LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

etween myth and historygenerations. How, then, could Uri and his death be incorporated and co-optedinto the context of life? In the name of continuity and procreation, Uri’s fatherexpropriates Mika herself and her fate from her own hands and takes them over.In the name of historical life as it is realised in the kibbutz, he demands that shegive herself and her child to them – that is, to Uri’s parents. It is telling, ofcourse, that historical life, as the life of continuity and procreation, depends notupon the native Hebrew man as its agent but rather upon the refugee womanfrom Europe. The perpetuation of the whole system depends on her: without herchild, there would not be another Uri, and without Uri, ‘they’ – presumablyrepresenting the historical circumstances of Jewish life in Palestine that requirehuman sacrifice – would not have the material upon which to feed. Finally,appropriating Mika and her unborn child, Uri’s father fulfils and complementsUri’s fantasy. The woman is left behind to mourn the dead warrior, therebyreaffirming the male fantasy of heroism within history. What, then, is the statusof this fantasy in the light of Uri’s dubious death?In the above, I describe He Walked in the Fields in terms of its criticalreception. I show the latter to be short-sighted, for it overlooks the complexitiesthat Uri’s character presents. The critical reception I refer to, however, deservesmore attention. In fact, many critics did identify a tension in the novel centredon the character of Uri. In order to draw out the intricacies of the novel’sreception history, I will now examine the relation between ‘history’ in thereception history and the novel’s struggle with myth and history. I would like toset my own discussion against two possible critical reactions to the novel. Onthe one hand, it could be argued that critics failed to notice the tension at thecentre of the novel. In contrast, it could be argued that critics did recognise sucha tension but chose for whatever reasons to silence it. In both cases, critics areultimately blamed for consciously or unconsciously producing a hegemonicreading of the literary text that conceals the tensions within the text as well aswithin the social and political reality of the time.Nevertheless, as the public debate surrounding the publication of the novelshows, quite a few critics of the time observed the disparity between Uri’scharacter and the ideal of the new Hebrew man. Still, rather than locating thetension within the novel, they explained it away by asserting that the frictionlies between the novel and reality, between the fictive character and thehistorical young Hebrew man. By examining the reception history of the novel, Iargue, in fact, against two reductive readings: first, of the novel and its charactersas one-dimensional, and second, of the critical scene as uniform and univocal.Hence, in this section, after reviewing the range of critical reactions to thenovel, I juxtapose them with one of the historical sources to the myth of thenew Hebrew – the figure of Joseph Trumpeldor. I suggest that the interpretativemechanisms that were formed through the circulation of the myth of— 117 —www.taq.ir