‘My Name is Yālū’. The Development of Metafiction in Ilyās Khūrīʹs Work

This essay offers an analysis of the metafictional elements in the works of the Lebanese novelist Ilyās Khūrī (b. 1948). The study of metafiction (fiction which deals with writing and reading) represents a useful way of approaching Khūrīʹs novels, since a preoccupation with storytelling, narrating and writing is a prominent and consistent feature of his work. This article aims at illustrating how such metafictional writing developed from the authorʹs earlier and shorter experiments to his last two, more ambitious novels: Bāb al-shams (1998) and Yālū (2002). Khūrīʹs use of metafiction does not merely draw his readersʹ attention towards the nature of writing, but has far-reaching implications as it promotes a reflection on the workings of human memory and the way history is written. Khūrīʹs metafictional writing culminates in the novel Yālū, which, as compared with his previous works, represents a more engaging and mature metafictional experiment.