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 © 2015 British Journals ISSN 2048-1268 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 © 2015 British Journals ISSN 2048-1268 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.

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