Narrative Discourse in al-Jahiz's The Judge of Basra and the Fly

Abstract

This study is an endeavor to apply the concept on The Story of The Judge of Basra and the Fly included by al-Jahiz in the book of al-Hayawan [The Book of Animals] against the three concepts of discourse introduced by Gerard Genette: duration, mode, and voice. The study addressed the concept and its procedures on the theoretical level on one hand and then to use of this concept and apply it on the story, on the other hand. The authority of the story was derived from the authority of the (Judge), which unknowingly trapped him in exercising (veneration)! Al-Jahiz tried through the discourse to deconstruct the authority and bringing it back to (solemnity) and bringing it down from steady to movement and from strength to weakness. The closed sequential order of time showed matching with the status of veneration and steadiness. That was against the opened time which is matching the insistence of flies in its transforming and mobile significance. The perspective followed by the narrator in building his story vision violated the Judge's perspective. The paradox was between the authority of the omniscient narrator represented by al-Jahiz and the central character represented by the Judge. It is a paradox between the discourse and the story. The study revealed a set of results of which the most important are that al-Jahiz relied on solo narration in the discourse of the story and the focus in his rhetoric message on the narration authority through words and actions between the narrator and recipient to explore the deep significance of the story discourse multitude of the mechanisms of producing narration in respective of the persuasive semantics that the narrator sought to establish in the narrative text.