LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalmannascent but well-organised Israeli army. At the same time, Palestinian civilianscontinued to leave the country until 1949, when armistices between Israel and theArab countries who had sent troops were signed.5. Fadl Naqib, ‘ÆAlam Ghassan Kanafani’, in Shu’un Filastiniyya 13 (1972), pp. 198,200.6. Kanafani’s novel would appear at first glance to be a historical allegory, since it isunmistakably in some way ‘about’ the period around the 1948 war. But thatreference is in fact not strict, as the multiple interpretations of the terms of theallegory suggest. Kanafani’s novel is more like philosophical or moral allegory thanhistorical, designed to warn and urge his readers to consider the state of Palestiniannational identity. Abul Khaizuran’s final address to the men whose corpses lay at thebottom of his truck, ‘Why didn’t you knock on the walls of the tank?’, may be takenas an appeal from the novelist, who had already arrived at the conclusion that armedresistance would be necessary in the assertion of national identity.7. Both issues related to allegory were at the root of Frederic Jameson’s proposal thatWestern readers approach all Third World novels as national allegories (in SocialText 15, Fall 1986, pp. 65–88). Addressing an American audience, and using theterminology of First and Third worlds, he urged readers to reappraise the apparentlynaive or simplistic ‘socially realistic Third World novel’ (66). What makes thisdismissive reading possible, Jameson charged, is our privileged (first worldly) distancefrom politics. Because we can take national and economic stability for granted, andhave been able to do so for some time, we have the luxury of reading fiction as a keyto our private, psychological status. First World readers therefore do not share thesame assumptions, in Jameson’s view, as a Third World reading community. Heoffered – as a way of building that bridge between fiction and world across which thereader must travel for a meaningful reading experience – the suggestion that aconscious link between the economic and political assumptions that underwrite theFirst World reader’s encounter with literature constitute an interpretive strategy.Jameson went beyond proposing an interpretive method, however, but alsoaddressed the problem of having a stable, target narrative (an extra-literary text,‘reality’) that allegory, to be legible, requires. He offered one: Third World culture isdominated by the collective struggle for political and economic autonomy, organisedprimarily through the expression and experience of nationalism. He thereforesuggested not only that privileged readers read Third World novels as allegories, butthat Third World novels actually are national allegories, always written in necessaryrelation to a one public issue, ‘the experience of the collectivity’ (86). Jameson’sbroadly stated proposal engaged a number of problematic assumptions, among themthe idea of the essential unity of and essential difference between what he calls the‘First’ and ‘Third’ worlds. These problems, and others, are treated eloquently in AijazAhmad’s reply, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”’ inSocial Text 17 (1987), pp. 3–27.At the same time, Jameson’s intervention was a provocative challenge to theinsistent transformation of non-Western fiction into ‘universal’ tales in order tomake them palatable to an English-speaking audience. This is precisely the tactic ofthe English introduction to Men in the Sun, which proposes that:Such a close involvement as we know to have been Kanafani’s in his struggle for— 76 —www.taq.ir