2 - Nasser as Fiction

Summary

Across the corpus of Egyptian literary narratives, one can identify two major approaches in which Nasser is inserted into the narrative. In the first approach Nasser is featured as part of a historical background against which the narrative unfolds. Interspersed in these narratives are references to Nasser, his legacy, physical and moral attributes, as well as his perspectives on matters concerning both Egypt and the rest of the world. These references are put forward in the dialogues that occur among the protagonists of the work, in their streams of consciousness, or by the omniscient narrator that the work may adopt. Nasser remains part of the historical setting, however, and does not enter the narrative as one of the characters. In other words, in these works Nasser is described, debated, denigrated, or glorified, yet he is not reimagined or fictionalised. Rather, his image is constructed insofar as the main protagonists’ lives interact with, relate to, or are concerned with his. Falling into the famous dictum of Georg Lukács, these narratives represent Nasser ‘as only a minor character compositionally, a figure described from the outside, in action, whose character is not developed throughout the novel, but whose presence, words, and actions have a significant effect on the other fictional characters’.

In the second approach, Nasser himself is a main, if not the main, protagonist. Living side by side with other invented characters, Nasser emerges as a fictive figure whose external reference outside the text is recognisable yet whose actual representation in the text may drastically add to, differ from, or contradict this reference. By way of introducing him, explicitly or allegorically, these narratives open up a space for Nasser as fiction, as a literary character whose life becomes subject to ‘conscious distortion of history through omissions, exaggerations, and anachronisms’. In so doing, each narrative in this category may give us a Nasser of its own, a revised figure that is inevitably coloured by the perspectives of its producers.