ABSTRACT
The chapter analyses two novels where the protagonists’ interior crisis is contained within an ironic structure, here defined “disillusionment plot”.
Maḥjūb, the young protagonist of al-Qāhira al-jadīda (1945, Cairo Modern 2008) strives towards achieving outward middle-class comfort. In this powerful novel the loss of youthful illusions works as a metaphor for the loss of the national illusion: the nation does not ensure identity values, social transformation or even ethical integrity in the determinism guiding the teloi of these stories.
Twenty years after the publication of al-Qāhira al-jadīda, ‘Abd al-Ḥakīm Qāsim portrays a similar trajectory in his coming-of-age story Ayyām al-insān al-sab‘a (1969, The Seven Days of Man, 1989), here identified as a Meta-Bildungsroman. The main character is an adolescent fated to radically change his perspective of reality, this time not as a result of a trip to Europe, but of the process of growth and urbanisation that will take him far from the Sufi community he grew up in, under the guidance of a father-leader equally fascinating and cumbersome.
