An ongoing discussion about the relationship between literature and the arts, history and society, contributed by Moroccan academic and novelist Said Bensaid Alaoui, who, during his participation in a symposium at the Abu Dhabi Book Fair, questioned the title “Naguib Mahfouz: A Mirror of History and Society,” in an exchange of cultural views that continues to this day in many parts of the region that read the Arabic language.
Saeed Bensaid distinguishes between the power of storytelling and the power of history, saying that there is a huge difference between talking about “history and society as they are depicted” in the literature of Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and talking about this literature as a mirror of history and society.
In a statement to Hespress, Said Bensaid Alaoui defended the fact that there is no novel without the novelist’s imagination and the writer’s creative effectiveness.
“This idea applies to everyone,” said the philosophy specialist. “From a scientific perspective, the old view of history before the revolutions in the methods of the humanities was that the historian reconstructs and produces the historical event as it happened. The revolutions that occurred in sociology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and historical knowledge showed that this is an illusion. The historian produces new historical knowledge based on the present, and he is governed by the present and its ideological tendencies, for example, and there is no such thing as reconstructing the historical event as it happened, but rather as the historian says it.”
He added: “As for sociology, it is not enough to say that I live in a society, because I know it. Rather, society is known scientifically based on the social phenomenon, confining it and subjecting it to consideration and examination. Society is not direct, but rather it is constructed by the sociologist.”
Then he added, “A novel is a novel, history is history, and sociology is sociology… The novel belongs to imagination, and if we remove it from it, and remove the artistic processes and enjoyment, it will no longer be a novel.”
He continued, explaining: “The historical novel, with its depiction of the direct composition of history in the novelistic work, makes it fall into vulgarity,” which is “what happened in the Arab world, and has happened a lot in Morocco with us; so the novel comes out heavy-handed and ridiculous.”
Said Bensaid recalled writing the novel “The Revolt of the Disciples” in which Mehdi Ben Tumart and the Tahrir Square uprising in 2011 intersected, “as the two texts seemed to me, not as they were in reality.” He cited his most recent novel, “Unknown Status,” which spoke with projections that go back to the events of “Moulay Bouazza” in Morocco in 1973, but “the historical data were in the service of the novelist, not the other way around.”
So, the idea of Said Ben Said Al-Alawi, who refuses to consider Naguib Mahfouz’s novels as a scientific reflection of Egyptian history and society, is that, in his statement to Hespress, “Naguib Mahfouz is not a mirror of history, but we should read history as it is represented to him, and society as it is represented to him, and whoever wants to write a historical novel must kill the historian so that the novelist may live.”
