Yusuf Idris is one of those short story writers who crafts tales in which not much seems to happen. Unlike some authors of whom this can be said, there is a method to what some view as the maddening lack of conventional notions of action. The stories of this Egyptian writer are populated by poverty-stricken peasantry who don’t have access to situations in which such conventional narrative “action” arise on one hand and on the other by the privileged ownership class who economic fortunes present the potential for such circumstances but who are so single-minded in their desire for more acquisition that they lack the imagination for such dramatic conflict.
What is at stake in the stories of Idris is the larger consequences of why nothing happens in the traditional narrative sense. “The Machine” is a story in which the set-up offers a perfect opportunity for some kind of specific and precise moment of action which would be the driving mechanism of the plot for some other writer. After faithfully providing twenty years of service operating a machine which grinds wheat, the operator of the machine is fired. One by one, a parade of other employees reveal an inability to get the machine working. This circumstance of plotting seems to be setting up a dramatic showdown between the working class and the ownership class exploiting their labor for capital without regard for their humanity.
The situation is one rife with opportunities for allowing the simmering tension to boil over into an outburst of retributive justice by the worker now that the balance of power has shifted so substantially over to his side. Instead, the story ends not with a bang, but the whimper of the now permanently displaced loyal employee when a new young arrival proves capable of re-starting and operating the machine as always. This is the condition of life for the characters in the stories of the author. They are often tales demonstrating the full consequence of the reality behind the poetic description of lives that are led in quiet desperation.
Perhaps the most iconic of the stories of Idris as an overall metaphor for the social condition of his characters is “All on a Summer’s Night.” The narrator is one of a group of lower-class young men relaxing at the end of the day on a pile of hay. They pass the evening swapping stories that increasingly seem to mingle reality and fantasy. The rehashes become cheats in which there is more action than existed in the reality of the story’s origin.
Nevertheless, the fictions inspire emotional involvement which is only intensified by the hormonal state of the age and gender of those telling and listening. Only gradually does the awareness of the emptiness and despair of their actual lives come to dominate the narrator’s comprehension of what has been taking place. The closing imagery of the story as the young men trek back to another repetition of the same conditions of social existence are aptly applied to any number of other stories by the author as the new day comes to loom like threatening monster from which there will never true escape.
