LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

writing the nationto disrupt the relationship. In marked contrast, Salim and Abduh’s responseevolves in a quite different direction:Extraordinarily enough, Salim changed into another person. Muhsin’s sensitive hearthad enough of the sacred fire in it to suffice to fill Salim’s heart and to make up forthe deficiencies of Abduh’s … Was it then contagious? Or a question of imaginationand suggestion? Is the heart not a frighteningly powerful source? A single sensitiveheart may suffice to inspire a wide diversity of others. Thus Abduh and Salim’sfeelings began as admiration and sympathy and ended as a shared participation. Thedeeper Muhsin got into his pain and the more they shared it with him they felt raisedby that much above their original status. With the passing days as they lived withMuhsin and his beautiful grief, every evil or hateful feeling in them toward Saniya orMustafa evaporated … They were witnesses and elegists for the torment of this youngperson who had given up so much for the sake of his beloved. (248–9)Thus, the original divisiveness of individual needs in the specific shape ofmale desire is displaced onto the superstitious Zanuba, who, as the figure of areactionary tradition, has become another national outcast or target of reform.And, in exchange, it is the sensitive heart of the artist, inspired by his vision,that now becomes the new source of male solidarity and the agent of communalsacrifice and the collective sublimation of those needs. By elevating his belovedto the status of an idol, but an idol for whom he now suffers, Muhsin removesSaniya from the earthly realm of competitive desire and thus appears to resolvethe conflict between individual needs and the needs of the community. Butinsofar as Muhsin’s symbolic appropriation of the peasants’ ‘treasures’, aided byhis imagination, is what empowers him to make the sacrifice, Saniya’s owncontradictory position in the narrative is not really reconciled. Rather, in raisingher to an idol, Muhsin seems almost to supplant her in her symbolic role, since itis around his suffering, and not her image, that the others now unite. And whilehis image of the suffering peasantry as the source sustains, as it competes with,his image of Saniya as the beloved Isis, it is his imagination, ironically enough,that now refuses to relinquish its grasp on the literal Saniya, the desirable woman:Not even the truth could destroy those imaginings and fantasies which he hadconstructed for so long around that letter [from Saniya]. Imagination is at times morepowerful than fact … He clung to it and to its familiar phrases as though imaginationthrough its persistence lent it the force of truth, or fantasy had changed into belief.How can truth defeat belief unless the intellect defeats the heart? (249)What the others seem able to sublimate through Muhsin, he seems finallyunable to sublimate himself. And in the link established through his desire herebetween imagination, the heart and belief, the artist’s vision reveals its doubleedgedeffect, rallying the nation around an image which is itself represented as afiction. It is thus perhaps only the faith in fiction, in the artist’s voice and theproduct of his vision, that can will the nation miraculously into being. ÆAwdat— 155 —www.taq.ir