Re-Cycling the Flâneur in Elias Khoury's The Journey of Little Gandhi

The representation of Beirut in the contemporary Lebanese novel is perhaps one of the most prominent themes that occupies some literary critics today. Although the image of Beirut in the novel started to take shape before the Lebanese civil war (1975–90),Lebanese novelists such as Elias Khoury, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hoda Barakat, Rashid al-Daeif, and Rabee Jaber have developed the genre since the war, and up to the present, by introducing innovations on the levels of novelistic forms, narrative stylistics, and writing devices. These novelists have created a ‘discourse’ centering on the various images and literary representations of Beirut. But as many of these narrations prove, Beirut is no easy city to write about. The city resembles a sea of contradictions, perhaps because it reflects a suggestive me´lange between the East and the West, and is historically perceived as a city on the cultural border between Europe and the Arab world; or perhaps because it reflects a hybrid text in itself, composed of many political and religious groups. The long civil war also has had a profound impact on the city, its architecture, its infrastructure, its arts and literature, and of course on its inhabitants, their everyday life, and their cultural production. Still today, we find traces of this war in the literature of Lebanese novelists.