Family as Novel

          This semester, we've encountered examples of the family saga genre. Between Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, (in some ways) Grass' The Tin Drum, and now with Mahfouz's Palace Walk (and the Cairo Trilogy as a whole), we can observe the tropes on which this form relies, such as the presence of a comparatively weaker physically, yet emotionally superior female authority figure -- Úrsula and Amina -- or the age-old competition between sisters over the title of first betrothed -- Maryam and Khadija, and Amaranta and Ursula. These familiar roles and conflicts are key to universalizing even the most culturally insular of familial allegories, allowing postwar Egypt to retain its unique character while still feeling cyclic, part of a larger order. Unlike Tolstoy's opening lines to Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," the family novel seems to write itself off its own brethren.  The question is -- if there is an inherent allegorical element then in this sort of narrative, where the same characters are born, grow up, and die in different permutations of life circumstances while still owning their classic roles, is the family saga necessarily a type of allegory? And to what tradition does it owe these standard formulas?  Perhaps this novel is less an allegory and actually more of an expression of the author's national character. After all, Solitude feels distinctly Latin American, and Mahfouz's work and its exploration of Muslim piety belongs only in the Middle East. Rather than simply writing a list of customs, social ideologies, and cultural essences, this genre uses its characters to write about the setting. The Nobel Prize Committee thus favors works of this type, because their focus on the "ideal direction," i.e., historically proven literary modes, is combined with honoring the writer's national spirit. The work is a love letter to one's own country.