LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

jeff shalanlargely as a backdrop for the story, but via Hamid who wanders through thatbackdrop from the privileged perspective of the landowner’s educated son. It isfrom a similar perspective that both narrator and author approach their subject,and in the same way that the mobility of Hamid’s class position distances himfrom the peasantry, the narrator’s use of literary Arabic distances him from thepeasants who employ colloquial in the dialogue which itself was a nonethelessinnovative advance at the time (Brugman 1984: 240). Thus, Haykal’s pen namemight be seen as the first instance of a semantic transference that works tobridge, if not efface, this distance by shifting the focus from class difference to acommon national identity.A similar transference is enacted in the narrator’s imaginative openingaddress to the reader:If fortune favoured, you might step into a moonless night … Soon you would findyourself following a path without knowing why, attracted by a force which you couldnot resist, your feet following your impulse … Moving on in pursuit of your heart’sdesire, you would reach a spot where your feet refuse to take you further … you wouldbe overwhelmed by the beauty of the world … Continuing on your journey … youwould see the young girls and boys … In their right hands they hold their sickles –those semicircles of iron which have been in use from the time of the Pharaohs up tothe present day. (Haykal 1989: 6–7) 20As the reader is drawn into the story, he is implicitly reminded of the fact thathe is an outsider to this world and that he finds himself on its unfamiliar terrainonly at the behest of the narrator, who thereby positions himself here as themediating agent between the reader’s world and the world of the story. One canthus assume through this rhetorical invitation that the intended reader isneither a peasant nor one familiar with the ways of rural life. But the reader’sfigurative placement within the actual scene of the story here works, in turn, tocounter the distancing effect of his status as an outsider to the action of thestory. By placing the reader within the scene, and indeed suggesting its irresistibleattraction, the narrator in a sense encourages him to step beyond his role asobserver and to in some way partake in this world. For if he, too, is one ofEgyptian stock, then this world is also his world, as the historical continuity ofthe concluding phrase suggests, the sense of which is then underscored a fewpages further on: ‘Their steadfastness, with its roots in history passed on fromgeneration to generation from the time of the Pharaohs through the rule ofIsmael to the present day’ (Haykal 1989: 15).It is thus possible to see in the narrative strategy of this passage the beginningsof Haykal’s attempt to construct for his reader a community centred onthe land and the agrarian life of the peasantry. But the reader’s momentaryidentification with the romantic depiction of this seemingly timeless life is quicklydisrupted by the contrasting image that immediately follows it:— 136 —www.taq.ir