LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalman198). Rather, in his view, the novel was considered extraordinary for how well itcaptured the Palestinian mood of exhaustion in the early 1960s. Anothercontemporary of Kanafani’s, Ihsan Abbas, found a similar meaning in AbulKhaizuran’s impotence, but thought the character’s weakness represented thefrailty of Palestinian leadership (1972: 17). This view has been replicated morerecently by Barbara Harlow, who observed that Men in the Sun can be read as apure allegory, in which ‘Abul Khaizuran … represents Palestinian leadership atthe time, emasculated and impotent, having “lost his manhood” in 1948 in thefirst Arab–Israeli war surrounding the creation of the State of Israel’ (1996: 48–9). The Lebanese writer Elias Khoury suggested that the tragic dimensions ofthe tale lay in how easily Abul Khaizuran was distracted from his goal by thetrivial matter of his virility. In this allegory, Khoury added, ‘[the] symbols areclear and evident. The Palestinian people die every day in the tank withoutcrying out; it falls upon the land to cry out now’ (1972: 174). In Radwa ÆAshur’ssubtle reading, Abul Khaizuran is a nuanced character who is difficult to reduceto purely symbolic terms, and serves multiple allegorical uses:Abul Khaizuran has good intentions, but he leads those dependent on him to theirdeaths anyway. As a leader, he does not keep his promises or fulfill his responsibilities.He is a symbol of the insufficiency of the Palestinian leadership during thenakba and immediately afterward in assuming responsibility. There is also symbolismhere with respect to the Arab leadership – the kings and Arab heads [of state] in the1948 period. It’s also certain that Abul Khaizuran is one of the people whom hedrives to their doomed end. He is criminal and victim, and we commiserate with himto the same extent that we judge and reject him. His richness as a character andGhassan’s success in creating a meaningful portrait in him make it difficult for us tolimit him to a political signifier with a unitary meaning. (1977: 69–70)As these variant interpretations of the novel suggest, the allegorical trends inthe novel did not accord strictly with a particular historical event, but moregenerally to the ineluctable sense of an overdetermined failure in 1948 and itsaftermath. What the reading public could agree on, however, was the idea thatthe novel translated a failure – whether military, political or historical – into theeasily legible figure of a man whose body is a failure because it has been castrated.Northrop Frye has pointed out that allegory, as a ‘structural principle infiction’ requires a ‘narrative basis’, for ‘we have allegory when the events of anarrative obviously and continuously refer to another simultaneous structure ofevents or ideas, whether historical events, moral or philosophical ideas, ornatural phenomena’ (1974:12). 6 As usual with the things that seem most obvious,allegory’s obviousness is a function of a collective presumption that its terms arenatural. This presumption is necessarily invisible; it is its invisibility that createsthe sense of perfect structural sympathy between a fictional literary narrativeand another, and that bridges two narrative worlds. When writer and reader— 54 —www.taq.ir