Amar, Ruth

Dr. Ruth Amar is Lecturer at the University of Haifa in Israel and teaches in the Department of French Literature. She has published a number of articles on the French contemporary novel, among others, on the work of Tahar Ben Jelloun, J.M.G. Le Clézio, Michel Tournier, Andrée Chédid, Jean Echenoz. She is the author of a book Les structures de la solitude dans l’æuvre de J.M.G. Le Clézio. (2004, ed. Publisud).

Tahar Ben Jelloun: Les Strategies Narratives

2005 0-7734-6098-5
This study is an analysis of elements that build the narrative strategies of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s work. On formal and thematic levels, the narrative sequence and its interwoven strands, manifest a story in perpetual becoming, in constant dissolution and evolution. In fact, the story is an infinite quest. It is told and repeated in various manners, with no possibility to be exhausted. This continual quest of the story is nourished by a lack expressed by the needs of the post-colonial Maghrebian novel for compensating a world that was, but is not any more. However, this lack conditions the production of the story. The text nourishes itself from the lack it produces. We could say then that Ben Jelloun’s novel is not the production of a story but the emphasized production becoming itself Story: it is not the story that is told but the story of its production. On the one hand, this study redefines Ben Jelloun’s narrative strategies, on the other hand, it focuses on the importance of the perpetual becoming, in all the aspects.

This book presents the analysis of Ben Jelloun’s narrative strategies manifested in his work, reflecting the difficulties of its hybrid nature, the function of the symbolical writing, the construction of characters and their contribution to the fragility of the story, the revelation of generative forces of a form and its rupture. Although other novels are taken into account, the focus of this study is on central texts like L’écrivain public, Moha le fou, Moha le sage, Harrouda, L’enfant de sable, La nuit sacrée, La Réclusion solitaire, Les yeux baissés.