LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

etween myth and historyimprint, and human yearnings’ (Pnueli 1950: 76). Shamir’s novel, Pnueliargues, fails to penetrate beneath the misleading appearance of the Hebrewyouth to expose its inner truth and so does it injustice. Following the sameargument, another critic asks worriedly: ‘How could [the reader] comprehendthe existence of the [Zionist] project […] how could he believe in its future,facing such a young generation?’ (Aran 1952). 18 The novel was thus criticisednot only for perverting the image of the Hebrew youth but also for discreditingthe Zionist national project as a whole.I would like to note that later critics mainly adopted Kurzweil’s attitudetowards the novel. Indeed, critics pulled away from the debate of whether or notUri represents an ideal Hebrew man; recognising a tension at the centre of thenovel, critics often identified it as the conflict between individual and collectivevalues, which the characters struggle to reconcile. Nevertheless, most acceptedunquestionably that ‘for all the assumptions of Jewish patriotism and the singlemindednessof the necessary struggle, there is no attempt made […] at a ratiocinationof the ideology. Neither by the narrator […] nor by the characters.They live their lives in this way as though there is no choice, and so noselection of options’ (Yudkin 1977b: 3). Furthermore, later critics interpretedwhat they perceived as the characters’ ideological one-dimensionality as areductive characterisation and condemned it for standing in the way of‘aesthetic fullness’. While conflicting critical reviews of the novel at the time ofits publication called into question Uri’s character, very little of this tension hasremained in later discussions, even for those critics who examined the receptionhistory of the novel. 19 Generally, in later decades the novel and its protagonistwere perceived as the stereotypical and idealising symbols of the 1948generation. 20Two implications of the above discussion should be noted. First, in the earlyyears following the publication of He Walked in the Fields Uri’s symbolic andmythic value was not determined and set. On the contrary, the public debatefocused on the question of whether or not Uri stands as a symbol for or as amythical embodiment of the Hebrew youth during the 1948 war. It seems, then,that the myth of Uri was not fully established until after the debate followingthe initial reception of the novel had subsided, probably towards the end of the1950s. In this respect, later critics were more instrumental in disseminating themyth than earlier ones. Second, on a more theoretical level, the above discussionunderscores the fact that the attempt to idealise Uri cannot be located in HeWalked in the Fields itself. Instead, such an idealisation appears to result from aninteraction between the novel and its readers and between the different readersof the novel. The discussion thus questions the tendency of literary interpretations(my own included) to locate the meaning they present within the literarytext itself. Introducing the reception history of the novel into its interpretation— 119 —www.taq.ir