Politicising World Literature

Egypt, Between Pedagogy and the Public

May Hawas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429535369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria africana

Politicising World Literature: Egypt, Between Pedagogy and the Public engages with postcolonial and world literature approaches to examine the worldly imaginary of the novel genre and assert the political imperative to teaching world literature. How does canonising world literature relate to societal, political or academic reform? Alternating between close reading of texts and literary history, this monograph studies a corpus of novels and travelogues in English, Arabic, French, Czech and Italian to historicise Egypt's literary relations with different parts of the world in both the modern period and the pre-modern period. In this rigorous study, May Hawas argues that protagonists, particularly in times of political crises, locate themselves as individuals with communal or political affiliations that supersede, if not actually resist, national affiliations.

1 Love in the Time of World Crises

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club

Literature, let’s say, entertains history, the way we entertain an idea; it also entertains itself, never at a loss for conversation or amusement; and in its more radical forms it invites history to think again.

Michael Wood, Children of Silence (13)

They speak of politics as ‘facts’. As though no one had explained to them the difference between ‘facts’ and that ‘reality’ which includes all the emotions of people and their positions. And which includes also triangular time (the past of moments, their present, and their future). They speak of politics as the decisions of governments and parties and states, like the eight o’clock news.

Politics is the family at breakfast. Who is there and who is absent and why. Who misses whom when the coffee is poured into the waiting cups. Can you, for example, afford your breakfast? Where are your children who have gone forever from these their usual chairs? … What reproach do you wish to utter? And what reproach do you wish erased? … Politics is the number of coffee-cups on the table, it is the sudden presence of what you have forgotten, the memories you are afraid to look at too closely, though you look anyway. Staying away from politics is also politics.

Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah (43–44)

Love and Bildung

In the beginning of novelistic history was the Word, and the Word was Bildung. On the face of it, Waguih Ghali’s 1964 Beer in the Snooker Club and Milan Kundera’s 1968 The Unbearable Lightness of Being follow a classical Bildungsroman format. The two novels feature central male protagonists for whom knowledge has a threefold meaning. It is a journey or process for the men to become aware of themselves as rational agents in history, a freedom or right to gain awareness or culture, and a goal to reach some sort of awareness or culture and therefore achieve freedom.

Set against the Prague Spring and the Suez Crisis, respectively, the two novels refute specific internationalist rhetoric in Egypt and what was then Czechoslovakia to offer alternative affiliations that are both personal and worldier. As Ghali resists Nasser’s anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist Arabism by presenting an image of individual cosmopolitanism that combines the elite good life with a call for social justice, Kundera resists Czechoslovakian nationalism and Sovietism by relocating Bohemia within a lost, Edenic, pan-European heritage. These counter-nationalist imaginaries may be described as “supra-national” in Kundera’s case and “cross-national” in Ghali’s. They imply that any integral understanding of the political identities of the Czech Republic and Egypt necessitates locating the countries as an essential part of the world rather than as essentially the experience of the colonised. Constructing a national ethos requires affiliating ourselves to larger political-cultural entities but also distancing ourselves from others.

The link between the Bildungsroman and nation-building has often been drawn, with the genre being launched formally with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–96).¹ There is still some debate about what specific formal or thematic characteristics are indispensable to the Bildungsroman (Swales; Buckley; Beddows), including opinions that the term may refer to quite different things in different literary traditions (Miles; Gottfried and Miles), or may be a form that actually ceased to exist in the twentieth century (Moretti 1987). Nevertheless, the references to Bildungsroman remain, as does the link between Bildungsroman, nation-building and individual societal affiliation. The link is even more clearly indicated in criticism which finds inflections in the form according to a certain region, pointing to “European” (Summerfield), “Spanish-American” (Doub), “African” (Collins) and “Arab” (Hallaq; al-Moussa) versions of the genre.

Across different language-cultures and publication dates Bildungsromane generally assume the core formula offered by one of the genre’s earliest proponents, William Dilthey, who explains that: they “all portray a young man of their time: how he enters life in a happy state of naiveté seeking kindred souls, finds friendship and love, how he comes into conflict with the hard realities of the world, how he grows to maturity through diverse life-experiences, finds himself, and attains certainty about his purpose in the world” (Dilthey 5:336). From there, additions or changes to this core formula are often considered as culturally-specific and intentional deviations such as the feminist Bildungsroman (Bolaki), the British feminist Bildungsroman (Fraiman), or the French, German, Russian and British Bildungsroman (Moretti 1987).

Towards “attaining certainty about his purpose in the world”, the protagonist then needs to experience, or find, by Dilthey’s formula, friendship and love – rehabilitative social relationships that signal the protagonist’s assimilation into society and adaptation to its mores, and therefore indicate that society itself is flourishing with the well-being of its individuals. Love affairs become fundamental to the development process, integral to the formation of the individual and the well-being of the nation. They signal sexual autonomy that is integral to the development, maturity and all-rounded heterosexual well-being of the usually male protagonists. Love also constitutes one or more necessary hurdles in the acculturation process, and relates directly to the protagonists’ modern, urban conditioning. The love affair then conveniently becomes a trope for two kinship myths at the same time: the family, which stands in as the nucleus of the nation, and the city, which functions as a microcosm of the nation state. From there, the protagonist’s ability to form a suitable relationship indicates his potential for mature, rational action, and consequently social assimilation and the ability to lead a meaningful existence. Successful love affairs point to the protagonist’s moulding along correct lines, and his eventual ability to function as a responsible citizen who, along with and because of a suitable partner or spouse, will become the progenitor of future suitable citizens. Meanwhile, failed love affairs signify that the individual is at odds with the norms of society and is therefore flirting with disaster, a state which, again depending on the Zeitgeist, could point out the individual’s naiveté (give him time and experience and he will toe the line), his eternal alienation, or his inability to adapt to societal values because these values themselves need rethinking (Moretti 1987; Buckley; Beddoes; Swales). Writing specifically on the English Bildungsroman, J. H. Buckley could thus explain that the protagonist needs to go through at least two love affairs or sexual encounters to progress into social maturity: “one debasing, one exalting, [and both] demand[ing] that in this respect and others the hero reappraise his values” (17).² In the past few decades love stories in postcolonial novels of formation have almost inevitably often been used as metaphors for national conditioning in an occupied state, both in conscious departure from the Bildungsroman and as an extension of the organic (and convenient) national ideal of the family being a nation writ small (Summers; Sainsbury). Of course, literary genres are never that formulaic. The term Bildungsroman may have outlived its precision as a genre-defining term. Every novel after all, in some way or another, can be read as an individual’s search for or journey towards Bildung. Because of its core premise of liberty and rational action, however, the Bildungsroman has not outlived its legacy to the novelistic form.

Between Egypt and Czechoslovakia

The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker Club are, aptly, romantics at heart. Rather than a full cycle of growth to maturity, formation narratives offer more accurately a cognitive transition, a move from one point of knowing to another, where maturity is not necessarily the resolution but an off-chance and the real focal point is the process of gaining experience. The protagonists’ political conflicts and their moments of self-enlightenment are dramatised and posited as representational of a collective experience (hence the ease with which both texts have been read as national allegories) and the general human condition. By depicting individuals who are strongly sceptical of the state’s ideals of national belonging, the novels do not simply depict the assimilation or lack thereof of the protagonist-citizen, but stress the seemingly inevitable conflict between individual and community, community and governing-structure, the nation and the world.

The love stories develop against two historical milestones in both countries. Political crises serve to temporarily mobilise the nation (or at least much of it) and later, even atavistically, become part of the rhetoric of national self-definition. Caught in the urgency of the political situation, the protagonists question the premises of their governments’ policies. The decisions the protagonists take towards women gain political resonance from this position, creating a personal-political conceptualisation of the crisis as a momentary, individual, and lived experience, rather than a state-ratified narrative of a collectively symbolic political event.

Both novels have similar plots of men facing politically-determining choices, and reflect an authorial attempt to widen certain nationalist ideologies in their countries. Kundera rejects the post-Prague Spring state to envision a “supra-nation” of Europe, a regional bloc that he perceives as a world in itself. He emphasises the shared nation myths of Europe and Bohemia to dislodge Czech culture from behind the Eastern Europeanness of the Wall, Iron Curtain, Orthodox Church, or Slavic semantic family (Kovačević), and works into his argument a small nation/large nation discourse that calls to save Czech history from local provincialism on the one hand and foreign barbarism through Russification on the other hand.³ Kundera’s supra-nation calls for the cultural boundaries of the Western European bloc to include more of the peoples of Europe. His conceptualisation, however, considers Europe not just as a regional bloc in the world but as the world: the maker of history and the marker of time. What happens outside Europe’s geographical boundaries happens as if on another planet, occasionally noteworthy like an infrequent eclipse but otherwise distant and unconnected. Perceived as the primary region of importance, Kundera’s supra-nation is presented from the top down, emphasising the grand narratives of history even as it questions them, and often heavily engages in totalising power discourses of distinctiveness and exceptionalism.

On the other hand, Waguih Ghali constructs a “cross-national” vision of Egypt which opposes the political discourses and slogans in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s state, from anti-Zionism to Arab socialism, by highlighting all the communal and individual identities these discourses exclude. The cross-national perspective looks beyond the nation state by linking individuals together around the world, focusing on a common humanity and political fate. The novel resists identitarian labelling by pointing to myriad counter definitions of what it may mean to be Egyptian. Ghali’s cross-nation is depicted as a personalised alternative to, and escape from, the political situation. As such, Ghali’s cross-nation describes Egyptian society not from the top down, but by digressions and divergences, often through chance encounters with representatives of Egypt’s classes and communities: street boys and rich playboys, and janitors and cultural attachés. At its most general the novel expresses Ram’s nostalgic lament for a lost communal knowledge and way of doing things. Although he clearly critiques Nasser’s regime, the narrator fails to offer a precise political alternative (or, tellingly, a clear narrative closure). As Kundera’s supra-nation expresses weariness of both the Czech Communist Party and Czech dissident intellectuals, and reclaims for his narrative a literary history of broader Western philosophies, Ghali’s cross-national vision expresses weariness with nationalism in general, and wishfully dreams of an old-world cosmopolitanism.⁴

Kundera seems to accept the division of the world into political alliances based on homogenous cultural traditions and ethnicities; what he has more trouble with is where the Czech nation (or Bohemia) is placed. Because the political strength and therefore the historical image of “small nations” is so precarious, the protagonist, Tomas, wavers between succumbing to political pressure or foregoing choice altogether. Ghali, however, resists the distinctive East/West dichotomies that would in his time eventually be named the Cold War, and which would place Egypt, probably beyond any degree Ghali imagined, at the crossroads of whimsical political pigeon-holing: today anti-Zionist, pro-Jewish and pro-Palestinian, tomorrow anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, and the day after, anti-Jewish and pro-Palestinian; today pro-British and French, tomorrow anti-imperialist; today pro-American, tomorrow anti-Western; today indifferent-Arab, pro-Soviet; tomorrow pro-Arab, anti-American. The protagonist, Ram, idealistically yearns to eliminate the political binaries that separate people into easily marked-out, mutually exploiting groups.

Both cross-nations and supra-nations reflect the “internationalism” of newly formed political alliances in the mid-twentieth century. For Egypt and Czechoslovakia, which were specifically and substantially entangled in their affiliations to the Soviet Union, Sovietism and the concomitant communism projected in both countries a similar political discourse that proclaimed “internationalism and condemned … chauvinism in [its] ideology, programs and propaganda” (Tomaszewski 67). At the same time, this political discourse “tried to gain the confidence of the major nations of each [allied] country by playing on patriotic feelings and the traditions of the majority including the traditions of national struggle for independence and/or unification … a task of reconciling the national tradition with internationalist ideology and current political needs” (Tomaszewski 67).

Yet Soviet influence took radically different political forms in each country. In Czechoslovakia, which was directly annexed as a satellite state, the popularity of Sovietisation was tentative inasmuch as Russia had frequently appeared in Czech history as an unsatisfactory but lesser evil, a saviour from other hostile, often Germanic, powers. Although the Communist Party had won the elections of 1946, consolidated its hold on power in the coup of 1948, and quickly commenced refashioning Czechoslovakia into an extension of the Soviet entity (Sayer 14), even Czech and Slovak communists in sympathy with Russian ideologies had had early on “ideological difficulties with Karl Marx’s derogative opinions about their nations and his condemnation of national movements (notably in 1848) among Slavic nations” (Tomaszevski 68).

In Egypt, Russian culture was familiar in literary and journalistic circles, while Egyptian communists, often having to work illegally, had helped spread Soviet ideas (Ginat). After the Suez Crisis, however, the Soviet Union came to be seen as a formidable ally against Western imperialism. The relationship between the two countries was clinched in agreements of trade, military and monetary aid, and the exchange of professionals and soldiers. Inasmuch as Egypt was actually able to determine its own destiny in the 1960s it was still much freer than Czechoslovakia to steer its own course in relation to the Soviet Union. Indeed, the polemics of non-alignment even afforded Nasser a dual privilege. He could crack down on communists in Egypt in a vicious military-orchestrated purge of political dissent while at the same time touting Soviet-style “centralisation” measures through sequestration of assets and the haphazard redistribution of wealth – eventually increasing his own and the army’s populist appeal in the cockeyed set-up known as “Nasserite socialism”.

Since the 1990s Egyptian and Czech literature has often been called postcolonial, the first in relation to Britain, the second in relation to the Soviet Union. The novels by Ghali and Kundera have fallen in line with these trends. They are properly located, however, within the history of the protest movements in the first half of the twentieth century that culminate in the global sixties.

“The March of Protest” and the March of Global Literary History

The 1968 Prague Spring and the 1956 Suez Crisis had major political reverberations. The first, “the most radical social experiment in the communist Eastern bloc during the turbulent events of 1968, brought Czechoslovakia to the centre of world attention” (Sabatos 1827). Coming to symbolise resistance to the Soviet/communist dystopia, the Prague Spring would become a symbol for non-violent resistance and (later) anti-communist protest. Meanwhile, the Suez Crisis largely signified the end of British (and later) French colonial influence in the Middle East and North Africa, pushed Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Arab cause temporarily to the forefront of international politics, and would become a popular symbol for anti-imperialism. Both events were appropriated locally as national symbols and signalled the end of an era. Havel’s description of 1968, for example, carries the same resonances as Ghali’s depiction of 1956 in Beer in the Snooker Club:

It was the end of an era; the disintegration of a spiritual and social climate; a profound mental dislocation. The seriousness of the events that caused this transformation and the profound experiences that came with it seemed to alter our prospects completely. It was not just that the carnival-like elation of 1968 had come to an end; the whole world crumbled … [O]ut of the rubble of the old world a sinister new world grew, one that was intrinsically different, merciless, gloomily serious. (Havel 8)

Both events were considered historical landmarks of regional significance in their time, a...