The chronotope and the generation of meaning in novels and paintings

Criticism, Spring, 1994 by Janice Best

This analysis of works by painters as well as by novelists suggests, moreover, another use that can be made of the concept of the chronotope, outside of the historical perspective explored by Bakhtin himself. That is to say that artistic meaning is created not only by the refiguration of time into a narrative sequence (as Ricoeur would have it), but also by making the effects of time spatially visible through the creation of specifically chronotopic images. As Bakhtin has said, "every entry into the sphere of meaning is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope" (Dialogic Imagination, 258). In the works of Flaubert and Manet, the loss of the private in favor of the public is intimately linked to the motion of the spiral. It is this temporal figure of which Georges Poulet has written(31) which gives full meaning to the motif of the bordello by making of it a figure that is not only spatially ambiguous but temporally transitory. What may appear to be paradoxical, but which is in fact the sign of the genius of Flaubert and of Manet, is that in this world of ambiguity and transition they succeeded (unlike many of their contemporaries) in creating works where the permanence of a certain gaze suggests that of the ideal and of dreams.

Acadia University, Nova Scotia

Notes

The research for this paper was conducted with the support of a Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A shorter version was presented, in French, at the Seventeenth Colloquium in Nineteenth-Century French Studies held in New Orleans, October 17-20, 1991. I thank Pat O'Neill for his comments on this paper.

(1.)Tzetvan Todorov, Le Principe dialogique (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 7: "On pourrait accorder sans trop d'hesitations deux superlatifs a Mikhail Bakhtine, en affirmant qu'il est le plus important penseur sovietique dans le domaine des sciences humaines, et le plus grand theoricien de la litterature au XXe siecle."

(2.)Hayden White's keynote address at the International Nineteenth-Century French Studies Conference in 1987 on history and chronotopes is a notable exception. Todorov (Le Principe dialogique, Paris: Seuil, 1981), Michael Holquist and Katarina Clark (Mikhail Bakhtin [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984]) pass briefly over this part of Bakhtin's work. Henri Mitterand, in an article devoted to an analysis of the chronotopes in Germinal, calls for a redefinition of the chronotope, suggesting that Bakhtin's conception lacks the double dimension of symbolic content and of semiotic form ("Chronotopies romanesques: Germinal," Poetique no. 81 [1991]: 89-104).

(3.)The French translation seems clearer here than the English: "[le] processus qui a permis a la litterature de prendre conscience du temps et de l'espace historiques reels et de l'homme historique vrai qui s'y revele" -- Mikhail Bakhtine, Esthetique et theorie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 237. All French language citations of Bakhtin will be taken from this edition. English language citations will be taken from : M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).