Spatial Form and Plot

Abstract

This difference however is crucial for understanding the perception of narrative precisely because that perception involves the movement of our consciousness. In one sense of the term plot, this movement is definitive. Joseph Frank's justly famous essay on Spatial Form in Modern Literature2 importantly pointed out that many modern narrative techniques tend to spatialize our understanding of narrative; we perceive Ulysses much more structurally than we perceive a typical romance. But structure need not be thought of as spatial only. When Sharon Spencer3 creates the category of the architectonic novel which achieves purely spatial form by virtue of the strange yet stable perspective of a narrative character, she reduces the progress and playfulness of The Tin Drum to a sculptural exploration of Oskar's unique ontology. This reduction flows from the acceptance of a critical metaphor as literal description and ignores the temporal-diachronic-experience of the text. I would like to argue that all reading of narrative is both diachronic and