Hariri’s February’s Promise: Experimentation in the Modern Arabic Novel, A Collection of Critical Essays – Nahida Saad, Lola Salibi

The notion of probability as a unifying principle is a salient technical feature skillfully manipulated in the underlying structure of February’s Promise. This strategy orchestrates the general movement of the novel and, in a peculiar way, the deep level of action which Hariri has succintly defined, in the words of one of his characters, as “the procession of intentions”. These intentions, with their lavish contradictions and their ironical turns, lend the novel a variety of scope, a multiplicity of points of view and a complexity of vision that is decisively original and unique.

In the Semitic culture, the notion of probability implies the ability of the human consciousness to transform the human situation eternally into a futurity. The essence of probability, in order words, is that mental faculty – imagination – which functions in such a way as to help transcend the immediate situation by perpetually transforming it into a state suspended in the general course of time. Things are always about to take place, always about to fulfill themselves as actuality, but not yet… like Doomsday itself, which is eternally there by the corner, but never turns that corner to become real.

Dwelling in probability implies that man always lives more in the future than in the present and that most of the things that take place in the characters’ mind do not really happen in the observable world of reality. Everything characters plan is left in a floating state of suspension, an intention about to be translated into action, about to be born as certainty.

Probability is also associated with time. Although an event or an incident envisioned by a character never takes place in reality, its very suspension, or the negation of its fulfillment, must take place in time. The continuity of things is at the root of what is being planned by characters for the future; characters, therefore, go on planning their own future throughout the novel. And since futurity is the essence of the human experience in February’s Promise, and since it is also the underlying principle of the novel’s structure, it is obvious that life, as conceived by the author, cannot be captured logically and systematically in a continual or conventional manner; hence, the fragmentary conception of the novel and its execution. This seems to be the conception that enables characters to live in the notion of probability, to envision a future and inhabit it while still living in the present.

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