NARRATIVISED PAST

I find Davenport's pronouncement on the relationship between geography and history tantalisingly appropriate for my exploration of the Arabic novel, for it elegantly sums up a key theoretical principle underpinning any discussion of Arabic narrative and storytelling at the juncture of the transformation from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern’ in the recent history of Arab culture and literature. Davenport not only places the stake of geography and history in each other, but also opens up the imagination to the forces of geography and history. He allows the imagination to be mapped by our notions of space and time and, more importantly, sees the workings of the mind in spatial and temporal dimensions. The idea is not new. What Davenport says of ‘imagination’ – that even though it is ‘metaphoric’, ‘like all things in time’, it ‘is also rooted in a ground, a geography’ – has been a familiar, if not dominant ‘motif’ or ‘trope’ in an array of ‘histories’, of science, thought, critical thought, art, literature and culture.