Naguib Mahfouz, Wedding Song. Olive E. Kenny, translator. Anchor, 1981/1984.
Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) is one of my favorite twentieth century writers, and his writing career extended over seven decades (1932-2005). I have read a small portion of his fiction, and I could spend a chunk of my retirement reading everything else. Fortunately, after he was awarded the 1988 Nobel in Literature (most?)all of his works have been translated into English.
Wedding Song is one of Mahfouz’s late works, a short novel that, like so much of his fiction, is set in Cairo. This is a story about a theater’s production of a controversial play, told Rashomon-like by four different characters: Tariq Ramadan (an actor in the troupe), Karam Younis(father of the playwright), Halima al-Kabsh (mother of the playwright), and Abbas Karam Younis(the playwright) In the small slice of his fiction that I have read, Mahfouz likes to write about artists: actors, authors, musicians, singers, and storytellers. They seem to represent a liminal space, a freer space, outside the restrictions (religious, political, governmental, colonial, patriarchal) that organize Cairene life, where conflicts and tensions are more fluid, creative, and interesting.
The play, “Wedding Song,” is the first that Abbas has had produced. He worked for the theater, as did his parents and Tariq, who was also one of the family’s boarders in their big house. All of the major and minor characters are in some way connected to this theater, so the novel is very insular. Abbas wrote the play out of his own experiences with all these people, and they are, justifiably, worried about the truths he exposes, for the world Mahfouz portrays is morally malleable, a reality that does not at all sit well with Abbas.
To telegraph a bit, by the time I finished the third chapter, I had become apprehensive and was prepared to be disappointed, which is not how I have ever thought about Mahfouz’s fiction. The narrators of the first three chapters–Tariq, Karam, and Halima– are stuck in their own self-centered myopia: complaining and full of grievances. Fortunately, the last chapter, Abbas’s narrative, recasts the entire novel as a künstlerroman.
The first chapter begins at the end of the read through of Abbas’s play. The actors are particularly shocked at the death of a baby, which the director and management decide to leave out of the production so as not to drive away audiences. Otherwise, the play looks like a potential hit and moneymaker. Tariq, who has been cast in the lead, is beside himself. He considers Abbas his enemy, because he ran off with Tahiya, Tariq’s girlfriend. Tariq believes that in the play Abbas confesses his guilt for Tahiya’s death.. Tariq wants something to be done–the police called, an investigation started–but the director and theater owner don’t care. They just wants the play to be successful, won’t be distracted by Tariq’s concerns, and advise him to focus on his acting. Tariq has been jilted in love and acts out accordingly. He was also kicked out of the Younis’s house as a result. He is still emotionally attached to Tahiya–because they were once lovers? guilt?--but he also admits to himself that he is a randy actor who chases after all the young, attractive women. Nonetheless, Tariq portrays himself as the good aggrieved party, while Abbas is the aggressor and thief of love. This perception, or misperception really, remains until Chapter 4. Tariq is assuaged by the end of the story because the play is a success, and he’s making money. At the end of the chapter, word spreads that Abbas has disappeared and even committed suicide, which Tariq believes explicitly: the appropriate ending for his enemy who clearly felt guilty for stealing Tahiya away from Tariq and murdering her..
Chapter 2 is narrated by Karam Younis, Abbas’s father. He tells the story of his courtship of Halima, her beauty and goodness, but that idyllic past has disappeared in the present moment. Both Karam and Halima are bitter people, recently out of jail. They used to work in the theater, but now they sell seeds and popcorn from a shop provided them by their son. They had a house, which they ran as a boarding house, brothel, and gambling den, to serve their theater friends, because, after all, what are friends for!? According to Karam, they did it just to make a little money. What Karam doesn’t say is that he had developed an opium addiction, which necessitated their plunge into illegality. Tariq, who has come to tell them about Abbas’s play, believes that Abbas ratted them out. Karam does not believe his son capable of such a betrayal, but when he hears about the play from Tariq he worries about what it reveals, fearing the public outing of family secrets. At the premier, rather than be proud of his son, he thinks about why he and his wife went to jail while everyone else did not. Watching the play he sees revealed what he had feared, a different kind of betrayal but a betrayal nonetheless. Despite her bitterness, Halima loves and is proud of her son. She denies that there is anything amiss with his portrayal of her and her husband. When word spreads that Abbas has disappeared and perhaps committed suicide, Karam believes it immediately, because it confirms the intense bitterness of his life.
While Karam’s chapter is dominated by bitterness, Halima’s story is marked by her desperate love for her son, the last barricade against her own formidable bitterness.
When she first comes to the theater, she is raped by the director and lusted after by all the men. She’s pregnant when she marries Karam, and the relationship goes quickly south. They live in mutual hatred. Because she’s tired of their poverty and cannot curtail Karam’s addiction, she quickly accepts the transformation of their home into a gambling den, brothel, and boarding house. She does not mention her own participation in the sex trade. She loves Abbas, but he becomes more distant the lower his parents fall. When he takes up with Taliya and moves out, she feels the shock, but her love for him remains unchanged: he is her angel. The rumors, as spread by Tariq and others, that he may have killed Talya and betrayed his parents to the police don’t move her. Only once she sees the play and how Abbas portrays her, revealing how much he knows about her own depravity, does her faith in him slip. She realizes that her love was unable to protect either him or her, and she completely gives into despair. Thus, when she hears about the suicide note, she knows that Abbas has followed through. She just won’t admit her feelings to her husband, whom she still despises and won’t give to him the satisfaction that they are equally embittered.
The story that each of these characters tells–or the “truth” (that is, the fiction) they come to believe–is shaped by the emotions that dominate their lives: Tariq’s jealousy and insecurity, Karam’s bitterness, Halima’s desperate love. The same can be said of Abbas’s story, but whereas the others seem stuck and unaware of anything but their pain Abbas finds liberation. This difference resets the novel and pacified the disappointment I had begun to fear for Mahfouz’s creative genius.
Abbas’s chapter transforms Wedding Song into a künstlerroman, a narrative (here, an autobiography) about an artist’s growth and maturity. While the others’ stories fill in narrative gaps with the characters’ resentments, grievances, and prejudices, Abbas’s story simply includes the details of which the others had no knowledge. Wedding Song is Abbas’s story. In the last chapter, Tariq, Karam, and Halima’s earlier stories now seem to function as a distracting chorus(chori?) to the main action.
Abbas begins his story with his childhood, which, although he spent much time alone in the big house because his parents were at the theater, was happy. His mother was loving and beautiful, and when she called him angel she also taught him a set of values (love what is good, do others no harm, keep your body and clothes clean). His father was extroverted, funny, playful, interactive, and demonstrably loving. In their stories, neither Karam nor Halima talk of a happy time for the family. Because his parents spend so much time at the theater, Abbas learns to take guidance from others. He loves school because he can interact with others, and he develops a knack for learning. He also develops an acute sense of right and wrong. Because of the influence of parents and school, Abbas dedicates himself to becoming a playwright. Everything is great until his father becomes addicted to opium, and then the family and home life fall apart. Tariq is taken on as a boarder: he is crude and insulting. He brings Tahiya home, which upsets Abbas’s moral sensibility. From loving father, Karam becomes mean-spirited and ugly, insulting and verbally abusing Halima and Abbas. Halima is unhappy but is still willing to go along with Karam’s plans to turn the house into a gambling den and brothel. She still loves her son, but these changes upset Abbas: this is not the happy family he was used to. Abbas rejects his parents for their moral depravity. As his home life falls apart, Abbas also finds himself strongly attracted to Tahiya, who leaves Tariq, and Abbas moves in with her to escape the craziness of home. All of this sturm und drang just reinforces Abbas’s desire to be a playwright. He gets a job at the theater, and his home life with Tahiya is almost idyllic. They live on his salary and her savings: love, sex, domestic bliss, and writing. But life continues its rounds of joys (birth of a son), betrayals (parents are arrested and jailed), and tragedies (Tahiya dies of typhoid, infant son dies). All of these shocks–rather than stymying Abbas–impel him to write. He grows, becomes the artist, inspired by what he sees as the conflict between life (the struggle of the soul against materialism) and death (the soul’s final victory). From the mix of life experience, philosophy, and aesthetics, Abbas produces “Wedding Song.” Despite the play’s success, Abbas disappears, not through suicide, but he vanishes to transcend his troubled existence.
Abbas’s narrative corrects the mistakes and misperceptions of the other three narratives. More to the point, his narrative represents artistic growth, a becoming, and a future: the künstlerroman. I really like how the final chapter transforms the entire book. Also, I can’t help think that when Mahfouz includes an artist in his fiction, just like when Homer includes a poet in The Odyssey, he is inserting himself, some piece of himself (real, imagined, idealized, maybe even demonized) into the story, revealing his own artistic struggle. Somehow, out of the dross of the real world can come art.