Dimensions of Semiotic Space in Narrative

Abstract

The observation and interpretation of spatial relationships in narrative texts is a significant recurrent theme in recent semiotics. Binary oppositions such as high/low, near/far, enclosed/open have been interpreted as systematic textual realizations of fundamental categories of mythic thought by Levi-Strauss, Toporov and Ivanov, of moral or cultural codes by Toporov and Lotman, and in terms of psycho-analytic oppositions by many post-Freudians. Lotman and Barthes, among others, have attempted to relate spatial oppositions in literary narrative to the dynamics of plot and point of view or the delineation of character. One semiotic system, relations, has been regarded as a kind of metaphor for other semiotic systems in a text. A purely binary opposition, however, while giving us direct and valuable insights into indicial relations in a narrative, especially in terms of myths, rites and moral values, may blur our perception of other aspects of semiotic space, for example, the extent to which it may have no spatial correlates at all, and the extent to which its dimensions are measurable, i.e., perceived in our reading as themselves consisting of graded relationships. Our title is a pun on both the key words: under we do include spatial relations as perhaps one of the most clearly structured and recognizable dimensions of meaning in a text - a semiotic system that models the world of the narrative. But we also use in its more general sense as used by mathematicians (Lotman reminds us in passing of the concepts chromatic space in optics and phase space as used by electrical engineers, but he does not look more closely at the implications of this analogy [Lotman, 1968, 1970]). Under dimension we include both the notion of cross-section, assuming that the art work can be cut at many different levels and angles and that many of