The Road Not Taken: Isḥāq Mūsā al-Ḥusseini and His Chickens · 261words and see the international message of Memoirs, at least indirectly
they do mean that solving national conflicts by peaceful means applies
also to the Middle East, if not exclusively so. In other words, like Plato’s
Republic, Memoirs does not exclude the Palestinians from applying the
author’s proposed principles to solving their national problem. As the
author watched the world self-destruct, he surely also saw the escalating
violence around him, some of which involved members of his own fam-
ily. Thus the readers might have been justified in reading a Palestinian
solution proffered in the book, albeit one of which they did not approve.
A Suitable Interpretative Grid
But the discussion needs to go even further. The question of the author’s
place in the interpretation of his work needs to be examined in depth.
The contributions of new literary and semiotic theories can throw light
on this issue. Even though the debate about the writer’s place in the in-
terpretation of his or her work is fierce, one thing that current literary
theories make clear is the inability to ignore the readers’ place in the
artistic contract between the progenitor/s and receivers of a work of art.
In this sense, we are dealing with at least a two-sided affair. And semiotic
theories do not suffice themselves with only two participants in an artis-
tic transaction: they add the general cultural surrounding of a work of
art, including its epoch. This is what I referred to earlier as “the here and
now.” The here and now means not only the political or social dimen-
sions but the whole conceptual framework in which a work is conceived,
executed, and understood by its immediate receivers—all that goes into
understanding a work of art—something to which both the progenitor/s
and receivers are privy, and which—at times—later generations, or peo-
ple from other cultures, do not always understand or fully grasp.
One such term that discusses this notion of a text is Hans-Georg Ga-
damer’s adaptation of Husserl’s term horizon, although Gadamer’s use
of horizon was geared toward his own scholarly interests, which included
dealing with classical texts such as Plato’s. In Gadamer’s hermeneutics,
one needs to understand a text in a larger context, which consists of its
own cultural and conceptual horizon. According to Gadamer, “Since Ni-
etzsche and Husserl, the word has been used in philosophy to character-
ize the way in which thought is tied to its finite determinacy.”^21 But under-
standing does not mean—and should not be confused with—agreement,