Fouad Laroui, ou quand le romancier devient historien = (Fouad Laroui or when the novelist become an historian)

Abstract

When history interferes in fiction, the generic boundaries are broken. From playful fiction we go to historic seriousness, and vice versa. In the dictionary, the word “History” is ambiguous. It is at the same time a set of real events, chronologically dated and localized and therefore necessarily circumscribed and a way of representing the real or reality by pretending to tell what might have happened or might happen.

Maghreb novelists will find in this semantic interpenetration a benefit so that their narration meet a History institutionally official. They have been developing, shortly before, a bulimia for the History that their elders and predecessors have not well grown. Even if they were not primarily seeking “The Absent of history” (Certeau 1973), they will pretend to be teachers to expose, under the generic label “novel”, a critical part of the history of Morocco by the end of the 19th century and the 20th century, by mixing historical personalities and characters at the service of fiction.

Marthe Robert defines the novel in these terms: “A revolutionary and bourgeois genre, that is democratic by choice and animated by a totalitarian spirit, making it break barriers and borders, the novel is free, free to the extent of being arbitrary to the last degree of anarchy” (1972: 14). It is in this spirit that we will try to see how History, with a capital H, is exploited in “the Old Lady of the Riad’’ by Fouad Laroui and in “Pilgrimage of an Artist in love’’ by Khatibi and how this transfer of historic references is operated into a narrative account apparently belonging to the fictional regime.