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For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories.
- Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller"
When things are repeated, they lose a fraction of their meaning. Or more exactly, they lose, drop by drop, the vital strength that gives them their illusory meaning.
- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
All identities are only simulated, produced by an optical 'effect' by the more profound game of difference and repetition.
- Gilles Deleuze, from the preface to Difference and Repetition
Published two years after the start of the Lebanese Civil War, Elias Khoury's second novel, Little Mountain, has become a reference point for a host of novels depicting this conflict that lasted from 1975 to 1990, novels which are part of what is now known as Lebanese Civil War literature. The novel is also emblematic of the fragmentary narrative style for which many of Khoury's novels are known. The novel's fragmentariness is most evident in the repetitive structure, which becomes apparent from the narrative's outset where the narrator recalls the Beirut neighborhood in which he grew up:
They called it Little Mountain. And we called it Little Mountain. We'd carry pebbles, draw faces and look for a puddle of water to wash offthe sand, or fill with sand, then cry. We'd run through the fields-or something like fields- pick up a tortoise and carry it to where green leaves littered the ground. We made up things we'd say or wouldn't say. They called it Little Mountain, we knew it wasn't a mountain and we called it Little Mountain. (3)
The movement of narration here begins and ends with Little Mountain. Between the beginning and the end lies a discovery of sorts about the nature of representation whose law of discursive correspondence between the described and description is laid bare through repetition-they called it...we called it... "because the mountains were far away" (3).
In the overall narrative, the repetitive movement of narration is characterized by an explosion of stories incorporated into a tenuous narrative frame. This narrative frame puts into sharp relief the novel's fragmentariness. In Little Mountain, the shape fragmentary storytelling takes is determined by the specific form of repetition out of which it arises. On its own, fragmentary storytelling in Khoury's novel has little...