Summary
In Anna Bernard’s reclamation of Fredric Jameson’s term, a structural tendency of literary production in times and places where the desire for an as-yet-unrealized national liberation determines everyday experience — and a writing practice, not only a metropolitan reading habit (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.32).
Details
- Jameson’s definition: “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (1986, 69, quoted PDF p.31).
- Bernard distinguishes two senses: an automatic metropolitan reading that confirms what the reader already ‘knows’ about ‘third-world’ countries, and allegory as a ‘structural tendency’ (Larsen, 2001, 19; Lazarus, 2004b, 58) naming the problem of constructing any narrative — realist, absurdist, autobiographical — that responds to a permanent, specifically national crisis (PDF p.31-32).
- The ‘older’ allegories are “conscious and overt” (Jameson, 1986, 80, quoted PDF p.32); their ‘epistemological priority’ (1986, 86) lies in narratives that do not institute a radical split between private and public (PDF p.32-33).
- As a structural tendency it can be just as typical for texts to reject or ironize allegory — as Midnight’s Children does — as to embrace it; Bernard’s corpus lies along that continuum, Barghouti and Khalifeh more explicit, Oz and Castel-Bloom more ironic (PDF p.33).
- Writers in international circulation know they are expected to narrate the nation and cannot but respond, even negatively; Bernard takes seriously the open “invitation to allegorize” (Attridge, 2006, 77, quoted PDF p.36) while denying that Zionist and Palestinian nationalisms are thereby politically interchangeable (PDF p.34-36).
- Chapter 1’s close reframes the practice: instead of reading narrative literature as an analogue of the macro-narratives of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, read for how texts intervene in the conflict over definitions of citizenship, through the Demographic imaginary each biographically-formed text produces (PDF p.47-49).
- Bernard reads Said’s Out of Place against the grain as a national allegory: its correspondence between private and collective is discontinuous, in Jameson’s phrase ‘a matter of breaks and heterogeneities’ rather than ‘the homogenous representation of the symbol’ (1986, 73, quoted PDF p.60, spelling as printed), Said simultaneously linking himself to the collective politically and distancing himself from it experientially (PDF p.56, p.60).
- As a reading practice, national allegory is also what Barghouti’s metropolitan reviewers performed: Paulin, Pryce-Jones and Moughrabi, from opposed political stances, each took I Saw Ramallah as a quintessential Palestinian intellectual’s response, assuming Barghouti’s typicality (PDF p.76).
Related pages
Rhetorics of Belonging, National narration, Fredric Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad