Al-Ḥafrah: A Narratological Analysis of Ḥasan Blāsim’s Short Story from Brian McHale’s Perspective: -

Abstract

This article tried to investigate the short story “al-Ḥafrah” written by Ḥasan Blāsim under the framework of the theory of postmodernist fiction proposed by Brian McHale’s. “Al-Ḥafrah” portrays the condition of a main character who escapes from conflict and falls into a hole. This hole bridges multiple realities and becomes the center of the story’s absurd narration. By employing McHale’s theoretical framework, this article seeks to construct the narrative structure of  “al-Ḥafrah.” This article results in three major concepts of postmodernist fiction. First world pluralism represents a heterocosmic unity between the space of conflict, the space of silence,  and the space of technology. Second, space construction and deconstruction simultaneously happen through three strategies: juxtaposing Iraq and Finland spatially, and juxtaposing the Abbasid era, World War II, the post-Saddam period, and the technological era temporally; interpolating the hole as an unknown space between known places and historical periods; and misattributing the hole by assigning attributes that should not belong to it. Third the recursive structure produces strange narrative loops through a hypodiegetic mechanism that generates new objects from older ones. These three anti-realist concepts dominantly highlight the ontological problems in “al-Ḥafrah,” which disrupt the nature of reality and become an antithesis to realist literature.