Fabulation and Fabrication: Constructing the Atlal in Anthony Shadid's House of Stone

Abstract

ABSTRACT Anthony Shadid's memoir House of Stone (2012) describes his return to a rural village in Lebanon and the rebuilding of his ancestral home after it had been left derelict due to the political turmoil of the country's fifteen-year civil war (1975–1990). This article explores the relationship between memory and ‘home’, and the ways Shadid depicts the ancestral house as a record of a conflation of memories, ranging from the personal to the ancestral and national. I argue that Shadid's project transfers the imaginary construct of home onto the physical site of the ancestral house. The memoir and the house function as sites of fabulation and fabrication. Shadid fabulates rich tales of an idealised Levant, encompassing romantic stories of Marjayoun's past and the house's role in his dream of fabricating a Levantine home. House of Stone illustrates the ways personal and national memory may be linked through the physical site of the house. This process of fabulation and fabrication is representative of an imagined collective identity, shared across time by family and nation. The article deconstructs Shadid's literary representations of physical and imaginary spaces in order to reveal ‘the home’ as a complex site of conflated memories.