Perdition and getting lost in a lost short story by Ghassān Kanafānī: When hostile space (al-makān al-muʿādī) takes over narrative space

The literary space assumes essential semantic importance: from Bakhtin’s structuralist analysis to the reading of space as in the concept of the “production of space” theorized by Henri Lefebvre, the issue of spatiality has unquestionably gained importance in literary studies. When the Jordanian writer Ghālib Halasā translated Gaston Bachelard’s La Poétique de l’espace (1957) as Jamāliyyāt al-makān (1984), he observes the French author does not address the hostile space (al-makān al-muʿādī). Halasā admits how this subject has enriched the issue of spatiality with significant data. Building upon these premises, the present contribution aims to offer an interpretation of this hostile spatiality within a story by the Palestinian writer Ghassān Kanafānī. “ʿUlbat zujāj wāḥidah” (Just a glass box)—included in the collection ʿĀlam laysa la-nā (A World Not Our Own, 1963)—is the forgotten short story to which this article intends to devote itself. Within this narrative space, two different forms of spatiality take shape—outside and inside the titular glass box—both characterized by that hostile, unfamiliar trait to which reference has been made thus far, and which we will try to investigate to expose its distinctive features through the actors who act in this space.