It also conveys a sense of resolution and resignation in the present - hence becomes more an 'echo' from the Mahfouzian body of works itself. The analysis employs the Bakhtinian chronotope to demonstrate the constant dialectics between the text's form and its presentation on the page.
'They say, however, that changes have come about: now, the important thing is the text in itself. How can this be?1 Mahfouz made this interesting comment in March 1999. By then changes within and around the Arabic literary form, conveyed well the interrelation between textual upheaval and experimentation in modern Arabic literature and the ways in which this could find full expression. The process behind this has been already well studied but it increasingly seems that the more the 'text' is scrutinized, the more it 'pulls' at itself so that the deeper we go, the more the external ether seems to change shape around the text. In a sense the text has unwittingly almost 'collapsed' into itself which makes Mahfouz's Echoes of An Autobiography and interesting experiment in textual upheaval2. Mahfouz's understanding of the text comes two years after the publication of his final work, Echoes of an Autobiography3 in 1997 and a further 5 years after the failed attempt on his life on 14 November 1994. The knife that almost killed him damaged the nerves running through his right arm and hence the very right hand which had written for so long. Mahfouz found himself in a perpetual struggle to regain his ability to write which as a sudden break in his work coincided with an approach to writing far less formalized and coherent and a void which could not help but invoke a retreat into the depths of the past. In this sense Echoes is quite unique amongst Mahfouz's oeuvre because it combines with the author at just the point when the blank space of frustration ironically demands an almost total re-unification of text with creator. The author himself goes back to basics, the text finally 'coming home'. Echoes conveys well that struggle to bring to form, the effort to draw out each measure of inspiration. This is why being first serialized in Al-Ahram in 1994 before being collected together and published, Echoes engages us with a rethinking of the writer, even as he rethinks himself. By then Mahfouz's literary pen had been condensed into smaller bites but it intermeshes with a long literary past in which the Mahfouzian corpus weaves its way through Echoes and becomes siphoned down so that each of his works, particularly the anticipated
expectation of the last finale Echoes, becomes in itself a mini-story of the larger story and indeed the larger story, somehow covertly or overtly, of Mahfouz. The Bakhtinian 'corporeal man' merges with the textual oeuvre. Echoes is certainly not a mini-version of Mahfouz's 'autobiography' nor a 'story' of Mahfouz's life. It is more a kaleidoscopic mix of aphorisms, segments and nostalgic bits and bobs from the past conveyed through a sense of resolution and resignation in the present- hence more an 'echo' from the Mahfouzian body of works itself. Roger Allen, in his discussion of the word 'echoes' similarly argues that Mahfouz deliberately attempts to situate the text 'in the Mahfouzian corpus4. In this regard Echoes is a 'montage' of ambiguity, a 'project in autobiography writing' incorporating the authorial endeavour as well as invoking works from classical Arabic literature. It is the echo of the 'autobiographical elements in those fictional narratives5 which comprises the various narrative techniques Mahfouz has experimented with. Yet at the same time, it has a unified sense of purpose to it. Echoes is in one way the final sumptuous maturation of the Mahfouzian experiment, but also the spraying out of unified form into smaller enticing bits.
How does one incorporate Mikhail Bakhtin's understanding of the chronotope within this? In a way the chronotope constitutes a merging of space-time through which we can approach the narrative, which in itself is part of a text taking part in a larger dialogical promenade. Bakhtin tells us in his essay that the chronotope is 'where the knots of narrative are tied and untied6 and that 'every literary image is chronotopic7, hence conveying its succinctness, the unifying nature of the chronotope. In a way he seems to suggest that we approach the literary image through a sense of something to grasp, something like a linchpin which allows us to interlink the various events in the narrative. The chronotope in this way contrasts yet links to Bakhtin's whole life-time preoccupation with everything dialogical, everything interconnected and every 'social' sense of the word and the visible artistic form. This subtle play between drawing together and drawing apart8 is quite challenging in this way because it shows how the 'text' has to form part of a play of forces more tangibly affecting wider aspects of its form.
Mahfouz's Echoes is interesting in this regard because it began as a divergent sprinkling in Al-Ahram later taking on a convergent form in the text. Yet individually it is visually and narratively fragmented while at the same time drawing upon the larger Mahfouzian textual corpus, which itself is a complex interrelation. In Echoes the textual corpus mingles with the intertextual/dialogical but is itself a succinctness of the text combining together into a workable readable whole. To 'tie' and 'untie' the narrative requires one to look at the way the chronotope extends beyond and re-winds back into the narrative thus unravelling and ravelling its whole form as it plays out on various levels. With Echoes the tract of 'time' in the chronotope takes on the chronological reel of the textual corpus and indeed the long span of time which finally led to Echoes, but also the 'space' of the chronotope has to take on the shape and form of each of the texts and the changes they undergo. This therefore also demands an understanding of the 'narrative' chronotope as an intertextual phenomenon, an intertextual chronotope.
In the same way the chronotope certainly gels together, yet the chronotope also draws out, the chronotope sprays itself across into smaller doses of succinctness through the whole textual corpus, demanding a more visual understanding of textual break up. Echoes in this regard is poised almost for that 'montage' of memories it draws back and forth from in Mahfouz's earlier works, yet it forms into the wholeness of a smaller book form and yet typographically quite clearly fragments with each individual segment at the same time forming a succinct whole. I want to explore these interrelations to in a way show how the 'form' of the chronotope through its intertextuality also brings physicality into play as the vestiges of 'time-space', in a way the 'outline' of the chronotope as it were, its shape. Bakhtin is certainly aware of the visual potential underlying the chronotope. In The Dialogical Imagination he tells us that 'in the literary artistic chronotope spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete whole. Time as it were, thickens and takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time plot and history9 (my emphasis). How does the chronotope take on the tract of change, form and reform again, shape and re-shape as a fuller expression in some sense of that ambiguity? Indeed in what ways can expression become expressively linked to a wider textual dynamic?
The scope of this paper will allow me to only allude to certain changes in the chronotope as a working dynamic within and through Echoes, using certain select examples. The complexity of the chronotope requires in Echoes an understanding of a certain type of chronotope, a particular strand through which we can possibly discern certain interrelations being 'fleshed' together. We can look at the ways it draws apart and moves around and draw out its textual interrelations through various fabrics of the narrative. My starting point for Echoes will be through the key figure of the child in the first segment 'A Prayer' which links back to one of Mahfouz's earlier texts, Palace Walk10. I will move from an initial perusal in understanding how this child forms part of an intertextual link between Echoes and Palace Walk and then part of further links within Echoes itself. Such succinct links between Palace Walk and Echoes is therefore quite interesting for our understanding of the 'intertextuality' of the chronotope and the dialogical 'chaos' of textual form intertwining the two, so that even in the 'middle' interplay between the two texts we have linkages being strung out through this child figure in works such as Hakayat Haretna, translated as Fountain and Tomb11 and written in 1972, a more fragmented version of Palace Walk, yet a less fragmented but anticipatory form compared to Echoes12.
My aim is to point out how the 'textual' and 'intertextual' links provides a 'sumptuous' rendering so to speak of the narrative chronotope, a textual panorama of 'memory' which become gradually inscribed within various layers. Palace Walk certainly does not have to be the only text Echoes goes back to but Mahfouz's allusion to it in the first segment 'A Prayer' certainly makes us wonder how he intends to lavishingly merge his whole textual corpus into this final work. Hence we can draw out enticing ways in which Mahfouz's last work reminds itself of 'itself' through flirtatious allusions riddled throughout Echoes. From there the general tumultuous, fragmented passion in Echoes is I argue related to a gradual textual upheaval of which the 'form', the physicality of the text is affected. I will be using certain basic typographical examples, in both the Arabic version and the English translation to allude to possible ways in which the fragmented 'narrative chronotope' also takes on a visuality which both 'fleshes' and 'unfleshes' space and time, space-time become infused into wider meanderings. My aim is to slowly extend the chronotopic 'flesh' bit by bit to take on further avenues of exploration.
Mahfouz certainly suggests in the first segment, 'A Prayer', a vivid memory from the past:
Example 1
It is hard here not to notice the uncanny resemblance to Kamal's walk in Palace Walk when he is led by the maid to school but finds it closed. It echoes his sense of anarchy in that 'swelling deluge of his heart' as it is described in Palace Walk, that 'gleam of joy mixed with dismay' in his eyes, but also initiates that pinpoint balancing act Kamal is pressured to maintain in Palace Walk between childhood exploration and rigid authority. Contained within this niche-like passage the subtle usurpation of Kamal's own constrained character takes on the enclosed form of the passage itself. Here however the bubble does burst more forcefully into the various meandering, fragmented globules that follow the passage. Mahfouz's first stamp here of an 'I' so surreptitiously tagged with the child in Palace Walk and indeed Mahfouz's own quasi-autobiographical shadow over the character of Kamal discussed so much by critics, is now being 'reborn' so to speak, from its initial birth and is immersing itself within the various dialogues in the narrative. We have a sliding of two panels from both texts as they synchronically mesh together through the other texts, one in which the subjective 'I' becomes somehow infused within and through the corporeal, bodied linking of the two.
The child presented here is certainly not an onlooker who stood outside the demonstration itself and saw 'death in the abstract' in Palace Walk. Instead the figure in the above passage who 'walked like someone being led to prison' has the markings of an emerging adult and the markings of a deeper chaotic outburst, almost in anticipation of the final showdown in Palace Walk. When he ends with a resounding air that 'from the depths of my heart I prayed to God that the revolution might last forever13 we are given a hint of the eventual 'outburst' that is dieing to come out. There is also a strange tumultuous passion almost from the 'depths of my heart' in which a young boy's gleeful pleasure over school being closed contrast's to the larger chaos 'out there'. This is the child's universe but narratorially gives way to the kaleidoscope of memory thereafter when we find for example the mysterious narrator later on in prison, drawing the child figure gradually into the adult's prophetic shoes. The child gives way, so to speak. He completes the gradual submergence he had started in Palace Walk by indenting the narrative further so that he is now an active re-fashioner taking on the shoes of the future yet also loyal to Kamal's last song in Palace Walk to 'remember me every year'. We can easily sympathise with this first delectable memory before it is plunged into the 'adult world'- the text taking on the tract of this change. The chronotopic 'knot' through which we enter the text becomes more adventurously brash in its approach, swishing and swerving, both passionately yet confusingly organizing itself in relation to the general fragmentation in the narrative. This is a cyclical consciousness which reverberates back into the narrative of Palace Walk yet through the perspective of first-person becomes personalized enabling the omnipotent author to consciously transfer his perspective to the child. The sense of the text taking on the emotive tract of time and having to convey that emotion comes out quite well, but also shows how the intertexuality of the chronotope and its individual succinctness becomes a fractured lens through the fragmented text.
With Echoes it is hard not to ask the question after all these years not only what it 'remembers', but also how it remembers- how do memories 'stretch' the chronotope, how do memories become ingrained with the physicality of form, how do memories transcribe themselves externally, both in their immediacy but also as an almost inevitable merging of form through the textual corpus of time? Once we link Echoes to its placement towards the end of the chronological tract and as 'echoes' of the whole Mahfouzian corpus, we can begin to engage with the 'text' as in some sense carrying the inevitable markings of these changes. How does Echoes take on the tract of time, enmeshing all these words together? Allen's understanding of this kaleidoscopic 'montage' in Echoes from its first stamp in 'A Prayer' threads out through the love affair between the child and Mahfouz and becomes the mark of a carefully astute sensibility which delectably threads and connects various segments together. The text displays various hints of these tangible threads. I will point out a few of these.
Kamal's smile and wave back to his mother and sisters as he sets off with the men in Palace Walk, becomes in Echoes the 'handsome young singer' who attracts 'the blurred shapes of women behind the chinks14 yet under the 'sparks of disapproval' from men's eyes. Here the initial enclosed concentration of the first passage where the child marches off to school is loop-holed back and turned inside out as he stands 'in the middle of the lane'. Like Kamal's beautiful singing in Palace Walk, particularly in his ramblings with the British soldiers, here we find that the Bakhtinian dialogical forces are able to penetrate deeper into the secluded domains of the women, echoing as a sort of pulsating heartbeat that consistently fracturize's and destabilize's the segment. It in a way grinds at the disapproved stares of the men such as Al-Sayyid Ahmad in the Trilogy as the singer's words, "The pretty one is coming", melodiously draws the women out from behind the chinks, even as the young Kamal draws out his mother from behind the chinks in Palace Walk, and even as this 'pretty one' echoes the flirtatious pangs of excitement from Aisha's encounter with the police officer. The effect of this pulsation reverberates throughout the text reflecting a dialogue 'between' and 'within' each segment.
A Prayer' encapsulates the dialectic of coming to be, having been, and is, yet establishes a circular rhythm resounding throughout the rest of Echoes. This ends with the last segment of the text, 'Release'. Here vibration reaches its peak, yet in anticipation the inhabitants of the cave look towards the door as 'hearts throbbed into their very roots in anticipation of release'. We get a sense that a lifetime's ''task in the market'' has reached its fruition. In typical vibratory fashion, there is not a straightforward end just a sonorous note which resounds through the infinitismal abyss so that 'the inner vision saw it, the inner mind heard it15. Further analysis of Echoes, particularly the cyclical pattern, should reveal interesting connections in the fragmented narrative. The segments exude memory, in a way they draw back from the textual corpus and come into shape. Such segmental links are similar to Ghazoul's comments that 'The Arabian Nights is distinctive for its repetition more than its re-working- with the result that a corpus produces the effect of a merry-go round16. The result is that, 'it is precisely the rotation that gives the impression of continuity17, hence providing that kinetic force to initiate agency. The consistent circular, spiral like movement underlying Echoes is an example of this 'I' always on the rewind as it moves its vantage point. Our immediate understanding of the chronotope lies therefore in the general way in which space and time are 'fleshed' together, they merge with and tease the 'memory' of the whole Mahfouzian corpus itself.
Witness other interesting reminders, for example, in the segment called 'A Beggar18. Yasin's torturous battles in Palace Walk with a past filled with sex and scandal through his mother, comes out well here in the character who 'swims in the sea of the past…its echo spreading out in a sorrowful melody that does not vanish'. To approach this 'man in his twenties' and the 'women next to him…over fifty' is to understand that 'she bestows upon him memories of tender motherhood' even as Yasin eventually visits his older mother in Palace Walk. Yet somehow in that 'innocent seclusion' comes reminders of 'burning desires' and the 'fever heat of the call'. The young child version of Yasin in Palace Walk, tempted by the man with the 'oranges', is here a memory of 'shyness' and then of 'something like fear'. In this way the chronotope therefore takes on the 'impressions' of movement in the fragmented narrative as an overall gelling effect almost, even as in the story 'The Beggar' just discussed, the young man 'begs for forgetfulness'. The 'memory' of this and others, however, will persist and grind away in interesting ways throughout the text. Yasin's yearning to 'forget' in Palace Walk is riddled with a similar 'burning desire' and that 'fever heat' in his lust for women such as Zanuba. The segment both 'forgets' and 'remembers'.
It is the faces glancing behind the chinks which hint touchingly at many love's lost and gained between seclusion and the outside world, a memory resonating throughout the text in the narrator's own understanding of past loves throughout Echoes. We are reminded of Aisha and the police officer in 'The Fact of the Matter' where 'the woman in the balcony gazes down from behind the lattice works with eyes full of alertness and compassion19. Again Kamal is able to submerge into the role of the police officer yet also encapsulate the little boy 'who has penetrated into the lane and has not come back' through a resounding timelessness because things 'do not stay like that for long'. Yet that same women of 'alertness and compassion' evokes memories of Amina as she watches the men leave the house in Palace Walk and Kamal waving back to her because 'the small boy plays between the house and sings', a maternal glimmer strung out in many other segments such as 'Forgiveness20 and 'Exuberance'21. This young Kamal-like figure struggles between his own fascination for the world and the 'lanes that empty out into the sides of the square coming from the vast areas of the city'. He submerges deep 'within' while the 'woman' eagerly 'gazes' down. Yet even as Kamal became overwhelmed by a world of such enticing allurements, 'the little boy tares himself away from the world', even as he 'tore' himself away from the poster of the reclining women in Palace Walk and 'enters the house'. The boy draws the women 'out' even as Kamal does with his mother and yet the boy delightfully swims within the world of women. In many ways however when eventually 'the balcony is emptied of compassion' and this 'little boy' has 'penetrated deep into the lane and has not come back', we are getting a textually nostalgic 'coming to form' as it were, of the young boy as he takes Aisha's beloved away into the city of 'time' and a young boy's innocent meanderings under maternal protection, into a world far from rose-eyed. That maternal 'women' loses her place when of course Amina is banished by Al-Sayyid Ahmad and the balcony loses 'compassion'. The child is 'lost'. Interestingly 'The Fact of the Matter' is repeated eighteen segments later where the women behind the lattice comes out as a young girl with a 'pigtail' that 'exuded the aroma of carnations' while 'he' (our little boy) 'was playing in the street'. Here the young boy's stares towards the girl become embroiled in a strangely un-child-like male chauvinism, as his eyes towards her were 'filled with a feeling of conceit' and he runs off to display his physical prowess. A little earlier, in the segment 'The Constant and the Changing'22, we find this same girl with this time 'two pigtails', again appearing with the 'scent of carnations wafting from her'. The mischievous boy asks her to "take off some of your cloths", against a backdrop of changing seasons and a market that 'melted away', but the girl requests for the 'right time' of the year to come. The bygone memories of a 'longing' which united them, contrasts to the mother's fears for her daughter's wandering eyes in 'The Fact of the Matter' as she gives the boy an 'equivocal' look. This time the spectator through the child, becomes the director of a film being rewritten through the mysterious 'man sitting in the corner' who vehemently argues, ''let her look at him so long as she likes to do so, and as for him, let him run about until his powers dwindle and he calms down'23.
The onlooker also becomes a re-writing of male chauvinism advantageously exploiting the women in the same way that a little earlier the narrator tries to textually 'capture' that untimely memory of Aisha and the police office in the Trilogy. In the segment 'Loneliness'24, we are told of that 'ugly scene' of 'the officer's blind slap as it landed on the cheek of her sick father'. The text 'responds' to the patriarch, just as the officer himself appears later on in the Trilogy. While this lady like Aisha, 'loved her father and revered him', she becomes embittered with confusion as 'she grew old alone, watched with pity by the universe'.
We have other hints spattered about. In 'Layla' the women remembers the old days where she 'sparkled in an aura of beauty and allurement'. Her mockery of those who condemn her of immorality yet years later 'return with a purseful of coins and disrepute25 is a sneering indictment against society. In 'The Aroma' Mahfouz questions the 'women who is not permitted to grow old', yet paints her as a goddess, 'a naked women with the bloom of the nectar of life' and the 'heart of music at her sight'26. The scandalous women can be taken to symbolize the various 'unconventional' women riddled throughout Mahfouz's work yet also reminds one of Kamal's father in Palace Walk and his affairs with Zubayda, yet it also underlies the tension inherent between apparency and transparency which continues even after Palace Walk. Interestingly here men now dance around the goddess in throngs of passion and joy, almost like this is the emancipated pinnacle of feminine beauty that Kamal had pondered over yet it also eerily suggests Al-Sayyid Ahmad's clown-like dancing around Zubayda. The vulgarization is hurtled onto the other side towards the owners of the 'purseful of coins and disrepute' and the latter's moral overtures in Palace Walk are passed over to the scandalous women, evoking memories of Jalila's own remonstration of Al-Sayyid Ahmad's hypocritical relations with her.
Each segment in Echoes represents a nodal point in itself by encompassing past, present and future, but their continuation also involves a gradual change, a gradual development from one point to the other. It means the surge of kinetic force starts to seep into various 'levels' of the text. The segments generally become smaller, more concise, more turgid, the circular links becoming the kinetic, almost sensual rendering of this. The child in 'A Prayer' connects with the ending of the 'first half'27 in 'The Abode of Grace' after which each segment becomes sharper and concentrated and the figure of Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta'ih takes precedence. This illusive, mysterious figure dominates the dialogue that results between the narrator and himself after 'The Abode of Grace'. Allen also identifies how it is through this figure that the work is divided into two halves mainly from the narrative viewpoint28, the first part of which is mainly told through a first person narrator eventually merging largely into the third-person perspective through the Sheikh. It is a dialogue which typically deepens that initiated in Palace Walk and in 'A Prayer' between and within the narrative itself, thereby meshing the 'outburst' of fragmentation from the first segment. There is a sense that the two figures are various facets of Mahfouz himself debating with each other. The Sheikh's cry that 'a stray one has been born, good fellows…I lost him more than seventy years ago and all his features have slipped my mind'29 becomes almost a rebirth again from the first story 'A Prayer', through the vision of this older, wiser figure. Interestingly the passage goes on to assign the childhood identity to him by remarking, 'He was known as Abd-Rabbih al-Ta'ih, the stray one'. The conflation of identity with the two dialogues suggests yet again the subject resounding through this birth of the 'stray one', the insinuating slice of the child. It is also however a deceptive one. If the Sheikh was represented as some semblance of Mahfouz himself, who lost the 'stray one' seventy years ago, then knowing Mahfouz's present age would mean this child would be strangely a young man of sixteen30. Yet if the Sheikh is not taken to be part of Mahfouz, then since we do know his 'present' age one can also assume that the child's birth seventy years ago is a rendering of the Sheikh's present age at seventy. There is a disparity of sixteen years here which also suggests a mediating point between the 'loss' of childhood and the gradual emergence of adulthood.
The acrobatic way in which the text balances the 'worldly' half and the more 'spiritual' half around this Sheikh figure plays out well, for example, in the segment 'Forgetfulness' 31 much earlier, towards the beginning of Echoes. The narrator inquisitively pursues the character of this 'old man', the Sheikh, the teacher of Arabic. His physical activity while 'drying his sweat', in contrast to the magic rush of our later Sheikh, becomes blankly inscribed by a people who love him 'but seldom does anyone greet him, because of his weak memory and senses'. The sheikh sinks into a 'forgetfulness' drawing him away from the 'worldly' where 'he has forgotten relatives and neighbours, students and the rules of grammar', almost as a preparation for the worldly 'upheaval' of the later Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta'ih as he mystically draws apart the text, in the same way that the young man in 'The Beggar' resembling Yasin in the Trilogy longed to 'forget'. The text undergoes this almost 'spiritual' maturation by moving from the worldly, material and physical in the 'first half' by gradually 'forgetting', losing itself, and hence losing its fragmented form even more.
A little later after the story 'Forgetfulness' we have 'The Lesson'32, where the sheikh remonstrates the young student for ignoring "the old man who was weeping and you missed an opportunity for doing good, the likes of which you won't obtain by listening to my lesson today." Yet the balance of the world and spirit becomes an almost textual meshing through the appearance of another sheikh in the story, 'Advice', a sort of 'middle' interplay in which the sheikh's apparent love for food and drink and 'smart appearance' evokes the defence that, "We occupy God's world and do not shun it. Our delight is in the ardour of love and spiritual contemplation." The textual merging of theme and content here coincides well with this 'sheikh' persona via the 'stray one' called the child, as the 'I' moves from world to spirit, yet in this segment unifies and textually ripples out towards both 'halves'. This is emphasized even further with the sudden 'jump'/'break' in the narrative signified by the sudden arrival of the 'stray one' as he bungles his way through into the interactions of Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta'ih. The 'invisible' barriers between the two emphasize how a certain movement plays between them, through which the chronotope has to negotiate. In the beginning of the 'first half' the child is 'born' in the first segment during the young boys walk to school. In the beginning of the second half the child is born again as the 'stray one' who got lost seventy years ago, with the final 'birth' being the last segment 'Release'. 'Release' involves a gathering of these friends to finally be free, in anticipation of the text which gradually breaks up more and more. Mahfouz characteristically leaves this last section sort of poised on a needlepoint as they 'wait in anticipation'. So yet again we get a sort of rhythmic movement that is first plunged into the 'world', yet is then pulled out then thrust back into the 'second' half into the 'spiritual realm' so to speak. In a sense the development from one to the other emphasizes that 'personality' almost which is keenly astute in its perception of its past and what also lies ahead. It thinks, it plans, it regrets and pines for the past and a future which could just about be in its grasp, but is always there to be 're-finalized', in classic Bakhtinian language, again and again.
The point is that an overarching dialogue between a first and last segment as well as a dialogue between first and last in each half of the work, establishes a sort of rhythmic pattern, rippling circles from first to last, as well as smaller concentric circles. It is almost like an 'invisible' realm of interplay sort of separates the narrative yet prevents further disintegration and it is the child's movement in between these domains which hint at subtly intuitive development, one typically being the influence of Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta'ih.
It is the 'episodic' structure of Echoes of an Autobiography which creates this spiral-like action, each segment expands and contracts, yet in doing so reaches back to the same point, just on a different level. In one sense the chronotope takes on this movement of expansion/contraction, it takes on the changes going on around it in the rest of the text. Between time and death, Mahfouz establishes a variety of trajectories from which he can expand on a memory as well as contract on it. By identifying possible connections underlying Echoes we can glean this subtle rhythmic reconstitution working away which cannot leave the various segments completely isolated.
This is why as Allen comments that the segments in the 'second half' take us 'into different levels of consciousness'33. The horizontal movement accompanies a deeper burgeoning undertone to it as well, alongside the fissuring inward movement of the mystical experience. Here the Kamal in Palace Walk who soared the heights of ecstasy in 'The Abode of Grace' is thrust down into submergence, and literally 'reborn' again, echoing the cyclical narrative pattern underlying Echoes, yet also that increasing lightness in the diachronic movement in the text. It is Kamal's escapades on the tree outside his house, just after his encounter with the women in the poster and passing the Al-Husayn mosque, which sniffs at passionately an attempted flight of ascension. Yet while in Palace Walk the child who 'high above the roofs…poised between earth and sky' on the arbour of the hyacinth beans and jasmine tree, was dragged down into human existence in the form of his father's brutal hitting, the more circumspect wanderer in Echoes becomes in the slightly longer segment 'The Abode of Grace', a drunken, mystical meandering. Here in a state of intoxicated elation the mysterious 'I' is granted the wish to become a bird soaring high up in the sky and 'see the beauty of my beloved', something not attained by 'those who wander upon the earth'. Comments such as 'I became convinced, through futile effort, that there was no way of being successful except through flying and looking down from the tops of trees'34, seem to almost resurrect the ghost of Kamal's begrudged attempts above the tree. Yet the desire to flee and the constraints of the human world are balanced out by the beloved catching this young bird, assigning 'me to a cage and her touch sent through my being a sense of intoxication that comes only from the wine of Paradise'35. This time 'the madness of joyous happiness is balanced by the knowledge that 'theirs (the birds flying) is as nothing compared to being close to the beloved', thereby juxtaposing the conflict between agency and narrative in Palace Walk and the fragmented one in Echoes.
This forward 'thrust' releases a whole plethora of short, sharp bursts throughout the text, almost like throngs of inspiration. This rush is captured quite succinctly by the Sheikh in the short aphorism 'Inhalation/Exhalation' where he remarks that, 'with the inhalations of the universe and its exhalation, all joys and pains are in raptures'36. The general whirlwind of ecstasy is precisely what the symbolic child in Palace Walk can now become embroiled within in the form of Echoes of an Autobiography. As we head towards the final scene, 'Release' we see the final stage of the journey in a gathering in the cave where 'every breast gave lavishly of its hankering until an elation of song was defused'37. This is that 'inward' movement surging the segments 'inwards', granting that sense of floating rapture indicative of a deliberation beyond it. Infact this second 'half' of the text is riddled with the Sheikh's short, turgid bursts of inspiration gradually lightening the already lightened text. Yet even as the Sheikh searches for this child, so too does that 'stray one', as we find for example in his earlier 'worldly' wanderings within the segment 'The Millieme'38. The narrator reminisces that 'I found myself as a child wandering uncertainly in the street' and yet like the reeling out of that 'sheikh' persona who sinks into a 'forgetfulness' of memory and world, the child also 'had a millieme, but I had completely forgotten what my mother had told me to buy' and yet as the Sheikh/child slowly draws away from the world, the young boy also cannot help but think 'what I had gone out to buy did not cost more than a millieme'.
Already therefore the chronotope works through the narrative both as immediate globules of memory, but also as an aura which is intermeshed within the rest of the narrative. Allen's 'levels of consciousness' show us how the chronotopic upheaval in the narrative is not so much only 'fleshed' together. Rather there is merging and unmerging, there is unification and fragmentation, yet there is also a cyclical sense of time and space 'repeating' again and again through a deeper level. Such complex interrelations demand that we take Bakhtin's understanding of the chronotope in the narrative, as the narrative also reshaping the chronotope on other levels. Within the general mystical revelry in Echoes, particularly through the figure of the Sheikh, lies a surreptitious surging passion almost which transcribes itself within the very textual fabric, almost anticipating the move onto the page, a cumulative surge which seems to make the 'flesh' of the chronotope take on the rest of the book.
We see this for example, in the various 'jumps' across and between various randomly selected stories. Here the child's absence marks its presence even more clearly. If we number the segments in the order they are represented we can see how much haphazard these various jumps are yet still locate a certain sort of internal coherence through which the chronotope can in a way start to creep through. The first mention of the cave is in the story 123, Waiting,39 where interestingly the mysterious 'lady' in 'The Pursuer' finds her way to the eager disciples who 'had exerted every effort in searching for her'40. Here the eagerly poised consciousness ever present in the combined worship of the various believers find's its culmination in the Sheikh 'who held out till the end'41. This theme of the cave suddenly develops in story 126, 'The Complaint', where now the 'bosom friends' have entered yet the ardent worship seems to have tipped towards a certain extremity as 'the gentleman were angry, they raged with anger and brandished sticks'42. Story 133, is a shortened version of a rapturous enthusiasm finding its pinpoint balance with the 'beautiful stories of love' being recited.
It is in story 138, 'The Postman', that the enraptured mystics are interrupted by eagerly awaited blank letters, a miniature 'blank-space' interestingly enough bringing in the blankness around the print back into the dialogue of the mystics. The rhythmic, dance inwards and outwards into the blank space is a reminder of the rapturous flirtation consistently going on at the contour between its inner content and the blank space. The Sheikh seems to be a surging culmination of a sentience whisping back and forth even as he tries to recapture that lost child skirting through the blank spaces and between other 'bodies'/stories, such that the child in a way becomes a merging of two spaces, 'the space of intimacy and world space'43.
The 'loss' is the journey, the cumulative thrust of the Sheikh's love even as it pines over its loss, yet most crucially it means that the loss encompasses the dialogical movement within and between the print. In the story 'A Sea' he remarks 'I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other'44. This shifting consciousness is what links the stories of the cave. After 'The Postman' comes 'I am in Love'45, story 206. Here an 'external' voice mingles with the dialogicality when it interrupts the inmates by proclaiming 'I am love'. While linking within the text, the segments dealing with the cave also find their own development with the final story 'Release'. There is a surging drive expressing that sense of childhood in rapturous mourning even as the 'I' contemplates the various shades of the kaleidoscope.
The 'I', the subject's immediate stamp initially in 'A Prayer' becomes a fleshy absorbent mass almost working and textually grinding at the whole text on various levels. While the theme of the cave shows an astute artistic vision carefully stringing together and developing a certain pinpoint vision, it also re-emphasizes the dialogical interconnections that maintain the disparate nature of Echoes of an Autobiography. For a start the inmates of the cave are preoccupied with Love which becomes a central flux of vision swirling around with other voices. So while connections are consistently formulated they are also re-formulated, mimicking the various forces at work. Within the larger body 'parts' of the fragmented text, those individual fetishistic stories hint at how, 'the fragment calls for an "everything" (the total reconstruction of the body, the investigators desire to learn everything, the totalizing version of the crime) but it is not self-sufficient, and it cannot be combined with the other fragments to form a self-sufficient whole'46. Hence the desire for a resolution is underpinned by a hurtling away from it.
A classic example of how Mahfouz strings together various themes is in the contrast of the cave with the market which stands apart as the domain of 'worldly attractions' vis a vis the mystical revelry of the cave. We have the touching realisation of childhood innocence becoming dragged increasingly into the corruption of the world 'echoeing' the submergence of the young boy in 'A Prayer' into the vast social 'confusion' of the fragmentation to follow thereafter. Mahfouz suggestively combines the market with the cave yet also emphasizes its adventurous streaks. In the overall sequence of the story the market 'jumps' as well from story 108, to 126, to 142, but less haphazardly in terms of length compared to that of the cave, reflecting a more balanced nuance to the whole love affair between the two. Yet it is in the 'middle' sequence in story 126, 'The Complaint' that the market and the cave combine. Here the inmates of the cave find themselves suddenly interrupted by a voice which blew out the candles. Before this story in number 108, quite suggestively called 'The Choice', the dilemma of this material 'weight' in the market place contrasts to the man who carries something 'light in weight but of great price'47. The narrator becomes intoxicated by Sitt al-Husayn so that 'I rose to my feet to follow her, leaving behind my mind, my will and my livelihood'48.
The child, as noted earlier, does not just occupy the spatial dynamics of the surface page, but is part of an animation working through both an expansion and part of the fragmentation yet also a succinct sort of awareness of its own insipidness, particularly in 'A Prayer'. It thereby renders the miniaturesque on the point of a tottering position. The child's whirlwind intimations work within the meanderings of the print and hence a sort of skirting across various contemplative points, the market and the cave, the Sheikh's mystical overtures alongside the desire to regain the lost childhood innocence, poignant memories with dangerous liasons of desire, it is all a heated debate for this child. Mahfouz hedges towards a criticism of the rush to flee the world when the guard at the door say's 'she does not desire those who flee the market'. The sensitive balancing act which has to be maintained, quite acrobatically finds its way into the last and infact final story in the whole text, 'Release'. That very unfinished, indecisive sense of the 'personality' of this chronotope is what provides the poised frustration, 'as the inner vision heard it'. As readers we are left quite bemused by this. The more the first person narrator undermines this notion of the 'I' which we cling to, the more the reader becomes compelled to cling onto whatever we can trace as at least a semblance of a concrete manifestation.
Yet away from interlinkages, certain individual segments also give us a more vivid flavouring of this flesh becoming incorporated into the whole typographical working. Here our understanding of the chronotope starts to in a way take on the whole form of the book and assumes a shape on the page. Bit by bit formations, form. If we look at the most obvious stamp of this in the first segments 'A Prayer', already the Bakhtinian 'flesh' seems to make flirtatious seams within the space of ambiguity, the region of dialogical 'chaos' and disillusion always somehow 'fleshed' together. The English version and Arabic version are displayed in full:
What clearly stand's out in both the Arabic and the English version is the titles beginning each one. Quite confidently they encapsulate a certain message in themselves yet it is their immediate link to the other segments that implies yet again a sort of invisible dialogical 'connection' through the blank space onto the segment. A sort of working pattern can be discerned here from the patterning of the storytelling which seems to almost lead us on from one segment to the other, a sort of lulling rhythmic pattern, which spirals into a consistent reformulation for the subject as it winds its way through the printed subtext. Patterns of storytelling create that sense of rhythm underlying it. According to Genette there are four patterns, an ellipsis, a pause a scene and a summary.49
If we look at the actual body of the print, we can link the storytelling to the print. In both the Arabic (Example 2) and English (Example 1) there is a grand introduction signified by the 'title', which provides a sweeping gesture leading us to the next segment. The sentence, 'I was less then seven years old when I said a prayer for the revolution', becomes the pause and scene combined which sets the stage as it were yet also means that the narrative halts but time continues, encapsulated within one long sentence. The interlinking of the retrospective time extending over a long period here back to the time of a child and the 'presentness' of the narration within such a streamlined print, seems to exaggerate its insipidness even more to a greater 'stretch'. It also indicates a storytelling which hasn't necessarily 'begun' but continued from a previous thread of storytelling. The blank space poised between this and the next paragraph is symptomatic of a certain interruption of thought pertaining to a dialogical strand spring-boarding into the next paragraph. The latter emerges as the beginnings of a main 'body', as it were, which is similar to the chiselled block like typography in Palace Walk this time personalizing the child's walk to school using the first person narrative, through a summary. Time slows down but the narrative continues hinting at a certain rush towards the next scene. The print indicates containment in its gradual descriptive sentence with the contour more streamlined and taut yet it also contrasts visually with the thinner sentence preceding it. The larger block provides a contrastive backdrop to the corporeal interactions working away together. The momentum slowly builds up into the next segment which acts as an ellipsis where the narrative and time seem to have come to a certain working standstill. It finds expression yet again captured in the shorter, thinly encapsulated sentence, 'A wave of joy flowed over me and swept me to the shores of happiness'. It is bought to a summary culmination in the last sentence, 'From the depths of my heart I prayed to God that the revolution might last forever'. Here another longer, thinner sentence after the one before it, provides a lingering after-effect to the story's end. The various sections have been labelled to try and glean some sort of 'body' or 'figure' in this first story. There is a certain bulging interaction which seems to have seeped onto the surface on the print such that now a sort of corporeal dialogicality has started to be created. What is labelled as the 'head' and 'neck' and 'main body' and the drifting off towards the end as a sort of 'legs' are not definitive, particularly the last category, but what needs to be emphasized is the 'bodily functions' of each part of the print reflecting a corporeal dialogicality working away.
Deleuze and Guattari give us an interesting image with the corporeal workings underlying the typography, what they call the BwO. The issue of locating the organs of the story discussed above resides on how interestingly we never reach the BwO, 'you are forever attaining it, it's a limit'50, the BwO is the point of a flow through which only 'intensities pass and circulate….it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension'51. Crucially it is not just 'space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree'52. My incorporation of these working body 'organs' in 'A Prayer' even as the child meanders within it means that the 'BwO is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism53. The BwO is opposed not to the organ but to that organization of the organs called the organism' and hence the 'organic organization of the organs' as it is called. It is the sort of individual arrested fetishism within which the literary gaze homes in on each part of the story as it undergoes its customary unveiling which gives the narrative chronotope a sort of festishistic air.
Yet what is more interesting is how both the Arabic and the English display a similar patterning on the blank page which indicates that certainly by the time we get to Mahfouz's last text, in the end the movement of the chronotope incorporates more of the textual corpus to take on board the greater changes in movement through the language changes. Hence it is possible to relate each 'organ' not as a defining unity in itself, but more as a flows and gestures within the BwO which means that the printed whole resides as an organism on one level of organization and hence 'a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation'54. Yet again of course my incorporation of the BwO in relation to the chronotope must take into account how these subtle working parts of the organism/printed formation seem to be also a sort of flowing, the 'head' or 'main body' do not exist as a solid entities in themselves but are in themselves a strata of flow within the BwO. The first story 'A Prayer' is clearly marked with the echo of the archetypical child figure, it is the 'birth' from which the chronotope starts to slowly thread apart the 'I' (hence the use of first person narrative) even as the murmurings of Kamal's figure find their way into this first segment and meander throughout the rest of the stories. This 'I' is becoming immersed within the every day hum-drum of society and must be captured again in some 'tangible' sense hence a typographical 'capturing' almost conveying a nostalgic, emotive snapshot.
The various 'organs' I have tried to identify seem to work together such that fragmentation becomes the interrogative mode even as it rips it asunder. It can be located in the constant shuffling around that is located in conjunction with the blank space. It is particularly in the reader's role of consistently moulding and re-moulding that allows us to view this 'shuffling' corporeal body and of course yet again in the case of the Arabic the movement is from left to right in the reading process. Even with this, however, a similar spreading across the page accompanies the unfolding of the storyteller's art. There seems to be a similar unfolding accompanying the Arabic and English which suggests also a similar movement of the corpus as it incorporates language differences. What must be brought to light however, is how much this working 'body' connects to the young boy in the story who makes his way to school and hence the child. The difference from the young Kamal in Palace Walk is his minor role on the fringes of the demonstration, yet a similar feeling of anarchy resides in him just like the 'I' in Echoes in his desire for destruction. It is another example of how the child's workings in the narrative 'rubs' against itself through the larger corporeal corpus but also yet again reaches out onto the very surface of the page. This time however the 'I' amongst many other 'I's, as part of that distinctive 'personality' of the chronotope, emerges as part of the print and is dissolved throughout the text. It marks a slow, painstakingly alert pathway across the blank space, shaping, forming, gradually meshing together as a shape-shifting builder, slowly applying each brick. Yet, going back to the BwO it also means that the print is a sort of 'glacial reality where the alluvious sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism- and also a signification and a subject-occur'55. An incorporation of the chronotope's 'reach' across the printed page alongside the body as a sort of working organism full of leakages, holes, sewed up bits and bobs, and inflows/outflows, goes some way in helping to extend the 'chronotope of childhood' and its interaction across planes through which the organ called 'child' may not be entirely a snug fit. It allows us to appreciate the fetishistic indulgence which now starts to sweep its way across the print so that the various 'bumps' and 'curves' represent also a sort of intense convergence of a certain 'bit'.
Another typical example emerges in the story 'Exuberance'. Here the Arabic and English version show some greater differences. The print in the English version (Example 3) is stretched out horizontally so that the process of reading in its very streamlining echoes the 'impotent' tongue, which can only stretch to a certain extent. It is a streamlining even within the Arabic (example 4) which slowly homes down and chisels the print even as the memory rushes ahead until we get the last line, 'yes indeed, immoderately exhuberant'. In a similar way suddenly the print in English condenses vertically as shown in the diagram. A slender form starts to emerge on this side through the curved, vivacious contour with a straight stalwart line along the other. When the narrator comments that in that 'my childhood was furnished your delightful merrymaking', we are taken into the past even though the 'memory' in itself is pervaded with such stillness, that even the identity of this narrator comes into question. The temptation is to link it to the childhood memory in 'A Prayer' and yet this whole identity pervades so many identities as a strange whoosh of personality that takes on the whole dynamic of the text such that moments of stillness like this are really quite poignant. Yet the obvious maternal insinuations of the women with flabby skin 'redolent' of death stands in correlative contrast to the child/elder adult dynamic stringing out the curvatous passion of women such as Jalila, Zanuba or Zubayda in the Trilogy or indeed on the flip-side the 'dull, lacluster' eyes expressive of Amina. Both sad yet nostalgic, both scandalously radiant yet repressingly maternal, this whole segment expresses well the contrastive play of gestures. The childhood reflection begins with that slightly voluptuous surging out after the more 'straighter' bit before it and accompanies a 'body' which is riddled through with more lines compared to the first 'body' in the beginning. The effect is to gradually break up the childhood memory further like little bubbles almost until we get to the final sentence. Being permutated with more blank spaces means also that the words 'making' and 'immoderately' puncture it almost by forcing the way away from the sentence but then further in again, smaller 'curves' siphoning down the larger curvatousness' of the 'exuberant' women.
This contrastive gesture makes the slender curves of the other stand out more yet they also suggest a play of various forces spreading out across the surface of the print beyond the contours. It also contrasts the curvatures of the women of 'merrymaking' with the 'flabby' skin of the old women now. The curved side of this paragraph is quite dishevelled and contorted, the straight tautness of youth in the other side of narrative with the softness of old age on this 'flabby/curved' side and vice versa even as the Arabic from the left to right employs the straight line as a visual gaze across the more sensual vivaciousness the opposite way. It also suggests a fine-tuning of forces here which carefully plan to what extent they will extend onto the blank space. What creates a sense of untimeliness is the feeling of old age reflecting back on a youthful exhuberance full of pitfalls, it is the contrastive juxtaposition of child and adult becoming more delicate in its poise.
After this first section suddenly the slender 'figure' pushes outwards again and the mysterious narrator almost commemorates this women, as is shown in the diagram, in a sort of voluptuous note of appraisal. Here the movement splurges out and then we have the momentum building up, then characteristically a sort of gradual toned down narrative, which also starts to slowly condense, with the final triumphant line 'yes. Lady, indeed you are immoderately exhuberant'. It is the bashfulness of youth through the looking glass of adult nostalgia, as a medium to combine the old age one side and the child on the other. The Arabic however shows a more gradual movement which slowly narrows down the overall print; here the speed of the story aims to home in on the final reflective moment of nostalgia. Our vision in the Arabic, in its gradual fissuring down works with the sudden 'gap' in the middle, separating it into two distinct 'bodies' as opposed to the three 'bodies' in the English version. This 'gap' succeeds, in the general fissuring down of the overall 'body' as a sort of immediate arrested gaze inwards into the whole then a burgeoning out suddenly. It certainly succeeds to a certain extent in capturing the nostalgic speed of the story perhaps more rhythmic than the English version as a splurge of expression onto the page. The English is certainly much more prim and proper in its display with each of the three 'bodies' more balanced out and the various outgrowths assuming some sense of uniformity.
Yet Mahfouz quite cleverly places the childhood memory just after the statement 'O women of unforgettable merry making' towards the end of the second 'body' when we would expect this to start with a new section, as it were. Here is in a way where the great lament starts. In its unconventionality therefore it connects the second and the third 'body' with the childhood memory accompanying a more rushing 'sigh' almost into the past. In a way one could say we have two build-ups, the first regarding the 'presentness' around the elder women's condition and the second one heading into the memory of the exuberant women. Childhood occupies two sides of the same coin and the flip-side almost of the page.
In a sense, the cumulative build up preoccupies the retrospective act even as it occupies the domain of chronotopic space hurtling towards the stories magnanimous resolution. Yet the speed of the English collides with the print as it expands, swerves and curves inwards, then bulges out again. Here yet again we can label a sort of 'head'/title, then a sort of shoulder, curving voluptuously 'inwards', then curving outwards until we get the final breathtaking finish. It is one where the slow fissuring down of the Arabic seems to become more visually alert to the corporeal movements of memory in the narrative at hand. The reader is inevitably affected by these various curves providing a sort of 'fleshy' sweep across the page and the curving outwards then inwards even as it provides a classic backdrop to a sort of working animation ingeniously commingling with the blank space and evoking the workings of the actual narrative itself. Storytelling of this nature in its appreciation of speed and build-up of momentum is also a classically corporeal gesture which tones. This corporeal art form works on the level of the storyteller and the reader who take part in the continuous making and re-making of the story. These parts are ever alert to these enfoldings even as they are also able to recognize the difference to each other. This is the body which is absent, away from being, hence somehow sniffing of being present, stretching and pulling the chronotope. As I have pointed out, within this the workings of a child 'separated' right from the beginning in A Prayer meanders not only within the stories but through them.
I will give a final brief example of how the typographical dynamic is conveyed further. Certain stories are threaded together delicately yet carefully crafted which suggest a dialogue working 'between' them. The Sheikh's life is reflected in a particular segment called the 'The Pursuer' where he begins his story, 'it pursues me from the cradle to the grave: Love'. The whole segment has been shown in (Example 5) as the English and (Example 6) as the Arabic. Yet again the 'head'/'face', 'The Pursuer' which proclaims this beginning sentence as one long sentence satisfied by the pause, then the word 'Love', threads this sentence pin-pointedly across the page. From this starts a sort of playful love affair flaunting itself in dribs and drabs across the page alongside the reader's tempting perusal. It is marked by the sign between it which acts as sort of intermissiory curtain paving the way across the blank space to the next 'scene'. The mysterious women conveys a symbolic gesture of mystical revelry who incites men to throw themselves down in adoration of her. Both of them are heading towards a resting point both through the storyteller and the typography but the English certainly takes the more 'immediacy' of the expression in the Arabic and invests it with that sense of pruning in its presentation. In the Arabic version (Example 6) however we see a difference more in the sense that there is less this grand production, expressing the storytelling. It show's no use of signs in the middle but divides this whole section up into three stories suggesting this time that the chronotope moves within and between the stories just as much as it does not need certain sign posts along the way to try and give it the flavour of a story. Hence the movement from Arabic to English seems to also involve the workings of a dialogical movement increasingly in tune with the ways in which extra flavour can be added to certain key points, in this case the gradual meshing together of the three stories, through the use of signs instead of titles in the English. It enables the chronotope to merge even as it tries to alert us to the intricate movement from one story to the other. Here we can try to incorporate the child within this who forms part of an alerting, as it were, to the storytellers art even as it incorporates it.
In both the Arabic and the English the print for the second part of the three 'sections' takes on the form of a more finely chiselled paragraph, describing the scene of the contest which would win the heart of the mysterious women. The Sheikh sets the stage describing the scene in more regular paced sentences reflecting the men 'overcome with drowsiness'. Yet this straighter chiselled form has a function as well. It seems to mimic the narrative build up until its final breakdown as in Palace Walk, but within the more smaller play of the storyteller here, it classically expresses a strategically insulated form which will surely, and we know it will, burst. This is of course what happens, yet the Arabic insinuates its containment even more, by the more solid divisions between each section. The print conveys the resounding sense of an 'ending' within the narrative itself. This means after an intermission we are followed by this pursuer of Love, the Sheikh who has found success with the mysterious lady among all the competitors for her hand, and he falls 'into the abyss'56. Here yet again the storyteller guides us as he chisels a slowly evocative form. In customary fashion for the eagerly poised audience there is the big introduction marked by the title, this is the 'head' the immediate countenance which sparks that deadly glance of infatuation. It accompanies the Sheikh's words on love through a print which is very thin, and spread across the blank space yet again seems to indicate a sort of insipid clarity. The main theme here, love, is nestled at the end of the sentence which through the shape of the print allows one to sort of settle on the word with a sort of summary assurance. It is this next scene which tease's out the meaning of the word Love as a main 'body'. Although it looks haphazard as in not linear enough, there is a certain chiselled curvature that is reflected in the tempo of the narrative, that is the Sheikh's pursuing of Love. Yet by the time we get to the third scene this main 'body' starts to exude more 'breath' so to speak. The intensity of the pursuing in the previous scene is reflected in the more condensed, taut, print which starts to give way reflecting the rapturous furore of the Sheikh who eagerly awaits his prize.
The print is now a mixture of the first scene and the second scene in the Arabic and English not only just in terms of the story itself but also its layout, as a mixture of a certain curvatousness and discipline at the same time. Now increasingly the Sheikh's words reflect an almost corporeal mysticism reflected in the print. The contour is more curved winding, twisting and turning indicative of the rapturous revelry and hence a gradual build up. Yet it covers a more wider arena, indicating the splurging out of the Sheikh's raptures. Here we have a succession of shorter thinner lines similar to the first scene yet now they are stacked one after the other in a sort of processional overture providing a rhythmic beat. The effervescence of that chronotope seems to so intermesh within this mystical furore, the intensity of the atmosphere keeps the 'flesh' always in ecstasy.
Typographically the striving of the Sheikh plays out in rapturous form, to reach a state of purity yet also reclaim it in the lost childhood innocence. As pointed out earlier, the Sheikh has lost the 'stray one ', the glow of a child 'born' then bungled out seventy years ago, and it is this pursuing which takes on various avenues within the narratives and the corporeal garb of the print. The child forms part of that dialogical encrustation somehow of the chronotope which drives and surges through the various segments. The child seems to follow a similar pattern in the Arabic and the English of unfolding through the Sheikh's desire for Love which suggests the consistent intensity of a search carefully, astutely creating a similar rendering across the page. It is a 'Love' and search that forms a similar awareness of a child being 'aware', deliberately making sure it is masked in the presence/absence game.
What the symbols in the English dividing the text also show is how much a corporeal dialogicality is able to successfully link together various aspects of the text, but work between them through the blank space thus in a way showing how 'sometimes on the contrary, instead of becoming welded together, words loosen their intimate ties'.57 Yet the fact that the Arabic version, as pointed out, does not use this but maintains the consecutive individual story order means that this subject works between the actual stories but extends this in the English by breaking and merging them more. This indicates the covert operations of the blank space as it allows the flowing of this dialogicality to thread together certain common themes. This consciousness winds its way through the blank space yet is able to also assume a certain visual body, pop back inwards then pop back outwards.
I have so far tried to show how Mahfouz's whole life, whole personality, whole 'body' of works when appreciated as an operative expression demands consistently new ways in which this expression conveys itself. Within an understanding of the chronotope, the point was to gradually map out certain complex, allusive yet also passionate interrelations between Echoes and Palace Walk/Trilogy as well as within Echoes itself. The interconnections are certainly not exhaustive, but the aim was to map out a species of experience almost which pans out as certain dynamics within the narrative of Echoes and as an eventual fruition which incorporated a wider understanding of the text. In this way the whole intertextual, fragmented form of the narrative requires further elucidation into the chronotope's workings.
Critics such as Gaber Asfour are certainly keen to move away from the 'compartmentalization' riddling interpretation of Mahfouz works through various 'phases' of development. Instead she argues one should 'perceive a variety in relationships that lead us to the "living unit" of a system, marked by restlessness rather than stagnation.'58 In this way 'unity emerges not as the sum of parts but as the result of combined relations, both among elements of a single text and among elements in all texts'59. In this way 'dynamic intertextuality' 60emerges as Sabry Hafez puts it, which further interrogates that 'intertexual chronotope' as a working whole, yet also the narrative chronotope within each text. Changes corrode into other changes and cause that crucial 'rupture'61 necessary to 'break with established tradition in order to elaborate the basis of another one'. 62The chronotope cannot just draw together without also drawing apart in the same way that the chronotope is just as much a reinterpretation, a 're-capturing' as it were through a consistent reforming of itself even as it unifies into an 'optic-lense', as well as captures the narrative in some sense. In this way the chronotope also forms part of a corporeal meshing which also blurs and draws itself out in gestures of ambiguity. New avenues of exploration unfold, new ways in which one can possibly incorporate a more sensual, corporeal, visual dynamic to the chronotope and all narrative forms of expression.
P.S. All print examples mentioned are included in the Arabic version of this essay.
1- Naguib Mahfouz, Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber: Reflections of a Nobel Laureate, 1994-2001, From Conversations with Mohamed Salmawy, (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2001), p. 59
2- This essay was originally published in a certain shorter form in the Arabic journal Fusul but has been expanded upon a little further. It was initially adapted from a more wider thesis dealing with Bakhtin's chronotope as well as certain other literary works. Within that I had dealt with what was called the 'chronotope of childhood' and the interrelations between narrative and textual form through various texts. I had also discussed the 'book' and the 'text' in a wider framework as well as within Bakhtin's wider theories.
3- Naguib Mahfouz, Echoes of An Autobiography, (New York: Doubleday, 1997), trans. Denys Johnson-Davies. This particular translation shall be used. The Arabic translation of Echoes of An Autobiography used in this study will be A.sda' al-sirah al-dhatiyah, (al-Qahirah: Dar Mi.sr, 1995).
Note that I shall be using the slightly different transliteration from the translation by Denys Johnson-Davies, A.sda' al-sirah al-dhatiyah, not the one used by Al-Ahram.
4- Roger Allen, "Autobiography and Memory: Mahfuz's Asda' al-sira al-dhatiyya" in Robin Ostle et.al., Writing the Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature, (London: Saqi Books, 1998), p.215.
5- Ibid., p.216.
6- M.M Bakhtin,"Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," in The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist (ed.), trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas, 1981), p. 250. Note that I shall generally be using The Dialogical Imagination as the standard reference throughout to allude to the general collection of essays in this book.
7- Ibid., p.251.
8- I use as this as a general allusion to the ways in which the chronotopic 'form' is forced to become more physically 'pulled' as it were in a variety of ways, not as a sort of summary of patterns underlying Bakhtin's whole works.
9- M.M Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, op. cit., p. 279.
10- Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk, (New York: Doubleday, 1991), trans. William Maynard Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny. From now on this particular translation of Palace Walk shall be used.
11- Naguib Mahfouz, Hakayat Haretna translated as Fountain and Tomb, (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998). Translated from the Arabic by Soad Sobhy, et.al. Without going into too much detail here there are, among other things, remnants of certain activities of the child's relationship to Aisha in the Trilogy and an initial important meeting of the child and the 'sheikh', as in a way the inevitable textual fragmenting through which the child later meanders out and spins out the 'sheikh' persona in Echoes, to be discussed in this article. These points I will discuss in a further article.
12- Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk, p. 365.
13- Naguib Mahfouz, Echoes of an Autobiography, op.cit., p. 1.
14- Naguib Mahfouz, Echoes of An Autobiography, p. 7.
15- Naguib Mahfouz, Echoes of an Autobiography, op.cit., p.118.
16- Ferial J. Ghazoul, Nocturnal Poetics: The Arabian Nights in Comparative Perspective (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1996)., p.82.
17- Ibid.,
18- Ibid., p.25
19- Naguib Mahfouz, Echoes of An Autobiography, p. 64.
20- Ibid., p.68
21- Ibid., p.9.
22- Ibid., p.55
23- Ibid., p. 75.
24- Ibid., p. 25.
25- Ibid., p.21.
26- Ibid., p.55.
27- I use this as a more general division denoting two major 'shifts' in thought within Echoes.
28- Roger Allen, op.cit., p. 208.
29- Najuib Mahfouz, Echoes of an Autobiography p.77.
30- I am taking Mahfouz's age here to be about 86 from the publication of Echoes of An Autobiography in 1997 and the authors birth in 1911.
31- Echoes of an Autobiography, op.cit., p. 6.
32- Ibid., p. 36.
33- Roger Allen, op.cit., p.210.
34- Echoes of an Autobiography, op.cit., p.76.
35- Ibid.,
36- Echoes of An Autobiography, op.cit., p. 103.
37- Ibid., p.118.
38- Echoes of an Autobiography, op.cit., p. 119.
39- It must be pointed out here that there are 243 stories in Echoes, which I have followed consecutively from the first one 'A Prayer' to the last one 'Release'. I shall be using this numbering sequence for the short segments I will identify in the rest of the article.
40- Ibid., p.79.
41- Ibid.,
42- Ibid., p.81.
43- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) p. 203.
44- Ibid., p.106.
45- Ibid., p.107.
46- Ann Tomiche, "Writing the Body: The Rhetoric of Mutilation in Marguerite Duras' L'amante anglaise" in Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin (ed.), Thinking Bodies, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994), op. cit., p. 127.
47- Najuib Mahfouz, Echoes of An Autobiography, op.cit., p. 69.
48- Ibid.,
49- See Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. J.E Lewin, (New York: Cornell, 1998). Genette argues there are four narrative movements, ellipsis, pause, scene and summary. In the context of Arabic autobiography this has been elaborated by Tetze Rooke, In My Childhood: A Study of Arabic Autobiography, (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 1997). I have mainly used Rooke's study, pages 153-169 particularly discuss this.
50- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, (London: Continuum, 2003), p.150.
51- Ibid., p.153.
52- Ibid.,
53- Ibid., p.158.
54- Ibid., p.159.
55- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op.cit., p.159.
56- Najuib Mahfouz, Echoes of an Autobiography, op. cit., p. 98.
57- Gaston Bachelard, op. cit., p.213.
58- Gaber Asfour, "From Naguib Mahfouz's Critics" in Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar (ed.), Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional fame to Global Recognition, (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1993), p.155
59- Ibid.,
60- Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse: A Study in the Sociology of Modern Arabic Literature, (London: Saqi Books, 1993), p.23.
61- Ibid.,
62- Ibid.,