LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

shai ginsburgmoments of interpretation into one non-dialectical moment. Both meaning andthe history of meaning are thus condensed into a point of singularity, outside oftime and history.My own interpretation of Uri oscillates between moments of mythicalreassurance and historical doubt. For me, this movement suggests that readingthe reception history of the novel may be utilised to contravene the tendency totransfigure both the novel and its protagonist into a transcendental realm. Byerasing the tension constitutive of historical representations, such a transfigurationallows for the equation of Uri’s and the new Hebrew man. Indeed, Uri’sdeath and its interpretations are revealed as complex only when seen as aninteraction between a series of representations and erasures: in the case of thischapter, as the interaction of my own interpretation with others’; the interactionof the representation of the reception histories of the novel and the mythof Trumpeldor, and so on. In short, the singularity or non-singularity of Uri’sdeath is an effect of a play of mirrors and distortions. In the end, it seems that itis the position of myself as reader within this play of mirrors that determineswhat I see, what I determine as (provisional) ‘Truth’, and what remains obscure,waiting for yet another reader. 33notes1. I am grateful to the participants of Literature and Nationalism in the Middle Eastand North Africa conference for their comments on the first version of this paper. Iam especially thankful to Ayelet Ben-Yishai and Nirmala Singh whose commentson the paper have proven to be invaluable.2. See, for instance, Jauss 1986; Gadamer 1993.3. See, for instance, Said 1979; Jameson 1981; Greenblatt 1988, 1991; Bhabha 1994;Anderson 1991.4. While the first edition was ready for printing during the last months of 1947, theactual publication of the novel was delayed for several months. I am dealing with thisissue in detail below. In the following I am quoting from the first edition. A secondedition with a few changes was published in 1955 (Shamir 1966) and later criticscommonly refer to this edition. These changes, however, do not affect my argumenthere.5. The data is cited in Shaked 1993: 393.6. This is the Hebrew-Israeli name for the armed conflict between Palestinian Jews, onthe one hand, and Palestinian Arabs and the Arab countries, on the other hand,which lasted from November 1947 until July 1949. In this paper I focus exclusivelyon the Jewish-Israeli perspective of literature and history. Hence, I adopt theterminology current in the Zionist-Israeli discussion of the period.7. Zionist discourses often described the modern Zionist project as re-establishingJewish independence, following the independent Jewish entities of antiquity.8. For the sake of clarity, I give account here only of the main plot-line of the novel.9. Here and in the following, all translations from the Hebrew are mine.— 124 —www.taq.ir