The middle, the east, the west of Erin: Narrative disorientation and the production of space

1 Introduction

In 1957, Guy Debord, de facto leader of the Situationist International – a revolutionary organization of artists and intellectuals – published an idiosyncratic map of Paris, titled Naked City. Described in its subtitle as an “illustration of the hypothesis of psychogeographical turntables,” the map consists of nineteen fragments cut from a Parisian map and linked by directional arrows offering paths between disconnected areas of the city (McDonough 2002: 243). In its fragmented representation of city space, Naked City renders the map not as a tool of absolute knowledge, i. e., a stabilized and authoritative representation of space existing outside the strictures of time. Instead, Debord’s map represents city space diachronically as a series of events: movements through limited perspectives of space. In other words, the map represents city space as a kind of quasi-narrative.^[1]

This narrativized city space builds from Debord’s notion of the “dérive,” a critical practice that reconfigures the commodified city. Described as “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences,” individuals practicing the dérive “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (Debord 1958: 63). This movement is not randomized wandering. One’s awareness of and engagement with the city produce “psychogeographical contours” that guide movement, what Debord calls its “currents” of space. (The Latin root, derivare, means to divert flows of water.) Mackenzie Wark describes the practice as cutting “across the division of the space of the city into work, rest and leisure zones,” finding “other uses for space besides the functional,” and playing “in between the useful and the gratuitous” (2015: 25) The dérive transforms one’s perception of the city and disorients one’s place within it, fusing aesthetic and political action through principles of spatial movement.

I extend political and aesthetic implications of this relationship between space and narrative by considering disorientation of narrative space more generally – that is, by investigating narrative strategies that displace or disrupt access to narrative setting, spatiotemporal movement, or the space of narration. To do this, I fuse Henri Lefebvre’s geographical work on the social production of space to Gabriel Zoran’s systems of narrative space. This fusion imagines a spatial critique that describes and categorizes ways that narrative is central to the politics of spatial practice. Admittedly, this categorization undermines the implicit unity of narrative space. Thus, in order to model this interactivity, I turn to Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), a prototypically disorienting text in which we see the fusion of these two spatial fields – one narratological; the other geographical – as well as disorientation’s role in critical spatial practice.

At Swim-Two-Birds is a homodiegetic narrative of a lazy Dublin student, living in his uncle’s house, which he rarely leaves except to drink with friends. To pass the time, this student writes an increasingly complicated narrative that begins as three separate stories: about the devil Pooka McPhellimy, the author Dermot Trellis, and a series of Irish legends. In Trellis’s narrative, the bedridden author demands his characters perform immoral actions counter to their nature, and so these characters drug Trellis so that he will spend more time asleep and they may live as they choose. Cowboys, an invisible fairy, Mad King Sweeny, Finn MacCool, a happily married couple, etc. – all characters in Trellis’s stories – interact with one another and, eventually, with Trellis, who falls in love with and impregnates one of his characters. Born into the world as a fully formed adult, Orlick strikes against his father, writing a narrative in which Trellis is tried and punished for his crimes. Eventually, the student writing this convoluted narrative passes his exams, and, wrapping up his writing, has Trellis’s maid accidentally burn his writings, freeing Trellis from his punishment, and ending the narrative.

While metalepsis is the central device that drives this bizarre novel, I put that element aside for now. More than enough work has been done on that aspect of the text (Bell & Alber 2012, Cohn 2012, Fludernik 2003). Instead, I see this interpenetration of diegetic levels producing a singular narrative space, one situated explicitly in Irish political, historical, and cultural contexts. M. Keith Booker identifies three critical trends for approaching that context (2004: 1–2). The first identifies the novel’s postcolonial challenge to the ideology of English realism (see Esty 1995). The second appropriates Bakhtinian dialogism to explore the novel’s rich discursive structure (see McMullen 1993). The last attends to its revolutionary content, i. e., the revolt against the author (see Devlin 1992). To these three, I add a fourth that approaches narrative politics through this spatial lens, informed on one hand by narratological concerns with spatial disorientation and on another hand by ideological concerns of spatial practice. In that intersection between critical geography and narrative theory, At Swim-Two-Birds becomes a narrative about the complicated interplay between creation and control of space – the way that space is configured and reconfigured through spatial practice.

2 Disorientation and the production of space

Undergirding this assertion of space as site of reconfiguration is Henri Lefebvre’s theoretical model for the production of social space, which connects the work of artistic production (and the imagined worlds created in that production) to very real negotiations of capitalist space. Moreover, Lefebvre’s model reveals ways that the imagined spaces of literature subvert social organizing systems by proposing models of their own that question modes of spatial production, offering sites for imagining emancipatory possibility outside current definitions of space. Lefebvre’s dialectical analysis of capitalist space (what he calls “abstract space”) involves a “conceptual triad” that splits social space into three distinct elements. The first element, spatial practice, “embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation” (1991: 33). As Rob Shields describes it, spatial practice is “space perceived [perçu] in the commonsensical mode – or better still, ignored one minute and over-fetishised the next” (1998: 160). Edward Soja defines spatial practice as “the process of producing the material form of human social spatiality” (1996: 66). This is the dominated space as experienced through everyday experience, with all the intractabilities of social space intact.

Second, representations of space are “tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations” (Lefebvre 1991: 33). Best thought of as discourses on space, representations of space are the coded systems of spatial production, the dominant spaces that decipher, produce, and control spatial knowledge. This element reveals the details of spatial practice by deciphering the space in which it occurs – that is, by describing and measuring its organizing principles. In this way, conceived space contributes the models and systems through which we come to understand spatial practice. It creates the spatial modes through which organizing systems are possible. These systems are the dominating spaces of regulation, power, and ideology, imbued with epistemological power through language and discourse. At the same time that representations of space serve hegemony, however, they are also the sites of utopian thinking and abstract constructions of alternate possibilities.

Finally, in spaces of representation, power is coded and rendered symbolically. These are discourses of space. Shields describes this level as “space as it might be, fully lived space [l’espace vécu], which bursts forth as [...] ‘moments’ of presence” (1998: 161; emphasis original). They contain resistances to and negations of dominant modes of social space. Spaces of representation include the spaces of artists, writers, and philosophers who “describe and aspire to do no more than describe,” yet through that description offer possible resistances to hegemonic spatial modes of capital and nation-state (Lefebvre 1991: 39; emphasis original). Spaces of representation are, for Soja, “strategic location[s]” that are “the space[s] of radical openness, the space[s] of social struggle” (1996: 68; emphasis original).

Here Soja moves beyond Lefebvre’s model to point out what he sees as Lefebvre’s assumptions about spaces of representation. Soja believes that Lefebvre prioritizes the elements of the conceptual triad as site for political possibility. He offers two possible explanations for Lefebvre’s silence: (1) he “either assumed [the centrality of spaces of representation in a liberatory politics] would be implicitly understood” or (2) he “avoided an explicit recognition of it for fear that it would be construed as uncontestably fixed, a complete answer, a permanent construction that would divert too much attention away from other modes of spatial thinking” (1996: 69). Whether or not Soja’s speculations are justified, they reveal that spaces of representation – and artistic production that occurs as part of it – carry dialectical potential to reconceive social space. Because spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of representations are inherently interconnected and only separable through abstraction, any relationship between textual form and space must inherently deal also with other elements implicit within the production of social space. In that interconnectivity, art’s capacity to reconceive space integrates this radical openness into the larger structures of social space.

Literature’s position in this spatial matrix allows it not only to reflect on current modes of spatial production, but also to reveal political paths for reconceiving spatial practice. For Jacques Rancière, politics entails the construction of “spheres of experience” that define the objects shared by a collective and the subjects with the power and voice to designate and describe what takes place within these spheres. Politics designates those objects, people, and ideas that can and cannot be made visible. Rancière explains:

This distribution and the redistribution of space and time, place and identity, speech and noise, the visible and invisible, form what I call the distribution of the perceptible. Political activity reconfigures the distribution of the perceptible. It introduces new objects and subjects onto the common stage. It makes visible what was invisible, it makes audible as speaking beings those who were previously heard only as noisy animals. (2011: 4)

Politics, in other words, entails reorganization of what (and who) can be seen, heard, and understood. The politics of literature take advantage of its ability, according to Rancière, to intervene “in the relationship between practices and forms of visibility and modes of saying that [carve] up one or more common worlds” (2011: 4). For Rancière, literature construes relationships between language and representation as radically open, implying “the equality of subjects and the availability of any word and any phrase to build the fabric of any life whatever” (2011: 26). The politics of literature thus redistributes what can be said and seen, disrupting or disorienting hegemonic models to posit new regimes of sensibility, new models of space and time or geography and history. These redistributions reconceive relationships between space and politics by offering new modes for understanding such concepts and by disorienting and undermining current modes.

3 Disorientation in Gabriel Zoran’s narrative spaces

Before clarifying these disorienting strategies, I should explain what they do not entail. I distinguish my sense of “disorienting” from narratological discussions of the unnatural. Disorienting narrative worlds are not necessarily impossible, as Alber et al. have defined the unnatural (2011: 116); in fact, their possibility often transforms the lens by which these narratives represent, critique, and propose alternate modes for the production of space. If anything, they reveal the “unnatural” (i. e., culturally, economically, and political contingent) structures of spatial production in all social spaces, even the supposedly “natural.”

Rather than a binary system of inclusion and exclusion, I think of “disorienting space” as a flexible set of spatial characteristics ranging from prototypically to marginally or minimally disorienting. To position texts within this set, I employ a modified version of Gabriel Zoran’s levels of spatial structuring in narrative.^[2] Zoran divides narrative space into conceptually horizontal and vertical categories. On the horizontal level, Zoran identifies three basic “scopes”: (1) total space, which comprises the entire narrative world (whether represented in the text or not); (2) the complex of space, which involves spatial elements located in the text; and (3) the unit of space, or individual spatial elements comprising the complex of space.

While aspects from this horizontal axis implicitly make their way into this study, I focus on Zoran’s vertical structure of space, with slight modifications, and I subdivide this category into four distinct levels: topographic, chronotopic, linguistic, and textual space. Vertically, narrative space is at its most abstract when addressing what Zoran calls the topographic level. Here, representational space exists “with its own ‘natural’ structure, cut off entirely from any structure imposed by the verbal text and the plot” (1984: 315). Topography is tied to physical rules, political characteristics, geographic details, etc. that are either assumed or explicitly stated in the narrative. Building on the works of possible-world theorists like Lubomír Doležel, Thomas Pavel, and Marie-Laure Ryan, David Herman recognizes both fictional and nonfictional narratives’ capacity to “transport interpreters from the here and now of” the narrative telling to “the here and now that constitute the deictic center of the world being told about” (2002: 14). This cognitive relocation to new storyworlds accounts for a great deal of narrative’s immersive power. While differences exist between their two models, at their core both Zorn’s topographic space and Herman’s storyworld are concerned globally with the constructed world in which narrative takes place.

Unlike Bakhtin’s interest in “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (1984: 84), Zoran focuses the chronotopic level on structures and organizations of space created through narrative movement and action.^[3] In other words, plot progression creates spatio-temporal structures that determine and are determined by changing events and situated movements within the narrative. Relative relationships of movement and rest determine an object’s ability to reorient itself to new spatial contexts. An object (whether a character or an inanimate thing in space) can be either moving or at rest. When at rest, it is tied to its spatial context. When in motion, that context shifts, and the object constructs new spatial contexts until it comes to rest. Whereas topographic movement is hypothetical – moving from point a to point b is as possible as moving from point b to point a, or from point b to point c – chronotopic movement is authorially determined. This movement produces what Zoran calls “a network of axes having definite directions and a definite character” (1984: 319).

I subdivide Zoran’s textual level into two separate categories: linguistic and typographic. The linguistic level imposes structure based on three characteristics of language: (1) its inability to exhaust all details of a given object or space; (2) its inherent linearity; and (3) its dependence on point of view. Zoran makes no distinction between verbal and printed language, and so I include a typographic level, which attends to the page (or, more generally, physical location and position of text). Here is the material foundation on which all other spatial concerns of print narrative build; narrative worlds, movement through those worlds, and the languages used to access those worlds depend on engagement with the material space of print surface. All texts must be organized in some readable structure and must appear on some surface, whether that surface is paper, brick, digital space, human skin, etc. Furthermore, material details – dimensions, shape, geographical location, method of production, etc. – can signify by interacting with textual layout. In this sense, the typographic level is more limited than the linguistic level, since it necessarily encompasses only situated examples.

All four levels – topographic, chronotopic, linguistic, and textual space – occur simultaneously and any division must be abstracted from a unified whole. Yet, abstraction establishes criteria for identifying disorientations in individual examples. These four levels potentially include qualities and characteristics that make narrative space more or less difficult to reconstruct, organize, and understand. So, while disorientations are interrelated, we can, for the moment, describe characteristics that disorienting texts may exhibit at each level. What follows is a description of these levels of disorientation, examples of texts that employ these strategies, and a look at their presence in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds.