Reading for the Nation: 'Third-world Literature' and Israel/Palestine

Abstract

Abstract The lack of attention to reading and reception in postcolonial literary studies makes it easy to forget that one of the field's earliest points of reference is a theory of reading. Fredric Jameson's controversial 1986 essay on 'Third-World Literature', which famously dutinguuhes first-world' from 'third-world' writing, also posits a difference between first' and 'third' world readers by arguing that the first-world' reader L· seriously limited as a reader of 'third-world' texts. This essay returns to Jameson, and to the idea of national allegory, as a way of understanding and responding to the popular and academic reception of Palestinian and Israeli literature. Although metropolitan readers have generally been very willing to read both Palestinian and Israeli texts as national allegories in something like the sense described by Jameson, readers of Palestinian and Israeli women 's writing have tended to privilege these writers ' gender over their nationalism. Drawing on the work of two of the most internationally recognizable female novelists from Israel/Palestine, Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh, the essay argues that national allegory should be understood as a reading and a writing practice, one that writers of both genders anticipate and emphasize in contexts where the nation's political and imaginative force remains urgent and immediate. Keywords Fredric Jameson, national allegory, Palestine, Israel, women's writing, Sahar Khalifeh, Orly Castel-Bloom The lack of attention to reading and reception in postcolonial literary studies makes it easy to forget that one of the field's earliest points of reference is a theory of reading. Fredric Jameson's controversial 1986 essay on 'third-world literature', which famously distinguishes 'first-world' from 'third-world' writing, begins by positing a difference between first world and third world readers. It is worth revisiting the terms of this claim: [A]s western readers whose tastes (and much else) have been formed by our own modernisms, a popular or socially realistic third-world novel tends to come before us, not immediately, but as though already-read. We sense, between ourselves and this alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other reader, for whom a narrative, which strikes us as conventional or naive, has a freshness of information and a social interest that we cannot share.1 Jameson's concern in this passage is not that 'third-world' writers 'are still writing novels like Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson',2 a statement that Aijaz Ahmad and others after him indignandy took at face value.3 Instead, as the quotation marks around the reference to Dreiser and Anderson indicate, Jameson is imagining the response of a hypothetical 'first-world' reader whose engagements with texts from the rest of the world are limited by the narrow political and aesthetic horizons of his or her education and experience. We have been trained, Jameson writes, to 'restrict our aesthetic sympathies, to develop a range of rich and subtle perceptions which can be exercised only on the occasion of a small but choice body of texts'.4 This failing in our reading practices is what motivates the better remembered corrective that follows, that 'all . . . third-world texts are to be read as what I will call national allegories',5 which, in contrast to the unconscious political allegories of modern and contemporary 'first-world' literature, are 'conscious and overt'.6 If we are 'to coincide in any adequate way with that Other ideal reader'7 of the conscious allegory, we need to be able to recognise the 'epistemologica! priority',8 in a materialist sense, of narratives that do not institute a 'radical split' between the private and the public,9 and to take seriously the idea that 'the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself'.10 As Neil Lazarus has suggested in his account of this challenge to the first world reader - who for Lazarus is not any first world reader, but a reader with a particular kind of literary and political training and set of beliefs1 [ -Jameson's 'third-worldness' is best understood not as a geographical term, but as the name of a political desire for autonomy and collective self-determination in a world where the nation remains 'unforgoable as a site of liberation struggle'. …