«Beyond a snow pile»: Naǧīb Surūr’s Challenging Reading of the Egyptian Literary Canon in Riḥla fī Thulāthiyyat Naǧīb Maḥfūẓ

The generation of Egyptian artists and intellectuals from the ‘60s and ‘70s represented a turning point, following the Nahḍa, in expressing new aesthetics and ideological paradigms and in re-defining the literary canon(s) [Kendall2006; Ramaḍān2012] within the context of contemporary Egyptian culture’s influence throughout the Arab World [Mehrez1994; Jacquemond2008]. Naǧīb Surūr (1932 - 1978) was an Egyptian poet, dramatist and literary critic whose eclectic production has been both appreciated and neglected by critics [Cachia2011; Fontana2018]. Among his little-known critical essays, Riḥla fī Thulāthiyyat Naǧīb Maḥfūẓ [1978] represents one of the bravest attempts at re-defining the literary canon, a challenging exercise in style suspended between irony and the conviction that no author/literary classic is ineligible for an in-depth analysis. Within this work - which is one of the least-cited sources on Naǧīb Maḥfūẓ - he dives into Maḥfūz’s novel Bayna al-Qaṣrayn, going beyond the “snow pile” of its sensational success and characterizing it as “the greatest tale of a failed Revolution” whilst also emphasizing its warm realist tones as well as its ideological weaknesses. My intervention aims to focus on Surūr’s Riḥla as a successful attempt at reviewing the Egyptian literary canon of the 1950s, as well as consider the paradoxical destiny of silence suffered by Surūr, who paid for his revolutionary approach to literature through his exclusion from mainstream cultural production. I was awarded a PhD in Arabic Literature and Linguistics at The Sapienza University of Rome (early 2018) with a thesis entitled A linguistic, rhetorical and metrical analysis of Naǧīb Surūr’s experimental works. My studies focus principally on Arabic rhetoric, prosody and linguistics as applied to literature, according to a holistic and culturally embedded approach. Among my latest academic endeavours: “A New Methodological Approach to the Rhetorical and Metrical Analysis of Contemporary Arabic poetry” workshop at AUB (Beirut, May 2018).