Elias Khoury’s Little Mountain: The Lebanese Civil War and the Aesthetics of Revolution

Elias Khoury’s second novel, Little Mountain, has become a reference point for both the Lebanese Civil War literature and the fragmentary narrative style associated with it. Little Mountain’s fragmentary and repetitive narrative, rather than standing for a crisis of conventional mimeses as the common reading would have it, actually connects the two crucial domains of identity—the aesthetic and the political. The chaos that narrative repetition creates stunts the development of identity, in both senses of the word. Repetition does so by targeting the logic of representation itself, exposing in turn the aporia of difference at the heart of national identity. The trauma ensuing in such a situation, then, comes as a result of the disintegration of the illusory sense of being part of a solid, national collective.