Summary
Lebanese novelist whose The Little Mountain (1977) stands in Said’s “After Mahfouz” at the opposite limit from Nagib Mahfouz: the politically committed writer of a fractured, dissolving Lebanon, whose formless, repetitive fiction embodies a predicament Mahfouz’s settled Egypt never imposed (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.311-314).
Details
- Khoury “is amass of paradoxes” (“amass” as printed) among Arab novelists of his generation: a practicing journalist for at least twelve years, a political militant from his sixties schoolboy days in Lebanese and Palestinian street politics, and a publishing-house editor who worked for a leading Beirut publisher for a decade, establishing an impressive list of Arabic translations of major Post-Modern Third World classics (Fuentes, Marquez, Asturias) (PDF p.311).
- He is a critic associated with the poet Adonis and his Beirut quarterly Mawaqif, whose group conducted some of the seventies’ most searching investigations of modernity and Modernism, and, almost alone among Christian Lebanese writers, he espoused from West Beirut, at great personal risk, the cause of resistance to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon (PDF p.311-312).
- His earliest important work of fiction, The Little Mountain (1977; fiction), now appears in English for the first time in Maia Tabet’s translation (University of Minnesota Press, note 2): five chapters exfoliating from the family house in Ashrafiya (Christian East Beirut), to which neither Khoury nor the narrator can return, through the latter 1975 campaigns in downtown Beirut and the eastern mountains to an exilic encounter in Paris, with no rest, no final cadence and no respite (PDF p.312).
- Some of the city and mountain fighting of autumn 1975 and winter 1976 described in the novel is based on his own experiences (PDF p.311).
- For Khoury the finest strand of modern Arabic writing derives not from the stable forms native to the tradition (the qasidah) or imported from the West (the novel) but from works he calls formless — Tawfik al-Hakim’s Diaries of a Country Lawyer, Taha Hussein’s Stream of Days, Gibran’s and Nuaimah’s writings — an amalgam of autobiography, story, fable, pastiche and self-parody that Western theorists have called “Post-Modern”; in his essays the past is discredited, the future completely uncertain, the present unknowable (PDF p.312).
- Style in The Little Mountain is first repetition — the narrator’s search for the order and protocols of a civil war — and comedy and irreverence; its churches are soldiers’ camps and its Father Marcel a garrulous and inebriated racist (fiction), and it ends with the narrator accosted by a disturbed veteran on the Paris Metro (PDF p.313).
- Orphaned by history, the minority Christian whose fate has become nomadic, Khoury, along with Mahmoud Darwish, gives voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities; his work bids Mahfouz an inevitable and yet profoundly respectful farewell (PDF p.314).
- In the essay’s epilogue, Khoury met with Darwish and Said at Algiers for the meetings of the Palestine National Council — the first time the three had met together in six years — and commented relentlessly, but fondly, as a Lebanese, on the Declaration of Statehood proceedings, suggesting that perhaps Lebanon might some day be like Palestine (PDF p.314).
Related pages
Nagib Mahfouz, Mahmoud Darwish, Gamal al-Ghitani, Edward Said, Exile, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays