Lonely Times, Lonely Places: Christopher Isherwood’s Chronotopography of Loneliness

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This article outlines the connections between the phenomenon of loneliness and the categories of time and space in Christopher Isherwood’s writing. Characteristically autobiographical, it reflects the author’s quest for self, including the geography of his wanderings around Europe and emigration as well as the complexities of the historical context of his life. The study starts with a discussion of loneliness as an existential issue and goes on to explore its temporal and spatial manifestations at the various levels of national, gender, and age identity, including the experience of being a foreigner in an alien sociocultural space and psychological immaturity as a specific temporal modality of emotional estrangement. The article then investigates how Isherwood uses time and space to construct narratives of historical change, in which the pre-war anxiety and the post-war consumerism are revealed through the city/nature juxtaposition. The social dimension of loneliness is analysed in terms of the Foucauldian concepts of heterotopia and heterochrony. Gay bars, hospitals, and universities alike constitute spaces of contained otherness, where time is experienced differently, reinforcing either the sense of community or social alienation. Finally, the article looks at the notion of home, which functions as a chronotope and the point of conceptual and structural organisation for the circadian novel.