NAGUIB MAHFOUZ, Midaq Alley: Space and Historical Constriction

This week’s episode will be focusing on Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley and how it gives us an example of historical constriction in African literature. The novel is set predominantly in the Midaq Alley of the title, but we find that the setting is used to introduce us to a range of diverse characters from different social classes and backgrounds. More importantly, the novel establishes a link between the sleepy alley that represents a form of traditional way of life and the outside world of Cairo that encapsulates rapid historical transition. The historical period that the life in the Alley is set against is the Second World War, and it will be shown how the presence of the British Army in Cairo during the War produces an overarching if invisible matrix of aspirations and social mobility for characters in the novel. This matrix of aspirations however also conceals a form of colonial ideology that ultimately situates Egypt as an appendix to world history. As we shall see, within the novel this secondary status is translated into forms of impatience and anger expressed in interpersonal relations between characters. I will be arguing that these are really inchoate responses to a liminal sense of historical constriction generated by the historical conditions within which they live. A comparison between Midaq Alley and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and other novels will be made with respect to the representation of anger as an unconscious response to historical constriction in African literature.

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Suggested Readings

Muhammad Siddiq, Arab Culture and the Novel: Genre, Identity, and Agency in Egyptian Fiction, (London: Routledge, 2007).

Marius Deeb “Najib Mahfuz’s Midaq Alley: A Socio-Cultural Analysis,” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 10.2 (1983): 121-130.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (London: Penguin Classics, 2008). First published in 1935.

Waïl S. Hassan and Susan Muaddi Darraj, eds. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz, (New York: Modern Languages Association, 2012).

Matti, Moosa, The Early Novels of Naguib Mahfouz: Images of Modern Egypt, (Miami: University of Florida Press,1994).

Raymond Stock, “Naguib Mahfouz: A Translator’s View,” The Kenyon Review 23.2 (2001): 136-142.

Naguib Mahfouz and Alan Byrne, ed. and trans., On Literature and Philosophy: The Non-Fiction Writing of Naguib Mahfouz, Volume I, (London: Ginko Library, 2015).

Naguib Mahfouz and Rashid El-Enany, ed. After the Nobel Prize 1989-1994: The Non-Fiction Writing of Naguib Mahfouz, Volume IV, (London: Ginko Library, 2020).

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Related videos

Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God : https://youtu.be/hNv9Y5UvgTo

Spatial Analysis: The Airport as Chronotope: https://youtu.be/1_-_KX3xxyo

What is Urban Studies?: https://youtu.be/XlJ6rpFgLsw

The Railway Station as Chronotope in The Bourne Ultimatum : https://youtu.be/JMMSyXzv1CY

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

Doctor Strange and The Matrix: The Geometries of Space and Time: https://youtu.be/0_tC-kbA-Sc

Видео NAGUIB MAHFOUZ, Midaq Alley: Space and Historical Constriction канала Critic.Reading.Writing with Ato QUAYSON