LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

irony and the poetics of palestinian exileIsraeli citizenship on the other. The strange, or amazing, events leading to Said’sdisappearance are those that bridge the gap across the identity hyphen, themovement from being a Palestinian to being an Israeli. They are nothing morethan repeated encounters with the Israeli state system. To Said, they appearamazing, sometimes stranger than the strangest fiction, such as the ArabianNights, or Voltaire’s Candide, both of which are cited as models for the type ofthings that happen to Palestinians in Israel. As there is not enough space todiscuss the novel in more detail, I shall restrict my comments here to a discussionof its overall structure. Commentators have already drawn attention tosimilarities between Voltaire’s Candide and The Pessoptomist, but what has notbeen observed is Habibi’s ironic parodying of Voltaire’s novel. We only have tocompare chapter headings for both works to see the extent of Habibi’s relianceon Voltaire’s method. Here are some examples from Candide: ‘How CandideEscaped from the Bulgarians and What Befell Him Afterward’; ‘Candide andHis Valet Arrive in the Country of El Dorado – What They Saw There’; ‘TheHistory of the Old Woman’; ‘Candide’s Voyage to Constantinople’. Comparethese with the following examples from The Pessoptomist: ‘How Said Becomes aLeader in the Union of Palestinian Workers’; ‘Said Becomes Possessed of TwoSecrets’; ‘The Story of the Golden Fish’; ‘Said Relates How Crocodiles OnceLived in the Zarqa River’: ‘Said at the Court of a King’. Here we see clearly asimilarity in the manner in which the novel is presented.Habibi himself draws attention to this similarity in the chapter entitled ‘TheAmazing Similarity Between Candide and Said’. Said is a more complexcharacter than Candide because there is a gap in the two parts of his identitythat do not fit together so well. That hyphen across the Palestine-Israel orIsrael-Palestine line is extremely unstable. The chapter on the similarity betweenthe two novels strikes me as being disingenuous; it could only have been writtenby a master ironist whose purpose was to acknowledge a debt to Voltaire andalso to show he was not plagiarising Candide but putting it to his own use. WhatHabibi has produced is, I believe, an ironic parody of Voltaire. First there is themanner of presentation, as we can see from the chapter headings; and secondly,the connection between the two works highlights a fact which I think theauthor wanted to emphasise, namely, that the events that befall Said are just asamazing as those that befall Candide. In both novels, the adventures aredescribed in a similar manner. Clearly, Voltaire also was a master ironist, theirony in Candide consisting in the comparison between a Utopian way of life ina place like the legendary country, El Dorado, and the way life is lived inEurope. Voltaire’s irony arises from the disparity between what is and what isdesirable. To parody an ironic work successfully is to produce a doubly ironicone. The irony in Habibi incorporates Voltaire’s irony, adding another level toit by means of inter-textual reference. Habibi’s irony, like Voltaire’s, also arises— 45 —www.taq.ir