During the final four years of his life before he died in 2006, he relied totally on the dictation process — especially for his dreams, which were first published in Arabic in the magazine Nisf al-dunya, and now finally in English as "Dreams of Departure," in a superb translation by Raymond Stock (who is also Mahfouz's biographer).
Not surprisingly, the second volume of his dreams reveals a feisty rebel, unflinching in regard to questions of state authority, censorship, and inhumanity.
Thus, regarding politics, Mahfouz's dreams touch on issues of social instability, dissent, revolution and incarceration, as well as a certain fear of the state as an amorphous presence rather than a visible reality.
In one of the most powerful sequences, he and a group of his friends are arrested, thrown into detention for half a year without trial, and then suddenly released.
The brief vignette concludes, "To this day, whenever I recall the torment of prison, I wonder why it was that we'd ever been seized."
In other dreams, people disappear without a trace, suggesting that the fear of his own incarceration was genuine, not simply a fantasy.
An old man by the time these dreams were first published, Mahfouz was, nevertheless, constantly thinking of young women, the early loves of his life, sexuality. The subjects are ubiquitous enough that on one occasion he states, "I have resolved myself to forget both lovemaking and fighting."
Yet he muses, also, about the questions of aging, mortality, the passage of time—in short, his impending demise.
Not surprisingly, journeys and the body's decline are also topics of his concern.
The most memorable sequences in the volume, however, read as if they are outlines for short stories (or novels) that Mahfouz was never able to write. To that extent, they reveal an artist with all of his remarkable creativity still present.
In one of the more bizarre sequences, Mahfouz dreams of preparing a table with delicious food.
Then the doorbell rings and when the writer opens the door, there is his girlfriend, who falls onto the couch.
Her body immediately goes limp, prompting Mahfouz to slap her in order to wake up. When his efforts are unsuccessful, he concludes that she is dead. Aware of scandal, he carries her body into the kitchen and throws her from the window into the stairwell. Next morning there is talk in the apartment building about a woman who was taken to the hospital. The landlord adds, "The doctor told me, 'There's a lot of hope we can save her, and the prosecutor is waiting for the right time to speak to her.'"
It's a grisly story, layered with the fear of scandal, and – more revealingly – with guilt. What would a Freudian psychoanalyst or scholar speculate about the 90-year-old writer? What is the reader to conclude? What can be said about Mahfouz himself — who in one of his final published dreams, identifies still another lovely young woman, but this time holding him as the two of them examine many of the writer's own books for sale by a street bookseller? No problem with what I have described so far. What writer wouldn't want to share his work with his beloved?
But then he picks up one of the volumes, only to discover that the pages are blank. The same happens with others, thing inside the volumes at all. The dream concludes, "I stole a glance at my girlfriend who was gazing at me in mourning." Does she still love a writer of blank books?
Like all great writers and despite his fame, Naguib Mahfouz feared that his work would be forgotten. Or, let's say that at least his dreams express such a fear. Hopefully, the rest of the time, he realized that reality and dreams are not identical. Yet dreams are always aspects of reality.
Naguib Mahfouz.
"Dreams of Departure."
Translated by Raymond Stock.
The American University in Cairo Press.
Charles R. Larson is professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C.