ABSTRACT
Winnifrith, Tom, Shattered Eagles, Balkan Fragments, London: Duckworth,1995
Theoretical discussions of space in relation to the novel or to narrative in general often begin by opposing space and time, an opposition that inevitably leads to claims for the greater relevance of one or the other coordinate. For example, Joseph Frank's frequently cited concept of "spatial form" in literature assesses texts in terms of their oscillation between the "two poles" of space and time and defines modernist writers as "intend[ing] the reader to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence" (see Frank, 1963). For Frank and his followers, "spatial form" is "the technique by which novelists subvert the chronological sequence inherent in narrative," thus drawing attention to the way that "units of narrative" are "juxtaposed in space, not unrolling in time" (see Smitten and Daghistany, 1981). In this definition, space has no positive characteristics but becomes manifest only as, and after, the negation of time. Not surprisingly, then, the notion of spatial form does little to specify what space means. It also overlooks how modernist techniques undermine space along with time, and conflates two very different spaces, the space of the narrative (where chronology gets subverted) and the space of the printed book (where textual units are juxtaposed).
