Three Dimensions of Space in the Narrative Text

Résumé 0

This article sets out a syntagmatics of the narrative text that departs from the notion of the "linearity" of the signifier. The space concerned, which is also not that of description, for example, is bound up with graphic space as it is deployed in texts such as the Dos Passos "Newsreel" or Nabokov’s discontinuously articulated Pale Fire. While space as it is manipulated in these texts corresponds to an internal syntagmatics that accentuates the iconic, in Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, composed of parallel and partially overlapping "series" of narratives, textual space is developed according to an external syntagmatics and follows an indexical principle. With Melville’s Moby-Dick, space is related less to the graphic features of the text than it is to the symbolic function of the sign and the network of semantic relations woven out of the whale as "representative," the whale being a "vehicle" that acts both as a model for the analogy of relations and as a metasign, thus serving as the principle structural metaphor in the novel. The forms of space as conceived here are elaborated along the juncture between the intratextual and the intertextual