An Analysis of Anachronism in Ghada al-Samman’s “The Fire of that Summer” Based on Gérard Genette’s Theories

Time is one of the important topics in narratology. Gérard Genette, a French theorist of structuralism, has provided the most comprehensive theorization of time in narration, especially the discrepancy between the time of the narration and the time of the story. The present research tries to examine Ghada al-Samman’s “The Fire of that Summer,” published in her 1973 collection of short stories The Departure of Old Ports, based on Genette’s theorization of time order so as to determine the extent to which anachronism is used in two retrospective and prospective modes in this story. The main hypothesis of this study is that Samman’s short story, since it has many temporal inconsistencies so that the past, present and future intrude into one another, can be analyzed by Genette’s theories. The research, adopting an analytical-descriptive method, analyzes the inconsistencies between the time of the story and the time of the text to demonstrate that the author, using retrospective anachronism (in three forms: diegetic, non-diegetic, and a combination of these two) and prospective anachronism (diegetic and non-diegetic), breaks the linear time of the story. The story begins at a moment when the internal and subjective conflicts of the main character (the narrator) are highlighted. By exposing the inner world and the chaos of the protagonist, Samman invites the audience to read a moving, complex, and, sometimes, highly engaging story. She uses retrospective diegetic anachronism to depict the protagonist’s bitter memories of the fall of the West Bank and the defeat of 1967, while she uses non-diegetic anachronism to portray the Arab community’s negligence of the suffering of Palestinian people. Prospective anachronism is used to portray the predictions of the protagonist about the future of Arab societies. Since the story is based on the portrayal of the reminiscences of the protagonist, retrospective diegesis is highlighted.