Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: creating new discourses from old
- 2 Women's voices and women's space in Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia
- 3 Tahar Ben Jelloun's Sandchild: voiceless narratives, placeless places
- 4 “At the Threshold of the Untranslatable”: Love in Two Languages of Abdelkebir Khatibi
- 5 The view from underneath: Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
- Concluding: breaches and forgotten openings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Tahar Ben Jelloun's Sandchild: voiceless narratives, placeless places
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: creating new discourses from old
- 2 Women's voices and women's space in Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia
- 3 Tahar Ben Jelloun's Sandchild: voiceless narratives, placeless places
- 4 “At the Threshold of the Untranslatable”: Love in Two Languages of Abdelkebir Khatibi
- 5 The view from underneath: Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
- Concluding: breaches and forgotten openings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
And thus a book, at least as I conceive of it, is a labyrinth consciously devised in order to confound readers with the intention of losing them and bringing them back to the narrow confines of their ambitions.
[Et puis un livre, du moins tel que je le conçois, est un labyrinthe fait a dessein pour confondre les hommes avec l'intention de les perdre et de les ramener aux dimensions étroites de leurs ambitions.]
The Blind Troubadour in The SandchildNot for nothing am I the great grandson of that Ts'ui Pen who was governor of Yunnan and who renounced wordly power in order to write a novel that might be even more populous than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost.
stephen albert in jorge luis borges' “The Garden of Forking Paths,” LabyrinthsThe Sandchild (1985) opens with an absence. The reader reading Ben Jelloun's tale for the first time is apt to be unaware of a pair of missing quotation marks failing to enframe the words of the speaker that begin it. The speaker describes in considerable detail an enigmatic personage-subject whose features have been ravaged by time, who is shut up in voluntary seclusion, afflicted by the incursions – the sights, sounds, smells – of the outer world. The speaker goes on to tell us how the subject sets about to order the details of his impending death and alludes to “the outline of a story to which he alone [the subject] held the keys” [“l' ébauche d' un récit dont lui seul avait les clés”] (9).
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- Islam and Postcolonial Narrative , pp. 66 - 95Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998