Narrative Space and Time

Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature

Elana Gomel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138547926
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134519705
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Space is a central topic in cultural and narrative theory today, although in most cases theory assumes Newtonian absolute space. However, the idea of a universal homogeneous space is now obsolete. Black holes, multiple dimensions, quantum entanglement, and spatio-temporal distortions of relativity have passed into culture at large. This book examines whether narrative can be used to represent these "impossible" spaces.

Impossible topologies abound in ancient mythologies, from the Australian Aborigines' "dream-time" to the multiple-layer universe of the Sumerians. More recently, from Alice's adventures in Wonderland to contemporary science fiction's obsession with black holes and quantum paradoxes, counter-intuitive spaces are a prominent feature of modern and postmodern narrative. With the rise and popularization of science fiction, the inventiveness and variety of impossible narrative spaces explodes. The author analyses the narrative techniques used to represent such spaces alongside their cultural significance. Each chapter connects narrative deformation of space with historical problematic of time, and demonstrates the cognitive and perceptual primacy of narrative in representing, imagining and apprehending new forms of space and time.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the connection between narratology, cultural theory, science fiction, and studies of place.

1 Layering; Or the City of Two Tales

From Sanitation to Steampunk

Sometimes it seems that there are not just two cities in A Tale of Two Cities but two Dickenses as well. On the one hand, there is Dickens the realist, a painstaking chronicler of Victorian London. On the other hand, there is Dickens the fantasist, a precursor of Franz Kafka and Neil Gaiman. The first is the Dickens of place, the second the Dickens of space.

The first Dickens is an investigative journalist and urban reporter, an increasingly more sophisticated and socially aware Boz (of The Sketches by Boz, his early series of essays depicting life in different geographical areas and economic strata of London). He is part of the concerted push by Victorian social reformers to understand the city in order to normalize it:

“Fredrick Engels, Charles Dickens, and Henry Mayhew were the most distinguished among a throng of missionaries and explorers, men who tried to read the ‘illegible’ city, transforming what appeared to be a chaotic, haphazard environment into a social text that was ‘integrated, knowable, and ordered’” (Walkowitz 18).

This Dickens knows the city as it really is, and soberly depicts both its industrial dynamism and its abject poverty. As early as 1903, Francis Miltoun claimed that “no one has breathed more than Dickens the spirit of [London’s] constantly shifting and glimmering world of passion and poverty” (11). Dickens-Boz is one of the pillars of Victorian realism. His novels are praised for their truth to life by critics as diverse as Efraim Sicher Alexander Welsh, Judith Walkowitz, and Murray Baumgarten.

The second Dickens is an anarchic revolutionary whose landscapes of blood and madness are populated by a menagerie of monsters. He is hailed as a precursor of contemporary urban fantasy, the presiding deity of the online Gothic world of Fallen London, the patron saint of Steampunk: “The 19th century saw a process of transformation whereby tales set in cities evolved into full-blown urban fantasy; CD [Charles Dickens] was a figure of central importance in this process” (Clute 269). Dickens’ “re-workings of Gothic” propelled the Victorian revolt against realism (Jackson 124).

The two Dickenses employ two different narrative registers in their depictions of urban space. The realistic London is represented through accumulation of “descriptive, graphic detail” (Stein 236). The fantastic London is metaphorical and symbolic: “Streets, figures and crowds, they generate, for Dickens as flâneur, his own ‘figures’: figures of speech, fictional characters, and a figural, that is to say, allegorical sense of reality” (Tambling 2009; 10). The artistic offspring of Dickens the realist are the BBC costume-drama productions of Bleak House and Martin Chuzzlewit, securely distancing Victorian London by situating it in the museum space of the past. The children of Dickens the fantasist are Steampunk novels, comic books, and computer games, reimagining postmodernity as a Dick-ensian carnival of urban misrule.

Steampunk, a popular form of SF based on Victorian aesthetics and set in an alternative Victorian age, gleefully acknowledges its debt to Dickens. Steampunk writers, such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Dan Simmons, and Michael Moorcock, have appropriated Dickensian settings, images, and plots. But what Steampunk chiefly borrows from Dickens is a complex topology of his urban space. The post-Dickensian Steampunk texts create a fantastic metropolis which “resists [singular] ontology, and thus affirms its alterity, its multiplicities, its excesses, its heterogeneities” (Wolfreys 1998; 4).

Dickens’ generic duality is inscribed in the very structure of his urban chronotopes. Like any narrative representation, Dickens’ London has two levels: diegetic (the level of the storyworld itself) and extradiegetic (the level of the discourse used to describe this world). But in contrast to the settings of most realistic narratives, in Dickens’ London the two levels are generically and topologically at odds with each other. Rosemary Jackson claims that in many Victorian novels “within the main, realistic text, there exists another non-realistic one, camouflaged and concealed, but constantly present” (124). Uniquely in Dickens, this “non-realistic text” occupies its own distinct space, which interacts with the diegetic level, creating a third textual layer that is neither literal nor figurative but somewhere in between. This space shadows the realistic London of Boz, which becomes a city haunted by its own impossibility.

The famous opening of Bleak House (1852–53) provides an example of this dual structure:

“

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery [ . . . ]

Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery” (Chapter 1, 3).

On the one hand, there is the mimetic urban space that Dickens shared with his readers, evoked through familiar place names: Lincoln’s Inn Hall, Holborn Hill, and Temple Bar. In this mimetic space, the polluted streets are covered with physical dirt, the unwholesome air is laden with actual fog, and the Court of Chancery is a solid building, housing corrupt bureaucracy. But on the other hand, there is a second space, superimposed upon the realistic mapping of the city like double exposure. It is a space in which past and present intermingle, as dinosaurs stroll through the crowds like escapees from the Jurassic Park; in which physical laws of evaporation are subordinated to the moral laws of evaluation, with the fog emanating from the wicked Court of Chancery rather than from the river; and in which the boundaries of animate and inanimate are so blurred that dirt engages in financial transactions and soot goes into mourning.

Every realistic novel employs metaphors to a greater or lesser extent. But in few realistic novels do these metaphors coalesce into a secondary narrative space, which is self-consistent but topologically incompatible with the primary diegetic level. In even fewer realistic texts do metaphors exert actual influence upon the events of the plot. But they do so in Dickens.

The fantastic extradiegetic space of Dickens’ novels impacts the lives and actions of the characters inhabiting the realistic diegetic space. In A Tale of Two Cities (1859), for example, Darnay’s insane decision to return to France cannot be separated from the figure of the “loadstone rock” that draws him to destruction. In Bleak House, the organic Hell of the extradiegetic level gradually “descends” into the social Hell of the diegetic level, as the slum of Tom-All-Alone’s becomes a purposeful avenger, unleashing demons of contagion upon the insular world of the upper classes. In Dombey and Son (1848), the extended metaphor of the train as a ravenous monster actually devours villainous Mr. Carker.

The layering of two distinct spaces within the same text fragments its temporality. The shadow of the fantastic London lies upon the realistic London like the prophecy of an impending catastrophe or the nightmare of a past atrocity. Topology becomes destiny.

The Body of Power

Layering as employed by Dickens generates the monstrous body of a city in turmoil: a fantastic urbanatomy. The organic imagery of his novels is shaped by the fecund grotesquerie of his imagination that delights in strange bodies and convoluted, nonlinear plots. This grotesquerie is not just Dickens’ special gift; it is as much an index of the cultural transformation of space-time as it is of his own imaginative genius. In the mid-nineteenth century, the strict causality of Newton is being undermined by the contingency of Darwin, while the linearity of progress is being challenged by sudden jolts of revolutions, wars, and massacres. In Dickens’ representations of urban violence and urban upheaval, the torn, traumatized body of an individual is projected upon the wrecked body of the city. The result is a new and strikingly postmodern image of the monstrous corporeality of power.

The articulation of the city always implies the articulation of the body— and vice versa. In Flesh and Stone Richard Sennett describes their reciprocal connection:

“The city has served as a site of power, its spaces made coherent and whole in the image of man himself. The city has also served as the space in which these master images have cracked apart” (25).

The dual chronotope of Dickens’ London embodies this duality of power in the topology of his urban space. The city is a site of both order and chaos; hierarchy and violence; coherence and trauma.

In their Poetics and Politics of Transgression (1986), Peter Stallybrass and Allon White map out the corporeality of the city in terms of a clash between the classic and the carnivalesque bodies. They borrow this terminology from Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1965), in which Bakhtin described the classic body as disciplined, smooth, and “closed,” while the carnivalesque body is excessive, grotesque, and “opened,” shamelessly flaunting its leaking orifices. The classic body inhabits the ordered Newtonian space of realism; the carnivalesque body lurks in the sewer darkness of the fantastic and the Gothic where time and space are distorted by the pressures of forbidden desire.

Dickens is aware of the two bodies of London and endeavors to keep them apart. Layering is a narrative strategy that accomplishes this by keeping the carnivalesque corporeality safely quarantined on the extradiegetic level, while letting his virtuously straitlaced men and women go about their daily business on the diegetic level. But the very attempt to ensure this separation intensifies their mutual contamination. Layering, extensively deployed, creates an extradiegetic level so “top-heavy” that it leaks into the diegetic level. The body of London becomes a “body at war with itself” (Sennett 25).

The way Dickens’ urban spaces figure the relation between social power and biological life is uncannily similar to Giorgio Agamben’s approach: in both cases, the relation is figured not conceptually but topologically. Agamben’s analysis of the “bare life” that underpins the pyramid of power is couched in the language of non-Euclidean geometry:

“The state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides of a single topological process in which what was presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a Mobius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception), and the sovereign power is this very impossibility of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception, physis and nomos. The state of exception is thus not so much a spatiotemporal suspension as a complex topological figure [ . . . a] topological zone of indistinction” (Agamben 28).

Dickens is a guide to this topologically impossible “zone of indistinction,” in which the interdependence of power and violence is projected upon the body of the city. This body is simultaneously a reflection of the ideal hierarchical order of social and individual relations and of the unruly biological substratum of disease, mortality, and desire that underlies this order. The bioenergies that cannot be contained by the realistic grid of his diegetic level are displaced onto the fantastic extradiegetic level where the Newtonian certainties of time and space are supplanted by their phantasmagoric distortions.

Dickens’ novels are distinguished by their focus on the collective rather than the individual, probing “the total manipulation of power and language by whatever group has the power of definition and control” (Tambling 1996; 30). With some exceptions, such as David Copperfield (1849–1850) and Great Expectations (1860–1861), Dickens’ novels subordinate their characters to a depiction of the systems that generate, sustain, and often destroy what a Foucaldian would call a delusion of individuality. In his reading of Bleak House J. Hillis Miller shows how the characters in this novel are “helpless parts of a structure based on words” (75). The Court of Chancery and the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit are only two examples of the Dickensian vision of social systems as machines that stamp out the endless stream of Barnacles, Smallweeds, Doodles, and Coodles.

But while not particularly interested in the individual psyche, Dickens is obsessed by the individual body. In Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), a crook named Riderhood is fished out of the Thames, and the same people who despise and mock him are solicitously trying to revive him—but only as long as he is in mortal danger. They abandon him the moment he comes back to life:

“All the best means are at once in action, and everybody present lends a hand, and a heart and soul. No one has the least regard for the man; with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and they are living and must die” (Chapter 36).

By being reduced to a “spark of life,” Riderhood becomes what Agamben calls Homo sacer: the “bare life” of the biological body that functions as the foundation of social power, and yet is extrinsic and resistant to its manipulation. The dual function of the body is uncovered in moments of crisis when it is subjected to a violent trauma. And what is true about the individual body in pain becomes magnified when pain is transferred to the body politic. The impossibilities of Dickens’ urban chronotopes create a topology of trauma and violence, in which the metaphorical “space of exception” becomes literalized in the narrative architecture of the city under siege.

The impossibility of Dickens’ urban chronotopes is a reflection of the impossibility of social history, in which the life of the body, in its vulnerability, mortality, and capacity for violence, is both excluded from the social mechanisms of individuation and power and necessary to them. This paradox becomes evident in the moments of rupture when the continuity of history is interrupted by a disaster, be it a riot as in Barnaby Rudge, an epidemic as in Bleak House, or a revolution as in A Tale of Two Cities.

“The body comes to life when coping with difficulties” (Sennett 310). Dickens’ urban bodies come to life when coping with a near apocalypse. But the irrevocable duality of these bodies indicates that the result of trauma is not the restoration of wholeness but rather the discovery that this wholeness has never existed in the first place.

The Museum and the Haunted House

Dickens’ two historical novels, Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), focus on pivotal moments of violent change: the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 and the French Revolution. One would expect critics to appreciate his sensitivity to the revolutionary pace of modernity. But in fact, Dickens’ depiction of history has been denigrated or even dismissed as a pursuit of cheap thrills, most notably by the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs, who argued in his Historical Novel (1937) that the French Revolution and the Gordon Riots are used merely as “a romantic background” (243–244). Humphrey House, in The Dickens World (1941), calls Dickens’ attitude to history “an amused contempt” (34). Andrew Sanders claims that “Dickens had scant understanding of, and even less affection for, history” (69). At best, his two novels are overlooked: in his wide-ranging survey The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950, for example, Richard Maxwell refers to Dickens only in passing. At worst, they are dismissed. George Woodstock regretfully notes that “as a historical novel in any litera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction I: Space
• Introduction II: Time
• 1. Layering; Or the City of Two Tales
• 2. Flickering; Or Ghosts of Space
• 3. Embedding; Or the Pocket Universe
• 4. Wormholing; Or the Darkness Within
• 5. Sidestepping; Or Dimensions of Divinity
• 6. Collapsing; Or Urban Black Holes
• Postscript: “A King of Infinite Space”
• Notes
• References
• Index