Moving from critical writing to creativity.. Abdel Latif Mahfouz: Criticism did not die, it was worse

Between story, novel and criticism, Moroccan Abdel Latif Mahfouz tracks an epistemological biography of his image as a writer, mixing reason and conscience. Although his literary career began late, what he presented reflects the image of the preoccupied with creative workmanship.

Between story, novel and criticism, Moroccan Abdel Latif Mahfouz traces a biography of his image as a writer in which he mixes reason and conscience.

Although literary writing started late, it became present in the image of the creator preoccupied with the creative industry instead of residing in the frontiers of its cognitive, historical and aesthetic premises.

It is a shift, as much as it raises doubts among the Maghreb reader about the secret of Mahfouz’s transition as a writer, carrying a critical project in the field of discourse analysis towards writing the story and the novel, but on the other hand, it confirms the extent of the features of cognitive peculiarities and the cultural diversity that he lives in himself, between abstract thinking that delves into Literary theories and their representations in the imaginary Arab novelist and the fictional one based on literary genres such as the story and the novel to ignite his emotional potential.

As in his short story book “Multiple Phobias” (Dar Al-Faisa, 2019), in which the author returned to his childhood with all its dreams and failures, revealing important stages in his life.

Not as an age stage that one lives in in his existential biography, but by virtue of the abundance of his life and its momentum with its joys and sorrows and its details and protrusions to the extent of affecting his imaginary present now as a writer.

On the occasion of the release of his new novel "Valley of Milk" in 2021, Al Jazeera Net had this stand with him about his critical and creative achievement:

From research to creativity

What is the secret behind your transition from critical writing to the worlds of fiction and fiction writing?

I confess at the outset that I have never been a critic in the strict sense of the word, because one of the tasks of the literary critic is to keep pace with creativity, follow up on its transformations and work diligently to monitor its productions.

Which was not a day of my concern and cost me.

And as I always emphasize: I do not consider myself a critic, but rather a researcher in the field of discourse analysis, and the evidence for this is that I have never played the role of mediator between a creator and a reader, or the role of a watchdog over the book’s aesthetic and ideological choices.

My concern, then, was not to go beyond learning about literary theories and their philosophical backgrounds, and the form of their transformation into curricula with idiomatic and conceptual mechanisms that constitute their material means for approaching texts and phenomena.

Through this deed, I aimed to contribute to controlling, representing and criticizing it in the horizon of bringing it closer to other Arabic readers.

I did not move from critical writing to creative, but opened up to the latter in parallel with the normal preoccupation with research imposed by my profession, and I began to combine the production of literary studies with the writing of narrative texts.

I am still practicing the same tasks so far, so I did not move from critical writing to creative writing, but rather opened myself up to creative writing in parallel with the normal preoccupation with research that my profession imposes. narrative texts.

The writer's childhood biography mixes narration and psychoanalysis (communication sites)

Criticism never dies

Is it about the death of literary criticism, as promoted by some literary experiences in Morocco?

I do not think that criticism will die or fade, but will become limited, either linked to certain names, such as those that have a media presence dedicated by paper or audio-visual platforms, or those that won prizes.

This is because the number of books published in different races far exceeds the capacity of an individual.

This is due to the fact that the entire literary production that has accumulated over decades, and accumulates every day, makes it impossible to follow it, as no one can study and criticize it, but not even be able to read it.

This is because the number of books published in different races far exceeds the capacity of an individual.

I think that those who accuse literary criticism of shortcomings are, in fact, dissatisfied with the selective follow-up that concerns certain Asma's texts.

And despite the fact that most of these forms of criticism are, in fact, nothing but promotional writings that beautify the texts and do not criticize them, because they tend, in most cases, to present a shorthand of the contents, not based on their reading and awareness of their backgrounds, but rather they proceed from the assumptions of meanings that the critic imagines to match those titles.

Therefore, some readings/summaries seem not to characterize the content, but rather to suggest it.

The thing that makes it a news letter lacks an objective business strategy, whether it comes to presenting creative experiences or how to present them.

For me, criticism is not dead yet, but rather selects texts based on the presence of names in the media.

To some, his deed may seem worse than death itself.

polyphobia

In your book Multiple Phobias, you go back to childhood paths and fantasies.
What does it mean to you as a creator at this particular stage?
And what does it achieve in your imagination?

As I said earlier, writing about oneself was a coincidence, because it was a response to a proposal, but it was, nevertheless, an adventure to test creativity.

However, the adventure has become a game that includes all the conditions for the pleasures that accompany playing, such as evasion, flattery, caution and cunning.

One of my most important motives for continuing to write about my childhood was that, on the one hand, it synchronized the decisive stage in the struggle of the state apparatus with the opposition forces, and on the other hand, it followed the multiple struggle between “traditionalism” and the signs of modernization in all aspects of life, from dress and music to the forms of relationship between Genders.

The conflict was raging between an epistemic (cognitive) component whose components were malfunctioning and another trying to dominate... That is why (childhood) seemed to me a time stage suitable to be a spatial metaphor for violent conflict between contradictory parties, contradictory values, and contradictory perceptions as well.

It also seemed to me that, due to the peculiarity of the social time in which it was realized, it is an inexhaustible source of imagination and double imagination.

Nonfiction text or autobiography?

On the level of naturalization, it is difficult to ascertain whether the book is a collection of short stories or a biography, as each gender has its own characteristics, writing and existential condition.
Why did you call it a childhood biography, even though it implied many of the characteristics and features of fiction writing?

Indeed, all critics and researchers who studied this biography noticed confusion regarding the naturalization of its tales, as they noticed the juxtaposition of two definitions: “stories” at the top of the cover and “childhood biography” at the bottom; Some of them considered it a short biographical novel. And they are, in my opinion, right in their questions, because the double naturalization indicates the writer's confusion and inability to make a decision.

But none of them went beyond the level of questioning to meditate on the background, or to suggest a possible interpretation, since no one has yet noticed that for the first time - as far as I know - a biography is presented in the form of short stories, each independent of its neighbors, although it matches them in terms of The narrative structure and at the end that identifies a certain fear, or a lesson deduced from the content structure of the story, and the impact of this deed on both sexes, given that it may open - if it has not already opened - a new horizon for the story that can be made available from the personal experience of its writer, And a new horizon for the biography, which transforms it from being an extended one that mimics the novel and urgent, to a reasonable one that captures the important moments in life that express the reasonable ego.

The novel about Dar Al-Fasla in Tangiers in 2021 (communication sites)

Experimental feature

Do you think that the reason lies in the fact that contemporary writing is of a complex nature and is open to experimentation?

It is true that the races may overlap and be a means to develop the form or a reason for it, but this is only successful within the limits that make the overlap enrich the dominant race, and benefit its texts thanks to a reasonable and thoughtful interaction.

And this is exactly what I tried to achieve between the biography that we were familiar with to be “chronological” and with a narrative form that expresses the extended ego of the self, and part of the ego extending to the social college, and we did not try much to produce it according to the form of the short story.

Perhaps this synthesis is what made my childhood biography “multiphobia” well received, taught by a large group of serious researchers from Morocco and abroad.

Creative writing privacy

The book is characterized by the smoothness of the impulsive narration and the aesthetics of the narrative based on the loudness of facts, memories, images and living within the Moroccan society.
How did you come to think of biography as a literary/historical genre and a haven for your creative writing?

I explained in a previous paragraph how I noticed the pleasure of narrative writing, and the richness of the private life experience, and I now add an answer to your question that, on the one hand, as I re-contemplate the events that I lived or experienced by those with whom I shared the places, I discovered that a group of those events hide in their appearance Simple implicit social and political facts.

These “manifestations” also reveal shared or contradictory perceptions that rush in secret. On the other hand, I discovered, through the interaction of those who read the first story I published, that readers are more willing to write about themselves, perhaps because the majority believes that the biography makes us transcend the barrier of imagination that It is a mask in the story and the novel, and makes the search for meaning difficult.

Based on this tendency, I preferred to express my position on social life and the hidden laws that govern it based on my biography and the biography of those close to me, believing that this will make it much more popular than the novel or the short story.

And indeed, and in a record circumstance, I learned that the house is preparing to issue a third edition.

One of the creations of the Moroccan writer and literary critic (communication sites)

From story to novel

A few days ago, your first novel was published in Morocco under the title "Valley of Milk" (Comma, 2021) and it attracted the attention of many readers inside and outside Morocco.
Not because of its worlds, but because of your keenness to accumulate a creative achievement alongside your literary criticism project.
How can you live this cognitive momentum in your body and how does it reflect on the act of writing?

I admit for the first time that I tried to write the novel 20 years ago, but the text did not appeal to me at all, so I abandoned it and forgot it, and after 10 years I wrote a second novel whose topic was about the margin, and I was inspired by the topic of the real life of a friend who moved like me from Fez to Al-Bayda, and imposed on him , in a certain situation, to commit murder in self-defense.

But I abandoned her due to my inability to diagnose the shape of his life during the years of imprisonment, and 9 years ago I wanted to dedicate a literary work to my mother’s soul, so I thought that the most appropriate gift would be to write about her city (Tessa), about its history and present, and so I spent 5 years reading the history of Fez and its aspects and the history The Hayayna tribe, and when I felt that I had become familiar with the subject, I wrote the novel “Wadi Al-Laban”.

Second: I do not find any problem in moving from creative writing to writing a study or an intervention, because the mental preparation for both imposes openness to certain worlds and an appropriate language.

And third: I think that the readers’ interest in my novel is not necessarily due to the fact that I have a research experience in the field of semiotics and discourse analysis, but also to the title of the novel, which is related to one of the most important battles that Morocco fought against the foreign invasion.

This book is a semiotic approach to the novels of the Nobel Prize winner for literature (communication sites)

novel time

As an academic and literary critic, don't you see that we live in the time of the novel, not in the sense that this gender has become an expression of the needs, issues and problems of contemporary man.
Rather, it is because of favoritism on the part of the institutions.
Do you not see that this implicitly affects the function of literature and makes it subordinate to the concept of supply and demand?

It is difficult to determine the main factor that makes the novel the most important literary genre now, is it its ability to diagnose life in its various dimensions, or the intellectual and aesthetic pleasure it provides to readers, or the ease of writing because it accepts all languages and all subjects.

It is also not possible to determine the main factor controlling the demand for writing it, is it the large number of prizes allocated to it, or the feeling of those who can write that it is the gender that allows him to express everything he wants to express... For me, the true novel is the one that can deeply diagnose reality. Intellectual and aesthetic latent in structure and language.

These are traits that are rarely realized even in texts selected by some major prize juries.