Mahfouz's Speech: A Reading

I would like to take a look at selections from Mahfouz's Nobel Lecture:

I was told by a foreign correspondent in Cairo that the moment my name was mentioned in connection with the prize silence fell, and many wondered who I was. Permit me, then, to present myself in as objective a manner as is humanly possible. I am the son of two civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilization; the second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic one. I am perhaps in no need to introduce to any of you either of the two, you being the elite, the learned ones. But there is no harm, in our present situation of acquaintance and communion, in a mere reminder."

Like Orhan Pamuk, Mahfouz's literary persona is built upon a cultural crossroads between religions (pantheism and Islam),  historical periods (Ancient Egypt and the fall of the Byzantine Empire), and ideologies (kingship cults, the Quran). However, his barb pointed toward the predominantly Western European members of the Academy and the Swedish Nobel Prize Committee, a half-mockingly bow to their intelligence, reveals that Mahfouz has not abandoned his own perspective, despite the repeated Islamic extremist attempts on his life, and his own admission that an artist coming out of an austere Islamic upbringing is nigh impossible.

"It was my fate, ladies and gentlemen, to be born in the lap of these two civilizations, and to absorb their milk, to feed on their literature and art. Then I drank the nectar of your rich and fascinating culture. From the inspiration of all this - as well as my own anxieties - words bedewed from me. These words had the fortune to merit the appreciation of your revered Academy which has crowned my endeavour with the great Nobel Prize. Thanks be to it in my name and in the name of those great departed builders who have founded the two civilizations."

Curiously, Mahfouz highlights the trend that the Committee champions unique worldviews that belong to no single tradition, and this peculiar preference is likely what has barred any Americans since Toni Morrison (1993) or Saul Bellow (1976) from receiving the award. An American's identity, while the product of a "melting pot" cultural ideology, and even more as a member of a nation absolutely indebted to the West and the Enlightenment for its genesis, is nonetheless of no unique character other than the inward-looking gaze that European society scorns. That being said, the  aforementioned most recent American winners have none of self-possessed, middle-class, capitalist eye of past American recipient Sinclair Lewis (1930). Perhaps the Nobel Committee, in the light of World War II and the Holocaust's gutting and devastation of the Western European consciousness, had to revise their policy, favoring less an uncompromising individual vision and more a sense of cultural connectedness and unity in order to rebuild Europe and foster a sense of solidarity.

"You may be wondering: This man coming from the third world, how did he find the peace of mind to write stories? You are perfectly right. I come from a world labouring under the burden of debts whose paying back exposes it to starvation or very close to it. Yes, how did the man coming from the Third World find the peace of mind to write stories? Fortunately, art is generous and sympathetic. In the same way that it dwells with the happy ones it does not desert the wretched. It offers both alike the convenient means for expressing what swells up in their bosom."

What Mahfouz seems to be forgetting here is that the extraordinary nature of his circumstances tends to beget an individual with an extraordinary life, and this sort of experience is vital to writing. This "labouring" of which he speaks is the necessary struggle of a writer. There is a zero-sum proposition to be made here, where one's greatness and skill is proportional to the life's suffering they are prepared to face; the diligence, self-discipline, loss of anonymity, individual smallness, all of this -- for a book. But the writer does not choose his art, and then suffer. No, he writes, suffers, and writes for the catharsis. Mahfouz, in lighter terms, expresses a similar sentiment.

"I beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen, I feel I may have somewhat troubled your calm. But what do you expect from one coming from the Third World? Is not every vessel coloured by what it contains? Besides, where can the moans of Mankind find a place to resound if not in your oasis of civilization planted by its great founder for the service of science, literature and sublime human values? And as he did one day by consecrating his riches to the service of good, in the hope of obtaining forgiveness, we, children of the Third World, demand of the able ones, the civilized ones, to follow his example, to imbibe his conduct, to meditate upon his vision."

The author seems to be at his most inappropriate in this passage, apologizing for embodying the image of him as a highly political supported of Egyptian nationalism and angry denunciation of Islamic groups such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. But his aesthetic "vessel," his writing, must necessarily reflect his own individual views, predilections, and frailties. Palace Walk, featuring alcoholism, infidelity, female subservience, and crushing patriarchy, reflects the struggles of a man who came of age in a Third World regime where these misgivings are far too common and far too riveting to be anything but the source of great writing, and a difficult life.