The chronotope and the generation of meaning in novels and paintings

Criticism, Spring, 1994 by Janice Best

Despite the ever-increasing renown that Mikhail Bakhtin's works have enjoyed sinced his death in 1975,(1) his theory of the chronotope, which is based on the idea that spatial and temporal dimensions are as inseparable in works of literature as they are in Einstein's theory of relativity, has attracted few scholars' attention.(2)

The main use Bakhtin made of this theory in his own published works was in the study of literary history, where it served principally to demonstrate the "process of assimilating real historical time and space in literature [... and] the articulation of actual historical persons in such a time and space."(3) In this paper, I shall take as my working hypothesis the notion that the concept of the chronotope is not restricted to the analysis of novels, but, as Bakhtin suggested, can also be applied to "other areas of culture," especially that of painting, where time is just as "intrinsically connected" to space as in the novel.

In an analysis of works by painters and novelists, I shall suggest other uses and applications that can be made of the concept of the chronotope, outside of the historical perspective explored by Bakhtin himself. My hypothesis is, in effect, that the chronotope constitutes at once a metaphor of society and one of the principal generators of artistic meanings in both literature and painting. By moving from the thematic study of the chronotope as a certain cultural vision which informs a specific work (novel or painting) to a structural and semiotic study of the chronotope of the encounter, I shall argue that one can go beyond the "word-image" opposition, as Mieke Bal has called it,(4) and that one can talk about reading a painting just as one can speak of reading a novel. For the purposes of this paper, I shall choose one example of a famous meeting place, taken from Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, and confront it with spatial and companions found in the works of Manet, principally in his Serveuse de Bocks and Un Bar aux Folies-Bergere. The advantage of this strategy is that is allows me to approach the problem of the generation and the interpretation of artistic meanings independently of distinctions of form and genre (a problem that Nelson Goodman Leaves aside in his Languages of Art(5)).

The chronotope

The most succinct definition that Bakhtin himself gave of the chronotope, which he claimed to have borrowed from Einstein's theory of relativity, "almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely)," accentuates its figurative meaning:

Thus the chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space, emerges as a center for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel. All the novel's abstract elements--philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect--gravitate toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work. Such is the representational significance of the chronotope. (Dialogic Imagination, 250)

According to Bakhtin, the chronotope constitutes the matrix where the principal temporal and spatial sequences of a work of art meet, where dialogues, encounters, events occur:

From a narrative and compositional point of view, this is the place where encounters occur [... where] the webs of intrigue are spun, denouements occur and finally--this is where dialogues happen, something that acquires extraordinary importance in the novel, revealing the character, "ideas" and "passions" of the heroes. (Dialogic Imagination, 246)

Despite this emphasis on the figurative and generative functions of the chronotope within the work of art, the main use Bakhtin made of this theory was in an historical perspective. His chapter on "Forms of time and the chronotope" is essentially a sketch of the evolution of different variations of the novel in Europe, commencing with the Greek adventure novel and ending with Rabelais. Nonetheless, if the chronotope can be used to distinguish "the most important generic variations on the novel in the early stages of its development" (Dialogic Imagination, 243), this concept also has other values and applications. It is on some possible other applications that I intend to focus in this paper.

Definitions and examples

As a figure, then, that is both temporal and spatial, the chronotope generates not only the encounters that advance the plot, but also the principal symbolic and metaphorical patterns of a work. In the ancient Greek adventure novel, the major chronotope associated adventure time (coincidental and non-biographical) with a foreign, abstract world.(6) The theme of the encounter was an important aspect of this chronotope, as it was by its very nature both temporal ("at the same time") and spatial ("in the same place") (Esthetique 248-249). Bakhtin further offered several illustrations of different places of encounter that determine specific genres of novels. In the Greek adventure novel as in the novel of chivalry,(7) these encounters were often linked to the chronotope of the road; in later novels, where time has become cyclical or biographical, these encounters occur in more concrete places such as the public square, the theatre, or the agricultural world. Although Bakhtin centers most of his analyses on the works of Rabelais and Goethe, he also offers some ideas concerning nineteenth-century novels in his concluding remarks. According to him, one of the essential chronotopes of the nineteenth-century French novel is that of the salon as seen in the works of such writers as Balzac and Stendhal: "Of course this is not the first appearance of such space, but only in these texts does it achieve its full significance as the place where the major spatial and temporal sequences of the novel interesct" (Dialogic Imagination, 246). The salon, nonetheless, is only one of the places in which temporal and spatial series intersect in the novels of these and of other authors of the nineteenth century.(8) In this paper, I will argue that in certain novels written in the nineteenth century, the nature of places of encounter undergoes a modification to which Bakhtin does not refer. Furthermore, I shall attempt to show that it is not only in novels that this change occurs, but also in the paintings of some artists of the same period.(9)