In the light of post-structuralist notions of mourning (particularly but not exclusively), this projects draws on the ethical obligation and the therapeutic need to remember the past without claiming it. The act of remembrance must rather recognize its own impossibility in order to avoid a false claim of fidelity and leave the conversation with the past open. According to Derrida, “[w]e must hold fast to this evidence, to this excessive clarity, and continually return to it as if to the simplest thing, to that alone which, while withdrawing into the impossible, still leaves us to think and gives us occasion for thought” (35). The project shows that such a representation of latent memories in literary narrative may rely on metafictional and metaleptic interventions to revise its failed models of remembrance. In this self-reflexive strange loop, mourning is never lifted and the mourner is constantly haunted by a past that is always yet to come but is destined to fail as an ontological entity. Such a failure paradoxically represents a more ethical model of mourning.

The project explores the textual and aesthetic techniques in four of Jaber’s novels. It mainly focuses on the role of metafiction and metalepsis in producing a mnemohistory of dissonant narratives and failed models of remembrance. Two of the novels, 2008( ا عترافات) Confessions and The Mehlis Report, mourn the missing from the Lebanese war. The former recalls 2005 ( تقرير ميليس) the past through the first-person memories of a traumatized war survivor, while the other draws on the relation between the war and 2005 through the voice of a war kidnap victim narrating from the afterlife. Two other novels, 1996( البيت ا خير) The Last House and 1997( رالف رزق في المرآة) Ralph Rizkallah through the Looking Glass, mourn the Lebanese movie producer Maroun Baghdadi and the Psychology professor Ralph Rizkallah respectively.