Naguib Mahfouz’s Miramar. A Mediterranean Saga

Abstract

From the numerous literary productions of Naguib Mahfouz, is Miramar (1967). The novel tackles four main characters with different socio-political and economic backgrounds put together in an inn and left to deal with each other. Mahfouz does not place his narrative voice between the character and the reader, but rather, allows the characters to shock and subvert. The reader does not see a single reality the author presents but how reality appears to each character. There is a plurality of consciousness, each character with his own world, which resembles what Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and develops as a ‘polyphony.’ The dialogue has no fixed position or subjects; its analysis emphasizes the combination of existing statements or speech genres that construct a text, which are layers of ideologies and reflections. It presents a sample of a Mediterranean city with its past and present, the old and the young, the rich and the poor, and the educated and the uneducated, which are orchestrated in one musical symphony called Miramar. Every character represents an instrument with its distinctive voice, and all play together to form a symphony of a city’s saga. The paper analyzes Mahfouz’s Miramar, as a Polyphonous novel set in Alexandria in a raging time of Egyptian history. in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony.