UC Berkeley

This dissertation identifies investigation as an ironic narrative practice through which Arab authors from a range of national contexts interrogate certain forms of political language, contest the premises of historiography, and reconsider the figure of the author during periods of historical upheaval. Most critical accounts of twentieth-century Arabic narrative identify the late 1960s as a crucial turning point for modernist experimentation, pointing particularly to how the defeat of the Arab Forces in the 1967 June War generated a self-questioning “new sensibility” in Arabic fiction. Yet few have articulated how these intellectual, spiritual, and political transformations manifested themselves on the more concrete level of literary form. I argue that the investigative plot allows the authors I consider to distance themselves from the political and literary languages they depict as rife with “pulverized,” “meaningless,” “worn out,” or “featureless” words. Faced with the task of distilling meaning from losses both physical and metaphysical, occasioned by the traumas of war, exile, colonialism, and state violence, these authors use investigation to piece together new narrative forms from the debris of poetry, the tradition’s privileged mode of historical reckoning.

In the first two chapters, I bring together two novels with remarkable formal and structural similarities, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s al-Baḥth ʿan Walīd Masʿūd (In Search of Walid Masoud; 1978) and Elias Khoury’s al-Wujūh al-bayḍāʾ (White Masks; 1981). From these two works, I shape a general typology: the novel of investigation begins with the mysterious disappearance or death of its protagonist and proceeds as a search for causes and answers conducted by a metafictional frame narrator. In the second two chapters, I observe how the investigative model manifests both in Egypt, with Yūsuf al-Qaʿīd’s Yaḥduth fī Miṣr al-ān (It’s happening now in Egypt; 1977) and in Morocco, with Driss Chraïbi’s Francophone detective novel Une enquête au pays (1981), at approximately the same historical moment. In all of these novels, I argue, the absent protagonist represents a figure for political resistance that seemed to have disappeared in the disillusionment occasioned by the 1967 defeat—the peasant, the freedom fighter, the exilic intellectual, the Berber, etc.—while the self-questioning frame narrator stands in for the author himself, attempting to wrest meaning from the scattered, chaotic events of recent history.