Half a Day

For those familiar with Mahfouz’s work, “Half a Day” might seem like an anomaly at first glance. Unlike his best-known novels, including Midaq Alley and the Cairo Trilogy, “Half a Day” can’t be read as a literal account of daily life in 20th-century Cairo. This isn’t to say that many of the details in the story aren’t realistic; in fact, the work’s matter-of-fact descriptions of details such as the boy’s clothing, the school’s appearance and the school curriculum are all characteristic of literary realism. However, the rapid aging the narrator experiences over the course of just half a day places the story firmly within the genre of allegory.

In this sense, “Half a Day” functions on several different levels. The most straightforward interpretation of its symbolism is as an exploration of how humans experience time; we often perceive our already short lifespans as passing even more quickly than they actually do, particularly when (as in Mahfouz’s story) we’re preoccupied with day-to-day concerns. On the flip side, relatively brief periods of time can seem to stretch out when there are many things happening, or when what’s happening holds particular personal significance. Mahfouz dramatizes this phenomenon via the structure of the story, devoting roughly one third of what turns out to be the narrator’s life to one pivotal event: the trip from home to school that effectively marks the end of his boyhood.

At the same time, the story’s depiction of an Egyptian city (presumably Cairo) enables it to work as social or historical allegory. In the time it takes for the narrator to reach old age, the city has undergone a parallel transformation: Cars, tall buildings, security forces, pollution, and overcrowding have replaced the quiet streets of his childhood. These changes are the result of Egypt’s efforts to industrialize and “modernize” after securing its independence from Britain. Meanwhile, the narrator’s comparison of his childhood home to “paradise” suggests another layer of allegory—in this case, an analogy to the story of Adam and Eve, who in Islamic tradition are expelled from paradise after eating from the tree of forbidden fruit. Similarly, the chaotic and disorienting atmosphere of the story’s final paragraph has parallels to Islamic depictions of the apocalypse, implying that the work as a whole symbolically encapsulates the spiritual history of humanity.

Notably, many of Mahfouz’s prior works contain similar social and religious commentary; in fact, he was at one point targeted by religious extremists as a result of perceived blasphemy in his novel Children of Gebelawi. In this thematic sense, “Half a Day” is therefore very much in keeping with Mahfouz’s earlier writing, for all its stylistic differences. It also anticipates some of Mahfouz’s later experimentations with genre; Mahfouz’s final collection of stories, for instance, was entitled The Seventh Heaven: Supernatural Stories.