LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

writing the nationchange, we can read both an expression of that fear and one which seeks thereader’s allegiance against such movements, the implication being that if thepeasants are powerless to change their lives, then change must be initiated andorchestrated from elsewhere.One might recall here, by way of comparison, an oft-quoted line from Marx’sThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1898): ‘They cannot represent themselves;they must be represented’ (1984: 124). In Marx’s analysis of the 1848French revolution, the small peasant proprietors could not represent their ownpolitical interests because they were not conscious of themselves as a class andthus aligned themselves, against their own best interests, with Bonaparte’sreactionary agenda. But as Gayatri Spivak points out in her insightful discussionof this passage, representation carries a strong double sense in Marx’s text,meaning both ‘proxy’ and ‘portrait’ (Spivak 1988: 276). And following thedistinction Spivak draws, what we can then see in Zainab is an instance of therhetorical power that derives from the collation of the two meanings: theliterary representation, or portrait, of the peasantry standing in as the politicalrepresentative, or proxy, of their class interests by constructing those veryinterests through a portrait that leaves the peasantry bereft of all agency. Assuch, the novel can offer the reader an image of a community centred on theimage of the peasant without having to worry about the ways in which theactions and demands of the peasantry might in fact challenge that image of thecommunity. 23 For as an objectified symbol of the nation, the peasantry will onlyparticipate in its construction to the extent that they are constructed to fit theneeds of a community whose agency and power will evidently reside elsewhere.To arrive at such a conclusion may seem extreme in light of Zainab’s relentlesscritique of tradition and the way it contributes to and helps to maintain themiserable social conditions of the peasantry. But what I am suggesting here isthat this critique is, in a sense, contaminated by its very object in such a way asto defer to a now more distant future its argument for fundamental socialchange. In other words, by rhetorically excluding the peasantry from taking anactive role in the process of social transformation, the text implicitly advocatesthe continuation of a traditional class structure. What first appears in Zainab asthe inclusive appeal that nationalism makes on behalf of the majority mightthus be better seen as the articulation of an exclusionary pact between narratorand reader. That pact does not foreclose the possibility of change so much as itdefines the terms of change by projecting a vision of the nation under thetutelage of an intellectual elite whose power is predicated on maintaining itsprivileged distinction from the masses.This vision becomes, in turn, even more pronounced through the figure ofHamid as the ‘fallah-intellectual’ who embodies what Charles Smith sees as thenovel’s central conflict: love and the impossibility of its fulfilment in Egypt— 139 —www.taq.ir