That Smell and Notes From Prison

by Sonallah Ibrahim

Read an article, “The Dialectic of Nature.” Planets in motion, the earth cooling, establishing the conditions of life, the first cell, the vertebrates, mankind, mankind in its most advanced stage, the extinction of the earth (its cooling, its collapse into the sun), the persistence of matter in alternate forms in an infinite universe. Subject for a great novel.

  Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse has opened up a new world for me. . . . Her idea of art seems to be the same as that given in her novel by the painter: “One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.” This is what Woolf does in the novel, handling everything that is simple, ordinary, quotidian. She writes by magic, elegantly and simply, without artifice: “But he did not ask them anything. He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it; but he said nothing.”

  Anything that takes us beyond the limits of the conventional novel, now exhausted, is worth doing. I believe writing, the practice itself, will reveal the ingredients of experimentation, will be the incarnation of its content.

  How shall I write? I don’t think I have to write about any given topic — that is, sit down to write it and find a suitable form. Not at all. My feelings are set in motion by an idea, an experience, a memory, a style, a form, and they demand release. In releasing them, they interact with my rational mind, which determines their form and content.

  Depths of the sea: a book by William Beebe, A Half Mile Down — “At a depth of eighteen meters, red light vanishes. Yellow vanishes at one hundred. Two hundred and forty meters down, green and blue also vanish from the spectrum, giving way to a deep blackish blue. Between 520 and 580 meters, we were enclosed in utter blackness.” A battle in the deep dark waters between a whale . . . and a nine-meter squid. With its snaky, suckered tentacles it measures 15 meters. A strange world, where darkness reigns, unsafe, unchanging, ice-cold, almost without oxygen. But there is life. About the Japanese shrimp, Dr. Noginama says that the act of insemination occurs between midnight and eight in the morning on mild and calm summer nights, in fresh water: “The male pursues the female . . . gripping her as she tries to flee him . . . and tears off her outer shell. He then embraces the naked female and she takes his organ of reproduction, brutally and coarsely, inside her, then rips it off . . . so that he remains in a state of impotency until a new organ takes the place of the old.”

  The rest of Yevtushenko’s article in L’Express:

  — Prose is far less tractable than poetry. A novel can’t be written in a few days, nor read aloud to the public.

  — Realism is the greatest ism of art. But realism, as I understand it, can assume hundreds if not thousands of different forms. . . . Each work that moves the spirit of man, whether or not it represents houses, people, and trees, I take to be a work of realism.

  — Once a tired woman worker came up to me and said, “Just write the truth, son, just the truth. . . . Look for the truth in yourself and take it to the people. Look for the truth in the people and store it within yourself.”

  November

  Eliot’s “objective correlative”: he means an image through which the poet articulates his emotion, so that the image provokes a similar emotion in the reader. This emotion is not a feeling but rather the transformation of feeling into an image, for poetry is not an expression of feelings but rather an escape from them. It is the poet’s effort to transform his personal pains into something strange and fertile, something universal that accords with a general rather than selfish interest.

  Can I unify the personal with the objective in my writing? Set off in three directions at the same time: subject, style, and form.

  My father taught me to put no store in anything whose only justification was custom. I learned from him that I must think about everything for myself, on my own terms.

  Naguib Mahfouz’s style in The Search is the same style I used last year in my own writing. It’s also derived from Joyce and Woolf. Mahfouz’s novel, of which only four parts have so far appeared, will be the beginning of the modern Egyptian novel.

  December

  “I projected The Battleship Potemkin as a consecutive series of events, a dramatic totality. The secret of the work’s unity lies in my having arranged the events according to the laws of tragedy, a classical tragedy in five acts. I divided the events of the film into five acts and in each act treated specific events, whose meaning was dependent on the events that preceded and followed them, with the stipulation that each shot add something new to what came before. . . . Each shot has a particular meaning and the general idea of the film does not lie in the film itself, but is rather created by the spectator through his tracking of the events, which were selected from among the facts of the historical narrative.” “A Director’s Thoughts,” Sergei Eisenstein.

  Friday, December 20, 1963. How wonderful suddenly to hear a word of praise directed at something of yours which no one else found value in. A. said something that’s turned my head; I don’t know what to say or to think. It’s a beautiful thing to have someone call you a kind of genius, or to say that you will make something truly new. But is it true? I’ve been searching for the new, which is why I was so irritated to discover Naguib Mahfouz using stream-of-consciousness in The Search, just as I had. . . .Well then, will I repeat him? . . . Must look for something new. . . . I have just realized that stream-of-consciousness, in the novel and in the short story, is on the march all over the world, including Egypt. And I’ve become irritated by all those ready-made phrases, now turned into fossils: He walked, he went, he said. Can our country innovate in the novel on a world scale?

  A.’s words to the effect that man had discovered the scientific method and used it in his life, and that the method must be reflected in his literature.

  Realism in art and literature was a new vision of the world following the transformation of material, social, and political conditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, specifically the industrial revolution. The writer no longer wrote to save mankind from its boredom, nor to help them pass the time. He aimed his discoveries at the darkness surrounding his field of vision. He was enriched by new movements in morality and politics, which left their marks on literary and artistic groups: partisan literature and realism → psychological realism, historical realism, social realism, materialist realism, socialist realism, revolutionary realism.

  All these schools represented a persistent attempt to reach reality, as well as a quest for new forms. Surrealism was not a mode of pessimism nor escapism, as frivolous people suppose. It was another attempt, motivated by the nightmare of World War I, to discover reality, which had abruptly demonstrated the impotence of previous schools to articulate and uncover it. Socialist realism played this same role in the age of science. But it failed due to intellectual stagnation, Leftism, and an “unscientific” approach to reality (its neglect of contradictions, its gaudy picture-painting, and its commitment to a style and technique that were out-of-date). Scientific socialism is a science, not a method. There is no commitment. There is only the issue of the scientific method. . . . Art is opposed to daily politics. It takes a long, comprehensive view. Trial and error. It is not a tool, but open to all newness. Lenin and the freedom of the imagination.

  Life will have no meaning unless we stop at once and look at it and see all the things we have been blind to . . . unless we look at ev
erything that lies below the surface, unless our curiosity is fired by the miracle of the everyday.

  Toward a new movement in the novel and the short story. Why is there a crisis? We don’t have a long history in this art form. Our reality has changed in bewildering fashion; it’s no longer possible to represent this reality using the old methods. The development of this art form cannot happen in Egypt as it happened in Europe. We need a true leap forward.

  “The directors of the New Wave face up to the absence of conventional drama. They put characters on display, but do not attempt to have them make sense. Their films are entirely free of the structure of conventional drama. So long as the camera is no longer constrained to tell a continuous story with beginning, middle, and end, it can represent what it sees, just as in life. For life is not orderly, its unity is incomprehensible, its one continuity is its principle character, the axis of life and its events.” Alexandre Astruc in Le Monde, August 12, 1959.

  “Why Neorealism Failed,” Eric Rhode, translated by Ata’ al-Naqqash for al-Katib, April 1963: Moravia believes neorealism ended because it fulfilled its task, which was “to respond to the pressing need, after the war, to account for every kind of deficiency brought about by defeat and national disaster.” Neorealism offered more than merely spiritual succor. It was an attempt once again to go back to the beginning: What is man? What are his rights and responsibilities?

  — “The reality buried under myths flowered once again. Cinema remade the world. Here was a tree, an old man, a house, a man eating, a man sleeping, a man screaming.” Cesar Zavattini.

  — Principles of the movement:

  1) An end to naïve clichés.

  2) An end to imaginary and grotesque fabrications.

  3) An end to historical narratives and the adaptations of novels and stories into films.

  4) An end to the rhetoric that represented Italians in general as on fire with the same noble sentiments . . . making all of them equally aware of all the problems of life.

  — Zola defined the naturalist writer: “His great concern is to gather material and to find out what he can do in this world he wishes to describe. When this material is collected, the novel will spontaneously find its form. The writer has only to gather the facts and put them into a realistic frame. The oddities of the story must not claim his attention. On the contrary, the more the narrative is shared and universal, the better. . . .”

  — Umberto D is the closest Zavattini has come to his ideal of inserting 90 consecutive minutes from the life of man into a film. . . . Here we are confronted with a paradox of neorealist film, which presents, at moments, a reality broken off from life and therefore as meaningless as the realism of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur. But this should not surprise us, because it is the logical development of Zola’s idea of collecting the facts and then seeing what significance or importance they bear in and of themselves.

  — Georg Lukacs says of Zola: “Perhaps no one has been able to paint so precisely and suggestively the exterior trappings of modern life. But merely the exterior trappings. . . . These constitute the enormous backdrop in front of which minuscule people come and go, acting out with random gestures their accidental lives. Zola was unable to discern what the great realists such as Balzac, Tolstoy, or Dickens, had achieved by representing social institutions as human relations, and social phenomena as composed of these relations. . . .”

  — Description and analysis is substituted for epic situations and plots.

  For realism, as for Aristotle, the characteristic procedure of art is its method of imitating an action.

  Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Van Wyck Brooks (Viking).

  — “I believe that it is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated.” Pasternak.

  — “I always feel it’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.” Eliot.

  On Le Nouveau Roman

  — “Only through writing can the writer uncover new artistic values.” Alain Robbe-Grillet.

  — “The writer must distance himself from visible, known, and studied reality. He must focus on the interior world that is strange to him.” Nathalie Sarraute.

  “He would write a book when he got through with this. But only about the things he knew, truly, and about what he knew. I will have to be a much better writer than I am now to handle them he thought. The things he had come to know in this war were not so simple.” Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  1964

  January

  Naguib Mahfouz in al-Katib: “When the novel was interested in life as such, the traditional style was the most appropriate. Human character appeared in all its details. When life becomes a problem, the human being cannot be a particular person but simply a human being. . . . Details vanish, along with narrative, and dialogue dominates all the other aspects. . . . When man stands face-to-face with his destiny, details lose their value.”

  The only essential commitment of art is to the truth.

  Sex and Morality in the United States, Time Magazine:

  — Hemingway’s phrase has become a moral law: “What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

  — It is part and symptom of an era in which morals are deemed private and relative. Pleasure is more like a constitutional right than a privilege, and self-denial is increasingly seen as foolish rather than virtuous.

  — The days of its bold talk of sexual freedom long over, Communism has now become the most powerful force for Puritanism in the world.

  — Radcliffe girls believe that necking is dirty because it provokes desire without satisfying it. Intercourse is therefore more virtuous.

  — The new sexual freedom in the United States does not necessarily set people free. . . . The great new sin today is no longer giving in to desire, but not giving into it fully and successfully. While enjoyment of sex has increased for many, the competitive mania to prove oneself as a functioning sexual machine makes many others feel neurotically guilty, and therefore impotent or sexually frigid.

  Sartre’s article on the Soviet film Ivan’s Childhood, in Les Lettres Françaises, the literary magazine of the French Communist Party: “The better socialist realist productions have, in spite of everything, always given us complex, nuanced heroes; they have exalted their merits while taking care to underline certain of their weaknesses. In truth, the problem is not one of measuring out the vices and virtues of the hero but one of putting heroism itself into discussion. Not to deny it but to understand it.”

  March

  March 7, I’ve been trying for two days to start writing again. I thought I had figured out what it was really about and how I would write it. But when I start writing I become frightened. Early yesterday I cried because I couldn’t go on for more than two pages. I felt like I’d lost something. I hadn’t thought I would write at night, but then I felt a strong urge and had a clear mind — but with the same result.

  “. . . I read it and was really upset, because it taught me the story of mom and dad, and you and me. It taught me how much effort it cost dad before he could take me away from my mother, and how much worry we caused him. He could have lived in a nice place if we had never existed. But thank God he did keep at it until he could take me away from my mother’s family. I would have been so miserable if I lived with her. It also taught me what Mama Aisha did to us, and a lot of other stuff I hadn’t known before. You’re the one w
ho knows everything. I liked the story because you took it from real life. I mean there’s not too much fantasy in it. I also liked your style and your way of putting things. It’s not the normal way. There’s something a little strange about it and this was the best thing in your story — your way of putting things. But how did you remember everything so exactly?

  “I hope you’ll forget the bad stuff, especially about Mama Aisha. She’s changed a lot, to the point where now you can’t believe the bad things she did. She’s the one who insisted on visiting you in Qanatir prison, both times, and she always asks about you. So I hope you’ll forget the rest. As for everything else. . . .” From my sister’s letter.

  The flash-forward, to which Raauf has assigned great importance: It is one element in our new vision of reality. An example from Port Saeed: A. R. is fighting courageously and at the same time we cut to see him ten years later in different conditions. Another example, from the correction of man in prison: the torture reaches a certain level, then stops; five years later, in an ordinary setting, he talks forcibly, calmly, confidently, and from a place of power; but if the torture had been one tick more severe, his fate would have been completely different. In a tragedy of Djamila Bouhired, she is re-imprisoned after liberation. Knowledge of this at the beginning lends strength.*******

  From Nouvelle Critique, December 1962, Claude Prévost. “The Battle for Moscow, sixteen years after,” on Aleksandr Bek’s two novels Volokolamsk Highway, published in 1944, and Several Days, published in 1960.

  — If the critic’s theory of “an absence of conflict” did harm to the theater, it also harmed the novel, pushing it to refuse a treatment of detail, which critics supposed would lead to naturalism. . . . (Realism is the organization of detail, which must not be neglected or bypassed, but rather clarified in general. To neglect details, with the excuse that they are sordid, is anti-realist. In war, this neglect becomes a betrayal of realism, for the basis of war is sordidness.)