Nor is this all. Khoury is a highly perceptive critic, associated with the avant-garde poet Adonis, and his (now defunct) Beirut quarterly Mawaqif. Between them members of the Mawaqif group were responsible during the 1970s for some of the most searching investigations of modernity and modernism as applied to Arab culture; as explicator, critic, polemicist, translator, and formulator of new ideas, Khoury came to remarkable prominence while still in his 20s. It is out of this work, along with his engaged journalism — almost alone among Christian Lebanese writers he espoused the cause of resistance to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon (see his book Zaman al-Ihtilal, Period of Occupation) and did so publicly and relentlessly at great personal risk from the heart of West Beirut — fiction, editing, translating, and literary criticism that Khoury has forged (in the Joycean sense) a national and novel, unconventional, fundamentally postmodern literary career.
This is in stark contrast to Mahfouz, whose Flaubertian dedication to letters has followed a more or less modernist trajectory. Khoury’s ideas about literature and society are of a piece with the often bewilderingly fragmented realities of Lebanon in which, he says in one of his essays, the past is discredited, the future completely uncertain, the present unknowable. For him perhaps the most symptomatic and yet the finest strand of modern Arabic writing derives not from the stable and highly replicable forms originally native to the Arabic tradition (the qasidah) or imported from the West (the novel) but those works he calls formless — e.g., Tawfik al-Hakim’s Diaries of a Country Lawyer, Taha Hussein’s Stream of Days, Gibran’s and Nuaimah’s writings. These works, Khoury says, are profoundly attractive and have in fact created the “new” Arabic writing which cannot be found in the more traditional fictions produced by conventional novelists. What Khoury finds in these formless works is precisely what Western theorists have called postmodern: that combinatorial amalgam of different elements, principally autobiography, story, fable, pastiche, and self-parody, the whole highlighted by an insistent and eerie nostalgia.
Little Mountain replicates in its own special brand of formlessness some of Khoury’s life: his early years in Ashrafiyyeh (Christian East Beirut, also known as the Little Mountain), his exile from it for having taken a stand with the nationalist (Muslim and Palestinian forces) coalition, subsequent military campaigns during the latter part of 1975—in downtown Beirut and the eastern mountains of Lebanon — and finally an exilic encounter with a friend in Paris. The work’s five chapters thus exfoliate outward from the family house in Ashrafiyyeh, to which neither Khoury nor the narrator can return given the irreversible dynamics of the Lebanese Civil Wars, and when the chapters conelude, they come to no rest, no final cadence, no respite. For indeed Khoury’s prescience in this work of 1977 was to have forecast a worsening of the situation, in which Lebanon’s modern(ist) history was terminated, and from which a string of almost unimaginable disasters (the massacres, the Syrian and Israeli interventions, the current political impasse with partition already in place) have followed.
Style in Little Mountain is, first of all, repetition, as if the narrator needed reiteration to prove to himself that improbable things actually did take place. Repetition is also, as the narrator says, the search for order — to go over matters sufficiently to find, if possible, the underlying pattern, the rules and protocols according to which the Civil War, most dreaded of all social calamities, is being fought. Repetition permits lyricism, those metaphorical flights by which the sheer horror of what takes place (“Ever since the Mongols … we’ve been dying like flies. Dying without thinking. Dying of disease, of bilharzia, of the plague. … Without any consciousness, without dignity, without anything.”) is swiftly seen and recorded, and then falls back into indistinct anonymity.
Style for Khoury is also comedy and irreverence. For how else is one to apprehend those religious verities for which one fights — the truth of Christianity, for instance — if churches are also soldiers’ camps, and if priests like the French Father Marcel in Chapter Two of Little Mountain, are garrulous and inebriated racists? Khoury’s picaresque ramblings through the Lebanese landscapes offered by civil combat reveal areas of uncertainty and perturbation un-thought of before, whether in the tranquility of childhood or in the certainties provided by primordial sect, class, or family. What emerges finally is not the well-shaped, studied forms sculpted by an artist (like Mahfouz) of the mot juste, but a series of zones swept by half-articulated anxieties, memories, and unfinished action. Occasionally a preternatural clarity is afforded us, usually in the form of nihilistic aphorisms (“The men of learning discovered that they too could loot”), or of beach scenes, but the disorientation is almost constant.
In Khoury’s writing therefore we get an extraordinary sensation of informality persuaded gently and not always successfully through the channels of narrative. Thus the story of an unraveling society is put before us as the narrator is forced to leave home, fights through the streets of Beirut and up into the mountains, experiences the death of comrades and of love, ends up accosted by a disturbed veteran in the corridors and on the platform of the Paris metro. The startling originality of Little Mountain is its avoidance of the melodramatic and the conventional; Khoury plots episodes without illusion or foreseeable pattern, much as a suddenly released extraterrestrial prisoner might wander from place to place, backward and forward, taking things in through a surprisingly well-articulated earth-language, which is always approximate and somehow embarrassing to him.
Finally of course Khoury’s work embodies the very actuality of Lebanon’s predicament, so unlike Egypt’s majestic stability as delivered in Mahfouz’s fiction. I suspect, however, that Khoury’s is actually a more typical version of reality, at least so far as the present course of the Middle East is concerned. Novels have always been tied to national states, but in the Arab world the modern state has been derived from the experience of colonialism, imposed from above and handed down, rather than earned through the travails of independence. It is no indictment of Mahfouz’s enormous achievement to say that of the opportunities offered the Arab writer during the twentieth century his has been conventional in the honorable sense: he took the novel from Europe and fashioned it according to Egypt’s Muslim and Arab identity, quarreling and arguing with the Egyptian state, but finally, always, and already its citizen. Khoury’s achievement is at the other end of the scale. Orphaned by history, he is the minority Christian whose fate has become nomadic because it cannot accommodate itself to the Christian exclusionism and xenophobia shared by other minorities in the region. The underlying aesthetic form of his experience is assimilation — since he remains an Arab, very much part of the culture — infected by rejection, drift, errance, uncertainty. Yet Khoury’s writing represents the difficult days of search and experiment now expressed in the Arab East by the Palestinian intifadah, as newly released energies push through the set repositories of habit and national life and burst into terrible civil disturbance. Khoury, along with Mahmoud Darwish, is an artist giving voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages. From this perspective Khoury’s work bids Mahfouz an inevitable and yet profoundly respectful farewell.