Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere
Abstract
A theorist and a practitioner of the literary text, Kilito provides us with
a piece of work in which he ‘thinks’ that reality (the world) starts from
two major perspectives: one is aesthetical and the other is philosophical.
Aesthetically, Kilito’s writing is situated in-between the storytelling and
the essay. This means that his fiction could be seen as an impure literary
expression, proceeding by means of entanglements and overlaps between
genres and categories. That is why we are inclined to label Kilito as a
rhapsode, muallif, considering that he builds his fictional universe out
of scattered elements, originating, here and there, in the classical Arabic
tradition, but updated to a nowadays context. Philosophically, Kilito’s
writing asks questions and problematises as it focuses on notions taken
from the classical Arabic culture. Such notions are ontologically decisive
and substantial. One example is the notion of the Author, al-muallif, or that of the origin of the text as it is the case of Arabian Nights, a text whose origin is contested by the author in La langue d’Adam.
My ultimate goal hereinafter is to deal with Kilito’s art of writing, that is to say with the fictional construction process, as one can recognize it in the traces of his writing, not only of the fictional, but also of the essayistic one. I will consider the ‘fabrication’ of fiction at Kilito, on the one hand, starting from an analysis of the three essential components of his work as a rhapsode : the somatic, the poetic and the book-related memory. On the other hand, I will deal with the impure writing (postmodern aesthetics) at Kilito, a reader of the Arabian Nights, of Kundera, of Kafka, of Cervantes and of the classics of the field, so as to open the text to its semantical as well as aesthetical possibilities.
