La Disjonction de la Voix Narrative et la Manipulation de la Vraisemblance dans "Le Rocher de Tanios" d'Amin Maalouf

Authors

  • Peter Marteinson

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5617/jais.4579

Abstract

This investigation of the narrative voice in Maalouf’s Prix-Goncourt winning novel Le Rocher de Tanios observes the manner in which the multiplicity of enunciators, in the form of secondary narrators “cited” intertextually by the primary narrator, engenders a subtle play upon points of view, epochs, and cultural outlooks, an artifice which lends the novel a breadth in its generic status and veridictory grounding. It manages to be both an entirely possible, realistic narrative, and a fantastical legend, in which the “strange and the marvelous”, in the words of one of the secondary narrators, form a counterpoint against the rigorous historical research of the primary narrative. The result is a tale in which the appearance of a coherent and inevitable progression of providence melds with a capricious logic of chance events. The work raises the question of fiction and history and answers yes to each one; it is not only a fiction aspiring to verisimilitude, but conversely, it is also an actual history transformed into a novel – into the sort of novel that leads the reader to question his sense of truth and falsehood.

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How to Cite

Marteinson, P. (2017). La Disjonction de la Voix Narrative et la Manipulation de la Vraisemblance dans "Le Rocher de Tanios" d’Amin Maalouf. Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 6, 80–94. https://doi.org/10.5617/jais.4579

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Articles