Achebe's Spatial Temporalities: Literary Chronotopes in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God

Abstract

Human perception is most commonly shaped by the ostensibly 'concrete' nature of things, that is, by their existence at specific moments of time and in particular locations in space. In spite of longstanding philosophical enquiry into the issue of 'whether time has a continuous or discontinuous structure',' there is clearly a close correspondence between the progression of time and movement in space. Indeed, time itself may be said to assume essentially spatial dimensions: it is often conceptualised as a movement from one moment to another, regardless of whether such movement is perceived as being linear or cyclical. As Aristotle observes, 'when some time is thought to have passed, some movement also along with it seems to have taken place.'^ Time expands into past, present and future, the development of such stages strengthening the impression of temporality combined with spatiality. In imagining the present for example, notions of the here-and-now almost inevitably conceive of the 'here' as 'this space' and the 'now' as 'this time', with each term reinforcing the meaning of the other: space is located in time; time moves in space. The literary chronotope (literally, 'time-space') is a concept which shows how such temporal and spatial assumptions play important roles in determining the nature of fictional genres, particularly their themes and structures. According to Mikhail M. Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and literary theorist who first developed the chronotope as a tool of literary exegesis: