Heterologies of revolutionary action: On historical consciousness and the sacred in Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley

Abstract

This article considers a fundamental aspect of literary modernity: the emergence of new forms of historical consciousness that have attended the rise of new modes of discourse since the 1920s. It focuses on Mahfouz’s novel Awlād hāratinā [1959; 1967; 2006; Children of the Alley] – not on its well-known notorious and complex history of reception, but specifically on the form of historical consciousness presented in and through the narrative, a type of narrative phenomenology of the experience of time, in particular sacred time, in the popular imagination. This narrative phenomenology outlines a new type of “knowledge” when it comes to mass movements and the struggle of the masses for power, not to be found in official histories: “as if the masses could dream of a full stomach but never of exercising power”, as Foucault has succinctly put it (“Revolutionary Action” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977] 219). This insight ultimately draws on questions of amāra as explained briefly in the Introduction by Caroline Rooney. While the novel engages its own immediate historical context of the 1952 revolution, effectively offering an anatomy of its failures, and placing it in a particular conception of historical process, it anticipates in many ways the recent momentous People’s Revolution of 25 January 2011.

Keywords:

• Egypt
• Mahfouz
• modernity
• phenomenology
• narrative
• Marxism

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a paper delivered in April 2010 to the Cairo Workshop, which considered “the importance of literature as a form of cultural self-reflection”. Many strong historical moments, as well as the sharp prescient insights articulated in the presentations and ensuing discussions during the Workshop, could in hindsight be construed as an unmistakeable rhythm leading straight to the events of January–February 2011. No one could have foreseen the pre-eminence of these events. It was not a matter for a solitary Joyce walking by the Clock Tower, but an unprecedented spontaneity of attunement in the revolutionary act. I have therefore revised the introduction and some of the insights and statements in the body of the text, also to reflect some of the insights and comments offered by colleagues and members of the audience, for which I am most grateful.

Notes

1. See, for example, the more recent debate in the 1990s on the pages of the Egyptian literary journal Fusul 11.1 and 11.2 (1992) between Tal’at Radwan (1: 140–48), Muhammad Qutb (2: 343–50), Omar Fattal (2: 351–54) and Ahmad Sabra (2: 355–61). Mahfouz’s novel has, of course, attracted the attention of most critics and scholars of Arabic literature, and there have been several rigorous studies as well as many sharp insights on the pages of literary reviews and academic journals by Egyptian writers and critics.

2. To my knowledge, the first literary reception of Mahfouz’s novel in Egypt has only just come out by a young Egyptian novelist: Ibrahim Farghali, Abnā’ al-Gabalāwī [The Children of Gabalawi]. The novel has the significant subtitle of a sīra ruwā’iyya or a narrative biography and it offers a magical realist account of the sudden disappearance of all Mahfouz’s works and an anatomy of the intellectual, social and political conditions of life in Egypt after Mahfouz’s death.

3. See the recent reflections and debates between Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and Cornel West, in Mendieta and Vanantwerpen.