That Smell and Notes From Prison Read Free Page A

readers, made strange and new after a detour through Cairo?
Ibrahim takes other tips from Hemingway. The technique of italicized flashback,
used several times in That Smell , is borrowed from
Hemingway’s short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” But what appears to have
struck Ibrahim most about Hemingway is the American writer’s commitment to the
quotidian, to the truth of what he sees and hears. Ibrahim proves that this
style, unbuttressed by commentary, could make its own revolutionary statement.
(Equally interesting, of course, is what Ibrahim doesn’t take from Hemingway:
macho posturing is not in his narrator’s repertoire.)
    The third central concern of these notebooks is with the varieties
of realism. This was a live issue in Egyptian literary circles at the time.
Socialist realism was a dominant mode of the previous decade, most notably in
Abd al-Rahman al-Sharaqwi’s The Earth (1952), a
novel of class conflict in a village of the Nile Delta. The
Earth was celebrated by proponents of engagé literature and spawned a host of imitators. But by the early sixties, in
the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, socialist realism was considered by many,
even on the left, as the house style of Stalinism. Another strain of realism,
what we might call classical realism, culminated in the novels of Naguib
Mahfouz. His suite of historical fictions, The Cairo Trilogy ,is a
minute and comprehensive depiction of Egyptian life in the first half of the
twentieth century, refracted through the prism of a well-to-do family. But the
conventions of classical realism, which presume a relatively stable class system
to anchor its ambitious survey of social life, were unable to represent the
shifts brought about by Nasser’s reforms. The explosion of a lower middle-class
population, largely employed by the expansionist state, and the resultant
consumer society with its characteristic entertainments (movies, television,
popular clubs) and objects of desire (refrigerators, electronics, suits), proved
too much new material to squeeze into the strictures of Mahfouzian technique. In
order for realism to remain realistic — this is Ibrahim’s insight — it would
have to become experimental.
    In this sense, Notes from Prison can be
read as a late episode in the debate between Realism and Modernism among
intellectuals such as Georg Lukács, Berthold Brecht, and Walter Benjamin during
the 1930s and ’40s — the great age of speculation about the relationship between
politics and literature. Those debates were still alive in the pages of La Nouvelle Critique , albeit in simplified form, and
both Lukács and Brecht make appearances in Ibrahim’s reading diary. For these
writers the chief question was how to create a modern art form that would, in
Marx’s words, force mankind “to face with sober senses the real conditions of
their lives and their relations with fellow men” — with the ambition,
ultimately, to transform those conditions. If this goal now seems grandiose,
that speaks to the reduced place literature holds in our own life rather than a
flaw in the ambition. Ibrahim’s response to this question, as evidenced by the Notes and his novel, was to focus on the terrain
of the everyday. His fiction suggests that it is within the workday routine of
gossip, casual consumption, and bodily experience — washing, eating, sex — that
politics are most immediately felt and known. This is true even or especially
when what one feels most of all is the absence of politics. It is his concern
for the quotidian that seems to explain Ibrahim’s notes on the films of Italian
Neo-Realism and cinema verité. And indeed the narrator of That Smell acts as a kind of camera, recording the life around him
while abstaining from comment.
    Except in a few cases, Ibrahim did not have access to the texts
mentioned in the Notes in the original language, or
even in translation. He did not read the novels or poems, and did not see the
films that he