Ethics, politics and poetics: Tahar Ben Jelloun's 'Harrouda', 'La Reclusion solitaire' and 'L'Ange aveugle' (Morocco)

This dissertation examines how Tahar Ben Jelloun, arguably the most prominent Francophone Moroccan author of our time, combines ethics, politics and poetics in his oeuvre. Ben Jelloun, a self-proclaimed "porte-parole" for the North African community, explores issues of uprootedness, marginalization, and identity in wide-ranging works that carry a strong political charge. At the same time, he is a poet with a steadfast belief in the power of literature. Thus, the authenticity of his language is also the product of a learned and highly-refined poetics. This dissertation calls attention to the textual strategies that make it possible to be politically engaged, ethically committed and aesthetically motivated.; I focus on three fictional works which represent a largely diversified geopolitical space: Harrouda (1973), a poeticized novel about the cultural tensions between ancestral and modern Morocco; La Reclusion solitaire (1976), a fictional rendition of the psycho-physical drama of migrant workers in multicultural France; and L'Ange aveugle (1992), a collection of short stories dealing with the tragic consequences of organized crime in Southern Italy. Close readings of these texts reveal a profoundly ethical world-view enhanced by syntactic devices in a discourse characterized by figurative, metaphorical and allegorical language. In Harrouda, while the marginalized female protagonist inserts herself into the master's discourse to "ecrire la parenthese," the reader is confronted with the author's own parentheses and other stylistic configurations that function as allegorical representations of his own personal quest for a new language. In La Reclusion solitaire, recurring ellipses and other disruptive syntax symbolize the exclusion and dispossession of the migrant worker in France. Finally, in L'Ange aveugle, mafia-related problems are staged in an allegorical discourse that attempts to reach a higher order of truth described by the authorial voice as "verite litteraire." Thus, in a variety of contexts---Moroccan, French and Italian---three samples of Ben Jelloun's fictional writing reveal sophisticated ethical, political and literary considerations. This dissertation uncovers a number of textual strategies that often complicate rather than explicate the message, demonstrating that ethics, politics and poetics reinforce one another to prevent simplistic moralizing from taking over.