Abdel Halim Hammoud: a strident subconscious speech

Many novelists have tended to project their experiences and themselves clearly into the depths of their fictional texts, and this was evident to them through the personal occupation of the greatest space of revelation and expression to occupy the mind of the receiver and his analytical machine. . This is what Abdel Halim Hammoud did not do in his novel “The Illusion of the Ego”, recently published by “Dar Ruwaat”, where the collective self was distributed among the four characters seated at the narration table. Hammoud adopted fictional polyphony, which is the most difficult technique, to introduce us to Hilda, Nai, Raed, the prisoner, Sama, and Shams. Personalities who wanted freedom, whom Emile Cioran ridiculed as “the analogy of the healthy.” With Hilda, the revelation was strong.

A body that speaks with a direct accent. Pain, lust and instinct expressed Hilda indifferently. In other words, we are facing an explicit projection of the unconscious speech that was clearly demonstrated when Hilda described her dirty room as her name, and the poison inside it … the room of pleasure and intercourse and a deviation from the natural sexual path. The writer left an angelic space for Hilda when he wrote to reveal her suffering in the brothel with her mother, “Umm Assaf”, who took away her motherhood and deposited the desire to save money by starting with the body instead of her. Thus, the writer has used the character of Hilda to give a clear example of the saying of Emile Cioran: “The life of a person is the expiation of his birth”.
As for Nye, she is a journalist who dazzles with her daring, and has consciously refined her through Desire magazine, which she compiled with a handsome young man with a raw presence and courage that put her before the test of the “desire” that is two decades older than him. Hammoud created for this character a satanic space that allowed the recipient to see Nai’s restless inner circle, who wanted to free herself from her disciplinary framework and from the strict social tunnel with its customs and traditions. Nai, who fights with her daring press materials, added to her professional forehead an emotional front that Hilda used to blame at times for her administration and bless her at times.
Hammoud took advantage of the technique of multiple narrative voices, leaving space in front of each character to express their condition without crowding or crowding each other. Every reader looks for an argument for the lack of realism in the text. But the question lies in the shocked ending.

Addresses of places dating back to the time of the eighties and up to the present day.

Are the characters books of freedom? Or did the author write it under this restriction? Wouldn’t it have been better to avoid showing Hilda’s satanic novel, the connected novel separated from the text as the writer calls it, thus providing a greater opportunity for the recipient to draw the ending they see and open their own intellectual window far or near the character speeches organized chronologically?
There is no doubt that Abd al-Halim Hammoud, with this illusion, spoke of everything that goes into the heart of the ego. The text was the home of the unconscious shared by all. It strengthened and deepened the entry to the text with two words from Syuran about depression and the monk and butcher’s struggle for desire, but it spread the nihilism and belonging to freedom, chaos and madness that created all this psychological confusion.

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