Evaluación Financiera (VAN, TIR y ratios financieros).

It may be useful, then, to begin the discussion of repetition in Khoury’s novel by taking account of two common misconceptions about repetition’s role in literary texts in general and in Little Mountain specifically. Repetition, first of all,should not be interpreted as either the opposite of order or the antithesis of

chronological storytelling. I will come back to this crucial point and consider it more thoroughly, but, for the time being, it suffices to say that interpreting repetition in this manner might seem to illuminate dimensions of chronological storytelling (by means of speaking about what appears to be its opposite or antithesis) but would ultimately tell us very little about both the way in which

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This is in many ways both independent of and in keeping with Khoury’s own views on Arab nationalism in both its versions, the pan-Arab, cultural version and the state- based, territorial one. Though this chapter does not discuss Khoury’s own views, it is perhaps worthwhile to know that his views were ambivalent. In her essay “On the Necessity of Writing the Present,” Sonja Mejcher-Atassi write that “for a time Khoury frequented the ‘Arab National Club’ founded by the Palestinian intellectual George Habash. He sympathized with the ideas of Arab nationalism but was not part of any political group in particular. This changed with the Arab defeat in the June War of 1967. Shocked by the political events, he joined the fidayyin, the Palestinian resistance group in Jordan. While pursuing his studies in Beirut, he repeatedly took part in military action in Jordan and southern Lebanon” (88).

repetition can serve as the scheme of narrative and about the consequences of such a stylistic choice.

Therefore, rather than assuming that repetition in narrative signifies a simple escape from or avoidance of chronology, repetition will be treated here as pointing to a burdensome weight that the narrative we encounter in Little

Mountain tries to shake off. This weight is ultimately made up of depositories that influence not only the way we think about identity but also the way identity is fashioned aesthetically. This weight or burden, as we shall see later, is more related to fundamental questions about the nature and power of representation rather than to chronology as such.

What the reader encounters in Khoury’s novel is in many ways a desire to counter conventional notions of representation and in doing so weaken the symbolic order governing identity and ethics which existed prior to the crisis for which the civil war stands. In “The Mature Arabic Novel outside Egypt,” Roger Allen states that Khoury’s novels tend “to provide a challenge for the reader which greatly enriches the process of discovery” (219). From this perspective, the term “weight” could be applied to both reader and narrative: the dominance of the mode of repetition makes it seem as though the narrative and its reader are destined to start at the beginning, must perpetually repeat that beginning, rather than simply march forward while pretending that representation could

somehow dissipate the traumatic consequences of the civil war. Repetition, in short, is the mark of hesitancy to accept progress and the illusion of continuity, two key ingredients of nationalism as ideology.

Expressing this weight of “the eternal beginning” through repetition (and now I come to the second misreading) reveals that we are not simply dealing with a trauma-induced crisis of mimesis. According to Mona Takieddine Amyuni, for instance, it is the incoherence of the situation depicted which motivates Khoury to use this anti-realist style. In her essay entitled “Literary Creativity and Social Change,” she elaborates on the effect of the social upheavals of the sixties on the Arabic novel. Amyuni describes Khoury’s inability or unwillingness to write coherently about the Lebanese Civil War saying that

a fractured reality, indeed, haunts Khoury’s personae24

and is rendered through a similarly broken down style. The only reality…is made of endless stories one creates…the rest totally escapes one’s grip. These chopped-up stories are like a ‘mirror of a broken reality,’ and a basic question is posed in all of Khoury’s fiction: how can literature weave the language of our troubled epoch out of the mirrors of a broken reality?’ (108)

The metaphor of narrative serving as a mirror of reality (broken or otherwise) Amyuni deploys points to a persistent theoretical approach to make sense of literary experimentation.25 _{The intimation is that narrative cannot (or at least}

ought not to) weave a coherent language out of a reality characterized by chaos.

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The narrator is often compared to Khoury himself as a result of the biographical overlap with the main narrator’s experiences.

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This is a simplified characterization of this theoretical approach which is often posited in more complex terms. In Modern Arabic Literature, Paul Starkey puts it as follows: “a prominent characteristic of Ilyas Khuri’s work is its ‘self-referential’, or ‘metafictional nature, a strategy that attempts to involve the reader as a creative partner in the making of the text, which both marks the author out as a ‘post-modernist’ in the full sense of the term but which also reflects the fragmentation of the society to which he belongs” (150).

While Amyuni’s discussion of Khoury’s style is descriptively accurate, it is analytically questionable. Amyuni assumes that the inability to represent a broken reality through a coherent narrative is a shortcoming of mimesis. How is it possible to represent chaos through formal orderliness, the reasoning goes? This reasoning proves insufficient when considering the abundance of realist (or even documentary) narratives which seem to be capable of depicting chaos through well-ordered, chronological narratives. Since it would be questionable to claim that such depictions are in essence unsuccessful or unethical, we are left with no choice but to concede the possibility that aesthetic order could indeed successfully capture chaos.

Rather than a crisis of conventional mimeses, then, the fragmentary, repetitive narrative of Little Mountain points to an attempt to strip the story bare and leave it with as few symbolic traces as possible. Since the concept of mimesis is imbued with the connotations of recreating the world with a certain degree of fidelity, of imitation, and realist representation, thinking of repetition as a crisis of mimesis would suggest that the work suffers from an inability, at worst, or a refusal, at best: an inability to recreate what really took place or a refusal to invest the necessary effort to render it satisfactorily. Dealing with what took place through stripping the story of symbolic traces, however, suggests both the ability to create an alternative to conventional mimesis and the acceptance of the

challenges this entails. The symbolic traces I have in mind, it must be reiterated, are the building blocks of the process that inextricably links the individual and the nation at the crucial levels of identity and ethics. The point behind stripping the story of such symbolic traces in Little Mountain is not simply to dispute or to

respond to the questionable premises that initially contributed to the crisis but to use the fragmented parts of those premises as the primary material for creating an alternative style of articulation. In other words, it is a style of articulation that uses up the symbolic traces rather than deploys them. By using them up, it

renders them ineffective.