Issue No. 601
Culture
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29 August - 4 Sept. 2002 Issue No. 601 Culture |
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Sabry Hafez, an Egyptian literary critic, has been working in the cultural field since the 1960s. He is a professor of modern Arabic and Comparative Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His many publications include, in English, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse (recently translated into Arabic under the title Takwin Al-Khitab Al-Sardi Al-'Arabi), he co-edited Reader of Modern Arabic Short Story, Modern Arabic Criticism, and, in Arabic, Ufuq Al-Khitab Al-Naqdi (The Horizon of Critical Discourse), Masrah Chekov (The Theatre of Chekov) and Al-Tagrib Wal- Masrah (Experimentation and the Theatre), in addition to dozens of scholarly articles
I'm always working on two projects simultaneously, one in English for an academic audience, and one in Arabic as part of a continuous dialogue with the Arabic cultural scene, particularly here in Egypt. So, I'm now putting the final touches to a book for the Arabic audience that I've been working on for the last 10 years on the poetics of the new novel. I've been following the new generation of the 1990s, writing on each of the texts independently as it appears, and the book covers works by 40 new writers, male and female. I was trying to find a theoretical introduction to this body of works, which I formulated, and it appeared in the last issue of Alif. I created an analogy between the changing reality of Egypt in the last two decades and the change in the narrative discourse itself. The reality of Egypt, and of Cairo in particular, has changed dramatically beyond the old logical, well-organised Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz into the 1960s. The model of that Cairo is Khedive Ismail's Cairo: the downtown has a logical structure, it is a well-planned city, a city that also has a dichotomy between the old and the new, and a dialogue between tradition and modernity, between the poor and the well-to-do, hence the dream of transition from one part to the other. This was led by what I call an epistemological quest, that the world can be known and that it can be changed. This orderly world gave structure to the novel -- you had a well-structured novel, with plot, characterisation, and progression of characters, of action and of vision. From the 1970s onwards there emerged a "mushroomed" city -- this, I find, is the best term in foreign languages for what we call al-ashwa'iya, the ville champignon. It follows a logic of juxtaposition -- people build next to each other without any plan or vision of the future; and 60 per cent of the population of Cairo now live in this ville champignon --- there are two of them, one east of Cairo, and one west -- which I call the third city, as opposed to the modern and the traditional cities. So this third city has no plan, it is a city that is purged of hierarchical structure and of authority: police vehicles, for example, cannot penetrate into these areas, and therefore the structure of the city is pushing authority out. And I created an analogy between this third city which is overcrowded, and the new texts which are overcrowded with characters; in one of these texts, I counted more than 100 characters in no more than 120 pages while in Mahfouz, in 1,500 pages of the trilogy there are no more than 40 characters. In this new reality, too, people live with a closed horizon: they have no sense of the future, of where the whole country is going; large numbers of young people are unemployed and are aware of a sense of decay and of a world collapsing around them and on top of them, and temporally they feel trapped in the present: there is no future and the past cannot offer solace. So they've moved from the epistemological quest that characterised earlier generations to what I call the ontological concern: instead of "I can know the world and change it" their starting point is "I cannot know the world, the world is not logical, and therefore I can know very little." Their concern, therefore, is with very small and limited things.
The other project is directed to the academic English-speaking world, specifically to the American market where there is a proliferation of "world literature" courses and, as a result, there are a number of anthologies, such as the Norton Anthology, all of which have flaws. Longman wanted to compete in this market by creating a better anthology of world literature, so instead of using one or two editors they decided to have 12 editors. And for two years we've been working on a table of contents which has been refereed three times, each time by 25 professors. So the final table of contents has the literature of the world, from Ancient Egypt all the way until the 20th century. The anthology will be about 6,000 pages, in three volumes, and I'm editing the Arabic, Islamic section which includes works from pre-Islamic literature all the way until modern times, covering Arabic, Turkish and Persian literature. So there are works by all the major Arab poets in the mediaeval section, and there are also works by Persian ones like Hafez and Al-Firdawsi, and the same with the major Turkish writers. More recently, there is Mahfouz, Youssef Idris, Salah Abdel-Sabour, Hanan Al- Sheikh -- there are many. There are in all 350 pages of works from Arabic culture; this is not a small percentage, if we bear in mind that the largest Arab, Islamic component in any of the current anthologies doesn't exceed 30 pages and doesn't really encompass the whole range; in this anthology there are 60 pages from The Arabian Nights alone. I have a large section on the 19th century -- discourse of the occident, I called it -- where I translated for the first time Rifa'a Al-Tahtawi, Ahmed Faris Al-Shidyaq, and Mohamed Ayyad Al-Tantawi, a contemporary of Al-Tahtawi's who went to Russia and wrote a wonderful book called Tuhfat Al-Azkiya' Fi Akhbar Al-Bilad Al-Rusiya, which was not published for many years. But the fierce battle [between the editors] was in the 20th century section because of the proliferation of literatures -- from Latin America, Japan, China, Africa, and so on. If I'm unhappy with any section of the anthology it's the modern part, which has been given only 1,000 pages in all and the demand on them was huge because everybody wants more or less double the space available. The anthology is going to be published in 2004, and we're hoping to expand the modern section if the response is favourable. But it's going to be an enormous improvement on what's available.
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