Space and Movement in the Arabic Narrative Tradition

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. Two recent examples in the study of Arabic literature are a special issue of QSA (Ghersetti 2008), investigating the semiotic and symbolic value of places, and a discussion of Gaston Bachelard’s work in Caiani and Cobham’s 2013 monograph on the Iraqi novel. Another path of investigation looks into how, especially in pre-modern texts, character introspection (and emotions) is conveyed through action and movement. This aspect has also been integrated in the study of emotions which has become the object of increasing attention over the past few years (Blatherwick and Bray 2019). The aim of this special issue of QSA is to investigate 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. Visualisation indicates the production of mental images in the process of reading, while visuality “consists of all those components of narrative which trigger visualisation” (Brosch 2013).