Heterologies of revolutionary action: On historical consciousness and the sacred in Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley

Abstract

This article considers a fundamental aspect of literary modernity: the emergence of new forms of historical consciousness that have attended the rise of new modes of discourse since the 1920s. It focuses on Mahfouz’s novel Awlād hāratinā [1959; 1967; 2006; Children of the Alley] – not on its well-known notorious and complex history of reception, but specifically on the form of historical consciousness presented in and through the narrative, a type of narrative phenomenology of the experience of time, in particular sacred time, in the popular imagination. This narrative phenomenology outlines a new type of “knowledge” when it comes to mass movements and the struggle of the masses for power, not to be found in official histories: “as if the masses could dream of a full stomach but never of exercising power”, as Foucault has succinctly put it (“Revolutionary Action” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977] 219). This insight ultimately draws on questions of amāra as explained briefly in the Introduction by Caroline Rooney. While the novel engages its own immediate historical context of the 1952 revolution, effectively offering an anatomy of its failures, and placing it in a particular conception of historical process, it anticipates in many ways the recent momentous People’s Revolution of 25 January 2011.