Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
How to Read and Analyse a Novel: Analysing the role of SPACE
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This post is the sixth instalment of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel—we have now moved on to reading and discussing individual books! For full introductory details and the reading list, start here, there’s still time to catch up. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.
In her recently published lecture-turned-essay Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, Isabella Hammad describes a scene in Ghassan Kanafani’s novella, Returning to Haifa. In it, a Palestinian couple returns to visit their house in Haifa which they had fled during the 1948 Nakba. During their flight, they left behind a child, just a baby, and they discover upon their return that the Jewish couple that moved into their house adopted this child. When the son—now a man—finds out about his biological heritage, he denies it.
Hammad’s essay pivots on the idea of recognition. She explains that moments of recognition tend to drive her own writing, and in general have a long history within storytelling as a whole. In comedies, it might be the coming together of various narrative threads to produce some surprising revelation; the character is not a stranger at all, but a member of the family. In tragedies, it might be the cumulation of seemingly random symbols culminating in some grander discovery about the self or the world. These are high points in the plot, climaxes toward which the narrative works, and then from which things fall out.
She also emphasises that in narratives, and novels in particular, it is indeed “re”-cognising. That you will perhaps encounter something you already knew, even if you had not fully articulated it to yourself yet. These are, of course, in line with my own thoughts about how stories work, that we discussed earlier on.
As we did, she also posits that some of the pleasure of reading a novel is that realisation that we, the reader, are wrong about something. So there is recognition, but there is also surprise, epiphany, strangeness. The recognition of some new information might bring us not to a revelation, necessarily, but actually expose us to the limitation of knowledge itself. This is the power of a novel to astonish, to move you.1 It is also why it is particularly good at describing subjectivities, the ways each of our individual lenses puts limits on our knowledge.