Volume 4, Issue 2

Narrative has often been considered “an art of time.” This essay traces some of the historical reasons for this state of the field, or fields, of narratology, pinpointing spots in classical, postclassical and contemporary narrative theory where compensation was attempted or is being made through a focus on space instead of time. It suggests that as geography and geographers have become increasingly interested in narrative approaches in dealing with concepts, visualization, and digitalization, it is perhaps (once again) time narratology itself, while continuing to focus on and explore space and place, took account of its history of treating them and looked at how geography has implemented narratological concepts in its technical and philosophical approaches.

This essay places narratology’s emphasis on space-time within the emergence of the discipline of geography and the rise of a materialist, hard science orientation in US institutions after WWII, ultimately arguing that a nascent geographical narratology should aspire to the broad intellectual scope of geography’s origins. “The new geography,” which emerged in 1887 and focused comprehensively on the relation of humans to the earth’s surface, subsequently contracted and fragmented with the post-war emphasis on material science. Likewise expanding in the rationalist post-war climate, classical narratology emphasized logical categories, especially the space-time dichotomy, divorced from human meanings. Today, cognitive research suggests that narratology’s enduring space-time paradigm occludes the constructive realities of both human relations to physical locations and reader processes. Drawing on discussions of space in narrative theory and in current cognitive research on navigation, Easterlin demonstrates that readers and viewers, rather than building spatialized storyworlds, construe space in a functional, piecemeal manner. Finally, maintaining that the area of place studies and an ecological approach to reading are two components of a broadly interdisciplinary geographical narratology providing a nuanced, psychologically contextualized approach to human-environment relations and narrative, Easterlin demonstrates their utility in readings of stories by Raymond Carver and Lydia Davis.

Narrative space has attracted increasing attention in recent years, yet this attention only sporadically falls on narrative geography. In this article, I consider the possibility of geographical socionarratology and suggest that a geographical approach is able to enrich the perspective of socionarratology. Correspondingly, a social perspective can enhance the interpretative power of geography. Drawing from Jerome Bruner’s (1990, 1991) narrative theory, “canonicity and breach” as well as Reinhart Kosellek’s (2004) theory on the “existential pair” of expectation and experience, I argue that different geographical locations embody different expectations, emotions, and perspectives of action for characters and storytellers. The contradictory play of contested and conflicting expectations is analyzed more closely by reading Ian McEwan’s The Children Act (2014), a novel portraying competing family cultures and ethical principles. By connecting geography to expectations, I argue, the interpretative advantages of geography in narratology increase substantially.

Ever the devil’s advocate, Richard Walsh argues in a 2017 article that drawing maps based on narrative fiction is a meaningless activity, because (1) narrative cognition is temporal and not spatial; (2) narrative fiction does not project worlds in any experiential sense of the term (i. e. worlds as immersive environments) but only “worlds” as textual constructs, as products of écriture ; and (3) reading should lead to meaningful interpretations, and inferences should be limited by a principle of relevance. His example of futile map-making is the floor plan which is included in the English editions of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie but is absent from the original French edition. In this article, I argue that narrative cognition is not a specialized ability distinct from the forms of cognition that we use in practical life, but rather, the product of these abilities; and I defend the validity of narrative mapping as way to engage the imagination with – yes – a storyworld. This is not to say that narrative understanding requires the drawing or mental contemplation of a comprehensive representation of the storyworld; usually the formation of partial mental maps is sufficient to follow the plot. But for some readers (among them Nabokov) drawing graphic maps is a way to engage the imagination with the storyworld and to enhance comprehension. This map-making activity can go far beyond making sense of the text and become an autonomous activity comparable to writing fan fiction. To support this view, I invoke the numerous maps found on the Internet for narratives ranging from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings . While the strictly “textualist” aesthetics of orthodox literary theory would regard these maps as frivolous, a world-oriented approach regards the urge to map and diagram as a legitimate form of active participation in narrative, because, while you can imagine too little to appreciate these texts, you cannot imagine too much.

This paper examines how viewers of the ABC television show Lost collaboratively reconstructed the geography of the fictional island at the center of the show’s plot through an online encyclopedic wiki, Wikia’s Lostpedia. Examining participant activity on the wiki site over the course of the show’s six-year run reveals how narrative audiences initially processed information about the storyworld space as well as how those audiences revised their ideas and assumptions as the serialized story progressed. Here I use “The Island” page’s revision history to trace the means by which participants negotiated and organized the information concerning where the island was located in the “real world.” Secondly, I move to approaches used in locating and organizing landmarks. Finally, I address the ways in which participants synthesized this information into the creation of their own maps and the problems they encountered in doing so.

As novels can be mapped, maps in return can be shown to have a narrative dimension. Maps referring to historical events, for instance those of the invasion of the USSR in June 1941, obviously tell a story. Recounted through graphic means, that story has specific aspects in the areas of order, duration, frequency, authorship, and perspective. Yet, similar in this respect to the descriptions that historians provide, narrative maps are neither neutral, nor whole. Grounded in selection, they necessarily develop an argument, are incomplete, and rely on symbols that are both conventional and arbitrary.

In the 16th century most of Russia is still a terra incognita with a highly dubious and mostly mythologized geography, anthropology, and sociology. In this article we look at some texts of the Early Modern period – Sir Thomas Smithes Voiage and Entertainment in Rushia (1605), Peter Mundy’s Travel Writings of 1640–1641, and The Voiages and Travels of John Struys (1676–1683) – and try to uncover the transformation of the obscure country into a more or less charted space, filled with narratives of adventures and travels in an enigmatic land on the verge of Europe, where exotic cultures are drawn together in a flamboyant mix. It is travel narrative that actually charts the territory and provides an explanation from which stems a partial understanding, physical and cultural, of the “Land of the Unpredictable.”

The essay presents an interdisciplinary theory of what it will call “innerscapes”: artefactual representations of the mind as a spatially extended world. By bringing examples of innerscapes from literature (Kafka’s short story The Bridge ), radio plays (Samuel Beckett’s Embers ), and a creative documentary about auditory-verbal hallucinations (a voice-hearer’s short film, Adam + 1 ), it suggests that these spatial renditions of the mind are constructed by transforming the quasi-perceptual elements of inner experience into affording ecologies. In so doing, they enable an enactive exploration of inner worlds as navigable environments. The resulting storyworlds display features that resemble the logic and ontology of dreams. Cognitive research on dreams and cartographical studies of the personal geographies of dreamscapes will thus inform the understanding of what innerscapes are, do and can do if used, as the essay argues they should be, as enhancing devices for what Jesse Butler has called ‘extended introspection” (2013: 95).

This essay extends political and aesthetic implications in relationships between space and narrative by investigating narrative strategies that displace or disrupt access to narrative setting, spatiotemporal movement, or the space of narration. I fuse Henri Lefebvre’s work on the social production of space to Gabriel Zoran’s systems of narrative space in order to propose a spatial critique that describes and categorizes ways that narrative is central to the politics of spatial practice. I then apply that spatial critique to Flann O’Brien’s prototypically disorienting novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). 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.

Description and experience of the form of landscape are the core of geographical methodology and are explicitly theorized in humanist geography, particularly by Edward Relph. This essay outlines how his ideas about “seeing, thinking, and describing” – particularly the primacy of description – are relevant to a reformation for how narratologists handle the relationship between fiction and environment. Though the narratologist deals with reading and analyzing descriptions rather than producing descriptions as the geographer does, the phenomenological relationship between self, environment, and description of the latter can curiously expand what we normally think of as the reader-text dyad in the former. This new perspective is put into practice by studying three examples from American novels that offer descriptions of the environment from above.

The paper proposes to read the British novelist Ian McEwan as an ethically disconcerted post-imperial writer. His early works “gave voice to an anxiety about social, cultural and moral decline after the end of Britain’s imperial power had become vividly apparent” (Groes). Both the writer’s and his characters’ fatherless post-war childhoods testify to the systematic disconnection of the public and private in the late imperial and post-imperial country, which induced the growing feeling of unprotectedness among its inhabitants. McEwan consistently searches for an ethically responsible literary form to cope with the traumatic defenselessness that, much beyond post-imperial Britain, became the experience of both the recent world and literature. In this search, he develops a peculiar technology of his authorial self. By tending to provide a shelter to the defenseless characters, it reproduces the protective attitude of these characters toward the other characters. However, the author simultaneously exposes their remorseful attachment to the victims as selfish. As he thus never stops ethically exempting himself from his Doppelgängers, he continuously wrong-foots the reader. In sum, Atonement draws its characters, narrator, author, and readers into a frenetic pursuit of the final ethical truth by repeatedly entrapping them in this truth’s provisional political surrogates.

Although the work of Ian McEwan, one of the most important modern British writers, has been quite thoroughly researched, the narrative space was rarely the subject of narratological treatment. This article tackles a close reading of McEwan’s novel Saturday from a narratological perspective testing the applicability of a series of spatial categories systematized by Marie-Laure Ryan in the already existing narratological tradition and in her own research in narrative space. At the macro level of the story, the circular structure of the novel and the concepts of space as a container and space as a network are being shown and so is the use of local names. In the foreground there is a discussion of the five fundamental levels of narrative space (spatial frames, setting, story space and spaces of intertextuality, storyworld, narrative universe), followed by the treatment of textualization at the micro level (perspectivism and aperspectivism, map, and tour, and the lived experience of space). The analysis of space representation in Saturday eventually makes it possible to conclude that McEwan promotes the conception of space that became prominent within the spatial turn in postmodern humanities.

This article looks at Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Nutshell , as a great innovative contribution to narrative art. As far as its basic plot is concerned, it looks like crime fiction with Shakespearean resonances, but the choice of an unborn child as narrator and the consistent perspective from within the body of a heavily pregnant woman result in the disclosure and exploration of an entirely new world. Aspects investigated are the novel’s narrative situation, its relation to Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a reference text, the use of quotations and allusions and the representation of bodily processes and the relation between the I-narrator and the author. The ethical substance of the work is shown to be generated by its specific narrative form.