LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

16Between Myth and History: Moshe Shamir’sHe Walked in the Fields 1Shai Ginsburg— 110 —‘History’ has been a stumbling block for recent attempts to give a theoreticalaccount of the rise of nationalism in modern times. Questions – such as howtheory could coherently address divergent historical experiences without effacingthe historical particularity of each experience, how the North African and theIndian national experiences compare, or what the relation between ‘first-world,’‘second-world’ and ‘third-world’ nation-building is – continue to haunt attemptsto ‘theorise’ nationalism. While such attempts underscore the historicity of theprocesses that gave rise to nationalism as well as national consciousness itself,one region often remains outside the realm of history, that of literary meaning.In the 1960s and early 1970s, theoreticians such as Hans-Georg Gadamer(1993) and Hans Robert Jauss (1986) explored the historical operations thatproduce meaning. 2 Still, their insights appear all but forgotten by more contemporaryattempts to discuss literature in the context of modern nationalism. Majorfigures such as Edward Said, Frederic Jameson, Stephen Greenblatt, HomiBhabha or Benedict Anderson, who in every other aspect of their work introducehistory into the reading of a text, read the literary text as if its meaning is alwaysalready set and determined, beyond history. 3 In this chapter, I would like toaddress the question of history and theory by examining one case study from thehistory of modern Hebrew literature in the context of Zionist nationalism.In Israeli cultural memory, Moshe Shamir’s novel He Walked in the Fieldsoccupies a prominent place. The novel was first published in February 1948, andit gained an immediate commercial success. 4 Within just a few months, thenovel sold some 3000 hardcover copies and 20,000 paperback copies. 5 Toappreciate fully its extraordinary popularity, the reader should bear in mind thatthe Jewish population in Palestine at the time was about 650,000, many ofwhom were recent immigrants and could not read a Hebrew novel. In thesecond part of this chapter I shall address the critical reception of this novel indetail. At this point, I shall treat the critical response to the novel in generalterms only.Many read the novel as an attempt to portray the Hebrew youth, the nativesof Palestine, during the decisive moment in the Zionist struggle to realise Jewishnationality in Palestine. In particular, readers saw in the novel’s male protawww.taq.ir