The thousand and one tries: Storytelling as an art of failure in Rabih Alameddine’s Fiction

The paper discusses experimental fiction of Rabih Alameddine, an American writer of Lebanese origin, whose literary pursuits subvert Orientalist discourse based on the East/West dichotomy by focusing on the commonalities of the two. The recurring motif of searching for one’s identity (while being trapped in-between two mutually distant and at the same time similar worlds) is reflected in the subversion of the traditional understanding of the narrative which is destined to a constant failure. Alameddine’s storytelling is, in reality, a “story-trying.“ By employing multiple narrators, intertwining plots, genres and languages, the author is striving hard to tell “hisstory” about American homophobia, Lebanese sectarianism as well as the physical and psychological outcomes of war - a story which turns up to be a narration of the thousand and one failed beginnings.