Naguib Mahfouz is the first Nobel laureate in Arabic literature. And once again, the prize has worked its dubious magic, thrusting an author into the global glare. Not that Mahfouz has been a nonentity till now. The seventy-nine year-old Cairene has published nearly fifty volumes of novels, stories, plays, essays; he has received the highest literary accolades of Egypt; he has benefited from numerous foreign translations. Still, the premier author of the Middle East elicited, until recently, the response, Mahfouz who?
He recounts the story in his Nobel lecture of 1988. "I was told by a foreign correspondent in Cairo," he says, "that the moment my name was mentioned in connection with the prize silence fell…. Permit me, then, to present myself in as objective a manner as is humanly possible." This is poignant and a little astonishing. Why should it have been necessary for Mahfouz to "present himself" to that learned audience? Is this the mission of the prize: to make known a writer illustriously unknown?
The question tempts us to consider the conundrum of the prize. We need not moot, once again, the seeming vagaries of the Swedish academy. Its record, in the last several decades at least, has been honorable. And as George Steiner once put it: "Even Paris got it wrong. His prize-giving of the golden apple led to his own death and the ruin of Troy. All human awards are fallible."
Still, our bafflement regarding the criteria of selection persists. What is the tacit role of geography or ideology, of accident or intrigue, in elections to glory? Can the academy apply the same standard to every language and literature? What if, for instance, the novel had a fare briefer tradition in Egypt than in England or Spain - would the expectations of mastery remain the same? And is there no special merit in discovering some author, reclaiming a genuine artist from the shadows of history? Can we hope to answer these and other renitent queries without glibness or condescension?
I write from an active sympathy with the literary jurors of the Swedish Academy, and my queries bear directly on Mahfouz. More precisely, they bear on the geopolitical climate, cultures collide and interpenetrate continually even as traditions cling to their identities. That is to say, global and local violence, shape our world. Thus Arabic literature, like Arab nationalism or Islamic fundamentalism, enters our consciousness precisely at the moment when interdependence - the total ecology of the earth - becomes an inarguable fact. This is a major if implicit, theme in Mahfouz's work.
We should not fret, therefore, if Mahfouz articulates two seemingly contradictory ideas in his Nobel lecture, a contradiction vital to his work though it may be grating in our own experience. The first idea invokes universalism: "In the olden times," he remarks, "every leader worked for the good of his own nation alone…. Today the greatness of civilized leader ought to be measured by the universality of his vision and his sense of responsibility towards all human kind." (This permits him rightly to add in the name of the Third World: "Be not spectators to our miseries.") The second idea appeals to particularism: "The real winner of the prize," he insists, is the Arabic language itself. This is the language, as Mahfouz pointedly omits to say, that orthodox Muslims consider God's own and unique
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