FIGURATIVE SPECIFICS OF TAHAR BEN JELLOUN’S URBAN IMAGES: A CITY BETWEEN MEMORY AND OBLIVION
Authors:   Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine, Kobchinska Olena 
Published: June 2019

The paper offers an analysis of urban images in several literary texts by a contemporary French writer of the Moroccan origin Tahar Ben Jelloun. In particular, it explores their figurative specifics with respect to cultural, social, and historical contexts related to North African Maghreb in the second half of the twentieth century. Based on selected material, namely the author’s early novels (such as Harrouda, 1976; L’écrivain publique, 1983 and La Nuit Sacrée), as well as on a poetic cycle Cicatrices du Soleil, 1972, figurative and aesthetical aspects of the writer’s urban imagery are conceptualized with a focus on his central experiences as an immigrant and a multicultural novelist, whereas the dynamics of urban motives in his texts are researched as an important idio-stylistic and cultural matrix. While already available research on the theme served as a background to the investigation, the presented paper incorporates an extended material containing prose and poetry created both before and after the writer’s immigration from Morocco to France. Such an urban imagery is studied in relation to some essential components of the author’s narrative identity that was constructed in the process of always controversial, partially dramatic experience of his immigration. For the aims of the research, we recur to historical and cultural explication, as well as consider methodology related to the theory of intertextuality, hermeneutics, narratology, and psychoanalysis in the article. The results found in the course of the study allow making several conclusions. In the first place, we conclude that urban space in Ben Jelloun’s texts before emigration is represented as a significant cultural matrix that enables the writer’s reflections on historical and urbanistic traumas within colonial, postcolonial, as well as imperial rules in North African Maghreb and in Middle East in the second half of the twentieth century. Secondly, urban texts of Ben Jelloun as an immigrant writer testify a period of spiritual crisis in his writing career when being read as a man’s estrangement from the city, a breach between tradition and modernity, past and present, a postmodernist deterritorialization, and, at the same time, a simulacrum of being. Furthermore, it is found that a widespread motive of wandering in a multifaceted city without itinerary or support in Ben Jelloun’s urban texts is rooted in his personal psychologic gestalt, namely a dramatic experience of rupture with the native land after exile and an insatiable desire to reach it as a promised earth forever lost. In continuation, it can be declared that memory and oblivion are two powerful driving forces, indispensable modes of Ben Jelloun’s traumatic quest that make his urban texts appear as rather melancholic and nostalgic palimpsest of memories belonging to a vagabond in between lands and cities, which is de facto the writer’s autofictional hypostasis moreover mirrored by marginal characters and masks numerous in his texts. Finally, it can be concluded that as a multicultural writer, figuratively – a cultural translator – Ben Jelloun makes a special emphasis on a disabled authenticity and originality of those Moroccan cities that were largely damaged by colonial and postcolonial rules or reconstructions. At the same time, the writer parallels them to traumatic post- civil war transformations that took place in a range of oriental Middle East cities of Liban, Syria, Palestine, etc. bringing their depictions to dramatic, mostly apocalyptic dimension.