Raccontarsi con le macerie: voce e autorialità in Fihris di Sinan Antoon

Abstract

The great expansion of post-occupation Iraqi fiction, with its overall departure from social realism and its exploration of new genres, has brought along a new conceptualization of the Author. This paper aims to study how a peculiar figure of authoriality is both invoked and projected through narrative voices in Sinan Antoon’s Fihris (2016). A complex and multi-layered text, Antoon’s novel is narrated by human and non-human voices. Yet, despite the scattered and fragmented surface of narration, a hierarchical, almost concentric organizational principle is provided by the relations between the main narrators in a context of metalepsis. The analysis will focus on the strategies of authentication employed by narrators of different diegetic levels in the novel, from the short stories embedded, to the further level of authority provided by the autobiographical elements in the narrative frame.