The ḫabar as a Sandbox: (Moving) Subjects, Objects, Witnesses

Literary criticism has always been interested how physical locations are represented in texts, how they are visualised by the reader, and how they contribute to shaping narratives—in fact, the twentieth century has experienced what is described as a spatial turn in narrative theory. Another path of investigation looks into how, especially in pre-modern texts, character introspection (and emotions) is conveyed through action and movement. This article, and the special issue of QSA it introduces, investigates a micro-topic lying at the intersection of these two macro-themes. It focusses on a peculiarity of the building block of classical Arabic narrative, the khabar: its precision in describing how living things and inanimate objects move in space. The khabar is typically of limited length and is narrated by – involved or uninvolved – participants. Thus, its action often takes place in a defined, easily delimited space where movements can be visualised and followed minutely from a specific perspective. This type of visualisation, which may have been immediate for contemporaries, can still be experienced today, although it often requires the modern reader to imagine unstated intermediary steps in order to make sense of some passages—indeed, the description of movement can also provide incidental information on the material aspects of stories. ‘Visualisation’ and ‘visuality’ as narratological terms, especially as they are applied to the study of the English short story, may be helpful in approaching this aspect of the khabar.