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Maher Jarrar
Language and Textual Strategies: A Reading of Elias Khoury’s Novels

MAHER JARRAR

Language and Textual Strategies:

A Reading of Elias Khoury’s Novels

Elias Khoury has proven himself a critical thinker with command of diverse forms of expression. With a voice committed to social and liberation struggles, he incorporates these struggles into his everyday work at times when the pain of the Arab people has become unbearable. In this sense, he exemplifies the three characteristics that Edward Said called for in an intellectual: daring to speak truth to power, testifying thus to a horror otherwise unrecorded, and being a voice of dissent in the country in which he or she lives during clashes against ruling powers and institutions.

How do we enter the world of Elias Khoury’s novels? As readers, we are drawn into their space by the familiar voice of the first-person narrator, who weaves us into the fabric of the tale and implicates us within the narrative web, making us bear witness to the events. Entering Khoury’s world necessitates multiple re-readings of his texts, as each reading adds a new dimension to how we take in, savour and participate in the aesthetics of the creative act.

Khoury’s novels are preoccupied with questions of fiction and modernity: among them – Is writing an illusion? Is the truth of the story to be found outside of it? These questions are also pertinent more broadly to the reality of Arab intellectuals in the contemporary Arab world since the novel, as a mode of storytelling, recalls moments lived by the individual subject in the midst of collective social processes and through particular linguistic codes, inscribing them as a symbolic act upon the ‘re’-construction of social subtexts.

What is storytelling? Khoury asks. Are stories to be found strewn among the streets of memory and the pathways of the imagination? How do we gather them to create a structure where all other structures have been destroyed? What is death? Can a story actually heal and challenge death like Scheherezade did? If we understand a story as an act of recollection, then is this recollection separated from its reality only by ‘the twinkling of an eye’?

Khoury’s novels always open with a death and proceed to narrate stories of the lives and dreams of ordinary people and their pain. The death creates gaps in the narrative, which pave the way for marginal characters and ordinary heroes to narrate their stories. They always emerge from a recollection that works through a forward-moving dynamic. In this way, the end explains the beginning, which itself can only be understood through a ‘recollective’ dynamic. But this recollection commences from a beginning that is in and of itself the story.

Since 1975, Elias Khoury has written thirteen novels and one collection of short stories. Let us take a look at the sources of inspiration that have played a formative role in his texts:

Firstly, his solid knowledge of the Arab tradition of oral narration, in both its official and popular versions: the latter embodied by The Thousand and One Nights and the popular sirah, or oral epic in verse.

Secondly, a firm grasp of the history of the Arabic novel, from the works of Jurji Zaydan to Naguib Mahfouz, and a dialogic affinity with the poetics of the post-Mahfouzian Arabic novelists: the 1960s and 1970s generations in Egypt, and Emile Habibi, Youssef Habashi al-Ashqar, Ghalib Halasa, Ghassan Kanafani, Anton Shammas and many others besides. This is anchored in an all-embracing understanding of literature that includes an intimate knowledge and appreciation of both classical and contemporary Arabic poetry.

Thirdly, Khoury is well read in novels from world literature, having begun with reading Camus and Sartre at the age of 15, and being familiar with the masterpieces of the major contemporary novelists.

The intellectual corpus that has nourished Khoury would not be sufficient in itself to compel a new, seismic shift in the Arabic novel, were it not for Khoury’s stance as a critic and intellectual striving daily for social justice and the struggle against imperialism, especially Zionist settler-colonialism. It is there on the ground, among the people and bearing witness to the emergence of a revolutionary consciousness, that the language of Elias Khoury the novelist matured and he was able to sharply hone his techniques and textual strategies.

Language

Furthermore, Khoury can himself be considered one of the pioneers of innovation in language. His novel City Gates depicts a city closed to the outside world. Its circular form brings to mind the story of the city of brass in The Thousand and One Nights, and also establishes an intertextual relationship with the stories of the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. Stylistically, it deploys poetic techniques such as enjambment, repetition, prolepsis and analepsis, as well as plot interruptions, in an attempt to break with the constraints of form and create a language that had first begun crystallizing in Khoury’s mind as a young man. These elements have remained central to his subsequent novels despite the fact that the experimentation with language is different in each novel and gives each one its own special linguistic flavour.

The novel White Masks can be considered a major leap in modern Arabic fiction, in which Khoury borrows from the journalistic register with its straightforward sentences and blank, matter-of-fact tone, and from the oral cadence of unrefined speech as spoken by ordinary people. With the multiplicity of narrators, the different linguistic registers also multiply for the novel to become a polyphonic dialogue. These techniques capture both the language of everyday life and the fragmented parlance of the civil war, which re-scatters its fragments within the arbitrary mushrooming of urban space. For instance, The Journey of Little Gandhi is a retelling of the same story over and over again, alternating in focus between the minor characters one by one and retold in a different voice and from a different point of view each time. This circular trajectory does not lead to the text collapsing in on itself; on the contrary, it creates new outlets for speech through a proliferation of different registers and perspectives, and consolidating meaning.

       

Khoury’s experimentation reaches maturity and naturalness developing into a poetic polyphony, in Gate of the Sun and Yalo. In Gate of the Sun, which is based on real-life testimonies, Khoury adopts the technique of the frame tale from The Thousand and One Nights, where telling one’s story is, in a sense, an act of overcoming death: one that in this case opens up the individual and collective memories of dozens of ordinary people uprooted from their historic homeland of Palestine. Khalil, the overt narrator, is unable to distinguish one story from the next and keeps losing track of things, until he retreats into an interior world characterized by a stream of consciousness, an outpouring of emotions and a disconnection between real time and that of his own subjective world. He keeps handing over the reins of the story to other narrators in overlapping tenses. Each one of these narrators is haunted by his or her own perennial worries and has their own particular language, which indicates the geographic region and social class they belong to. The fragments of their stories come together to redraw for us the map of the Palestinian tragedy as it relates to present-day conditions. Gate of the Sun is effectively a counter-narrative that confronts the history written by the conquerors, by relating the history of their racist violence in the language of ordinary people.

In Yalo, we continue to experience the freshness of Khoury’s language through the pangs of its birth from the mouth of Yalo, the schizo as victim and prisoner, the narrator and main character. Yalo, structured around the strategies of crucifixion and carnival, is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, who tries through writing and recounting his story to prevail over his ego, which has been crushed and dismantled under torture in prison by agents of the authoritarian, repressive security apparatus.

In As Though She Were Sleeping, Khoury makes an informal contract with the reader based on references that run parallel to the text, which aim to alert the reader to the implied narrator’s variegated textual influences – which branch out in all directions. The title of the novel itself is an allusion to the Bible. It is divided into three parts, or three nights, as their titles show, which stand in for the three days and three nights Jesus spent in the grave between his crucifixion and resurrection. His choice of ‘nights’ over ‘days’ appears to be a means to smoothly draw attention to the dreamlike nature of narrative, enticing us to enter into its structure, which the narrator has crafted like a web. Like Scheherezade, the narrator weaves his patterns in the still of night, making of the novel one uninterrupted dream. Meelya, the main character, is hostage to the world of dreams on ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ to borrow from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. The narrative is framed by two dreams: it begins with Meelya as she closes her eyes again to resume her dream, and ends with her dreaming of the little white sheep crawling over her chest, which renders the novel a dream that goes in a circle. There are literary dreams too, embedded within the text, which play a role in the novel’s cultural context. In this way, the state of dreaming – and daydreaming – links the Biblical past to the present moment, especially as the dreamlike state itself is a borderland or liminal threshold that rests temporally in rituals of transition, suspended between the borders of temporal time and what lies outside it. The narrator who uses free indirect speech in As Though She Were Sleeping is inconsistent and non-homogenous in his style, assuming disparate roles as he speaks. He goes from taking on the persona of the omniscient narrator who knows all about every character, especially Meelya, to speaking more like a historian. But he also keeps hinting at his own presence in the narrative, until he finally reveals his identity shortly before the end: he is Iskandar, Meelya’s nephew, who has become a journalist.

In the first two parts of Khoury’s trilogy Children of the Ghetto, Adam comes out of his ‘circular metaphor’ which caves in on itself to become a truth that goes beyond symbolism and stands alone, like an ancient Arab poet on the atlal, or deserted ruins, that make up Palestine. Named symbolically for being the first baby to be born in the ghetto of Lydda after its occupation, Adam is, in a sense, a witness to the beginning of the massacre as well as the last person to experience the paradoxical enigma of these atlal across the geography of the rubble turned by Zionist colonialism into a chasm of violence and madness. There, Adam stands guard to watch over the devastation and preserve the voices of the dead. As a symbol for the beginning of man, Adam is a ‘present absentee’ abandoned at the crossroads of memory in a liminal, deterritorialized space of departure and deracination. His psyche is haunted by the phantoms of two characters from two previous Palestinian novels: Dov/Khaldoun from Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa and Saeed, Emile Habibi’s Pessoptimist. Like both of these protagonists, Adam happens to be a Jew by circumstance, or, shall we say, a Jew caught unawares. The atlal that honed the contours of his consciousness with their cutting pain, anxiety and memory are ironically rendered a paradox, perhaps by Adam himself, when he associates them with the ghetto of Warsaw and the Auschwitz death camp instead of his own ghetto of Lydda.

Perhaps in the third and forthcoming part of Khoury’s trilogy, this paradox will make him different than both Dov and Saeed. His character will come out of the metaphor of Arthur Koestler’s novel Thieves in the Night (cf. Kanafani) and step out of his exile and nomadic life through an ongoing struggle to redefine and to re-situate his identity, language and dwellings into the future paradox of the homeland/atlal, a paradox “whose resolution needs a war to be resolved”.

This is how, in his novels, Khoury develops a language that operates at the centre of contradictions, based on deconstructing official and mythic discourses. This newly-created language inflames our consciousness and amplifies the voice of the marginalized, re-telling the history of the silenced who are confounded by the challenges posed by their mode of existence.

Narrative strategies

In his texts, Khoury avoids using the voice of the omniscient narrator who dominates the entire space and is in control of its chronological progress, and of describing the characters and their inner conflicts. Even when he recurs to a first-person point of view, it is not the monotonous, repetitive speech of a single self-absorbed “I”, but rather an open or focalized angle of view – akin to a shoulder-borne 8mm camera – which presents to us views from multiple angles, as different narrators pass on the voice to each other. The changes in narrative voice and pronouns necessitate changes in the levels of narrative and the points of view, which open up to one another like reflecting mirrors. This makes the narration of plot events jumbled, as dialogues overlap and intersect, and the standard process of description is absent. Therefore, the plot is repeatedly reproduced through different possibilities for the outcome of any set of actions, and we have a set of secondary discourses that coexist with each other, helping to complete the structure of the novel’s textual space. The textual space is divided up through the cinematic technique of montage, which fragments and chronologically jumbles the tale so that it no longer progresses in a straight line. Repetitions, back stories, recalls, flashbacks and flash forwards all lead to intensifying time in the text, which varies between actual historical time, the time of the narration and the psychological time experienced by the characters.

We can deduce here that the nature of Khoury’s experimental language, which is based on deconstructed, fragmented sentences, the use of a blank, matter-of-fact utterance, the oral cadence of unrefined speech, and the coupling of standard literary Arabic with the spoken dialects of the Levant is not something contrived, or mere playing with the visual form of language. Rather, it is the natural outcome of a storytelling that is built through the juxtaposition and overlapping of variable focalization points of view.

Another element worth nothing among Khoury’s textual strategies is his outstanding ability to create characters, making his novels poetic dialogues par excellence. By avoiding direct description and not using the omniscient narrator, he avoids creating ready-made, pre-packaged characters; his characters are complex, multifaceted, dynamic and formed by the actions they are engaged in. And given that these are realistic characters who seem to spring from the real world, with universal, humanist dimensions, they possess an ability to linger on in the minds of the reader-recipient. Perhaps Khoury’s talent for creating iconic imagery and constructing symbols that have universal significance – Christ, Mar Elias, the outcast, the refugee, and the stranger, Palestine as a universal metaphor – is what gives his characters a life of their own outside of the text of the novel.

This leads us to our last item in these remarks: the historical and geographical space that Elias Khoury’s novels are so firmly rooted in. His novels take us back to pivotal events in the history of the Levant, such as the violence that engulfed Lebanon from the 1840s through to the 1860s and extended as far as Damascus, and the ethnic cleansing of Armenians and Assyrians in the early 20th century. These two major events reshaped the Bilad al-Sham, or the Levant, through the violence, death, mass uprooting and forced migration that they engendered. Then came the assault of the Zionist settlement, driven by the ideology of a mythical narrative, to uproot the Palestinian people through slaughter and expulsion from their lands and complete the circle of death by founding a ‘kingdom of strangers’ (to use the title of one of Khoury’s novels) on top of the ruins of the Levant. And indeed, Khoury’s novels give voice to these strangers and those dead, to let them narrate, from their own spaces, those stories that history paid no heed to.

The crucial observation here is that it was the Lebanese civil war that led to the true birth of the Lebanese novel. And Khoury himself does not look at the civil war in isolation from the historical and socio-political dialectics since the mid-nineteenth century and the founding of the autocratic model of the “Arab nation-state” which he labels as a “New-Mamluk-state”. It is there that the questions of the Lebanese civil war are anchored. Wars have no victors, his work seems to say; we are all losers in war. We are all victims in them and are all strangers; to be alienated is what it means to be human. Palestine, as a symbol, is at the heart of the existential questions raised by Khoury’s texts, beset by bloodshed, political debauchery and betrayal. In his novels, Palestine becomes the central question, an issue that can fuse together all peoples and all strangers in their search for meaning, freedom and human dignity.

Elias Khoury stands apart from the other writers of his generation, and can truly be counted among the great names in Arabic literature. His engagement with novels from all over the world, and strategies that might be construed as ‘postcolonial’, also makes him a luminary among the novelists of world literature.

Translated by Suneela Mubayi

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Check out the rest of the feature in Banipal 67 – Elias Khoury, The Novelist

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