Abstract
Na’il al-Tukhi's 2006: The Story of the Great War (2009) intervenes in a long tradition of writing about revolutions and underground political organizations in the Arab world by parodying it. While seemingly maintaining the somber tone of these accounts and following their narrative conventions, 2006 tells the story of a revolution that starts as a desire to establish "the Republic of Literature" through purifying fiction of any influence by other genres. The "revolution," however, is betrayed and turns into one that valorizes poetry above any other means of literary expression. Thus, al-Tukhi’s novel places itself within an intertextual web of various textual and visual works, including films (e.g. Rud Qalbi, 1957), novels (e.g. Naguib Mahfouz’s 1977 al-Harafish) and memories (for example, the large corpus of narratives of the Palestinian resistance).
In spite of formally following the conventional solemnness that characterizes accounts of revolutions, 2006 represents not an account of a revolution, but the image of such an account. For it reduces these account to their bare minimum, providing the reader with an X-ray of their structure. Thus, 2006 focuses on the following key points: the initial inception of the idea and subsequent secret agitation, the rise and fall of the revolutionary ideals, and the cult of personality that forms around the figure of the poet whose death inspired the revolution as well his widow who became the revolution’s iconic image.
In this paper I look at the nature of al-Tukhi’s intervention in discourses about revolutions. I also explore the extent to which al-Tukhi's parody disturbs revered narratives of political action and the role of intellectuals in them. Some of the questions I pose are: What textual strategies does 2006 employ in its conversation with canonical texts about revolutions and political organizing? How does it respond to and alter our readings of these texts? What effect does its comic nature have on the serious tradition it inserts itself into?
Finally, This paper also examines the novel's reception, analyzing how and through which strategies of reading certain reviews of 2006 emphasized the novel’s comic nature at the expense of its radical subversion of elite politics, thus turning it from a critical parody of revolutions and political organizing into a critique of specific failed movements.
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