LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

writing the nationobvious dramatic skill, allows him to avoid what Haykal resorts to, perhaps forwant of that same skill: an excessively descriptive style which tends to marZainab’s overall effect. Consequently, the intrusive voice of Haykal’s narrator isvirtually absent from al-Hakim’s text. In place of that controlling voice, and thevision it articulates, largely through Hamid as the figure of the buddingintellectual, al-Hakim offers us a self-portrait of the aspiring artist in search ofhis voice and the voice of the nation. And if the text itself represents thefulfilment of al-Hakim’s own quest for mature artistic expression, it is no doubta consequence of his acute attention and commitment to the formal matter ofcomposition which is usually not a priority for a didactic writer like Haykal, andwhich makes ÆAwdat al-ruh, as a result, a far more convincing and finelywrought portrait of various aspects of Egyptian life.Perhaps the most significant difference between the two novels, however,lies in the advantage of hindsight afforded to al-Hakim. Writing in 1910–11,Haykal could not possibly have foreseen the events of 1919 and what wouldfollow. Al-Hakim, on the other hand, was writing at the height of the culturalnationalist movement, after Egypt had secured at least its nominal independenceand at a time when the ideological content and direction of the newnation-state had thus become a paramount concern for artists, intellectuals andpoliticians. And in the Pharaonicist spirit that swept through Egypt upon the1922 discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, al-Hakim found the motif which wouldrespond to that ideological concern as it addressed the significance of the 1919revolution. 29 What Haykal could thus only allude to through a romantic imageof the peasantry, al-Hakim was, in turn, able to weave through his text as theunifying symbolic thread for its otherwise prosaic subject matter; and in sodoing, he created the first masterpiece of modern Arab literature: an allegory ofthe 1919 revolution as the rebirth of the eternal spirit of the Egyptian nation.But it would be misleading the reader to suggest that ÆAwdat al-ruh is thestory of the 1919 revolution. In fact, the mass uprisings which broke out inresponse to the British banishment of the Egyptian statesman SaÆd Zaghlul arerecounted only briefly in the final pages of the novel. Furthermore, at the literallevel, the text provides the reader with no preparation for this narrativemoment, remaining entirely mute on both the great historical events thatprecede it – World War I and the subsequent collapse of the Ottoman empire –and the obvious signs of social unrest in Egypt in the years leading up to 1919(Beinin 1981: 19; Beinin and Lockman 1988: 84–5). The narrative effect,consequently, is one of a spontaneous, almost unconscious, awakening of nationalistfervour that seems to erupt exclusively in response to Zaghlul’s forcedexile. 30 But far from a mere appendage to the main story, the depiction of thisevent marks, both aesthetically and ideologically, the climactic moment of thenovel. And while its particular representation here might in part be accounted— 145 —www.taq.ir