THE
CHRONOTOPE AND THE SOUTH
Sandra Lee Kleppe
In Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics
(1990), Caryl Emerson and Gary Saul Morson note that Bakhtin
did not make it easy for anyone to reconstruct the labyrinth
of linkages among his own ideas. . . . it is often hard to say
when a work was begun, and still harder to know how it evolved
in the interim (3). Such is the case with the idea of the chronotope,
which Emerson and Morson believe Bakhtin hit upon and developed
during the period 1936-1938 (10; 426), when he wrote the key treatise
Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel as well as
his essay on the Bildungsroman. Consequently, these scholars suggest
that at least two separate works constitute Bakhtin s theory
of the chronotope (405).
In an essay entitled The World According to Bakhtin: On
the Description of Space and Spatial Forms in Mikhail Bakhtin
s Work (1995), Eduard Vlasov finds a much more complicated
labyrinth of linkages connected to the idea of the chronotope.
Not only does Vlasov consider Bakhtin s chronotope to be one
of the most fundamental pillars for the study of space in current
narratology (37), but he also finds that a theory of the spatial
coordinate of the chronotope was introduced already in Author
and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (written 1920-1923), and was
further developed in Bakhtin s studies of Dostoevsky, Rabelais,
and Goethe (originally published in 1929, 1965 and 1979, respectively)
in addition to the essay on the chronotope. Vlasov s systematic
analysis of space in these works reveals that Bakhtin s treatment
of the chronotope, regardless of whether he employed that term,
evolved continually during his career. While earlier scholarship
has documented Bakhtin s contribution to the study of time in
fiction, Vlasov reveals how his oeuvre as a whole
contains a comprehensive theory of space as well.
In attempting to reconcile the scholarship on both the
space and the time of the Bakhtinian chronotope, this essay wishes
to take seriously Bakhtin s insistence, in Forms of Time and
of the Chronotope, on the inseparability of space and time
in fiction (84), at the same time as it brings the neglected
spatial coordinate of the chronotope into special focus. Bakhtin
s own use of the term chronotope does not always convey his idea
that spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully
thought-out, concrete whole in literature (ibid.). After initially
formulating the inextricable connectedness of space and time,
Bakhtin states explicitly that in literature the primary category
in the chronotope is time (85). Vlasov considers that Bakhtin
s treatment of the major chronotopes of the novel in this essay
concentrates on types of time and considers spatial forms as
an auxiliary means (44). In other words, it would seem that
Bakhtin s own diagnosis of the neglect of the study of spatial
relations it has been temporal relationships by and large that
have been studied is applicable to his own essay (258). Ironically,
as Vlasov s study illustrates, some of Bakhtin s most substantial
discussions of space are not to be found in the chronotope essay
but elsewhere in his work.
While a consideration of space in other works than Forms
of Time and of the Chronotope can yield a more balanced view
of Bakhtin s thought on chronos and topos, some remarks on the role of space in Bakhtin s major
essay are also necessary. When Bakhtin states that the chronotope
expresses the inseparability of time and space (time as the fourth
dimension of space) (84), space is not necessarily considered
as auxiliary to time, as Vlasov suggests, or even as a
mere prerequisite for time. The key to the relationship between
space and time in Bakhtin s essay is simultaneity, an aspect
of spacetime in which we live our lives the world of the author,
of the performer, and the world of the listeners and readers.
. . . are chronotopic as well yet nevertheless have difficulty
understanding (252).
Michael Holquist says of Bakhtin s works that it is this
overriding feature of simultaneity
that seems most difficult to grasp for those just coming to dialogism
(68), and he describes the chronotope as the ineluctability
of simultaneity (114). Although this postulation has important
consequences for the approach to the analysis of literary texts,
it does not mean that both coordinates are always equally prominent
in any given work, nor does it follow that both coordinates must
always be discussed simultaneously. In fiction, as in life, one coordinate
of the chronotope is never present without the other, even when
this is not explicitly stated or we do not immediately perceive
this to be the case. This essay foregrounds the importance of
place in the making of creative fiction, but for the sake of clarity
the term place is intended to imply the ground where the fusing
of space and time occurs. Emerson and Morson point out that [A]s
critics, we must probe not just representations but also the very
ground for representing (370). Place is one major site where
chronotopic activity is involved in the making of fiction.
Because literature is a narrative art and presents us with
what Bakhtin terms an image of man, time would seem to be the
primary category of the literary chronotope. Yet the interdependence
of time and space is never abandoned by Bakhtin in his treatment
of the various chronotopes in Western literary history. When Bakhtin
concludes his essay with the sweeping remark that [e]very entry
into the sphere of meanings is accomplished only through the gates
of the chronotope (258), he is reiterating his concern that
time must be linked to space if meanings are to reach us. Emerson
and Morson say of this conclusion that Bakhtin does not claim
that meaning itself is chronotopic but that, since we live our
lives inside the gates of the chronotope, understanding is not
possible outside of space and time (432). Without such temporal-spatial
expression, Bakhtin says, even abstract thought is impossible
(258).
Vlasov s systematic treatment of the chronotopes discussed
in Bakhtin s Forms of Time and of the Chronotope is paradoxical,
but it is a paradox that can be seen as abiding in the concept
of chronotope itself: in any given example of a literary chronotope,
simultaneity implies neither absolute equality nor hierarchy in
the organization of the spatial and temporal. Although Vlasov
underlines that Bakhtin pays major attention to time and considers
spatial forms as auxiliary means in the main section of his
essay, he nevertheless presents a whole catalogue documenting
Bakhtin s different types of space in this same section (44).
In Vlasov s discussion of the Concluding Remarks to Bakhtin
s chronotope essay, the relationship of space to time is turned
around. Here, Vlasov says, Bakhtin establishes a few adjacent
chronotopes of different scope and degree. Those he defines in
accordance with their dominant spatial, not
temporal,
characteristics (44). Yet Vlasov then proceeds to illustrate
how each of these spaces is inextricable from its own specific
time as well.
Two chronotopes from this adjacent list are particularly
significant for the study of Southern literature: the road and
the threshold. While each of these chronotopes has its own peculiar
form of time duration for the road and the sudden moment for
the threshold they are both employed in the fiction of William
Faulkner, Flannery O Connor, Ernest Gaines and Alice Walker to
relate an acute sense of place and concreteness of space. In world
literature, the most recurrent feature of the road chronotope
through the centuries has been the feature of realizing the metaphor
of the path of characters lives through the employment of their
concrete passage through the familiar territory of their own locality.
This trait of the road is thoroughly compatible with the Southern
passion for expressing universal concerns through a highly concrete
local landscape. Faulkner s As I Lay Dying and Gaines The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman
are two examples of Southern narratives in which characters set
out on the path of experience by embarking on a journey through
their own region.
The centrality of the threshold chronotope in Southern
literature can be established by considering its recurrence as
a motif in a host of works by Southern writers. The most fundamental
instance of the threshold, Bakhtin says, is as the chronotope
of crisis and break in a life (248), in which the forced passing of a
threshold (or the refusal to pass) is a way of expressing the
time of sudden change. The South as a place with a turbulent history
of change and violent resistance to change is a phenomenon which
is representable in fiction by use of the threshold chronotope.
Faulkner s characters in Absalom, Absalom!, Walker
s Sofia in The Color Purple,
O Connor s women in Revelation and Everything that Rises
Must Converge and Gaines men in A Gathering of Old Men
are all examples of characters who engage in violent encounters
on the threshold which are the result of the tensions which are
an inevitable part of a shared space.
On the givenness of space and the place
of South
Bakhtin s essay Author and Hero in Aesthetic
Activity (1929) provides some clarifying remarks on his understanding
of space:
Man s outer body is given; his outer boundaries and those of his world
are given
(given in the extra-aesthetic givenness of life). This is a necessary
and inalienable moment of being as a given. Consequently, they
need to be aesthetically received, recreated, fashioned, and justified.
. . . Inasmuch as the artist has to do with man s existence and
with his world, he has also to do with the givenness of man in
space as a necessary constituent of human existence. (Art and
Answerability 95)
What is absent from, or perhaps taken for
granted in Forms of Time and of the Chronotope, is a discussion
of this fundamental givenness of space. Bakhtin s view of aesthetic
creation in this early work is one in which space is not only
considered necessary to the creative act, but also one in which
space originates outside of the artistic imagination. In other
words, the artist does not impose just any kind of space on a
work of art, but receives and reworks what is already given.
Bakhtin returned to the topic of the necessity of space
in his essay on the Bildungsroman, where he explicitly yokes the
categories of space and time. According to Bakhtin, Goethe s
use of the chronotope represents an important development in the
history of the novel. Goethe possessed, Bakhtin says,
[t]he ability to see time, to read time, in the spatial whole of the world and, on
the other hand, to perceive the filling of space not as an immobile
background, a given that is completed once and for all, but as
an emerging whole, an event. (Speech Genres 25)
As Emerson and Morson as well as Vlasov have
pointed out, this study on the Bildungsroman was written during
the same period as the chronotope essay, and the two were likely
intended as different parts of the same work. In these works,
Bakhtin synthesizes his lifelong interest in the aesthetic problems
of space and time, and in his analysis of Goethe s Bildungsroman,
the theoretical problem of the inseparability of the two coordinates
of the chronotope is given perhaps its most lucid expression.
Bakhtin examines in detail how the creative imagination
of Goethe is restricted and subordinated to the necessity
of a given locality, the iron-clad logic of
its historical and geographical existence (Speech Genres 37). Vlasov suggests that one weakness in
this discussion is its connection with scientific objectivity
(54): such necessity, Vlasov says, predictably enforces the
transition from fictional narrative to scientific discourse
(52). Yet Bakhtin specifically states that there is no such connection:
[t]his Goethean necessity was very far both from the necessity
of fate and mechanical natural necessity (in naturalistic thought)
(Speech Genres
39). In other words, necessity as a category of aesthetics has its own problems which require special attention:
among these are the relationship between the writer and his or
her place and the relationship between given (actual) space and
created (fictional) space, both of which will be discussed below.
Not all writers, of course, are equally concerned with
the phenomenon of necessity. Bakhtin gives examples from Rousseau
s work to highlight a chronotopic approach which does not embrace
given space: creative historical necessity was almost completely
foreign to Rousseau, Bakhtin says of the typical romantic treatment
of space and time (ibid. 50). Bakhtin is particularly concerned
with the fact that the romantic chronotope does not allow for
the representation of the links between the actual historical
moment of a particular place and the historical future of that
place. Romanticism, according to Bakhtin, is characterized by
historical inversion, a chronotope which portrays the future
in images of the past. Goethean necessity, on the other hand,
is characterized by a fullness of time which takes into account
the geographical, biographical, and historical aspects of human
life in a particular locality (ibid. 42). In Goethe, the present
historical moment of a place always grows organically out of the
past and stretches itself organically into a future which is open
and unfinalized.
Many Southern writers are especially attentive to the demands
and rewards of the necessity of a given place. Eudora Welty
s essay Place in Fiction presents a cogent aesthetics of place
which not only postulates the centrality of a given geographical
and historical locality, but also includes the writer s relationship
to that locality as a dimension of creative necessity. Welty considers that there are three wide
aspects of place all vitally connected to each other in the
creation of fiction. The first is the actual place itself which
provides the writer with raw material, the second is the achieved
world of appearance in fiction, and the third is the writer
himself: place is where he has his roots, place is where he stands;
in his experience out of which he writes, it provides the base
of reference; in his work, the point of view (117). In Welty
s formulation, place is the key link between the chronotopes
of the actual world and those of the fictional world: The truth
is, she says, fiction depends for its life on place (118).
The rootedness of the writer is an aspect of Welty s aesthetics
which can be seen as particularly Southern, or perhaps as a generic
trait of regional literature in general. Whereas any writer (Hemingway,
for example) may write from his or her own experience or describe
in detail any given locality, the South has a host of writers
who are deeply rooted in one specific geographical/historical
place.
In her essays and fiction, Flannery
O Connor takes the aesthetic problem of this three-fold necessity
of a given locality seriously. The novelist is required to open
his eyes on the world around him and look, she says, [t]hen
he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees (Mystery
and Manners 177). Although each writer s personal convictions,
ideas and world view are different, O Connor stresses that fiction
nevertheless starts in the concrete:
[Y]ou don t write fiction with assumptions.
The things we see, hear, smell, and touch affect us long before
we believe anything at all, and the South impresses its image
on us from the moment we are able to distinguish one sound from
another. By the time we are able to use our imaginations for fiction,
we find that our senses have responded irrevocably to a certain
reality. This discovery of being bound through the senses to a
particular society and a particular history, to particular sounds
and a particular idiom, is for the writer the beginning of a recognition
that first puts his work into real human perspective. . . . He
discovers that the imagination is not free, but bound. (ibid.
197)
For O Connor, fiction does not begin in the
realm of abstract ideas, but in the here and now of the concrete
world. Writers who have not discovered this essential aspect of
the craft of fiction, according to O Connor, are bound to fail.
It was precisely such a discovery that proved pivotal to
the career of William Faulkner. As Faulkner biographer Joseph
Blotner has noted, when Faulkner turned to writing stories set
in his own county of Oxford, Mississippi,
he found it a process of discovery as well as invention.
Long afterward he would say, I discovered that my own little
postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that
I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and that by sublimating
the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to
use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened
up a gold mine of other people. . . . (in Blotner 192)
The artistic liberty that Faulkner discovered
in turning to his place is the same paradoxical bond which O Connor
recognizes: artistic freedom for these writers is tied to the
acceptance of the necessity of their given place.
For Ernest Gaines and Alice Walker, this acceptance has
an added dimension. As African-American writers living in a place
which has for generations oppressed their communities, acceptance
in their works is sometimes characterized by a powerful tension
between the necessity of a given place and a desire to escape from that place. In Gaines The Autobiography
of Miss Jane Pittman, for example, the protagonist spends the first quarter
of the book trying to escape to the North, and in Walker s The
Color Purple,
Celie, under the double pressure of white hierarchy and patriarchy,
plots to run away with her sister. Yet in both of these books,
the main protagonists remain within the deep South all their lives,
although their authors did not.
The choice of portraying characters in their Southern
place has important consequences for these writers.
Despite the urge to escape the oppressions of the actual world,
Gaines and Walker s descent into a fictional exploration of
their own region has opened up a gold mine of material for
them, as it did for Faulkner and O Connor. In her essay entitled
The Black Writer and the Southern Experience Alice Walker,
after enumerating aspects of her native South which she hates,
nevertheless expresses her indebtedness as a writer to this place:
No one could wish for a more advantageous
heritage than that bequeathed to the black writer in the South:
a compassion for the earth, a trust in humanity beyond our knowledge
of evil, and an abiding love of justice. We inherit a great responsibility
as well, for we must give voice to centuries not only of silent
bitterness and hate but also of neighborly kindness and sustaining
love. (In Search 21)
For Gaines, the love of his native Louisiana
can never be effaced by the racist damage done to his people nor
by any number of years spent in the urban North. As a young
aspiring writer, Gaines says that he
wanted to smell that Louisiana earth, feel that Louisiana
sun, sit under the shade of one of those Louisiana oaks . . .
. I wanted to see on paper those Louisiana black children walking
to school on cold days . . . . I wanted to see on paper those
black parents going to work before the sun came up and coming
back home to look after their children after the sun went down.
I wanted to see on paper the true reason why those black fathers
left home. . . . And I wanted to hear that Louisiana dialect that
combination of English, Creole, Cajun, Black. For me there s
no more beautiful sound anywhere. (in Babb 3)
Despite his move to California at the age
of fifteen, everything Gaines has published while residing outside
of the South is informed by his given place of Louisiana.
The artistic freedom that comes from a bond to a given
place seems to have different overtones for the African-American
Southern writer, whose separation from place in the form of escape
or exile may be characterized as an artistic necessity in the
form of the need for civil freedom. Although Faulkner moved from
the South during a period of his life due to economic necessity,
and O Connor spent some time in her early career studying in
the North, the ambivalence to place which characterizes the Anglo-American
Southern writer has less to do with the dialectics of escape.
O Connor s fascination with the bad manners of many Southerners
is frequently expressed in her fiction as a tension between a
character and a mocking, ironic, third-person narrator. Faulkner
s ambivalence to his place is given perhaps its best expression
in the closing lines of Absalom, Absalom!, in the dialogue between Shreve and Quentin. Quentin
s relationship to place is interpreted by Shreve as negative
in the question, Why do you hate the South? , to which Quentin
replies, I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it! (303). For Quentin, the South, even when
at its worst, is better than anywhere else if only because it
is the place one is from.
A classification of writers along racial lines, however,
is a generalization which becomes more and more complex as one
reads Southern literature. Alice Walker s works, for example,
are as much concerned with gender as they are with race, and Gaines
has pointed to Faulkner as one important influence on his work.
Despite differences in the race, gender, class, creed and
generation of all of these writers, it is the place of the twentieth-century
South that is the represented timespace of Ernest Gaines, Flannery
O Connor, Alice Walker and William Faulkner. The South is therefore
a shared crossroads which all of them have recognized as a given
for better and for worse which provides a starting point for
their fictional representations.
Bakhtin s ideas, then, on the givenness of space and the
necessity of a given locality are particularly relevant to the
analysis of Southern fiction. The Concluding Remarks to the
chronotope essay (added in 1973), provide some additional insights
which are important for an understanding of the chronotope. Bakhtin
opens this concluding section with the statement that [a] literary
work s artistic unity in relationship to an actual reality is
defined by its chronotope (243). The word relationship in
this formulation is crucial: Bakhtin s postulation is one which
sees the work as the created effort of an author who is firmly
grounded in the here and now of his or her own culture. The artistic
unity of any given work is a complex admixture of the relationship
between the actual chronotopes of the world in which the author
lives, the literary chronotopes passed down to the author through
history, and the chronotopes created by the author out of these.
Despite differences that Bakhtin underlines between the
actual and the created world, these two are nevertheless indissolubly
tied up with each other and find themselves in continual mutual
interaction (Bakhtin 254). The author-creator as the link
between the real and the represented, Bakhtin says, is situated
inside the chronotopes of his own unresolved and still evolving
contemporaneity, in all its complexity and positioned in a tangential
way to the chronotopes of the created work. Bakhtin postulates
a dialogical, give-and-take relationship between the creation
of a text and the culture of the author-creator; the author-creator
s literary activity is always situated within his or her own
time and place, and his or her created texts subsequently become
a part of that culture. This means, for example, that the works
of Faulkner are part of the givenness of the South for Walker,
Gaines, and O Connor, a fact which these three relate to in different
ways in their own fiction. The realm of literature and more broadly
of culture (from which literature cannot be separated), Bakhtin
says, constitute the indispensable context of a literary work
and of the author s position within it, outside of which it is
impossible to understand . . . the work (255-256).
There are three aspects of this give-and-take relationship
between the work, the world, and the author which are especially
important. First, that there are discrepancies between the actual
reality of a place and fictional representations of that place;
we must never confuse Bakhtin says, the represented world with the world outside the text (naive
realism); nor must we confuse the author-creator of a work with
the author as a human being (naive biographism) (253). Second,
that there are necessary discrepancies between the respective
representations of different writers portraying the same place;
Walker and O Connor, for example, portray almost exactly the
same geographical area near the actual Milledgeville, Georgia,
but their different relationships to this place become apparent
in any comparison of their fiction. One of the many reasons for
this is their different literary backgrounds. While Walker identifies
with Afro-American predecessors such as Zora Neale Hurston, O
Connor has expressed an affinity with a long line of Christian
writers including Augustine, Dante and Milton. In other words,
these writers have access to the actual chronotopes of the same
place in Georgia, but choose to incorporate very different literary
chronotopes in their representations of that place. Finally, each
writer s own peculiar vision is the result of his or her chosen
artistic organization of the material of the actual and literary
worlds into what Faulkner called the apocryphal, or represented
world. The artistic unity of this represented place is found by
examining its chronotope, its fictional time and space. Because
artistic creation is always realized in a concrete way through
the gates of the chronotope, the acceptance of a given place as
the starting point for fiction does not reduce, but rather expands,
the Southern writer s chronotopic possibilities.
Bakhtin s understanding of the mutual interaction between
the world represented in the work and the world outside the work
as a complex of cultural dialogues grounded in a real time and
place provides a standpoint for situating oneself in relation
to the endless debate about what and where the South actually
is (255). As Escott and Goldfield have illustrated in their anthology
on the South, [d]efining Southern distinctiveness is a major
academic industry (1). In another study, Cords and Gerster sum
up just a few areas of academic interest which seek to define
the South in terms of one or another factor such as its climate,
geography, or its seemingly distinctive economic, political, social,
or religious patterns (xiii). Whereas some scholars believe
that the South s sub-tropical climate, i.e. the natural world,
has formed the attitude, body and language of Southerners (as
reflected in their love of the land, slow gait, and slow drawl),
others hold that social structures, for example slave society
and its aftermath, are the determining features of the South.
The view of the South in this essay is one which attempts to reconcile
these extremes by way of a dialogic, but not dialectic, mediation
between natural, social and fictional worlds.
For the Southern writer, all of these aspects of the place
of the South make up the given material out of which they create
their works. The Southern writer s timespace, like Goethe s,
is a given which is in perpetual emergence; Southern writers do
not complete their place, but add to it. This view of place inverses
the contemporary scholarly tendency to consider the South primarily
as a myth or a state of mind which consists of certain concepts
and hazy physical boundaries. The South, David L. Smiley says,
is not a place or a thing; it is not a collection of folkways
or cultural distinctives. It is an idea (20), and Richard Gray
states that the South is primarily a concept, a matter of knowing
even more than being (xii.). Such a view ignores or at least
underestimates the importance of what Bakhtin early in his career
postulated as the givenness of man in space as a necessary constituent
of human existence (Art and Answerability 95). Embracing both the importance of the concrete and
the abstract for the creation of fiction entails thus a consideration
of the ideas, myths, states of mind, and literature of Southerners
as a dimension of a real place. This place contains many of the forms of space and time which go into the making of fiction,
and is the key crossroads between writers from this region.
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