The chronotope and the generation of meaning in novels and paintings

Criticism, Spring, 1994 by Janice Best

In the works of Manet and Flaubert, as in those of many other artists, action and meaning are born in places of a certain social ambiguity.(10) Curious mixtures of public and private, such places allow characters from different social classes to meet without breaking down the social barriers that, at least on some levels, continue to separate them. Their function of facilitating encounters gives these places a particular temporal quality. They are, in effect, places of passing, regulators of flow and ebb, of rising and falling, whose characteristics change with each hour of the day. Temporal transition corresponds thus to spatial ambiguity.

This spatial-temporal figure can be identified with counterparts in other aesthetic discourses of the same period, such as the paintings of the latter half of the nineteenth century to which T.J. Clark refers in his book The Painting of Modern Life.(11) According to Clark, the modern Paris which artists such as Manet, Monet, Degas or ToulouseLautrec depict is one of ambiguity and anomie:

This, I should say, is the essential myth of modern life: that the city has become a free field of signs and exhibits, a marketable mass of images, an area in which the old separations have broken down for good. The modern, to repeat the myth once more, is the marginal; it is ambiguity, it is mixture of classes and classifications, it is anomie and improvisation, it is the reign of generalized illusion. (49)

As Rene Huyghe(12) has suggested, the interest that painters and writers of this era showed for scientific objectivity led them to express the world in terms of disintegration, ambiguity and transition. The intersection of spatial ambiguity and of temporal transition produces a certain vision of the world and of the situation of men and women in this world which constitutes a new artistic chronotope according to Bakhtin's definition.(13) This is not, of course, the first appearance of such space, but it is not until this period that it acquires its full significance as the place where the major spatial and temporal sequences intersect in works of art of many diverse types. By maintaining social divisions and distinctions and at the same time allowing mixture of classes, this chronotope unites the myth of modernity's account of anomie with that of social division; it is here, then, that one form of control is mapped upon another.(14)

Time, space and meaning

Victor Brombert(15) has shown the importance of the symbol of the bordello in Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale. What I would like to suggest in this paper is that, in addition to determining the symbolic fabric of the novel, the specific spatial and temporal characteristics that Flaubert assigns to the bordello episode are repeated in all of the major places of encounter in the novel.(16) This repetition of chronotopic characteristics determines the outcome of the novel's encounters and explains, in particular, Frederic's repeated failures to be in the right place at the right time. These characteristics are, moreover, to be found in many of Manet's paintings and account for the sigular detachment which the people he paints seem to display towards their surroundings.