Space in Literature

Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga

The volume is divided into three parts. The first one, entitled “Spatial Concepts and Methods,” explores the methodological and conceptual application of space in literary studies, the second, entitled “Space and Genre,” focuses on the spatial characteristics of individual literary genres and on the ways different literary forms generate different spatialities, while the third is entitled “Spatial Topoi” and, as the title suggests, focuses on cultural and literary functions of individual topoi.

In the introductory chapter of the book, Andrzej Zgorzelski attempts to define the concept of literary space, which he understands as “a set of objects in the fictional reality (people, natural phenomena, products of civilisation, etc.) organised by a number of various relations, particularly by those of distance and direction.” As this definition evidences, in literary texts, as world-building narratives, the concept of space is closely related to the more general concept of the world. The former can be distinguished by, among other things, the type of relations between sets of objects, defined mostly by distance and direction. Zgorzelski points out the fundamentally metaphorical character of the notion of space, not only in literary studies but also in everyday life and argues that in literary analysis the consideration of literal and metaphoric uses of spatial concepts needs to be accounted for. Spatial relations, Zgorzelski emphasises after Yuri Lotman, are essentially semiotic and can be seen to signal other relations in the text. In effect, space cannot be analysed in isolation from other textual elements. At the same time, however, space must not be mistaken with its functions; as he explicates, “there is no ‘moral space’ in a novel, for instance, but space organisation may have a function in signalling the moral theme.”

The next chapter considers the question of literary space in the context of intertextuality. Recognising intertextuality, argues Podgajna, entails recognising an ontological transgression between fictional worlds; such a transgression results in constructing a dialogical space of texts that clearly breaks the boundaries of space defined by textual mimesis. The thesis is illustrated with the example of the intertextual space in E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. By applying Gérard Genette’s concept of hypertextuality and Boris Uspensky’s notion of point of view on different narrative planes, Podgajna demonstrates how intertextual decodings of the hypotext – Forster’s Howards End – affect the construction of space and trigger thematic recontextualisations in Smith’s hypertext. The chapter examines how the constant shifts in point of view on the spatio-temporal plane in Forster’s novel serve not only to expose the process of architectural disruption but also to foreground social and ideological transformations at the dawn of modernity. Contrastingly, the examination of the spatio-temporal framework in Smith’s On Beauty indicates that the dichotomous spatial arrangement in the hypertext serves to problematise the constitutive role of space in shaping one’s cultural identity.

While Czemiel illustrates his argument with reference to contemporary poetry, the following chapter, “The Irish Stage: Space and Communication in Printed Drama” by Tomasz Wiśniewski, focuses on the specificity of spatial arrangement in printed drama. As Wiśniewski argues, the communicative specificity of printed drama is rooted in the eccentric semiotic potential of its spatial arrangement; space in printed drama establishes dualistic relations: on the one hand, a play is bound to construct a fictional/presented reality and on the other it makes use of theatre conventions. The argument is illustrated by examples taken from Irish poetic drama at the beginning of the 20th century, in which, as Wiśniewski demonstrates, one of the central topoi thrives on the equivalence between the stage and Ireland on the one hand, and the off-stage and the sea on the other.

Another way of employing the spatial method in drama is discussed by Anna Suwalska-Kołecka in “Ontological Rupture in Caryl Churchill’s Traps.” The author argues that the distinct and diverse spatio-temporal constructs of Churchill’s plays dramatise the opposition intrinsic to any theatrical act (fiction/reality) and by the meta-theatricality explore the issues of performance, representation, and subjectivity. The chapter focuses on the strategies Churchill employs in her play Traps to endow the time and space continuum with ontological rupture, resulting in a sense of ontological plurality and instability. In the course of the play, the characters entertain various possibilities of change and the setting proves insecure. The play’s spatio-temporal construction draws the attention of recipients to its strangeness, artificiality, illusoriness and arbitrariness, and as such the play exhibits its own rules of creation.

In a parallel chapter, entitled “Spaces of History in the Dystopian Worlds of Walter Besant’s The Revolt of Man and The Inner House,” Justyna Galant discusses the spatiality of 19th-century dystopias using Walter Besant’s novels as examples. Applying Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere, Galant analyses the novels’ spaces as predecessors of loci familiar from the 20th-century classics of the genre, Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The chapter demonstrates the ways dystopian spatiality contrasts the unofficial places of deviant people with the a-semiotic and a-temporal official places of forbidding order, characterised by lack of polyglotism, heterogeneity, asymmetry and dialogism. Galant argues that while Besant’s novels explore the critical moments of the re-introduction of the past into the present, a simulacrum of history comes to function as a dominant semiosphere, which, while overthrowing the oppressive present, promises a cultural order where the production of meaning will still be compromised.

The next chapter, entitled “Principles of Space Organisation in Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder,” by Jadwiga Węgrodzka, discusses the spatiality of crime fiction. Based on the systematisation of textual spatialities introduced by Marie-Laure Ryan, the chapter analyses the fictional space of Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder as potentially representative of other texts of the genre. Węgrodzka examines four techniques of space organisation in the novel: time layering of space, spatio-temporal subterfuge, spatial multiplication and spatial adjacency manipulation. Some of these techniques are closely involved with the generic characteristics of crime fiction, while others are used in the context of the novel of manners. The chapter also discusses the ways the spatial organisation of the fictional world is relevant to the thematic concerns and semantic suggestions deployed in Christie’s novel.