Marie-Thérèse Abdel-Messih, University of Cairo
It is not by mere chance that fictional writing in Egypt took a new turn at the beginning of the twentieth century. Innovations in literary forms were partly inspired by new waves of cultural productions that came along with modernism. However, modernism was at times strongly connected with colonialism, arousing an irresolvable dilemma. Opposition movements against colonialism aspired to two major goals: nationalization and modernization. Early twentieth- century Egyptian fiction writing was mainly preoccupied with issues of identity, in an attempt to safeguard it against the hazards of acculturation. Independence was set as the main goal to establish equality with other countries, to become part of the modern world. However, these aspirations aroused a conflict. Modernism meant the assimilation of Western epistemologies, whereas nationalism ignited patriotic delusions about the possibility of retrieving historical roots. This, in turn, provoked further conflicts among the clashing discourses of different pasts in Egypt's history. In most cases, the reverence paid to the past created a reverse modernism. A cultural division ensued, due to the wavering between contradictory concepts of the nation. One was based on the nostalgia of a golden past, while the other held a Westernized futuristic outlook.
The ambivalence of the national quest was partly due to the appropriation of nineteenth-century Western concepts of the nation. This entailed a reductive nationalism with a master voice silencing all other voices. Modernism, as such, established binary oppositions dividing modern and archaic, science and intuition. The divisions established a hierarchy that obliterated the second element in each pair. By promoting an ideology of prioritization, the narratives of colonialism were consolidated on the international level. They were later on adopted on the national level as a pretext to realize a unified nation. A monological discourse pervaded fiction writing as well. Writers emulated the nineteenth-century realistic Western novel, while assuming an elitist position by claiming the power of knowledge. They either professed the wisdom of the West or the classical knowledge of the sacred texts, the two facets of high culture, and accordingly, popular culture was marginalized.
However, after Egypt's defeat in the Six Day War of 1967, the power of the establishment and the intellectuals was destabilized. Post-1967 cultural productions debunked the monological narrative of the nation, and rejected the elitist position of the author. Ibrahim Abdel-Maguid (b. 1946)1 is one of the writers belonging to the "disillusioned generation" rejecting the master voice. In No One Sleeps in Alexandria (1996),2 he attempts a dialogical discourse promoting interactive communication on the national and international levels. As such, he participates in the global discourse of our day, positing the possibility that the Egyptian culture may yet be represented within a social totality. In this paper, I will explore the author's strategies to provide a space where different cultures are in the process of articulation. The heterglossia of dialogical discourses obliterates the dividing line between author and reader, history and fiction. The subject and history interact, the single voice acquires its definition only in relation to the other. The dialogical discourse has become a means to question the subject in relation to history. The subject's formation becomes a process of interaction with the organic and inorganic environment. To belong to the present the subject should be relocated as a dynamic agent in social practice. The sources for my critical project are eclectic. However, the works of Mikhail Bakhtin3 and Linda Hutcheon4 are predominant.
Crossing Social and Disciplinary Boundaries. In Alexandria, the historical traces are viewed in relation to the fictional episodes. The intertexts of history and fiction are used interchangeably, challenging the boundaries traditionally set between art and non-art. The fictional past, in turn, is related to the reader's present. The interaction between different historical times and places reveals a multiplicity of meanings. However, multiplicity is not intended as a new form of absolute relativism, which is another form of determinism. Multiplicity is used as a strategy for intertextual reading, to avoid a linear reading of history that confers on it a univocal meaning. My intention is to trace the transmutations effected throughout the multiple pasts so as to subvert all attempts at stereotyping the subject. The transmutations that have occurred along history reveal the dialogical relationship between the subject and the other as a dynamic process. Against former realistic fiction, the strategy used in Alexandria is parody. Parody provides a theoretical framework that is at once hermeneutic and formalist, as Hutcheon has suggested.5 Hutcheon propounds that "To parody is not to destroy the past: in fact, to parody is both to enshrine the past and to question it."6 I will use parody as a framework for my study, in a different context. My aim is to trace parodic intertextuality in history and fiction, past and present, to find possibilities for intersubjective participation in history. This may eventually lead to the formation of productive relations within the social totality.
Alexandria draws on the past to contest a linear reading of history that presupposes a hierarchical stratification of events, where the peripheral is not represented. The representation of the marginalized in the cultural productions of the early century was through the author's single voice. The discourse of the nation has not included them. Although Benedict Anderson propounds that the novel as a genre helped in the creation of imagined communities within a calendrical time,7 in Egypt, the subalterns were disregarded. They were contained within the system, and their culture remained strictly oral. In that sense, the concepts of nationalism, as well as modernism, have contributed to a literary discontinuity. Modernism established a monological discourse that marginalized non-official literature. The militants for a reverse modernism, believing that the vernacular oral tradition was inferior to the language used in the sacred texts, also silenced oral literature. The wavering between binaries destabilized the concept of the nation. Alexandria proposes a rereading of the historical archive, in response to a call for the rescue of the premodern or the nonofficial from obliteration. The reinscription of the archaic within the modern proposes an alternative reading that does not consider the modern as other. By engaging the subaltern as agent, Alexandria presents a reformulation of ancient epistemologies. The release of other sources of knowledge reinterprets identity as a heterogeneous entity, not bound within a set geography or a determined archive.
The subaltern discourse is informed by archaic concepts. Therefore, the release of its sources of knowledge requires a backward movement, which is indispensable to the reading of the forward movement in history. The awareness of an ambivalent historical movement occurs across place and time. The reconstructed events are chronotopic, based on human and ecological interrelations, configured through quotidian events. The quotidian is not solely restricted to the body and its practices, but also involves the ethereal within its multiple material revelations: the animate voices the inanimate; the traditional body/spirit split is dismissed. The preeminence of the body, or physical reality, is one of modernism's fetishes, countered by the glorification of the spiritual in the discourse of its opponents. However, Alexandria reveals the dialogical relation between rationality and intuition, in which the subject experiences the esoteric through the quotidian.8
The dialogical interweaving connecting rationality and intuition rectifies the classic author-text relationship. The author's role recalls that of the oral chanter, who is narrator and narratee in the narrative process. In Alexandria, the author plays this ambivalent role of messenger and recipient.9 His shifting role allows for the smooth intertextual movement within history and fiction. He does not present historical records of the events, but reconstructs the archive through a subaltern consciousness. Competitive deeds are narrated in the style of oral narratives that recount the lives of popular heroes and brigands, parodying the myths of political leaders. The great events are seen through a subaltern insurgent consciousness, ironically combining determinism with contingency, to debunk the delusions of political leadership. The result is a realistic-romantic compound.
Intertexts, therefore, produce a dialogicity between historical and popular figures, literacy and orality. In as much as past and present are intertextual, everyday experience is informed by the cultural environment, and informs it. In turn, life experience is not restricted to daily practices but extends to the act of reading. Life and text, present and past, oral and written are intertexts of Alexandria. The author reads life as text, and the reader reads the text as a life practice. The interchangeable positions between author and reader may explain the author's ambivalent role. The interchangeable roles refer to a telepathic experience between author and reader, through which the act of reading becomes a secular revelation, at once rational and irrational. Reading becomes an intersubjective practice, when the written acquires a performative role. Unlike the separatist policies applied by modernism and its reverse, this provides an alternative reading, eliminating divisions between set binaries.
By eliminating the archaic from the discourse of progress, modernism has dispensed with all epistemologies remnant from the past. The occult is regarded as part of an obscurantist tradition that counters enlightenment. By invalidating the occult as an epistemology, modernists have contested the subaltern beliefs. In return, subaltern belief has become a form of resistance against a nonreligious modernism, adopted by the Westernized elite. The cultural division ensuing has also distanced avant-gardists from oral culture. There has been a general anxiety as to how the nation can be integrated into a modern world, totally dissociated from the past. Divided loyalties between tradition and modernism have had to be reconciled, to avoid the problems of identity that ensue. The question of belonging to a social entity, or a specific culture, has persisted ever since. The post-1967 generation has tried to create a localized "counter-response" informed by its location in historical time and place. Alexandria interrogates the cultural condition in the present by relating it to its multiple pasts. It is a cultural production that does not seek to privilege a definite temporality, or a specific place, to simulate a central position.
Alexandria as Carnivalesque Ground. Ibrahim Abdel-Maguid's Alexandria becomes the voice of a diversified community. It abounds with tales and accounts of war and peace, displacement and return, all narrating Alexandria's biography. The title, No One Sleeps in Alexandria, alludes to the proliferating voices through history. Alexandria's districts and monuments are metonymic of such unity in diversity. Karmuz, a popular district in the city center, abounds with a history of torture and destruction. At its center, Pompeii's Pillar stands in memory of Diocletian (AD 245-316), the infamous Roman emperor known to have tortured the resisting natives. Ironically, Alexandria has survived while the emperor has not. The Pillar eventually becomes the meeting point for lovers, vendors, and mourners. It merges the temporal contradictions it engenders. In other words, it is metonymic of Alexandria's continuous history.
The Mahmudiyya canal also reveals the ambivalence between destruction and redemption, configured in Pompeii's Pillar. The ships sailing across its waters traverse more than two thousand lives wasted during its excavation. "Two thousand wasted lives can surely provide a total history that narrates a nation. Its history will abound with mystery, myth and madness. The Mahmudiyya is a storehouse of memories" (Alexandria 231). Each narrative parodies a previous one. The chapters in the book are prefaced by fragments from Pharaonic, Coptic, Islamic, Indian, or Aramaic sources. The prefaces parody the narrated events. The intertexts of history and fiction generate a parodic reconstruction of the subject in relation to the cultural and ecological environment.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Alexandria becomes the ground for interacting rural communities and Westernized disciplinary systems. In the mulid carnivals of Alexandria, the masses celebrate anniversaries of Muslim or Christian saints. Whether the mulid is in honor of St. George or Sidi Mursi Abu'l- 'Abbas, Christians and Muslims join. The Christians have the design of St. George tattooed, while the Muslims draw Abu Zayd al-Hilali, a popular hero. Abu Zayd is pictured astride a lion, sword uplifted, which bears great similarity to the traditional St. George figure. The religious carnivals celebrate the ritual, but subvert the implicit hierarchy that divides the saint from the people. The saint is reinvested with the aspects of the popular hero, that is, he is subverted to his secular function.
The intertexts of heroes and martyrs are generated at several levels. At times, they bear a positive significance: popular ballads of heroism are invested as a cultural code to inspirit the community members to become active agents. Conversely, heroism can have its negative effects, when misconceived as a source of miraculous power. At times of distress and alienation, heroes are given such attributes by the masses, as in the case of Zahra, Magd al-Deen's spouse. In her bewilderment, she fantasizes a miraculous return to her home village, with the help of the knight whose statue is erected in one of Alexandria's major squares (Alexandria 103).10
Images of heroism acquire a grotesque appearance, as in the case of Adolf Hitler, who poses as a paragon of worldly success. He enraptures Alexandrines as thoroughly as any of the popular stars they see on screen. At one of the mulid carnivals, the magician boasts that his advanced capacities can outdo Hitler's manoeuvres. In another episode, a procurer tries to scare away the police by claiming that he is Hitler (Alexandria 130). The grotesque heroic figure suggests a rereading of historical texts to subvert all narrative myths promulgated by the media. The dialogical relation between international figures and commoners subverts the hierarchy imposed by dividing center and periphery. Furthermore, the intertexts of politicians, heroes, and martyrs configure the ambivalent nature of war and peace, two incommensurate, but not unrelated, spheres.
Parallel Histories/Narratives of Center and Periphery. The different fictive and historical episodes contain an admixture of war and peace as life-giving phenomena. The two spheres superimpose realism on romanticism, merging humor and pathos. The three main fictive episodes combine chivalric romance and picaresque realism. The fictive episodes dealing with local accounts parody international events. At the same time, they act as intertexts of past myths. Thus, every episode bears a multiple meaning, as it is set in a dialogical relation to the other texts. Humor is produced by rereading the myth in relation to reality; romance is produced by reinvesting the myth in everyday existence. In both readings there is a subversion of narrative as power and a reconstruction of the cultural product as collective practice. The superimposition of different cultural codes is to avoid univocal interpretations.
In Alexandria, the encounter of the subject with the other is instigated by the trauma of modernization. Alexandria, which lies on the Mediterranean coast, becomes involved in the Second World War. The incidents recounted in Alexandria are parodic of a perverse modernism. The events cover the central and the peripheral, on the national and international levels. The war, involving Hitler and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, has its parallels in local vendettas. The war has even a more direct impact on local policies. The martial law imposed by sovereign rule has given the local authorities leave to misuse their power. A provincial mayor has used such laws against his opponents. The expulsion of two major figures, Baheyy and Magd al-Deen Khalil, from their native village is an instance of that, and instigates the entire line of events. Both immigrate to Alexandria, a haven sheltering exiles from different geographical locations; displacements provide a space for cultural encounters.
We can follow up such encounters along three major fictive episodes. In the first episode, Baheyy acts as a popular hero, mythical prophet, and political leader. Born on the Sacred Eve of Ramadan, his mother named him Baheyy (radiant), as she fancied seeing a halo around his head; according to Zahra he bears a Messianic iconic appearance, which he will actually parody in the text by fighting on behalf of the oppressed. Baheyy fights for the emancipation of rural women from patriarchal impositions in order that they might obtain their authorized legal rights. He is also willing to give sexual satisfaction to those who need it. His body worship is antithetical to monastic asceticism, but it does not remain totally subjective. Eroticism and asceticism are no longer viewed as binaries. According to Georges Bataille, they are compatible: "Human sacrifice is loftier than any other not in the sense that it is crueler than any other, but because it is close to the only sacrifice without trickery, which can only be the ecstatic loss of oneself."11 Sacrifice, therefore, is abstinence and pursuit. Different practices can have similar ethical bearings.
In his resistance to oppression, Baheyy may be viewed as a political hero. Later, he acquires the language of violence, after taking part in the Second World War in Europe. Consequently, his former heroism becomes adventurous banditry. He eventually meets an antiheroic death in a futile battle between rival upper and lower class Egyptians. His death becomes a retribution for the power he was after and parodies Hitler's loss. The unexpected death in both cases reveals that the fantastic may spring from the historically contingent. It subverts the romantic belief in an immortal heroism and confirms that popular heroism is not an individual privilege but a collective gain. Popular heroism becomes an insignia for the collective values sustaining the community. Hence the death or life of the popular hero is of equal value. The hero's departure does not mark a tragic end, but engenders the continuity in life.
The second fictive episode takes place in the city, where Rushdi, an avant- garde poet/chivalrous lover, also plays an ambivalent role. Rushdi and Baheyy have been tortured by love, but have had different responses. Baheyy comes from a rural background, while Rushdi belongs to an urban setting: "the city boy is sure-footed, and is not carried away by the gusts of wind" (Alexandria 202). Baheyy is easily swept away by the vibrant storms of love and war. His contact with the West comes through war; his contact with women is physical. Rushdi's encounter with the West is through cultural interchange; his attraction to Camellia is intellectual and physical. Their love relationship interrogates the institutional Muslim/Christian binaries. Their religious difference configures the symbiotic relation between body and spirit, physical and occult, animate and inanimate. The couple is drawn together at a school competition, and their intellectual attraction becomes outspokenly physical on their Nile trip across the Mahmudiyya canal. Their mutual response is configured in the act of rowing: "Camellia admired his performance. She pondered on how his charm can captivate the whole world" (Alexandria 243).
The act of rowing alludes to the sexual act. Upon reaching the other shore, their rapture is intensified in the open fields. The warmth of the sun conveys their intimacy, and its rays confer a blessing: "what more would one expect the gods to offer?" (Alexandria 234). Away from urban structures, their love is generated as a sacred act, the ecological forces acting as an alternative to the historical. The ecological stimulates experience that sanctifies the body. Bataille postulates that "the sacred is only a privileged moment of the convulsive communication of what is ordinarily stifled."12 The act of convulsive communication is enigmatic, being incited by an individual desire to transcend subjectivity. However, the disjunction of the sacred from the transcendental becomes an act of sacrilege that breeds violence or death. This explains the institutional rejection of love as an individual choice. It is considered a breach of the communal code connecting the sacred to the transcendental, which is a self-negating act that consolidates the communal against the subjective.
The ecological acts as the sacramental, conjoining the lovers in space. Poetry conjoins them in time. Rushdi recites to Camellia some translated French verses. As translator he reproduces intetexts of past and present, and bridges East and West. Like Alexandria's author, he is both sender and recipient, their interrelated roles generating intertexts of art and life. Rushdi, at times, acts as the modernist, avant-garde poet who assumes an authorial position. Camellia sees him as "A master created by the gods, unaware that his insurgent consciousness can drive him to assume their role. This will also be the source of his perpetual agony" (Alexandria 236). Along with his role as modernist author, Rushdi also becomes a participant in the event as a romantic lover. His ambivalent role as author/participant, modernist/romantic is reconciled in his third role as popular chanter, taking part in a boatman's folk lyrics as listener and improviser. The improvised songs, in the vernacular, parody the translated French poems to enshrine the similarity in difference. It also shows that Western modernism is not the only means for innovation. Rushdi's interchangeable roles as translator and improviser configure the interaction between subjective pain and collective joy. The interchange of lyrics becomes a choral of blessing. The ecological provides a space for an "impersonal reality," where the "sacred is made substantial."13 Poetry provides intertexts of past and present time, where eternity is made substantial.
The ecological, therefore, is not a mere background, but an active element. It participates in historicizing the chronotopic experience, by interweaving temporal and spatial elements. Whereas Alexandria, the city, configures a cumulative, urban history, the open space provides an alternative experiential dimension. Open space, usually found in premodern areas, provides a distance from the urban, architectural, complex, or the closed system. The open space offers an encounter with the boundless, emancipating the self from narrow boundaries. However, neither the urban nor the rural provides a unique frame of reference; both are engulfed in a holistic entity. Departure from the city is essential for a return. Unlike the cumulative urban experience, the encounter with boundless space reinvigorates perception due to the immediacy of experience. Immediacy marks the consumption of the moment; every rebirth involves extinction. Rushdi's recitation of Charles Baudelaire's poem L'Horloge configures the passage of time, as the minute tolls its death; the recitation marks the repetition of fulfillment and yearning. It announces the hour of return to the city; it predicts the deferral of desire.
Unlike the historical event, the ecological experience is at once historical and mythical; the timed may allude to the timeless. The Mahmudiyya trip as a concrete experience may act as an intertext of Egyptian myths. On their return trip, a floating corpse of a drowned woman hits the lovers' boat. The corpse is reminiscent of the legend of Osiris, the Egyptian god and judge of the dead, and the dissemination of his corpse along the river Nile and its restoration by Isis. The legend reads death as the basis for regeneration, while the floating corpse is a sign of degeneration, anticipating a change in the couple's relationship. The boat trip is a narrative configuration providing intertexts of past legends and future expectations. It is a holistic experience, where physical attraction breeds the deferral of desire.
The Rushdi-Camellia episode also parodies conventional romances. Camellia is sent to Upper Egypt to be kept away from Rushdi. Rushdi's quest for his lover leads him southwards, a reverse direction to Isis's trip. Conventional romances usually create binaries, and the prioritization of one element leads to tragic or happy endings. Tragedy is often a sign of personal breach, where the self becomes a counterforce to an ecological or communal order. Yet, happy endings may imply conjugality on the basis of negating otherness, rather than embracing it. Conversely, the Rushdi-Camellia episode takes another turn.
Camellia chooses a monastic order, while Rushdi chooses poetry as a vocation. Their respective choice is not an act of self-negation, but instead reveals the interrelation between private and public. Unlike the binary choices characteristic of romances, their choice of sexual abstinence is not a physical deprivation. Rather, it privileges the body with other forms of communication. Although the body is a means of communicating with the other in public life, conjugal relations are not necessarily the nucleus of social coexistence. The private participation in the public may be effected either through conjugal or collective relations. In the end, aspirations for social integration aim at reaching an impersonal reality that is experienced as the esoteric. Camellia and Rushdi reach the esoteric, at first, through private experience. Later, their choice of social integration by playing a public role rather than consummating a conjugal relationship reinvests the potential in a cultural tradition that makes no division between private and public interest. The cultural tradition is not limited within canonized texts but incorporates what is stored in the collective unconscious, as well. If reaching knowledge, as reaching the sacred, is still incomprehensible, it is because it involves a conscious effort and an unconscious element, because it involves reason and revelation.
This holistic understanding of knowledge is antithetical to both disciplinary knowledge predetermined by social institutions and knowledge reached by individual reason. Camellia's choice contests the traditional image of the submissive woman as well as the Westernized view of the modern woman. Her emancipation is through the reinvestment of a cultural tradition that sets private participation in the public as the ultimate objective of self-verification. Her private choice is engendered in as much as it can be rightly incorporated in the social. Private and public cease to act as binaries; free will becomes an act of intuiting the predetermined or the socially adjustable. In that sense, Camellia's choice is not an escape from Rushdi, but a reunion that is transposed from private to public.
Rushdi's choice provides another alternative, one that is not restricted to binaries that create gaps between literate and illiterate. His role as interpreter of Western culture is to activate his practice as composer of verses. His exchange of verses with the boatman configures a personal achievement receiving public response, not simply expressive of individual agony. In this respect, he succeeds in bridging the gap created by conflicting cultural movements. His poetic practice shows that foreign culture is not necessarily an invading power, and tradition is not an obstacle standing in the way of innovation. If tradition alludes to the predetermined, it does not obstruct the freedom of choice: tradition and modernity overlap.
The community acting as an entity plays a major role in the third fictive episode. Its presence is perceived in several locations, be it on the coast, in cafés, or mulid celebrations. Despite the tough work undergone by the railway laborers, they while away their time by singing and joking. Recreation is the time for contemplation when they can sit and gaze at the open space. Physical exertion through hard labor brings them to the ethereal. It is a moment generated by sharing experience, surpassing it, yet without transcending it. The ethereal experience reveals the infinitude latent in finite space. Binaries between heaven and earth, the ecological and the historical are dissolved. The ecological becomes the source of human energy, an activator and reflector of individual response.
The dialogical relationship between urban and rural promotes a holistic experience, each providing a different dimension to experience. Magd al-Deen's first forced departure to the city enables him to develop new relations. In his home village, relations were restricted within a community that shares the same blood, or creed. In Alexandria, he maintains even better relations with members of other creeds. Displacements within rural or urban spaces are not meant to reveal choices between conflicting binaries. Magd al-Deen's first displacement was to stop a family vendetta; his private choice has promoted public stability. His second departure to the desert is also to fulfil professional requirements, another form of public welfare. Unlike life in the city that involves a process of urban acculturation, the desert provides an open space for self-interrogation. The void provides a distant perspective of social codes, which are habitually fixed in the foreground. The distant view incorporates difference as part of their signifying process.
Magd al-Deen and his coworker Demyan belong to different creeds but develop a staunch friendship. In the wilderness, they share their fasting and their religious feasts. In this case, difference creates even more opportunities for sharing. Moreover, difference can insinuate even profounder cultural interrogations. Demyan, a devout Christian, falls in love with Bereyka, a Muslim Bedouin shepherdess. She appears to him from the void and disappears into the wilderness like a heavenly messenger. In the cultural heritage, heavenly messengers appear to sustain the individual's conformity to the established social creed. The messenger, as signifier, in this episode obliterates binaries dividing social entities by encoded, institutionalized difference. Demyan experiences the ethereal through contact with the other. What is culturally misconceived as other is discovered as integral to the subject.
The cultural encounter in the desert is of a different nature. In the city, otherness is evoked by extraneous architectural, industrial, and technological systems that accentuate difference. In the desert, Demyan faces sectarian difference, distancing him from what he later discovers to be part of him. His agitation is due to his wavering between two religious conventions: the institutional and the preinstitutional. His dilemma is configured in the vision of St. George. The signifier, which has at one time signified solace, now appears as a blazing orb. The vision has been transformed into a sign of agitation. The Demyan-Bereyka episode counters the Rushdi-Camellia affair. Instead of arousing a public-private split, the unfulfilled relations sustain the social context. Demyan's separation from Bereyka arouses within him a greater need for Magd al-Deen's friendship.
Magd al-Deen and Demyan form a subjectivity that can be reconstructed in a wider social context. Their relationship becomes synchronized in the paradigmatic axis of a transnational community. Echoes of the call for prayer bring them together with soldiers from other colonies brought to fight by conscription in the war. Magd al-Deen leads them in prayer. He realizes what his brother Baheyy has previously failed to achieve by violence. As such, he parodies the popular hero, and posits an alternative transnational hero. The prayer ritual configures their bond, and counters the competitive spirit of their military leaders. The boundless desert can be an arena for subjective exploitation of the other, or an in-between space for a transnational culture.
The ambivalent desert is a force infusing life, or extinguishing it. Contingencies ensuing from its wild nature are of a traumatic effect. Both men's life in the wilderness becomes a ritual sharing of joy and pain, abstinence and pursuit. The quotidian becomes a revelatory experience that transforms earthly presence into an ethereal one. This is configured in their final escape from the bombs of rival Western forces staging their battle in the Egyptian desert. During their escape, fear lifts their feet off the ground, and their forward motion is almost an ascension: "They felt as though they were numbed to sleep, floating on a soft wave, soaring soundly in space, astride a flying bird" (Alexandria 388). Eventually, Magd al-Deen lives; Demyan dies in a bomb explosion on their return trip by train. Magd al-Deen undergoes a traumatic experience of loss. The scene of the explosion is transfigured into the image of St. George astride his horse. The trauma generates a telepathic experience where Magd al-Deen, the subject, and Demyan, the object, are identified. By reckoning the other as part of him, Magd al-Deen is released from sectarian limitations. The signification of St. George is multiplied now that it has become a transcultural signifier. Earlier, it referred to the symbiotic relation of solace and anguish; later, it refers to loss and regain. The reader, also, shares the telepathic experience between Magd al-Deen and Demyan at the close of Alexandria. After a long period of reduced lighting during the war, the city glows and becomes enveloped in a luminous haze. The reader reconfigures Alexandria as "a silver city, inlaid with streaks of gold" (Alexandria 404). The silver city is a visionary experience, a revelation relating the reader/subject to the narrative/object. Illuminations are not necessarily infused by traumas; the contingencies of life can produce revelatory experiences as well. The reading process is a life practice that involves the reader in a telepathic experience with the narrative voice; the telepathy is an outcome of intertextual readings of past and present.
Alternative Readings of Modernism. The proliferation of similarities within difference presents a shifting horizon of perspectives, problematizing the interrelations at the level of discourse interpretation. The historical knowledge attained through parodic reading challenges the linear reading of history. This historical knowledge comes as a sort of awakening, a leap beyond temporal history to recognize the present. The present moment becomes revolutionary only in the sense that it signals a fresh start. The historical leap counters the claims of historical determinism and its narratives of progress.
Revolutions have ceased to be the sole measure for change, as they may backslide into new forms of domination. Michel Foucault conceives of revolution "as an event whose very content is unimportant, its existence attests to a permanent potentiality that cannot be forgotten: for future history it is the guarantee of the very continuity of progress."14 Therefore, what counts is the ability to read revolution in an intertextual context to conceive the different possibilities for progress. Such a reading is a counter-strategy promoting a dialogical discourse that alleviates binary distinctions constructed to divide cultures, or define them according to historical temporalities. These are the divisions made by modernism and reverse modernism. Their semantics of progress have induced a subjectivist or predetermined reading of phenomena, giving way to abstract interpretations. Their redemptive claims have been debunked by destructive wars configuring an ethics of competition.
As against linear readings, an intertextual reading enhances the inventive ability debilitated by modernism and its reverse. The rereading of a preindustrial culture can rediscover an ethics of equality. A preindustrial culture articulates the other as part of the quotidian ritual of collective labor. A discourse based on cooperation rather than competition will promote the integration of otherness, not its subjection. Such social practices have founded a dialogical discourse that replaces the inside/outside split, by introducing possibilities for communication on the basis of equality. Members of the social group, be they laborers or poets, are able to communicate on the human or ecological levels. This moment of communication is the privileged moment that reaches the ethereal. The personal ethereal experience relies on public response, and the interchange between private and public, author and reader, postulates an ethics of equality that does not privilege just one sector with the sacred knowledge. Knowledge of the sacred is a collective practice that involves secular practice. Rereading a preindustrial culture may lead to a politically empowering knowledge of an undiscovered past.
The authorial voice is challenged by the dialogical voice of Alexandria, and becomes indistinguishable from the other proliferating voices. By enacting intertextuality, reading becomes a dialogical process that acknowledges the contradictory phenomena in the past and present. In that sense, it processes a social change that traverses temporal and spatial borders. It is also an attempt to reconstruct a contemporary cultural location in the global discourse. Alexandria becomes a collective subjectivity capable of maintaining more productive relations in the social entity. At present, the question is how to construe a dialogical discourse that negotiates a multicultural present. The question is not left open-ended. The interrogation of abstract interpretations acts as a counterforce to the narratives of modernism and its reverse, both assuming elitist positions distanced from the quotidian. The alternative reading to modernism and its reverse is a shifting horizon of perspectives that mediates the contradictions of the present. Political agency is a transversal process that crosses beyond the discourse of difference.
Notes
1. Ibrahim Abdel-Maguid was born in Karmuz, in Alexandria. He first studied at the School of Technical Studies. He worked at the Marine Arsenal (1965-74) while studying at the University of Alexandria. In 1973, he obtained his BA in Philosophy. He has published several novels and short stories. In 1996, he was presented with the AUC Naguib Mahfouz Award for his novel Al-Balda al-Ukhra (The Other Country, Engl. trans. Cairo: American University Press, 1997).
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2. Ibrahim Abdel-Maguid, No One Sleeps in Alexandria, trans. by Farouk Abdel-Wahab (Cairo: American University Press, 1999). Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. Orig. title La Ahad Yanam Fi Al-Iskandaria (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1996). Translations from Arabic are mine.
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3. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holoquist, trans. Caryl Eaverson and M. Holoquist (Austin: Texas University Press, 1981).
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4. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988); see also, Hutcheon, "Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History," Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1989) 3-32.
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5. Poetics of Postmodernism 127.
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6. "Historiographic Metafiction" 6.
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7. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) 30.
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8. Walter Benjamin has amply written on the importance of the occult in materialist studies. According to him, the experience of daily life is interwoven with the mystical. See Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, trans. Edmund Jephcot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) 314-36.
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9. I find the author's ambivalent role in Alexandria quite similar to Benjamin's concept of the historian as the Angel of History. The historian reconciles the archaic and the modern. He is the messenger who stands for the dialectics of redemption from destruction. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). See also Gershom Scholem, "Walter Benjamin and His Angel," trans. Werner Dann Lauser, in On Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge: MIT, 1988) 51-89.
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10. The statue referred to is that of Mohammed Ali, erected in al-Manshiyya, one of Alexandria's main squares. He is the founder of the late monarchy in Egypt. Some regard him as a veteran politician, the founder of modern Egypt; others consider him as an Albanian impostor, who came to power by fraud.
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11. "The Sacred," Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1985) 224.
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12. "The Sacred" 240.
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13. "The Sacred" 240.
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14. Language and Counter-Memory Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977) 146.
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