Space, Ideology, and Literary Representation

Abstract

first thing to say about notion of space from a literary point of view is that it does not exist, or should not exist. Literature, as we have been told at least since Lessing's Laocoon, is a temporal art. Space enters into literature only as a dubious fiction, as a phantom in minds of overimaginative readers, as an invasion from alien and rival forms like painting, or as a necessary evil in transmission of verbal by spatial, visible traces of writing. Despite a long tradition of literary pictorialism which stresses visual, spatial aspects of literary representation, dominant tendency in Western literary theory is resolutely iconoclastic, that is, antipictorial, antivisual, antispatial, even, at most general level, antimimetic. Aristotle makes it clear that, despite obvious analogies between poetic and graphic mimesis, truly distinctive feature of poetry is plot, arrangement of incidents in time. The spectacular effect, which would seem empirically to be a crucial part of at least dramatic literature, is, for Aristotle, quite foreign to art of poetry, belonging instead to the of costumier. The plot should be so constructed, says Aristotle (1932 [1927]: 29, 49),