Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel
We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. This term [space-time] is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity....What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space)....
In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history....
[One of the] basic types of novels developed in ancient times.... was the “adventure novel of ordeal....”
The plots...are remarkably similar to each other....There is a boy and a girl of marriageable age....A sudden and instantaneous passion flares up between them....They are confronted with obstacles that retard and delay their union....The novel ends happily with the lovers united in marriage....
These elements, derived from various different genres, are fused and consolidated into a new – specifically novelistic – unity, of which the constitutive feature is adventure – novel-time....the sudden flareup of their passion...their successful union in marriage. All action in the novel unfolds between these two points. These points – the poles of plot movement – are themselves crucial events in the heroes’ lives; in and of themselves they have a biographical significance. But it is not around these that the novel is structured; rather, it is around that which lies (that which takes place) between them. But in essence nothing need lie between them. From the very beginning, the love between the hero and the heroine is not subject to doubt; this love remains absolutely unchanged throughout the entire novel. Their chastity is also preserved, and their marriage at the end of the novel is directly conjoined with their love – that same love that had been ignited at their first meeting at the onset of the novel; it is as if absolutely nothing had happened between these two moments, as if the marriage had been consummated on the day after their meeting....
If the situation were otherwise – had, for example, the initial instantaneous passion of the heroes grown stronger as a result of their adventures and ordeals; had that passion been tested in action, thereby acquiring new qualities of a stable and tried love; had the heroes themselves matured, come to know each other better – then we would have an example of a much later European novel-type, one that would not be an adventure novel at all, and certainly not a Greek romance. Although the poles of the plot would have remained the same (passion at the beginning, marriage at the end), the events that retard the marriage would have acquired in themselves a certain biographical or at least psychological significance; they would give the appearance of being stretch along the real time-line of the heroes’ lives, and of effecting change in both the heroes and in the events (the key events) of their lives. But this is precisely what is lacking in the Greek romance; in it there is a sharp hiatus between two moments of biographical time, a hiatus that leaves no trace in the life of the heroes or in their personalities.
All the events of the novel that fill this hiatus are a pure digression from the normal course of life; they are excluded from the kind of real duration in which additions to a normal biography are made.
This Greek romance-time does not have even an elementary biological or maturational duration. At the novel’s onset the heroes meet each other at a marriageable age, and at the same marriageable age, no less fresh and handsome, they consummate the marriage at the novel’s end. Such a form of time, in which they experience a most improbable number of adventures, is not measured off in the novel and does not add up; it is simply days, nights, hours, moments clocked in a technical sense within the limits of each separate adventure. This time – adventure-time, highly intensified but undifferentiated – is not registered in the slightest way in the age of the heroes. We have here an extratemporal hiatus between two biological moments – the arousal of passion, and its satisfaction.
When Voltaire, in his Candide, parodied the type of Greek adventure novel that was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called “Baroque novel”), he took into account the real time that would have been required in such romances for the hero to experience the customary does of adventures and “turns of fate.” With all obstacles overcome at the novel’s end, his heroes (Candide and Cunegonde) consummate the obligatory happy marriage. But, alas, they have already grown old, and the wondrous Cunegonde resembles some hideous old witch. Consummation follows upon passion, but only when it is no longer biologically possible.
It goes without saying that Greek adventure-time lacks any natural, everyday cyclicity – such as might have introduced into it a temporal order and indices on a human scale, tying it to the repetitive aspects of natural and human life. No matter where one goes in the world of the Greek romance, with all its countries and cities, its buildings and works of art, there are absolutely no indications of historical time, no identifying traces of the era. This also explains the fact that scholarship has yet to establish the precise chronology of Greek romances, and until quite recently scholarly opinion as to the dates of origin of individual novels has differed by as much as five or six centuries....
Greek romances are comparatively short. In the seventeenth century, the length of similarly constructed novels increases by ten to fifteen times. There are no internal limits to this increase. For all the days, hours, minutes that are ticked off within the separate adventures are not united into a real time series, they do not become the days and hours of a human life. These hours and days leave no trace, and therefore, one may have as many of them as one likes....”