The Novel in Arab Hands
Blind spots are funny things. Once a gap in our knowledge becomes conspicuous, we may rush to fill it in the hope of free plunder. Usually the rush trails off in disappointment: We realize there is a great deal to learn partly because there is a great deal we are not interested in. Opportunity and interest are not the same thing.
"The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction" (Anchor, 486 pages, $15.95), edited by veteran translator Denys Johnson-Davies, deserves our carefully calibrated interest. Mr. Johnson-Davies makes no grand claim for Arabic fiction, which he sees as a unity, stretching from Morocco to Iraq. "The idea of an author creating characters and making them inhabit worlds of his creation not only was foreign to the Muslim Arab mind but was even regarded as almost unacceptable." "The Thousand and One Nights" was never held in high esteem by modern Arab writers. The first Arabic novel dates from 1929.
Early Arabic fiction, therefore, derives from Western examples. V.S. Naipaul looms unannounced over much of this book, not because he was an influence but because his solutions to the postcolonial predicament are anticipated here. How, after a superior education, to write about unfortunate villagers? Mr. Naipaul writes about them uncharitably, but with a humor that might still entertain them. He gives the inhabitants of "Miguel Street" (1961) a taste of their own medicine, and the privileged reader gets to watch.
The most successful early work here is similar. Egyptian Tawfik al-Hakim's 1936 "Diary of a Country Prosecutor" concerns, in the excerpt given, a catalog of silly misdemeanors — country backwardness compounded by awkward bureaucracy:
"Your honour — may God exalt your station — are you going to fine me just because I washed my clothes?"
"It's for washing them in the canal."
"Well, where else could I wash them?"
The judge hesitated, deep in thought, and could give no answer . . . .
"The state is not concerned to inquire where this man should wash his clothes. Its only interest is in the application of the law."
Mr. al-Hakim belongs to the first wave of Egyptian novelists, several of whom have not aged well. Naguib Mahfouz, from the next generation, was the first and only Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize (in 1988). Like Mr. al-Hakim, he keeps a distance from his poor characters, but he lets them go farther; they get into deeper trouble. The excellent story "The Conjurer Made Off With the Dish," begins in the mode of a fable: Sent to buy beans, a young boy forgets which kind, and returns again and again to his irritated mother, bothering her with his dithering, until finally in frustration he kills the bean vendor, runs off with a little girl, and witnesses a second murder. Lost at the end of the day, he says,"I told myself that I should be resolute and take a quick decision: the day was passing and soon mysterious darkness would descend. "Besides the irony — as if darkness had not already descended — the boy expresses an old desert wisdom.
Mr. Johnson-Davies's anthology is not presented chronologically, but it is possible to read it that way. After Mahfouz, the most celebrated writers turn yet darker. Yusuf Idris, a short-story writer also from Egypt, explores stock figures from a rich interior point of view. In "House of Flesh" a slender widow with three ugly daughters marries a blind Koranic reciter at her daughter's urging. All five sleep in the same room: "The girls are grown up; they know; they are aware of things, and by their wakeful presence it is as if the room has been changed into broad daylight."
From the Sudan, Tayeb Salih writes with the gravity that Westerners might desire from an Arabic writer. Incorporating visions into psychologically realistic narratives, Mr. Salih implies that mysticism might still be part of a post-mystical world. In the story "The Cypriot Man," a sophisticated man visiting Nicosia encounters the Devil, who wants the man to go womanizing with him:
Two American girls arrived this morning from New York. They're very beautiful, very rich. One's eighteen and she's mine, the other's twenty-five and she's for you. They're sisters; they own a villa in Kyrenia. I've got a car. The adventure won't cost you a thing. Come along. They'll be really taken by your colour.
Mr. Salih's writing brings us close to the race, sexuality, and magical terror that, perhaps for the wrong reasons, accounts for much of this volume's allure.
In another excerpt from Mr. Salih, a character, having ascertained that he desires his dead friend's wife, admits that "I — like him and Wad Rayyes and millions of others — was not immune from the germ of contagion that oozes from the body of the universe." What distinguishes Mr. Salih and some of the other writers here is the bargain they strike between that contagion — adultery and everything else essential to fiction — and the dignity of their imagination.
