The spatialized narratives in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “The secret room” and Wang Anyi’s “The public kitchen”

Abstract

Whereas Lessing distinguishes painting as a spatial art from poetry as a temporal art, Joseph Frank proposes the increased spatiality in modern poetry and novel, which feature the juxtaposition of images, the fragmented narrative, and the suspended meaning-construction until the entirety is perceived. Although excluded from Frank’s study, modern short story also exemplifies the spatial form to a remarkable degree. Through a comparative reading of French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “The secret room” and Chinese writer Wang Anyi’s “The public kitchen,” this article explores the different means and degrees of spatiality in these two short stories. In contrast with the obliteration of time elements in Robbe-Grillet’s story, time itself is spatialized in Wang’s story, and the space becomes an embodiment of the passing of time. It is then argued that, the time-inherent narrative reveals modern Chinese short story’s “modified correspondence” with its Western counterpart, which can be attributed to the paradoxical yearning for a sense of historical continuity in the path of China’s modernization.