Breaking into the Boundaries of World Literature: Tahar Ben Jelloun's "L'enfant de sable"

The essay aims to analyze the novel "L’enfant de sable" (1985) – the first bestseller by the French-Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun – in the perspective of World Literature as underpinned by the theories of David Damrosch and Pascale Casanova. This theoretical approach illustrates to what extent the success of a literary work is the product of the intersection between its aesthetic value and the socio-economic dynamics governing the literary market. A global writer on the threshold of two worlds, Ben Jelloun concocts a hybrid work in which Persian-Arabic literary and cultural traditions melt together with their Western counterparts. In particular, L’enfant de sable is characterized by a multilayered hybridity for a strategy of negotiation between the two cultures is employed at many levels: narratological, intertextual and linguistic. This strategy of hybridity/negotiation may be deemed as a mere compromise to reach a larger readership. Indeed, analyzing the novel within this theoretical framework highlights its ambiguities: remarkably, the author has been accused of commodifying his own culture to create a product palatable to the Euro-American market and compliant with Westerners’ expectations about the Arabic world – the topic appealing to French readers being the evidence of it. Yet, this reading also points out the novel’s undeniable aesthetic value: Ben Jelloun succeeds in merging two traditions artfully while opening a window into recondite aspects of Moroccan culture.