Temporal and Spatial Qualities of the Novel

In honour of Tara Collington, friend from graduate school days, and author of Lectures chronotopiques: Espace, temps et genres romanesques

There is an old riff I've always imagined to have been invented by some graduate student [...] struggling through Kant's abstruse account in his Critique of Pure Reason of the barely comprehensible categories of time and space, and decided that all this could be put much more simply [...] "Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once... and space exits so that it doesn't all happen to you."


By this standard, the novel is an ideal vehicle both of space and time. The novel shows us time: that is, everything doesn't happen at once. (It is a sequence, it is a line.) It shows us space: that is, what happens doesn't happen to one person only.

from Susan Sontag "At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning".

And so for day 599
03.08.2008