genre in relating the history of Egypt from the time of the pharaohs to the present, a lifetime project of forty novels. Since studying Ivanhoe, as part of the English curriculum at secondary school, Mahfouz had been fascinated by the historical novels of Walter Scott and embarked on this project under his influence. Scott's was not the only influence, for by the time he had completed his education and started writing several Arabic historical novels had appeared which he read avidly. Mahfouz's historical novels were clearly different from their predecessors in the genre. Although they had some romantic overtones, they were marked by structural coherence and high artistic composition.

The historical setting aimed to root the work in Egyptian history, but beneath the historical structure Mahfouz was clearly concerned with the national issues of the time. Aware of his nation's historical amnesia, he mirrors the present on the past in order to enable the nation to draw both support and guidance from its own history. History was clearly used to shape the imagined community and bolster the bruised national identity. The events narrated in these novels are mainly metaphoric representations of aspects of the national condition. The quest for independence and the need to develop both the national character and the individual's awareness of his role in society are the major preoccupations of his historical novels. After writing three such novels, two of which won important literary prizes, Mahfouz abandoned this genre, and turned his attention to the present. He realised that he had not made a dent in the vast history of Egypt, for he was still in the early pharaonic period.

Three factors played an important role in generating this shift: reading nineteenth century European novels, the outbreak of World War II and its impact on Egypt, and Mahfouz's urban life. When Mahfouz was introduced to the novels of Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Thomas Mann and Dickens, he began to doubt the ability of the historical novel to deal with the rapidly changing reality of his time and the urgent issues of his community. The turbulent years of the war were characterised by protracted social, national and moral crises in Egypt, and Mahfouz became increasingly aware of the need to avoid historical metaphor and deal directly with the burning social issues of the time. He became increasingly aware that his lack of first-hand experience and knowledge of the countryside mitigated against his historical project.

The title of his first "realistic" novel, al- Qahirah al-Jadidah (New Cairo), written in the first year of the war but not published until 1943, sums up the aim of his realistic novels: to articulate the new reality of a changing city. During the remaining years of WWII he wrote three more novels surveying the socio-historical reality of Egypt from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the war. These novels are concerned with the transformation of Cairo both as a city and as a distinct urban culture. The urban space of old and new Cairo is both the setting and the symbol of the clashes of cultural values, which affect many of the inhabitants of this teeming third world metropolis. The novels of this phase of Mahfouz's literary career reflect various facets of the trauma of change and its social, human and political consequences. They shift the focus of the Arabic novel from the country to the city, from the past to the present, and force it to deal with the conflict between the old and the new, between tradition and modernity and to grapple with the problems of change.

One of these novels, Midaq Alley (1946), skilfully demonstrates the complex dynamics of change and the intriguing but frequently tragic transformation of a society whose aspirations often extend beyond its ability to realise them. The sensitive juxtaposition of the old alley and its desire for modernity and progress, with modern Cairo in which the colonial presence provides modernity with subordination give the novel potency and relevance. Its tragic heroine, Hamidah, is often perceived as a 'metaphor' for Egypt in her naïve but just quest to improve her life and ameliorate her difficult situation. The novel shows the deterioration of Hamidah's strong character from the desirable belle of the old quarter to the cheap strumpet of the colonised city overwhelmed by the dictates of the War. It demonstrates the inevitability of Hamidah prostituting herself in a city controlled by the forces of colonialism.

Mahmoud Said, Woman Looking out of a Window

The four realistic novels create in their richly textured canvas a literary typography of the Cairene urban scene. They eloquently express the predicament of its inhabitants who are caught in the web of tradition and unable to cope with the ramifications of the city's rapid transformation. But Mahfouz's realistic project was still lacking its crowning piece to bring the city's contradictions and rich humanity together in a sophisticated narrative discourse worthy of his great city. This was achieved in the Cairo Trilogy, the work that culminates this phase.

The magnum opus of the Cairene urban chronicles is The Trilogy, a grand narrative project that took over six years (1946-52) to accomplish. Its completion coincided with the collapse of the old regime in 1952. Inspired by John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga, and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, it was the first family saga in modern Arabic literature. Many others have followed, but it remained unique and distinct in its scope and profundity. It emerges as a response to national and personal needs and succeeds in dealing with them. The country was at a crossroads of conflicting visions and projects and needed a stocktaking narrative to elaborate its identity and articulate its choices. Mahfouz was also at a personal political crossroads, he lost faith in, or at least harboured doubts about, his old Wafdist ideology after the Wafd was discredited for agreeing in 1942 to form a government at the request of the British. New ideologies and different narratives were springing up and he needed to examine them.

Thus, the Trilogy was his search for a sense of direction and of personal and national history. This makes it one of the landmarks of the modern Arabic novel for it covers both spatially and temporally a vast and dense reality. It is a multi-stranded narrative that records the socio- political transformation of modern Egypt in its quest for national identity and a role in the modern world. It is the story of three generations, covering twenty-seven years (1917-44) of Egypt's modern history, covering all its political shades and encompassing all social strata of its community. It deals with the whole scale of morality and sketches the topography of the urban scene with its rich cultural heritage and elaborate network of human relations. It is a valuable document of social history and of cultural anthropology as well as a literary masterpiece. It should be read both as a realistic representation of its society and as an allegorical rendering of Egypt's quest for nationhood and modernity because of its intricate and sophisticated viewing of the nation from multiple narrative and ideological positions.

The Cairo Trilogy, which appears in this [Everyman's] edition for the first time as one book, was originally conceived as a single novel, and not as three separate works as it has been produced since it was first published in Arabic in 1956. When Mahfouz finished, what he considered his best achievement yet, he took the manuscript, over a thousand hand-written foolscap pages, to his publisher, Said al-Sahhar. He looked at the manuscript and without reading it said: "What sort of a calamity is this?" Sahhar returned the novel to Mahfouz and refused to publish it on the grounds of cost, despite the fact that the manuscript was read by Taha Husain, the doyen of Arabic literature, and hailed as a great novel. Mahfouz was depressed and on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

What saved Mahfouz and his novel was a lucky coincidence. Yusuf al-Siba'i, the literary commissar of the new regime, was launching a new monthly review, al-Risalah al-Jadidah, and looking, as was the custom in Egypt at the time, for a new novel to serialise. When he asked Mahfouz if he had a new manuscript, Mahfouz told him the story of his rejected novel. Al-Siba'i was encouraged, rather than discouraged, by the length of the manuscript. It would keep his new review going for sometime. In 1955, the serialisation of Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk), as the whole novel was originally entitled, started in al-Risalah al-Jadidah, but the novel was much longer than the short-lived al-Risalah al- Jadidah could sustain.

As soon as its early chapters were published, the readers and the critics realised that Mahfouz has produced a major literary work. However, Sahhar was still reluctant to publish the whole novel, but agreed, in 1956, to bring out the serialised portion in book form, which became known as Palace Walk. When this was successful, he asked Mahfouz to give him another manageable portion of the novel to publish. That is when Mahfouz divided his work into three novels, with the inevitable revision to its narrative structure, and gave the other two novels, which were published in 1957, the respective titles: Qasr al-Shawq (Palace of Desire) and al-Sukkariyyah (Sugar Street). The three titles are taken from actual street names in the district of Gammaliyya.

The Trilogy is the great family saga of modern Arabic literature and the work that enshrined middle class morality and culture. It has been the subject of countless articles, books, and several doctoral theses in Arabic and other languages, and attracted different interpretations. It placed the Egyptian family at the heart of its narrative and followed its ups and downs over three different generations. Unlike many European novels of its ilk, it does not take the adventure or education of the individual as its core, but gives the central role to the family and the collective.

It also makes the mother the unsung heroine of the family and the reason d'être of the narrative, despite the ostensible authority of the father. The mother is not only the hub of family life, "the queen with no rival to her sovereignty", but she is also the one who provides the children, male and female alike, with comfort, confidence and support. More important in this respect is the fact that she is the one who sets the pace and controls the space of the narrative.

Beneath the illusive patriarchal representation in the novel there is a subtle layer of narrative that steadily subverts patriarchal authority. This makes the novel an elegy charting the dwindling of patriarchy as well as Egypt's painful path to change and modernity. As such it is both a realistic family saga and a national allegory and each enriches the other, though the success of its realistic dimension often masks its allegorical one. The dual genealogy of the Trilogy is responsible for these two layers in its structure. Mahfouz's reading of the European realistic novel and his desire to create an Egyptian family saga inspires the realistic layer, while the allegorical dimension is a result of his awareness of an Egyptian tradition that uses the novel to mirror national reality and his need to circumvent political authoritarian control and challenge the prevailing establishment.

Let us start with the realistic layer in this multi-layered novel. In the Trilogy space and time are inseparable. Time is the fourth dimension of space, and spatial and temporal indications are fused into one carefully thought-out whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, and becomes artistically visible and concrete. It is the major catalyst for change. Space, whether private or public, becomes charged with and responsive to the movement of time, plot and history. As a student of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Mahfouz knows that time and space are indispensable forms of any cognition, and that the image of man is always intrinsically rooted in space and time. Thus he roots every scene, character and event in both time and space.

The Trilogy spans a long and decisive period of Egypt's modern history -- 1917-1944. Palace Walk begins during WWI in 1917 with the bombardment that discredited the Ottomans and ends with the outbreak of the 1919 nationalist revolution. Palace of Desire starts five years later in 1924 with the British negotiation with Sa'd Zaghlul, the charismatic leader of the Wafd, and ends with his death in 1927. While Sugar Street begins in 1935 with Mustafa Nahhas, Zaghlul's successor, addressing a Wafd Party conference and ends with the mass arrest of political activists in 1944. But these political and historical events are mere temporal markers of the internal historical memory of the text and are inseparable from its spatial presentation.

The novel is mainly concerned with the family and mediates political events through its various members. The family becomes the microcosm of the nation and the transformation of its life and times carries allegorical significance. In Palace Walk, the Jawwad family home is the locus of narrative and the traditional quarter of Gammaliyya is the main space of the novel. The novel's world is in the grip of historical transition. As the title Bayn al-Qasrayn indicates, literally between two palaces and not Palace Walk, Egypt was in a liminal space between two political orders: the Ottoman Caliphate with its waning traditional legitimacy and the new independent nation whose difficult birth required the sacrificial blood of Fahmi.

If the Jawwad's household dwelled between these two orders, Shaddad's mansion in Palace of Desire, is firmly lodged in the new state, where Egypt makes a conscious decision to emphasise its link with European culture and western life styles. It is the opposite of the Jawwad's in every respect, as the new district of Abbasiyya is distinctly different to that of Gammaliyya. In Sugar Street, with its time of social polarisation and conflicting ideologies, opposites and doubles of the Jawwad family house emerge. These include contrasts such as Professor Foster's villa in Maadi and Abd al-Rahman Pasha palace in Hilwan with their associations of change, deviation and even corruption, and different doubles, in the form of the Sugar Street house and Sawsan Hammad's basement flat.

All these loci are inseparable from their times in the narrative. The expansion of space accompanies the augmentation of time from one novel to the next, but this is ironically marked by the shrinking of narrative. Palace Walk covers 2 years in 498 pages, Palace of Desire 4 years in 422 pages, and Sugar Street 10 years in 308 pages. Palace Walk establishes the traditional time with its slow rhythm and static continuity, the rituals and daily chores mark the cyclical time. The eruption of the revolution that brings this first part to a close with the tragic death of Fahmi dislodges the eternal timelessness from its harmony, stability and static continuity.

The Palace of Desire opens, five years later, with al-Sayyid "extracting from his caftan the gold watch," the emblem of chronometeric time, as a clear indication of a new perception. Sugar Street demonstrates how this new time and the vicissitudes of life have taken their toll on the old cohesive family, and is characterised by its fast pace of change and drama. This reflects the change from the pre-modern condition, with its timeless simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present, its slow rhythm and static rituals, to the modern, heterogeneous, empty time, its time of dynamic transformation and rapid change. As Benedict Anderson convincingly argued in his Imagined Communities, this change in the concept of time is vital for the birth of the imagined community of the nation. The very structure of the narrative shows the dynamics and pains of this change in the life of both the family and the nation.

The chronotopic presentation of narrative creates constant interaction between time and space throughout the text, which redefines relationships of power and develops its meaning and trajectories. The Trilogy starts with the mother, Amina, waking up at night and ends with her death, as if she is the raison d'être of the narrative whose death terminates its flow. In the first half of Palace Walk, she is inseparable from our perception of the novel's time and space. The chronotopic dialectics permeate the texture of the narrative where a constant process of encoding and decoding is taking place. The greater the gap between the time of the narrative and the present, the greater the need to employ detailed social codes in order to reproduce the socio-cultural milieu and make it vivid, authentic and lively. Hence the narrative needs more time and space to develop a sense of reality regarding the years between 1917-19 than the more recent years of the 1940s.

This enables Amina to set the pace and dominate the narrative, for culinary and other social rituals punctuate life in the Jawwad's family household. At dawn, the day starts with the kneading of the dough in the baking room on the ground floor. At the outset of the novel, although, chronologically, the kneading of the dough takes place after the mother performs the dawn prayer, narrative order reverses this, making it the marker of the beginning of the day. This is reinforced by describing the kneading and the subsequent baking in detail while mentioning the prayer only in reported narrative. Another indication of Amina's importance in the narrative scale of priority is the narrative subversion of the established order. The allocation of space in the house is hierarchically designated. The patriarch occupies the top floor, the mother and the male children the middle floor, the females the ground floor and the baking room is banished to the courtyard. But the temporal arrangement of the narrative brings the baking room, the domain of the mother and her domestic activities, forward. This narrative inversion of the realistic order subverts reality and rebalances the social hierarchy that diminishes the status of women by giving them narrative precedence over the world of men.

The elaborate description of the baking room, with its active females as the source of life and many of its delicious pleasures, gives it a highly significant role in punctuating the day and marking seasonal events from Ramadan and the two annual feasts to various social occasions. No wonder, for it is also the kitchen and the incontestable kingdom of the mother where she reigns supreme over the domestic life of her family. The room is presented not only as the internal clock of the house, the source of its nourishment (it backs on to the larder and storeroom), but also as the testing and initiation ground for its women. It harbours special recipes for fattening birds and animals for domestic consumption, and women for prospective suitors. The warmth and intimacy of the room and the delicious meals and drinks that flow from it are in contrast to other areas of the house.

Once breakfast is prepared, the mother takes it on a brass tray to the dining room and oversees its serving and consumption. Here again Mahfouz uses the culinary code to communicate a host of significant messages. Breakfast is singled out because it is the only meal in which the boys eat with their father, the nearest thing to a family gathering. The dishes eaten at breakfast reveal the social background of the family and even its national identity. Eggs, brown beans, cheese, pickled limes and peppers and hot loaves of flat round bread for breakfast put the family into the upper stratum of the middle class. While the presence of fried beans and flat round bread makes it unmistakably Egyptian, for brown beans is as Egyptian as bacon and eggs are British. The eating of the meal on a low table around which cushions are placed for seating further identifies the social setting as one of a family rising to the upper strata of the middle class rather than falling into it from a higher one. The latter would cling to a normal dining table and chairs. The interaction between the father and his three boys, the only members of the family allowed to eat with him, reveals further information about the character of the father, his educational and cultural background and his relationship with his children.

Naguib Mahfouz

Although the mother is not allowed to eat with them, her job does not end with the bringing of the breakfast tray. She stands in the room by the water jug waiting to obey any command. The mother who reigns supreme downstairs is reduced to a voiceless marginal existence upstairs. Yet her silent presence during the ritual confers on her a kind of hieromancy which is not available to the other female members of the family. The three boys, though famished, restrain themselves and wait until their father starts, then they follow in order of seniority: Yasin, Fahmi and then Kamal. This shows their highly formal response to their father's approach and the degree of hierarchical interaction within the family. This is reinforced when the author changes the narrative point of view and describes the progression of the meal from the standpoint of the youngest son, Kamal. He fears his father the most, eats cautiously and nervously and is concerned about his inability to compete for his share of food with his two energetic elder brothers, particularly after the father leaves the table. The departure of the father, followed by the mother, leads to the collapse of the eating order and transforms the formalised hierarchical space into a democratic one. Now the three boys fight for the food in a completely different setting. This very transformation is a further indication of the inner dynamics of the family.

The early departure of the father prepares the reader for the finale of his breakfast, when he goes to his room and the mother follows him with a cup containing three raw eggs mixed with milk and honey. Here the narrative opens on the world of different concoctions and tonics; some are prepared for the father to stimulate his appetite or for their aphrodisiac effect, while others are cooked for the daughters to make them plump and attractive. It also introduces the reader to the two contrasting concerns of men and women in this domain. While the mother is versed in the dietary aspects of such tonics, the father introduces us, through his train of thought, to the narcotic variations on the theme.

Another significant contrast is that between the family gathering over which the father prevails, the breakfast, and that over which the mother presides, the coffee hour, soon before sunset. In the latter, a democratic matriarchal interaction replaces the oppressive patriarchal order. Unlike breakfast which takes place on the top floor and is confined to the male members of the family, the coffee hour takes place on the first floor and is open to everyone, bar the absent father who, after work, goes on his nocturnal exploits. It has an order based on inclusion and not on exclusion. Although not every member of the family is allowed to drink coffee, everyone plays a role in the highly significant social ritual, which brings them together, and allows for the realisation of their different needs. The breakfast scene with its rigidly hierarchic order necessitates its presentation from a unitary viewpoint. When the author changes the narrative perspective to relate the rest of the scene from Kamal's point of view, this is done mainly to demonstrate the power of the hierarchical control. The coffee-hour scene allows for a polyphony of voices and a multidimensional narrative. Unlike the breakfast scene, the change of narrative perspective in the coffee hour demonstrates the richness of variety and amplifies the relaxed atmosphere of the occasion.

We see how family politics in the Trilogy demonstrates itself in the daily rituals of eating and drinking coffee as well as in the symbolism of the distribution of space for each activity. The breakfast takes place on the top floor, which is the sole domain of the father. Everyone comes to his ground and behaves according to his rules. The same can be said about the ground floor, the incontestable kingdom of the mother, and even about the first floor during the coffee hour. But since time and change are the two invisible heroes of the Trilogy the ordering of space changes and with it the significance of meals and refreshments that take place there.

In Palace of Desire, the move of the coffee hour from the first floor to the ground floor after the death of Fahmi and the marriage of the two daughters shows how these two major blows to the mother's world have almost eradicated the main source of her social pleasure. The devastating blow to the harmony of this home comes from the counter space of the Shaddad Mansion. The trappings of modernity in Aida's house are as significant as the different food she brings to the picnic at the Pyramids, where secularism and pharaonicism are brought together. Food can clearly indicate social class, cultural background and even temporal changes in modes of behavior and taste, but it can also herald a conceptual change in Kamal's life.

In Sugar Street, the return of the coffee hour to the first floor is used as an indicator of a major relational change. The series of disasters, which have afflicted the beautiful younger daughter, Aisha, gives her certain liberties earned through suffering, including smoking openly and participating fully in the coffee hour like the male members of the family. The coffee hour now brings the women from the ground floor to the first, hence establishing at least a quasi-parity between all members of the family. This is possible because of the deteriorating health of the patriarch, which forces him to come down from the top to the first floor. This is also indicated by the change in his diet and daily routine. Now he eats his supper, which consists of yoghurt and an orange, at home. No longer can he partake of the delights of night parties and the food and drink associated with them. When he becomes frail, al-Sayyid is brought down to the ground floor and ends up bedridden and totally dependent on his wife, thus completing his descent, while Amina stays in her first floor room until the end. The novel does not tell us this, is shows us how it gradually happens, and this is part of the narrative technique of substituting showing for telling to enhance the impact of the change. Later on the absence of the coffee hour becomes as significant as its presence. Presence / absence is one of the important dimensions of the operational code in Mahfouz's narrative.

The spatial rise of the mother is inseparable from the fall of the patriarch. While Amina appears to be submissive and docile her remarkable character and pragmatic conduct speak of a strong, practical woman. In contrast, al-Sayyid is an authoritarian man and a product of authoritarian society. Ironically both the demonstration and concealment of his virility and debauchery are quintessential to his patriarchy. Hence his character is the locus for sharp contradictions, for he is honest and hypocritical, harsh and tender, stern and joyful, pious and libertine, strong and weak. The seeds of his downfall are carefully implanted in the narrative: from the early scene of Yasin's discovery of his lascivious activities; to Fahmi's refusal to pledge to sever his links with the patriotic movement; to Kamal's unwillingness to follow his advice and study law; to his humiliation by the British in front of his son; to Zannuba's rejection of his advances. Similarly, the rise of the mother is as carefully implanted in the text, from the time when the children plot to demand her return after she is banished from the house as a result of her egregious act of disobedience and visit to the Shrine, until the time she reigned supreme in her household.

In these examples concerning the daily rituals, the mundane and the quotidian, one glimpses certain aspects of the politics of narrative presentation, which Mahfouz employs in the Trilogy, politics of gender and power. Simple rituals are depicted as repositories of cultural values and power relationships, as microcosms of political ones. We see how the life of the family is inseparable from the vicissitudes of times and politics in the country, and how spatial presentations shift to suit temporal changes. But nowhere in the Trilogy are the realistic and the allegorical so closely intertwined as in the central love story of the novel, that of Kamal and Aida.

The story is played out on several levels, the most significant of which is the allegorical one as an embodiment of the internal war of the body politic. When Kamal falls for Aida, it is not her class that attracts him, but her culture, European sensibility and secular orientation. She is unfettered by archaic tradition and is free to determine her future, qualities of the Egypt of his dreams. "Aida could have been on his mind when he said of Egypt: has she dismissed the one man she could trust at a time when he was busy defending her rights?" As a result of seeing her in these terms, he sees himself vis-à-vis his rival as a sincere man accorded the unjust treatment given to Sa'd Zaghlul at the hands of his rival, Ziwar Pasha, who replaced Zaghlul as Prime Minister. The failure of Kamal's affair with Aida is seen as betrayal, and heralds the end of the middle novel of the Trilogy with the cataclysmic historical event of the death of Zaghlul. What makes Kamal's passion for Aida a metaphor for a national malaise rather than a simple romance, is the chronotopic dimensions of the affair. Kamal's love is an affair locked in time and space, and is pervaded with images of paralysis and transgression of social or national boundaries.

There is a significant change of emphasis between the three parts of the Trilogy. Palace Walk is primarily concerned with the family, private protective space, traditional morality, and inner harmony within the family and the nation. If there is a contradiction in the conduct of any of its members, it is compartmentalized and hidden. The harmonious domestic space of the family home dominated by patriarchal order and strict morality is completely insulated from the masculine, libertine space of the concubines' house dominated by music and fun, and from the public space of emergent national politics with its imminent dangers. Palace of Desire juxtaposes different and contradictory spaces, class contradictions and conflicting political positions within the nation. Private emotions dominate the narrative and challenges to patriarchy replace the old collective harmony within the family. Scepticism and internalized contradiction supplant old moral and patriotic convictions. In Sugar Street, these internalized contradictions are played out fully in public spaces. This is a time of political polarization when the 'other' is not the opposite of a homogeneous self as was the case in the first part, but has been incorporated within the divided self. We see the death of patriarchy and the maturity of not only the children, but also the grand children. Political polarization opens the way for pluralism within the family and the nation and cultural dialogue over a wide range of topics and ideas replaces the traditional cultural monologue of the first part.

The Trilogy has an historical internal memory where certain repetitions demonstrate the impact of time and cruelty of change, and this widens the scope of its interpretation. It makes effective use of the narrative device of mirroring views, events, and characters on each other as if one is continually in a hall of mirrors. Yasin's interest in Maryam echoes his late brother's desire to marry her. Al-Sayyid's lust for Zannuba recalls her past affair with his son, and her future marriage to Yasin is a constant reminder of this past. Kamal attempts to recapture his love for Aida by chasing her younger sister, Budur. Ahmad's short love affair with Alawiya Sabri conjures up Kamal's protracted passion for Aida, and contrasts with it at the same time. These all mirror the present on the past and demonstrate how things have changed.

We have seen how each house in the Trilogy has its opposite and its double, the same process extends to the main characters where a constant process of mirroring, of contrast and similarity takes place. Al-Sayyid has both Shaddad Bey as his complete opposite and his own friends Iffat and al-Far as his doubles. Amina has both Haniyyah, Yasin's mother, and Bahiga, Maryam's mother, as her opposites and her daughter Khadija and even Zannuba as her doubles. Kamal has Fu'ad Hamzawi as his opposite, has both similarity and contrast with his own brother, Yasin, and his friend Riyad Qaldas, and has his nephew, Ahmad, as his double. Kamal, a Hamlet-like figure, who is perfectly at home with radicalism and conservatism, has long been interpreted as bearing many autobiographical elements of Mahfouz's persona, but the author has as much autobiographical affinities with Kamal as with his nephew Ahmad.

Mahfouz has said that his prose narrative is concerned more with architecture and less with interior decoration. The Trilogy succeeds in becoming both a political allegory and a reservoir of social customs, folk tales and songs, popular tunes, common proverbs and the whole undercurrent of urban culture in Egypt in the first half of this century. It reflects the cultural and political development of a society in turmoil under the pressures of the British occupation, and draws a highly detailed map of Egypt's political orientations. As a family saga it succeeded in enshrining the major social stereotypes of relationships, emotions and role playing to the extent that its hero, Ahmad 'Abd al-Jawwad, has become the Egyptian patriarch par excellence. Even today, when the trilogy is serialized in television both men and women throughout the Arab world view this archetypal and larger than life patriarch with melancholic nostalgia and admiration. This is so because the author portrayed him with similar sentiments for he was based on Mahfouz's own father. It is ironic that the most memorable patriarch in modern Arabic literature is the one who portrays the decline of his distinction and stature.

The novel also has its prophetic vision and warning for the future. Every novel in the Trilogy ends with a death and a birth, but the death and birth of the final novel, Sugar Street, are oracular. The novel ends with the death of Amina, and with her two grand children Ahmad and Abd al-Mun'im, the communist and the Muslim Brother, in prison. The two exponents of the conflicting ideologies of progress and regression emerged from the same house on Sugar Street, and are at the end incarcerated in the same cell. But the birth of this final novel signifies its ominous premonition, for the newly born is the son of the Islamicist, a premonition that is still relevant to the Arab reality of the present day.

Sabry Hafez is a leading literary critic. He published extensively both in Arabic and English, and is currently Professor of Modern Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of London.

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