Space and displacements: Multiple reading modes and tensions of meaning

According to Vinaver, one consequence of the potentially endless extension of narrative that the romance interlace technique entails is that “the reader loses every sense of limitation in time or space” (76). This observation, on the one hand, aptly summarises the malleable time frame of the Urania and its proliferation of settings and spatial displacements and, on the other hand, indirectly suggests how the interlace technique challenges concepts like linear chronology or spatial distance. In the analysis of Wroth’s preference for autodiegetic narrators, I have already pointed out how this practice tends to efface chronological and spatial distance in favour of an effect of immediacy. At the same time, it is clear that the linear succession of events is continually interrupted by the many transitions between narrative levels or strands. The same is true of spatial unity, given that changes of narrative level or strand usually signify a change in location. In what follows, I shall analyse in more detail how the narrative structures of the Urania affect the spatial dimension of the work and how space and displacements signify and provoke multiple reading modes. Reading space and displacements from more than one perspective, in turn, results in tensions of meaning as a single location or journey may at times suggest conflicting interpretations.