Narrative Geography in Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy

Abstract

As Susan Stanford Friedman has pointed out in her critical study aptly titled Mappings (1998), interpretations of have often subtly privileged temporal over spatial analysis. (1) In part, this inclination has been fostered by the nature of itself, which unfolds over time. It has also been supported by prevailing modes of narratology, which focus on the handling of as crucial (sometimes the crucial) variable in structure. Following Gerard Genette, James Phelan has emphasized as the fundamental characteristic of narrative, which must move, in both its telling and its reception, through time (Phelan 1989, 15). Psychoanalytic approaches to literature, as well, have privileged temporal development. Peter Brooks has argued that plot is the principal organizing force of the meanings we derive from narrative, and that plot develops its propositions only through temporal sequence and (Brooks 1984, xi). Indeed, analysis of character, generally, tends to be temporally organized, tracing pattern of development over time. Recent studies of narrative, however, have begun to attend more fully to spatial constructs and to adopt critical vocabulary based on spatial models. In world reconfigured by multiple migration, globalization, travel, and new modes of communication, readers have begun to reexamine the extent to which and movement configure lives and stories. This renewed attention to progression in affects Western mindscapes in two ways. First, it expands and multiplies concepts of space, altering temporal concepts as consequence. Material space--geographical or architectural space--which has always been crucial to the metanarratives of the West, is complicated by new conceptions of spatial relationships, encompassing, for example, cultural space, cyberspace, and virtual reality. On the other hand, the linearity of temporal concepts like past and present is challenged as these constructs are collapsed into coexisting elements of the space of consciousness. Second, the contemporary preoccupation with ha s reconfigured the concept of to include cultural as well as physical axes, with such elements of as class, gender, race, ethnicity, and national origin conceived as positions in spatial continuum. As Friedman points out, Space often functions as trope for cultural location--for and as locationally as well as historically (137). Friedman calls for readings that trace text's narrative geography. Following James Clifford, she argues for knowledge produced through an itinerary, always marked by 'way in,' history of location and location of histories (Clifford 1992, 105; Friedman 114). A geographical, as opposed to developmental, rhetoric of identity recognizes that who we are depends upon our place in particular constellation of evolving ecologies (Friedman 143). Developing Clifford's play on alternative meanings of the syllable /roots/, theorists in both literary studies and anthropology have advocated a dialogic movement back and forth between roots and routes--that is, between rootedness and passage (Friedman 152). Roots and routes are, in other words, two sides of the same coin: roots [in the botanical sense], signifying based on stable cores and continuities; routes [in the sense of road or course of passage], suggesting based on travel, change, and disruption (Friedman 153). Analysis of narrative geography has developed in the context of both changing experiences of and changing uses of as metaphor. In critique of established ways of thinking about textual form, Andrew Gibson has argued against conceptions of as unitary or singular, suggesting instead that discourse configures movement through multiple spaces at once (1996, 16-17). Gibson cautions that geometric spatial models and ideas of origin, fixity and essence cannot be separated (21). …