The Feeling of Estrangement: a Pervasive Preoccupation in Modern Fiction

British Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 10 April 2015, Vol. 13 (1)

The Feeling of Estrangement: A Pervasive Preoccupation in Modern Fiction

Prof. Thafer Y. Assaraira English Dept. Mutah University, Jordan

Abstract: This paper argues that the feeling of estrangement is a pervasive preoccupation in modern fiction and the permanent estrangement of the fictional characters, reflecting the state of contemporary man, reveals symptoms of emptiness, desertion, and unrelatedness to the modern world. The novels selected for this study reveal characters, who are afflicted by the incapacity to express their innermost feelings, and who have become estranged from family members, society, and from the world around them. These characters are trapped in the abyss of their estrangement, unable to experience any serious companionship in the world. These novels describe a world where the suffering imposed by estrangement is unrelieved by the possibility of human idealism and individual struggle. Overwhelmed by their total feeling of estrangement, the protagonists are left in a "living-dead" state.

Introduction “There exists a feeling of estrangement in modern man which has considerably increased during the last hundred years," Frederick Heineman writes in Existentialism and The Modern Predicament (9). This paper argues that the feeling of estrangement is a pervasive preoccupation in modern fiction and the permanent estrangement of the fictional characters, reflecting the state of contemporary man, reveals symptoms of emptiness, desertion, and unrelatedness to the modern world. For this study, I have selected some representative novels by William Faulkner, Albert Camus, and Naguib Mahfouz, whose characters are afflicted by the incapacity to express their innermost feelings, and who have become estranged from family members, society, and from the world around them, to live in their own worlds. In fact, their characters are trapped in the abyss of their estrangement, unable to experience any serious companionship in the world. One reason behind the three authors' constant and extensive writing on estrangement has to do with the major events that have taken place in the twentieth century. No doubt that Faulkner, Camus, and Mahfouz witnessed, at least, the horrors of WWI and WWII that caused changes not only in political structures and power relationships, but also in familial, societal, psychological, and moral values. The two World Wars have presented an immediate threat to the security and comfort of human lives. Even if people are not personally involved and perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles away from wars, they have to face the negative effects and horrors that they bring—effects such as: insecurity, death, discomfort, estrangement, loneliness, isolation, and solitude. As with many writers who have experienced the negative effects of these events on the moral, social, political, and religious values of mankind, Faulkner, Camus, and Mahfouz saw all of the pain and suffering that wars have brought; this, in turn, has influenced their understanding of modern life. Estrangement is one of the terrible consequences that wars have brought into the lives of individuals. Another reason for the creation of estrangement in the modern world has to do with the dictatorial governments that Mahfouz and Camus lived under. The Arab world has experienced periods of dictatorship, whereby members of society could not publicly express their political, as well as social and religious views. The conditions under which Mahfouz and Camus lived made them aware of the estrangement that such restrictive dictatorship produced. Dictatorship created forms of social, familial, political, intellectual, and religious estrangement. Because people, particularly intellectuals like Mahfouz, were not allowed to express their political views in public, they kept their critical views to themselves and suffered isolation and estrangement as expressed in novels such as Adrift on the Nile and Miramar. Mahfouz had seen the estranged and alienated men he depicted in these novels, and he wished to convey

British Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 11 April 2015, Vol. 13 (1) his feelings to others by creating a straightforward picture of estrangement. In these two novels Mahfouz uses concrete examples of his own country, Egypt, in order to make generalizations about the condition of mankind. In Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, Mahfouz's Adrift on the Nile and Miramar, and in Camus' The Stranger and The Plague, estrangement is manifest in form as well as content. It is also accentuated and visualized through the first person narrator, interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness techniques. Setting also plays a vital role in keeping the characters in their small worlds and away from any outside contact. Here I assume that Mahfouz had Faulkner in mind when he was writing Miramar, because there are clear, strong, and striking parallels between this novel and several of Faulkner’s, especially The Sound and the Fury, in structure, technique, and theme. In both novels, we enter the minds of four major characters to see how they view things, and how their views of things differ from one another. The two novels revolve around a heroine, Caddy in The Sound and The Fury and Zohra in Miramar; the reader has no direct view of them, but we learn almost everything about them through the other major characters in the novels. In addition, Mahfouz, like Camus, has taken advantage of the natural elements to represent estrangement. Rain, snow, storm, and wind force the characters to stay in the pension and cut them off from any outside contact. The bad weather also leaves Miramar, the boarding house, separated from the rest of the world. Although in Miramar we encounter characters who live together in a very limited space, a pension, they live in complete estrangement and solitude. To delineate this fact, Mahfouz places his characters in different rooms, each of which has its unique color to symbolize that the person occupying it lives in his own world, a world entirely different from his or her neighbors'. Most of the characters have come to Miramar looking for companionship, friendship, and communication. At the end of the novel, however, we realize that they have failed to attain what they have been looking for. Miramar narrates the story of Zohra Salama, a young, beautiful, intelligent peasant girl who flees to Alexandria, after her father's death, to avoid her grandfather's decision to marry her off to an old man, who needed her more as a nurse than a wife. She takes a job as a maid at Miramar, a pension where her father, along with Zohra, used to come. In her stay at Miramar, Zohra strives for friendship, communication, and understanding. Her physical beauty, kindness, personality, and intellectuality excite the residents of the pension, none of whom loves her spiritually, except Amer Wagdi who regards her as his daughter. The pattern of frustration, disappointment, betrayal, and ridicule she experiences in Miramar forces her to leave it. To present Zohra's story, Mahfouz, in a manner resembling Faulkner's narrative methods, detaches himself from the narration and uses his characters to tell the events. It is told from the points of view of four fictional characters: Amer Wagdi (a retired journalist who has come to Miramar after he has been fired from his job), Hosni Allam (who has come to Miramar because of his dissatisfaction with the life style of the bourgeoisie class that he now belongs to), Mansour Bahi (a coward who informed the police about the political stands of his friends), and Sarhan El-Boheiri (who loves no one but money). Amer Wagdi also narrates the fifth section of the novel. "Some," Nabil Rhageb comments, "might think that a story told four times by four consecutive characters will surely arouse the boredom of the reader because the novelist will have nothing new to add in each narrative. Events, situations, and characters are the same. However, this belief is not true when the story [like Miramar's] is viewed from different angles. Rhythms also change from one character to another... " (337). Miramar, in fact, stands for an exile for the major characters, none of whom is really from Alexandria. It consists of seven rooms where each room is of a different color. Amer Wagdi, the narrator of section one, is a retired liberal journalist who comes to the pension --exile-- in Alexandria to spend the rest of his life. He has lived a lonely life and now he has lost his job because of his old age. Although he has worked for many years for an Egyptian newspaper, he has been fired without a word of thanks to him. He is without a wife or children because he has maintained a determined stand against marriage. When answering the question of Mariana, the owner of Miramar, about his personal life, he says, "No wife, no

British Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 12 April 2015, Vol. 13 (1) family. And I've retired .... I'm finished" (2). Sabri Hafez writes, "the tragedy in this novel is not a tragedy of an individual; rather, it is the tragedy of social slices that pour into one course" (l04). Destroyed by his estrangement, Wagdi comes to Miramar hoping to find some type of social companionship after the lodgers have occupied the seven rooms of Miramar. He thinks, "Mariana was very happy. My heart [Wagdi's], hungry for contact, warmed to the new arrivals" (21). In this pension, however, he chooses an isolated room in the comer, "away from the sea front on the far side" (3), while the other younger lodgers, Hosni Allam, Sarhan EI-Boheiri, and Mansour Bahi, stay in the rooms overlooking the sea front. Although the three young men live in neighboring rooms, they remain estranged to one another. Every person lives in his own room, in his small world, without any contact with the outside world. The only person whom Wagdi communicates with is Zohra, who regards him as her father because of his wisdom and old age. Wagdi himself reminds Zohra of her estrangement in an important scene that takes place between Zohra and Tolba Beh Marzouq, a corrupt politician who was "under-secretary of State for the Ministry of Mortmain Endowments and a great landowner" (11). When Zohra enters Tolba's room, he is totally naked; he begins teasing her but she gets upset and screams. Wagdi comes and addresses Zohra saying, "Calm down, Zohra. He's an old man, older than your father... Poor Zohra, how sorry I am for you. Now I know how lonely you must be" (20). He goes on to warn her about Mariana and other people. He says, "This pension is no place for you; and Mariana, your protectress, would have no qualms at eating you up on the first available occasion" (20). Though he attains friendship, companionship, and communication with Zohra, he advises her to leave the pension because the people she is dealing with are not good. In Miramar Wagdi regards himself as "almost a prisoner in my house"(7). In this house, Mariana confirms the fact of estrangement by playing foreign songs instead of Arabic ones. She knows that the residents do not understand the songs being played, but she continues playing them. As Amer Wagdi gets bored with his solitude and estrangement, he wishes that "someone should invent a machine that would hold conversations with lonely people"(8). Because communication with people is unattainable, Wagdi expresses his companionship with natural sources: "I was all by myself, with nothing to keep me company but the howling of the wind"(127). To escape the boredom and depression that estrangement finally causes him, Wagdi, in the final section of the novel, tells Zohra (who finds him by himself and asks, "Why do you sit there alone?") that "I wish I could kill myself "(127). He prefers death to being in estrangement and solitude. This suggests that for one trapped as Wagdi is, unable to find either a form which can adequately contain companionship or communication to give his existence a meaning, death, in order to preserve the integrity of feeling, may be preferable to a life which offers no such possibility. Death is not, in these circumstances, a solution, but a statement that—for the dead one-- solution was impossible. In the section narrated by Wagdi we also learn about the estrangement of both Mariana and Tolba. Mariana is a stranger with Athenian roots but was born in Alexandria. She began work at Miramar in 1925, after her first husband, an English captain, was killed in the Egyptian Revolution in 1919, and after her second husband had committed suicide because of bankruptcy. In her sixties now, Mariana is left alone without husband or children. All she has is the pension. Even though Tolba loved her about thirty years before, he does not love her any more. Tolba is now another estranged and isolated person, left with nothing. He has been left alone because his only daughter has married her cousin and has gone to Kuwait, and his property has been taken by the government. In his estrangement and depression, he thinks, The Americans should have taken control of the whole world, when they had the secret of the atom bomb all to themselves. Their pussyfooting was a terrible mistake ( 13). Finally, his estrangement and solitude lead him to madness. Madness can be seen as the supreme isolator, and Tolba's madness is, at least, a symbol of that estrangement from human contact from which most of the characters suffer.

British Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 13 April 2015, Vol. 13 (1)

Hosni Allam, the narrator of the second section of the novel, lives an alienated world of his own. He has come all the way from Tanta to Miramar in Alexandria to escape the life-style of the high class that his uncle has been teaching him. Alienated by his parents, Allam has lived with his uncle since he was a young boy; because of his high social class status, he could not establish friendship with his classmates; he remained alone. Because of his dissatisfaction with his situation, he hated school and was unable to get a degree although he had tried many areas of study. To break his isolation, he tried to bond with a woman, his relative, but she rejected his marriage proposal. Burdened by devastating expectations, the young man gradually begins to retreat from his social class. Finally, he develops an obsession with sex hoping to find someone who would break his estrangement. Thus we see him accompanying a number of prostitutes one after another, hut he never commits himself to marriage with any woman. However, his attempts are doomed to failure. He thought Zohra would fall in love with him at first sight, but she ignores him. At the end of the novel we realize that he makes no friendship with anyone in the pension but Mariana, who respects him for his money. The novel's third narrator, Mansour Bahi, a cowardly intellectual from Cairo who once worked for the Alexandria Broadcasting Service, is another estranged person. The beginning of this section conveys Bahi's sense of isolation and estrangement. He says, "So I'm to stay prisoner here in Alexandria, to spend the rest of my life trying to justify myself" (63). Through interior monologue and stream-of- consciousness, we realize that Bahi, like other Mahfouzian characters, never commits himself to marriage. When asked by Mariana about his marriage plans, he says, "I haven't thought about it yet. Not now anyway" (64). The only woman he had fallen in love with was Dorriya whom he met when he was studying at Cairo University. Unfortunately, Doriyya was in love with Fawzi, an assistant professor in the economics department. In Miramar he hears the news that his close friends, including Fawzi, have been caught and put in prison for their political stands. After hearing the news he visits Dorriya, Fawzi's wife now, who assures him that the news is right, and now she is left alone. Since all of his friends are imprisoned, he too is left alone. When Fawzi was sent to prison, Bahi established a love relationship with her. As the relationship between Dorriya and Bahi developed, Dorriya filed for divorce from Fawzi. When she obtained her divorce, he left her alone, deserted, and depressed. She says, "you [Bahi] make me feel so unwanted - so hopelessly alone" (86). When she asks for a reason for his false love, he answers, "To tell the truth, I hate myself. Never get too close to a man who hates himself" (87). Sarhan El-Boheiri, "the deputy head accountant at the Alexandria Textile Mills (21)", is the narrator of section four. He describes Zohra, calling her, "a peasant girl, away from home, alien in that Pension, like a. faithful dog astray, looking for its master" (95). His love for Zohra, like his past love for Saffeya, was not a faithful one. His desire was to own her beautiful body; he finally deceives her. Once he has what he needs (sex), Sarhan soon deserts her to marry Alliya whose salary attracted his attention most. Along with his friend Ali, he makes plans to steal some products of the company he works for to sell on the black market. This materialistic thinking leads him to establish a good friendship with Mansour Bahi. On the same basis, we also see him establishing a relationship with Hosni Allam. His materialistic approach creates a barrier, a shelter which helps him to maintain his distance from others. After being caught, Ali admits to the police that Sarhan is his partner. When he hears the news, Sarhan finally commits suicide; his "body was found on the road to the Palma" (36). Because every character lives in his own world, not knowing that Sarhan has committed suicide, the lodgers believe that he has been murdered. Therefore, they start suspecting one another; they suspected "his first fiancee, Hosni Allam, Mansour Bahi, [and] Mahmoud Abu EI Abbas." It is not until the final chapter that the residents realize that he killed himself out of his guilt for what he did. In brief, money becomes emblematic of his estrangement. In the final section of the novel, told by Wagdi, Zohra decides to leave the pension because the people in Miramar do not respect her; she does not find security, comfort, and companionship. Without

British Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 14 April 2015, Vol. 13 (1) people she feels estranged and hopeless. Tired of estrangement, she finds no reason to continue work at Miramar. The stories of Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury and Light in August, Mahfouz's Miramar and Adrift on the Nile, and Camus' The Stranger and The Plague suggest the ways in which the three authors deal with estrangement. In presenting alienated characters, the three authors converge at four major points: the lack of mutual love between the lover and the beloved, the lack of communication among individuals although companionship is necessary to overcome the absurdity of the modern universe, the feeling of strangeness in the world the characters find themselves in, and the use of natural elements to develop estrangement further. The three authors describe a world where the suffering imposed by estrangement is unrelieved by the possibility of human idealism and individual struggle. They write of man's estrangement with an understanding that is as compassionate as it is despairing. They speak for people who, in their trapped- inwardness lack mutual love—this fact is present in Miramar, Adrift on the Nile, The Stranger, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August. At the heart of love's mystery is the fact that love is a private rather than a mutual experience. The lover, instead of breaking out of his estrangement and sharing his experiences with the beloved, creates a charged, illusory world of his own --an intense and strange world. In Miramar, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August the authors further emphasize the absolute lack of love between males and females. Most of the male characters in Miramar, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and The Stranger are interested only in sexual conquest. In some instances, the authors assert that love is determined by one person only. What each prisoner in the love circle strives for is what every lover ultimately seeks --an object upon which one can vent the repressed feelings of a lifetime of estrangement. In other instances, the three authors emphasize the essential selfishness of the lover. They reveal how the lover, totally absorbed in the quest for self-satisfaction, is narcissistic in the extreme, which is shown to be an unnatural and destructive attitude. For instance, when we encounter Meursault, Sarhan, and Joe Christmas, pitiful figures in the novels, they are living alone. They care nothing for the love of others. Reared in motherless homes, the characters have no idea what might be expected of them in a romantic relationship. Faulkner's Caddy, Camus' Marie, and Mahfouz's Zohra and Nur have the restlessness and imagination to wish to break free from the constrictive prison of ego and connect with another person. However, their male counterparts have no intention of being involved in a serious relationship. In fact, the authors stress the point that the fictional characters lack mutual love, but most of them play along in the game and pretend that they in fact have it. Meursault, most lodgers of Miramar, and Caddy's lovers are interested only in satisfying their physical appetites. For some of the men it is better to bond with women than it is to go to the houses of prostitution. It is important to note that Meursault, most characters of Miramar, and most characters of As I Lay Dying and Light in August have absolutely no intentions of falling in love. Their relationships with women can be expressed in terms of a game. Their determination not to fall in love is a determination not to get themselves involved with another human being. Although Zohra looks for friendship, companionship, love, and communication, she unfortunately is betrayed and finally left alone. Critic Fuad Dowara concludes, "poor Zohra … She has no one ... Everybody left her, or she left them when she discovered their treachery, corruption, or ineptness" (135). In fact, the pension lodgers, particularly Hosni, Mansour, Tolba and Sarhan, perceive her "as an object, as an attractive body, to seduce, or to capture or to sexually subdue.... As Mahfouz describes in detail, their response is to rape her with their eyes or thoughts (only Hosni sexually attacks her and is forcefully repelled)" (Gordon, 60). She demands that everyone, including the five males who reside in Miramar, respect her as a person, not as an object. Le Gassick states that "she is, after all, eagerly pursued by each of the young men who are representative of the nation's differing factions and classes, and yet she avoids permanent involvement with all" (153).

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At the very beginning, she has run away from her village and family because her "grandfather wanted to marry her to an old man, who probably needed her as a nurse" (16). In the conversation between Zohra and her sister and brother-in-law, who have come to the pension to convince Zohra to go back to their village, she stands against such an arranged marriage, a marriage that lacks love. 'You shamed us,' her sister cut in 'all over Zayediyya. 'It's none of any body's business,' said Zohra bitterly. 'If only your grandfather could be here!' ... 'How dare you! He only wanted to marry you to a good man!' 'He wanted: to sell me' (30). And she refuses to go back with them because such a marriage involves no mutual love at all. When Sarhan El-Boheiri states that Zohra is an "alien in that Pension, like a faithful dog astray, looking for its master (95)," he regards, himself as the master who can play the game of love with her. In fact, Sarhan, after having sex with Zohra, soon deserts her and refuses to marry her. Even though he marries the rich teacher Alliya, he also does not love her but pretends to; in fact, what he loves is her money. Similarly, Wagdi, Le Gassick states, "is seen to have maintained a 'determined stand against marriage'" (151). Detached himself from the possibilities of love, Wagdi, we are told in the first section of the novel, wants to have sex without affection. Likewise, Mansour keeps praising Zohra's physical beauty to play a love game with her, but she is aware of his intentions. El-Enany says that Mansour "hates himself...and is rendered unable to enjoy life or love" (76). Allam spends most of the time with prostitutes as a means to fulfill his sexual desires (like Said in The Thief and the Dog); he never commits himself to marriage. We learn that he proposed to Merfat, who refused the marriage proposal but we are not quite sure of his real intentions. If we are to judge him on the basis of his current behavior, we can say that he is a hypocrite who wears the mask of love in order to fulfill his sexual desires. Typical of Allam's Sensuality, he picks up a woman in his car and flirts with her, but she recognizes his devious intentions and stops him. His last attempt is with Zohra, whom he thinks will fall in love with him at first sight. She, however, ignores him. These frequent examples support my assumption that the relationship between the characters is not based on mutual love. Rather it is based on physical appetite. As Nabil Rhageb says, "Love [in Mahfouz's The Beggar] has lost all of its sublime meanings, and turned into a mere biological act" (302). In Camus' The Stranger and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, we find similar unserious relationships. In The Stranger, similar relationships are depicted between Meursault and Marie, and between Raymond and the nameless Arab lady. Meursault, in part four of the novel, remembers Saturday primarily because of Marie's sensuality: "I wanted her so bad when I saw her in that pretty red-and-white striped dress and leather sandals. You could make out the shape of her firm breasts, and her tan made her face look like a flower" (34). Once Marie frankly asks him about his real feeling toward her. Meursault describes his reaction, That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn't make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had the last time; that it did not mean anything but that I probably didn't love her. 'So why marry me, then?' she said. I explained to her that it didn't really matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married (41). He is bonded to no one but himself. Unlike the characters of Mahfouz and Faulkner, Meursault is honest and does not lie to her. While Mahfouz's and Faulkner's characters play a game of love with their "lovers" in order to fulfill their sexual desires, Camus' Meursault does not play it but still he fulfills his sexual needs. To all of them, marriage is of no importance; "if love manages to stay alive for a month in this space age," Ragab states in Adrift on the Nile, "it can be counted as middle-aged" (80). In brief, they are ready to perform the physical act of marriage, but only Meursault could not lie; he tells Marie the truth --a sign of absolute detachment.

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In fact, Meursault remains fascinated by Marie's beautiful body from the beginning of the novel till the end. When Marie, in the second section of chapter two, visits him in prison ( in a small cell with a small window) Meursault once again does not express or feel any kind of spiritual love for her. As mentioned earlier, what interests him is her physical beauty. He desires to leave prison in order just to embrace and feel her body through her thin dress. It is important to note that in this meeting Marie spends most of the time talking about her job and life, but Meursault's attention is on her appearance and not on what she is saying. At a later point, when he receives a letter from her stating that she will not be able to visit him anymore, he realizes that his deprivation of sex was a torture for him. Like Zohra, Marie is a young woman who seeks marriage, children, friendships, and companionship. Her purpose is to break free from the constrictive prison of ego and connect with another person. She feels happy when Meursault agrees to marry her even though he admits that he does not love her; she might have the hope that he will change his view in the future. In brief, she plans to go to Paris with Meursault where they can have a great life. When Meursault is arrested she is terrified, worried that she might be left alone if he remains in jail. She needs someone to bond with. When he is sentenced to death, her dreams die. In fact, she will be trapped in the cage of her estrangement. As mentioned above, no love exists in the relationship between Raymond and the Arab lady. Rather, their relationship is based on their needs for fulfilling their sexual desires. Like Said in The Thief and the Dogs, who turns to a prostitute after he has been neglected by his wife, daughter, teacher, and friend, Raymond spends some time with the Arab lady for the sake of sex and nothing more. Because of the lack of love, the Arab lady sleeps with another man, which makes Raymond jealous and causes him to plan revenge to make her repent for this act. Because she has given another man what Raymond thinks belongs to himself, he decides to humiliate her. He brutally beats her, and turns her over to the police as a prostitute. In Faulkner's As I Lay Dying we encounter a thoroughly estranged character, Addie Bundren, who does not love her husband, children, or students. Addie sees herself as being completely estranged, alienated, and alone in the world. She senses that her own father did not love her because he had a nihilistic view of life: "the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead along time," such a view prevents her from even thinking of her emotions; consequently, she remains estranged. Her estrangement is noticed by her physician, Peabody, whose description of her suggests that she is a woman who has lived terribly alone. For ten years, Addie closed herself to Anse, whom she married because there was nothing else to do, "So I took Anse." She simply accepted him without thought, without love or any emotional understanding. There is no implication of love but simply a marriage of convenience, later in the novel; she expresses her hatred for this kind of marriage. For instance, before Darl sets fire to the barn he has the feeling that his mother is: "talking to God .... calling on Him to help her .... She wants him to hide her away from the sight of man ... So she can lay down her life... We must let her be quiet" (Emphasis Mine). In fact, Addie frequently claims that a word like "love" is only "a shape to fill a lack" invented by people who never experienced it. Like Zohra who has been deceived by Sarhan's words in Miramar, Addie asserts that Anse has deceived her with his use of words of love too. Addie resembles the character of Lena Grove, in Faulkner's Light in August, who, after the death of her father and mother, moved to her brother's house where she worked as a kitchen slave. She accepts Burch, whom she does not love, in order to leave her brother's house. Because their relationship lacks mutual love, Burch leaves her after he knows that she is pregnant. She doubted that such a relationship would last forever. Early in the novel, she tells Mrs. Armstid: "I told you false. My name is not Burch yet" (15). In brief, Addie and Anse, like Lena and Burch, bear no love for one another, for family, or for others. In addition, Addie hates her own father for his nihilistic views, and she detests her students. Likewise, her husband Anse Bundren is apparently an estranged man who is living in his own world. In many places, we get the feeling that he spends most of the time sitting on the porch of the house doing nothing but watching the road. Not only does he not speak, but he also does not work. Completely

British Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 17 April 2015, Vol. 13 (1) cut off from any familial and societal contact, he does not perform any serious work; he tells people that if he works, the heat will definitely kill him. A selfish husband, he does not utter any words of love to his wife. Dewey Dell comments that her father has been dead (in all forms of death: psychological, social, familial, intellectual, etc) in his ten-year marriage, but he may not have noticed this fact. He can be seen as emotionally, spiritually, and socially dead. Although he promised to carry her body out to Jefferson to bury her, he is doing so not because of the promise or his respect or awe for the dead body of his wife, but because of his own selfish needs. He admits: "God's will be done .... now I can get them teeth." This is the extent of Anse's feeling. He cannot do her any favor, except when he has a personal advantage. Thus he uses his wife's death to accomplish his own selfish motives. He does not have or try to have any serious contact with his children. As a mother and a father, Addie and Anse are unable to establish meaningful contact with their children. Their view of estrangement has infected their children too. For instance, when they had Cash "I [Addie] knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it." Cash, who has penetrated into their loneliness, seldom speaks in the novel. When he breaks his leg, he tries to protest that he does not want the cement on his leg, but that he prefers torture. He does not even bother to formu1ate words enough to express his tremendous suffering. He seems to apply his mother's view about the uselessness of words. Similarly, their daughter Dewey Dell, who has been seduced by McGowan, realizes that she is nothing because she is alone, "It's because I am alone" (56). At another point in the novel she also says, "I feel my body, my bones and flesh beginning to part and open upon the alone, and the process of coming un alone is terrible." At the beginning of the novel, we find her looking for Vardaman. Critic Mark Frisch states that her comments on and description of the scene illustrate the depth of her estrangement and its effect on her. Faulkner writes, Beyond the hill sheet-lightning stains upward and fades. The dead air shapes the dead earth in the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth. It lies dead and warm upon me, touching me naked through my clothes. I said You dont know what worry is. I dont know what it is. I don't know whether I am worrying or not. Whether I can or not. I dont know whether I can cry or not. I dont know whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth (61). Frisch comments, "[t]he reference to the dead earth and the dead darkness, while sensuous, indicate that she is not a symbol of life and vitality and that she is not in touch with the living earth. Her confusion about what she can or can not know or doc underscores her struggle with her identity. Thus Dewey Dell', Like her mother, feels alone and isolated in the world" (81-82). To sum up, the Burden family is destroyed as a result of their estrangement. In fact, Faulkner has presented similar themes in other novels such as The Sound and the Fury. In this novel, Faulkner provides us with a family in which each member is self-centered and lives in his own world. Jason, for instance, is selfish and materialistic, much like Sarhan in Mahfouzs Miramar, in Sarhan's and Jason's opinion it is money that gives life meaning. Sarhan, for example, leaves Zohra and marries Alliya only for the sake of her money. Similarly, Jason uses his mother to gain her power of attorney, and then proceeds to cheat her out of a large amount of money. Estrangement is portrayed in the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury through the lack of communication and, understanding among the family members. To present a world where communication is impossible, Faulkner uses an idiot to narrate the first section of the novel. With the exception of his sister, none of the other family members fully understands what he tries to convey. Not only are the family members separated from one another, but they are also estranged from society. McCorquodale writes: The entire family is totally alienated from the present and from the community. Set apart by the idiot son, the unchaste daughter and granddaughter, the sense of superiority of Mr. Compson, the self-pity and psychosomatic ill-health of Mrs. Compson, the bitterness and

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hatred of Jason, and the bemusement of Quentin, the entire family is an example of existential estrangement (70). Because the characters of Faulkner, Mahfouz, and Camus are selfish to an extreme degree, they do not engage in any real love relationship. The characters of Sarhan and Addie, for instance, are self-absorbed; they love only themselves and are incapable of moving out of self-love toward others. Without love the characters are thus left in a "living-dead" state. The characters' view of love (for instance, that of Marie in The Stranger, Zohra in Miramar, and Addie in As I Lay Dying) has been unhealthy. If their view of love had been otherwise, they might have achieved salvation from estrangement or the boredom of being alone and alienated. In fact, love brings people together, gives them something to talk about and establishes new relations among them. Another point of similarity is that the three authors describe a world devoid of' companionship, communication, and understanding. In this respect the characters of Hightower, Anis, and Meursault -- who can be seen as symbolic reflections of the state of modern man-- are most striking. They are some of the authors' most appalling, yet most human creations. In the characters' self-centeredness, death-wishing, and strangeness, the authors suggest the disorders to which modern man is subject. So removed are they from the lives of those around them, and so out of touch with any honestly felt human emotion, that they might pass as exaggerated contrivances, an experiment in sheer grotesque characterization, were it not for the fact that deep within their troubled consciousness the characters sense their estrangement. Mahfouz's Adrift on the Nile deals with a more hopeless and more terrifying state of estrangement than that encountered in Miramar. In Adrift on the Nile Mahfouz takes us to a houseboat on the Nile of Cairo. It is to this houseboat that the novel's characters come to escape the world. "The houseboat people rotate in an orbit and the society rotates in another orbit. There was no link between the two except for 'Am Abduh, the houseboat guard who used to shock them with the disasters that happen around them ...." (Rhageb, 327). Like the pension in Miramar, the houseboat is separated from the rest of the world. The major protagonist of the novel, Anis Zaki, is the most estranged character in the novel who, "like Louis XVI, ... knows nothing of what goes on in the world" (Adrift on the Nile, 70). He is a civil clerk who lives in a world of his own; without paying attention to the world around him. Because of this, he presents a report to his boss without realizing that he was writing with an empty-ink pen. To this absurd act, his Director comments, "they [your eyes] look inward, instead of outward like the rest of God's creatures" (5). Every evening he, like other characters in the novel, retreats to the houseboat so that no one can interfere with him. His flight is to be free from the society and the world around him. In fleeing to the houseboat, Anis wants to desert that absurd world in order to forget his tragic experience which began with his failure in studying at the college of Medicine, followed by his failure in other colleges; his family members in the village have forgotten him; his wife dies when giving birth to a stillborn daughter. Because of these situations Anis lives in a world of his own. He tells Ahmad, “‘we have something in common.' 'What is that?' 'Loneliness [Anis says]'" (77). Because of his isolation and detachment he has no positive or active ro1e in Samara's drama, where she plans to have Anis play the role of a "Failed civil servant Former husband and former father. Silent and dazed, morning and night .... Sometimes he seems to me to be half mad, or half dead. He has managed to forget completely what it is he is escaping from. He has forgotten himself. He keeps his secret in his mind" (99). Anis, Zeyad Abu Laban writes, is "always amnesiac. He remembers nothing. Therefore, he does not speak; he is mute. His existence has no value .... He has lost everything, even him-self" (74). Many similarities among Anis, Meursault and Hightower can be noticed. First, I assume that Mahfouz had Camus' The Stranger in mind when writing Adrift on the Nile because the character Ahmad mentions Camus' novel. He says, "One might find a killer without a motive in a novel such as L'Etranger" (66-67). Like Hightower and Meursault, Anis experiences a kind of detachment from the people around him. One character says; "like Louis XVI ... [Anis] knows nothing of what goes on in the world" (70). Anis resembles them in his unwillingness to be connected with others. Like Meursault and Hightower

British Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 19 April 2015, Vol. 13 (1) who speak very Little, Anis does not speak to Samara until she addresses him; asking why he does not talk. Also, when Ragab introduces Anis to Samara we realize that Mahfouz wants Anis, the other characters in the novel, and the readers to sense Anis' estrangement, He is from a respectable family, but has lived alone in Cairo for a long time; he is quite a cosmopolitan now. Don't take his silence amiss -- he seldom speaks, roaming as he does in another realm entirely (26). On the other hand, except for the ride the characters take to Cairo, the characters of Adrift on the Nile, including Anis, prefer staying in the houseboat in order to be out of contact with the outside world. It is to this houseboat that the characters are attached. Mustafa, another character in the novel, alerts Samara, saying that Perhaps you are saying to yourself, They are Egyptians, they are Arabs, they are human beings, and in addition they are educated, and so there cannot be a limit to their concerns. But the truth is that we are not Egyptian or Arab or human; we belong to nothing and no one-except this houseboat ... (47-48). Le Gassick writes: They [the characters] spend their leisure time together on a Nile houseboat where, to alleviate their depression, they indulge to excess in sex and drugs, expressing nothing but cynical disillusionment and bitterness about their lives and the extent of their estrangement from the country where they live(149). In brief, the characters avoid any contact with the surrounding world, and are willing to remain there till they die. When the group was told that a journalist, Samara, would like to visit them in the houseboat, Anis replies, "Did you tell her that it is [death that] gathers us all here?" (40). In Adrift on The Nile, The Stranger, and Light in August, the authors have provided us with characters that we may think of as aliens, strangers, or people from another orbit. Cut off from people, they live alone as strangers and prisoners. The prisoner who spends his life behind bars, incapable of penetrating to others, is not the only person estranged from human beings. Prison is also the prison of self, whereby the individual finds himself cut off from his fellow beings, unable to share with others joy or pain. Man is left alone, tortured by his fears and anxiety, and above all by the fact that he may never know love. Seen in the context of Mahfouz’s, Faulkner's, and Camus' novels, the protagonists fail to share the joy and suffering of others because of their preoccupation with their own little worlds of self. Even though the lodgers live in a closed pension, they are strangers to one another. Wagdi says, "we did not get acquainted until the first Thursday of the Umm Kulthum season, when I learned that they [the residents] would join us in the evening to listen to the concert on the radio" (21). In spite of their gathering, they do not speak to one another; they only listen to music. To avoid their gatherings, Mariana plays foreign music. Because communication is impossible, Tolba Marzouq states that Miramar "is becoming a hell! (22)"; and Wagdi wishes that "someone should invent a machine that would hold conversations with lonely people" (8). By the end of the novel, we come to realize that each resident lives in his or her own world. When Zohra becomes tired of loneliness she decides to leave Miramar and look for another place. Similarly, Camus seems to convey the impression of his heroes' estrangement in The Stranger. As a European Frenchman in an Arab-Muslim-Algerian place, Meursault lives as a stranger, an alien. As a stranger, Meursault has been unable to communicate with his mother. At first, we discover that he has left his mother's house because they could not communicate. He does not even know her age. Second, Camus shows us how Meursault sees other people, especially Arabs, and how others see him. "When Meursault observes others, he does so from the outside, without intuitive comprehension, aided by experience, which one would normally bring to bear in one's assessment of people." He talks as if he has never seen people before, as if they were from an alien world. As for the attitude of the others toward him, the Algerian judge comes no closer to understanding him; he tells him that he has never met such a hardened soul.

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The stranger of Camus's theme is haunted by a continual sense of self-estrangement from the life around him. He is caught up in the vortex of social life and observes, at least superficially, the social conventions. Yet in a real sense he has lost an awareness of reality and the social life around him appears to be a phantasmagoria in which he has only a ghostly sense of identity (Krishna, 2). In court, Meursault finally recognizes his own strangeness. He also notices the fact that the trial seems to take place without his participation. In short, Meursault does not have any feeling of group solidarity either inside or outside the court. In The Plague, however, a group of people unite in order to face a deadly epidemic. The union does not however survive the end of the plague, because some of the people die, others depart and others return to their lonely routines. Placed in the Algerian coast town of Oran, The Plague serves the same theme of loneliness and separation in the depiction of the town itself. Oran, like the houseboat in Adrift on the Nile and the pension in Miramar, is separated from the rest of the world; with the closing of Oran's gates, the inhabitants are shut in upon the long ordeal of violation and suffering with which they have to live throughout almost an entire year. With boldness and precision, the authors create settings estranged from the rest of the world. In Faulkner's Light in August, Hightower prefers to stay detached in a cell of sheer dissociation. He does not have the desire to look for a companion with whom he can talk about his plans and dreams, if he has any. There is no guarantee that any human being will understand him, nor that his friendship will come to fruition. He knows how unalterable human character is. Consequently, all he wants in life is to be left alone. Although he is conscious of the many forces that have conspired to make him what he is, he is still content to watch the world from the study window of his darkened house on "the quiet and remote and unpaved and little used street" (53). He listens to his current visitor in town, Byron, but none of what he says is of his interest or concern. He listens to Byron's speech regarding the arrival of Lena Grove, the murder of Joanna, and the feelings of Byron for Lena as if "he were listening to the doings of people of a different race" (74). When Byron leaves, Hightower watches him from the darkened window and is drawn out of his dusky world of death- in- life by the motion of Byron's feet: And Hightower leans there in the window, in the August beat, oblivious of the odor in which he lives that smell of people who no longer live in life: that odor of over- plump desiccation and stale linen as though a precursor of the tomb--listening to the feet which he seems to hear still long after he knows that he cannot, thinking, 'God bless him. God help him' (300). When he ceases to hear Byron's feet, be hears "the myriad and interminable insects" and he breathes "the hot still rich maculate smell of the earth" (300). Like Anis in Adrift on the Nile, who spends his loneliness by reading books and contemplating ancient history, Hightower maintains his estrangement from the people around him by immediately turning to an intellectual activity, reading. I agree with D'Avanzo who writes that Hightower reads in order to escape any emotional or social relationships (69). At the beginning of Light in August Faulkner gives us the impression that Hightower imprisons himself in his own cage so that he can detach from the world around him. On the other hand, Camus chooses prison to present the loneliness of Meursault. In fact, Camus devotes half of the novel to Meursault's situation in prison. He spends the time in a small cell with a small window; he shares the room with other Algerian people -- people with a different language and cultural background. Since the two groups speak two different languages, communication becomes impossible. By the same token, communication does not exist between Meursault and his mother; that is why they live in two different apartments. The only communication we have is the one that takes place between us, the readers, and, Meursault, It "is accomplished by the use of the first-person narrative. If Meursault's story were told by anyone other than him, his attitude would be as unacceptable rand incomprehensible to the reader as they are to society" (Gowen, 52). Meursault does not seriously sense his loneliness; in prison, as he admits, he lacks nothing but cigarettes and sex.

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Like Mahfouzand Camus, Faulkner is preoccupied with these forms of separation, estrangement, and loneliness. His critics, like Phyllis Hirshleifer, have viewed Light in August as dealing mainly with the isolation and estrangement of man. Not only does it deal with the estrangement of Hightower, but also of Joe Christmas, Byron, Lena Grove and others. Like Anis, Zohra, Meursault and Hightower, Joe Christmas has been called a "stranger." Faulkner's description of Joe is memorable. Joe walks the earth seeking his place, his function, but he is unable to relate himself in any real way to any other human being: He thought that it. was loneliness he was trying to escape and not himself. But the street ran on: catlike, one place was the same as another to him. But in none of them could he be quiet. But the street ran on in its moods and phases, always empty: he might have seen himself as in numberless avatars, in silence, doomed with motion ... (l97). Faulkner, in fact, uses Joe to stand for the victim of racism in the South. Back then, it was true that a whole generation of black people were driven off the land into the cities, where they were unable to cope for themselves, who were still the off springs of slavery. The society around Joe in this novel reflects many of these concerns. He is totally victimized by the institution of racism. The fundamental tragedy in the relations between the Southern whites and Blacks is that neither group well understands the values of the other. He is caught between the two sets of values and unable to accept or be accepted by either group. Joe's rare chance is not to five as either White or Black, but to live as both and to unite the two modes of existence. Joe Christmas' last act before he murders Joanna is to visit the two sections of the town, Jefferson. He goes first to the white section, which he rejects because he senses his estrangement from it. He then goes to the Negro section, where he is rejected and where he realizes that he is isolated and estranged. Thus, Joe fails and drops all racial designations as a helpless admission of the impossibility of uniting the two worlds. James Roberts' writes: The mixture of his [Joe's] blood denies to him any hope of communion with fellow man. Knowing this, Christmas cannot come to any terms with either society or with himself Christmas, like Christ, is the portrayal of the stranger in a hostile and alien universe (186). McCorquodale states that Christmas is net only depicted as "estranged" from his fellow men in the world, he also wears a mask: And Byron watched him standing there and looking at the men in sweatstained overalls, with a cigarette in one side of his mouth and his face darkly and contemptuously still, drawn down a little on one side because of the smoke (27-28). He goes on to say that "Christmas is anonymous, another existentialist concept of man who has not yet found himself. That is, he is anonymous in that he is known by name, but that is all. 'They did not know who he was. None of them had ever seen him before I" (McCorquodale, 130). Like Meursault, Said, and Zohra, Joe Christmas' estrangement results in his inability to communicate with his fellow men. In fact, Faulkner has been able to condemn the White-Black relationship in the American South in many of his novels, because such a racial distinction has led to a difficulty in communication and the estrangement of one- group from another. McCorquodale points out, He [Joe] still had nothing to say to anyone, even after six months. No one knew what he did between mill hours. Now and then one of his' fellow workers would pass him on the square down town after supper, .and would be as though Christmas had never seen the other before.... No one knew where- he lived, slept at night.... None. of them knew then where Christmas lived and what he was actually doing behind the veil, the screen, of .his negro's job at the mill (31). Surprisingly, William Faulkner in Light in August has skillfully carried over the theme of estrangement into the structure of the novel itself. In this regard, James Roberts in William Faulkner: A Thematic Study writes:

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The novel may be broken down into many groups of seemingly isolated vignettes. However, each scene, though appearing isolated from others, is a part of on large thematic mosaic and none could be successfully removed without destroying the whole; likewise, each isolated character in each isolated scene is viewed in the final analysis as a part of the structure of a unified whole. Thus the isolation of each character is supported by .the structural device of presenting the action of the novel in groups of vignettes (155-6). Joe isolates himself from society because "All [he] wanted was peace." Roberts points out that Joe imprisons himself in a cage which keeps him apart from mankind. "The earliest instance of his imprisonment is seen in his life in an institution. Later in life, he thinks of women, marriage and children as additional ways to keep men caged in. He even cuts off all buttons that women have sewed on his clothes. But the strongest symbol of his imprisonment in a cage is seen through the conflicting white and black blood in his veins" (150-1). Finally, natural elements play ambivalent roles in Mahfouz's and Camus' fiction in presenting the estrangement, separation, and loneliness of human beings from one another. In Miramar, it is through Wagdi's comments that we learn about the general atmosphere of the city. He says, "Alexandria, I know you in winter: you empty your streets and your squares at sunset, leaving them to solitude, wind and rain, while your Inner rooms are filled with chatter and warmth" (4). To keep the characters from any outside contact, the novel takes place in the winter, where we witness cold weather, strong storms, and heavy rain. Wagdi goes on to describe the winter weather outside the pension saying, .... outside is a heavy downpour, the ram drumming loudly on the iron stairs in my air- shaft... It is early in the afternoon and it is still raining hard, the clouds decanting enough darkness into the room to make it seem like night. I reach to turn on a lamp, but as I press the switch the shutters gleam with lightning and I hear rolling thunder (10-11). Even in the fifth section of the novel, once again Wagdi gives us the impression that he finds companionship with natural elements as he says, "I was all by myself, with nothing to' keep me company but the howling of the wind" (127). Likewise, in the second section of the novel, narrated by Hosni Allam from Tanta, the weather is described, The face of the sea is dark, mottled, blue from stifled wrath; there is unappeased rage in the ceaseless hammering of the waves.... From my balcony at the Cecil I cannot see the Corniche unless I lean out over the railing. It's like being on a ship. The sea sprawls right below me. A great blue mass, heaving, locked in as far the fort of Sultan Qaitbay by the Corniche wall and the giant stone jetty-arm thrusting into the sea. Frustrated, caged. These waves slopping dully landwards have a sullen blue-black look that continually promises fury. The sea. Its guts churn with flotsam and secret death (38). By having the story taken place in winter, Mahfouz has been successfully able to prevent the characters from leaving the pension. They remain inside without being able to have any serious contact with the outside world. Inside the pension, every person remains isolated, estranged, and alienated from the other residents. Each lives in his own room watching the weather: and sometimes listening to foreign music and songs. Although we find minor incidents in which characters leave Miramar and make contact with people from outside the pension, their attempts fail. For instance, Allam leaves Miramar at one point in the novel where he meets a "strange" woman of a Syrian father and an Italian mother. While he is driving, it starts raining. It is because of the rain that he picks the lady up. Once again, they are imprisoned in the car because of the weather. Likewise, in The Stranger Camus employs natural elements to carry the characters' isolation and estrangement further. In The Stranger, it is because of the blinding sun that Meursault shoots the Arab. In this regard, it is worth quoting David Ellison who points out the role of the sun and light in the novel. He writes,

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The sun and the light seem to have a numbing effect on Meursault; their unbearable (in French insoutenable) force causes him to lose all conscious control of his action. In I,1, this emotional numbness translates as the apparent indifference of the protagonist toward his mother's death—a lack of expressivity that the prosecuting attorney will equate with callousness. In I,6, however, the sun will blind Meursault to such a degree that he acts in a way that transforms his life (62-63). This act leads Meursault to prison, which cuts him off from any external contact. Incapable of penetrating to others, he remains in a small room with a small window, Once again, although there are other people sharing the room with him, he finds himself cut off from them. In conclusion, the authors suggest that contemporary man is ultimately destroyed by the feeling of estrangement he experiences in the modern world. To delineate this, Faulkner, Camus, and Mahfouz portray most of their characters as strangers, aliens, and prisoners who are estranged in the world, with no close familial or societal ties. Man craves some type of communication with his fellow men, because he is not created for a lonely and estranged life. The need for social companionship is a basic urge common to all men and deserves consideration as a fundamental aspect of life. Overwhelmed by their total estrangement, isolation and strangeness, the protagonists are left in a "living-dead" state.

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