The Civil War Novel as Gateway to the Literary Field

Abstract

The second generation of postwar writers, when they entered the field in the late 1990s and 2000s, found it in a state radically different from what it had been in the late 1970s. The pastoral idylls, a literature idealizing Lebanon as a cultural crossroads and haven of peaceful coexistence, though it may still have featured in their school books (Salem, 2003, pp. 55–56), had been relegated to the past by a group of writers who claimed to have reinvented Lebanese literature. Novels of the war generation were widely held to rank among the most innovative and experimental works of Arabic literature, and they painted a different picture of Lebanon: a crossroads it remained, but for the armies of neighboring countries, the local militias, and criminals of all descriptions who sought to profit from the breakdown of state authority. Blood, violence, and destruction, and the visible and invisible wounds the war had inflicted on the population, had become the focus of literary production: “condemning the war,” as Abbas Beydoun put it, was to many writers the main purpose of Lebanese literature.