From The Thousand and One Nights to Magical Realism: Postnational Predicament in The Journey of Little Ghandi by Elias Khoury

Summary

I recall Alice's words and try to imagine what happened, but I keep finding holes in the story. All stories are full of holes. We no longer know how to tell stories, we don't know anything anymore. The story of Little Ghandi ended. This journey ended, and life ended.

–Elias Khoury(The Journey of Little Ghandi, p. 7)

This refrain, repeated at the beginning of all the middle five chapters in Elias Khoury's novel, The Journey of Little Ghandi, anticipates the type of story and storytelling that will follow, and encapsulates the kind of intellectual crises Lebanese writers have had to grapple with during and subsequent to the Lebanese civil war (1975–91). Written and published towards the end of the war, 1989, the novel tells the stories of an array of characters who die or disappear in a random fashion during and immediately after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and occupation of Beirut (1982–84). The stories may be structured around the central theme of the Israeli invasion, but the scope of the novel goes beyond this particular historical event. It interrogates the sense, or nonsense, of a civil war driven by sectarian passions and leading to the destruction of a community. The word journey in the title may be taken to mean at one level the journey through the time of the civil war and the war-torn landscape of Lebanon, a landscape now littered with memories of death. The explicit link between story and death evokes immediately the Thousand and One Nights, in which stories are told to postpone death, to keep it at bay. When the story ends, life ends too. Paradoxically, death, or the desire to keep it at bay, generates story, as the civil war has done for Lebanese writing at the time.

That story equals life, as Sabah Ghandour points out in her ‘Foreword’ to the English translation, draws attention not only to the existential resonance of the Nights in the novel, but also a number of similarities between the two works. The novel mimics the frame-within-frame structure of the Nights. The Journey of Little Ghandi, in seven chapters, is made up of three main interwoven narratives. The first and final short chapters, which frame the novel, tell the story of the narrator, or textualized novelist's search for story.