Space and the colonial encounter in Lawrence Durrell, Out el-Kouloub and Naguib Mahfouz.

Abstract

This study is an attempt to see how colonial and postcolonial discourses produce the social fabric of mid-twentieth-century Egypt. By examining city space in novels of the period this study aims to explore how colonial and postcolonial discourses articulate everyday practices. The theoretical thesis, derived from Henri Lefebvre's insights into the production of space, is that attention to everyday spaces can reveal obscured social relationships. In three chapters on three writers prominent in British colonial, Egyptian Francophone and Egyptian Arabic literary circles, I explore how space reveals the colonial-colonized encounter. Chapter One, "The Decay of Order: Late Colonial Space in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet" (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea, published 1957-60) argues that the narrative depends on colonial spaces constructed according to ordering representations and colonized spaces constructed according to the dynamic interplay of forces. Chapter Two, "The Harem and the Sea: Women's Space in Out el-Kouloub's Le Coffret hindou, Ramza and Hefnaoui le Magnifique," (texts published 1951-61) examines how Out el-Kouloub, an important but neglected member of Egypt's once-thriving Francophone community, constructs gendered spaces to articulate a sophisticated critique of both traditional and Western affective practices. Chapter Three, "Space and the Malaise of the City in Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley, Cairo Trilogy and Miramar," argues that close attention to Mahfouz's spaces allows one to see the roles money, ideology, religion and custom play in producing Egyptian "urban malaise.". It emerges from the analysis that colonial and postcolonial literary spaces employ different ordering schemes which channel practice differently. The major argument of the study is, therefore, that the disjunction between different spaces leads to debacle as practices corresponding to one space unwittingly exceed the limits of another. The significance of this study, beyond proposing revisionary readings of Durrell and Out el-Kouloub and providing a new perspective on Mahfouzian "urban malaise," lies in the light it sheds on how literary spaces reveal the deployment of cultural codes. The potential for decentered space to reveal postcolonial relational discourses as opposed to reaffirming an imperious ordering of privileged subjectivity makes space an increasingly useful tool in cultural critique.