Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading

Narrative
by SUSAN STANFORD FRIEDMAN

In Reading for the Plot, [Peter] Brooks defines narrative as "the play of desire in
time" (xiii) and identifies two sites for this play: first, the text itself, wherein
desire to order compels the plot's unfolding; and, second, the space between
text and reader, wherein the reader's desire for plot impels the reading (37-61).
Analysis of these narrative desires involves seeing "the text itself as a system of
internal energies and tensions, compulsions, resistances, and desires"
(xiv). Like Paul Ricoeur in "Narrative Time," Brooks insists upon the
temporal dimension of narrative, on narrative's essential relation to time. I want
to extend Brooks's "dynamics of narrative" by reintroducing the issue of space
into a discussion of narrative, by considering narrative, in other words, as the
play of desire in space as well as time.1

I define narrative most simply as the representation of movement within the

coordinates of space and time.2 Here, I adapt M. M. Bakhtin's concept of the
chronotope, by which he means the special form in which the "intrinsic
interconnectedness of temporal and spatial relationships" is expressed in litera-
ture (Dialogic Imagination 84). Invoking Einstein's theory of relativity, Bakhtin
argues for the "inseparability of space and time" (84) and resorts repeatedly to
spatial tropes in his analysis of various chronotopes. I also want to develop Julia
Kristeva's adaptations of Bakhtin's spatial tropes in two early essays, "Word,
Dialogue, and Novel" (1966) and "The Bounded Text" (1966-1967), both of
which are included in her collection Desire in Language. Here, in introducing her
concept of intertextuality, she advocates a reading practice based in the
"spatialization" of the word along vertical and horizontal axes in an intertextual
grid. In this essay, I will adapt her spatial tropes to suggest that we can read
narrative by interpreting the text's horizontal and vertical narrative movements
and intersections. Such interactions are events, I will argue, that take place at
every moment in the text in a kind of interdependent interplay of surface and
depth. Such moments may appear as juxtapositions, oppositions,
conflations, convergences, or mirrorings of narrative coordinates. These
moments in tum join to form a fluid "story" of a dynamic text ever in
process, ever "narrated" by the reader.

KRISTEVA'S SPATIALIZATION OF THE WORD

For Kristeva, spatialization—with its attendant graphic tropes of coordinates,

axes, trajectory, horizontal, vertical, surface, intersection, linearity, loop,
dimension, and so forth—allows for the visualization of the text-in-process, the
text as a dynamic "productivity," an "operation" (Desire 36-37). Spatialization
does not mean the erasure of time by space, as it does for Joseph Frank,
who, in his influential essay, "Spatial Form in Modem Literature," argues that
avant garde narrative techniques in modem literature created an illusory effect
of simultaneity and unity. Rather, for Kristeva, spatialization constitutes the text
as a verbal surface or place in which both space and time, synchrony and
diachrony, function as coordinates for textual activity. Kristeva's earliest essays
pose a critique of the static analysis of structuralism and a call for the
identifìcation of textual process. Invoking Bakhtin, Kristeva identifìes this
process as fundamentally dialogic and intertextual—at the level of word,
sentence, and story. Bakhtin, she explains, "considers writing as a reading of
the anterior literary corpus and the text as an absorption of a reply to another
text" (Desire 69). "Each word (text)," she continues, "is an intersection of word
(texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read . . . . [A]ny text is
constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and
transformation of another" (Desire 66). She graphs these intersections by
identifying the text's "three dimensions or coordinates" as the writing subject,
the addressee, and exterior texts. What she calls the horizontal axis is a line
drawn from writing subject across to the addressee, who is either a character to
whom the speech is directed or, more generally, the reader. This horizontal axis
represents the text as a transaction between writer and reader. The vertical axis
is a line starting with the text and moving down to the exterior texts, or contexts,
of the text in question. This vertical axis emphasizes the text as a writing in
relation with other writings. In other words, a text's dialogic interaction operates
along both horizontal and vertical axes, from writing subject to addressee, from
text to contexts. What emerges from a text is not "a point (a fìxed meaning),"
but rather a dialogue of writer and reader, text and context (Desire 65).

In her early work, Kristeva's insistence on spatialization, which embeds her

critique of pure formalism, is part of her Bakhtinian project to (re)insert the
social and historical context as a necessary dimension of a text. Reading, she
suggests, should never be merely a "linguistic" process focused on an
isolated text. Consequently, she advocates a reading of what she
calls the "translinguistic," by which she means the text's dialogue along
horizontal and vertical axes with its writer, readers, and context (Desire 69). She
coins the term "ideologeme" to identify the point of intersection between
the text and its precursor texts. This ideologeme is "materialized" "along the
entire length of its [the text's] trajectory, giving it its historical and social
coordinates" (Desire 36). Reading for the dialogic ideologeme means
reading the text "within (the text of) society and history" (Desire 37).

SPATIALIZING NARRATIVE

Kristeva's spatialization of the word has potential applications for narrative. I will
alter her model of a text's vertical and horizontal axes at the same time as I
maintain her insistence on historical and intertextual resonances. As an
interpretive strategy (not as a narrative typology), I propose two kinds of
narrative axes whose intersections are reconstructed by the reader in the inter-
active process of reading. Bakhtin's notion of the novel's double chronotope is
useful:

Even in the segmentation of a modem literary work, we sense

the chronotope of the represented world as well as the
chronotope of the readers and creators of the work . . . .
[B]efore us are two events: the event that is narrated in the
work and the event of narration itself (we ourselves partici-
pate in the latter, as listeners or readers); these events take
place in different times . . . and in different places.(255)
The totality of the work, he concludes, is made up of the interacting chronotopes
of the writer, reader, and text. We can graph Bakhtin's two chronotopes along
horizontal and vertical narrative axes. The horizontal narrative axis involves the
linear movement of the characters through the coordinates of textual space and
time. The vertical narrative axis involves the space and time the writer and
reader occupy as they inscribe and interpret what Kristeva calls the "subject-in-
process" constituted through the "signifying practice" of the text and its
dialogues with literary, social, and historical intertexts.

Both axes represent a movement through space and time—the one (horizontal)
referring to the movement of characters within their fictional world; the other
(vertical) referring to the "motions" of the writer and the reader in relation to
each other and to the text's intertexts. Where the horizontal movement exists in
finite form within the bounded world of the text, the vertical movement exists
fluidly as a writing inscribed by the writer and reconstituted by the reader more
or less consciously and to a greater and lesser degree depending on the
specific writers and readers. As different functions of narrative, these axes feed
off each other symbiotically; neither exists by itself as a fixed entity. I separate
them only for strategic purposes, for the insight that such a spatialization
provides for interpreting the overdetermined complexities of narrative. A fully
spatialized reading of a given narrative text, as narrative, involves an
interpretation of the continuous interplay between the horizontal and vertical
narrative coordinates. The "plot" of intersection, "narrated" by the reader, is a
"story" based on a reading of the different forms that intersection takes through
time, that is, how the horizontal and vertical narratives converge and separate,
echo and oppose, reinforce and undermine each other.

Let me specify in more detail what I mean by horizontal and vertical narrative
coordinates. The horizontal narrative is the sequence of events, whether
internal or extemal, that "happens" according to the ordering principles of the
plot and narrative point of view. Setting, character, action, initiating "problem,"
progression, and closure are its familiar components—the focus of much tradi-
tional narratology.3 The horizontal narrative follows and is constrained by the
linearity of language—the sequence of the sentence that moves horizontally in
alphabetic scripts is repeated in the horizontal movement of the plot from "be-
ginning" to "end," however the categories of start and finish are customarily
understood. Determined in part by historically specific narrative conventions, the
forms of the horizontal narrative differ particularly in their handling of chro-
nology, teleology, and narrative point of view—from the "well-made" to the
picaresque or "plotless" plot; from the omniscient to the multiple, unreliable, or
first-person narrator; from the epistolary to the embedded and complexly framed
narratives. But for all forms, reading the horizontal narrative involves interpret-
ing the sequence inscribed in the linearity of sentence and story. In simplest
terms, we ask, who is the story about? What happens? Where? Why? What
does it "mean"? Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, for example, plot the movements
of their characters through the cities of Dublin and London on a single day in
June. Reading the horizontal narrative axis, we focus on the exterior and interior
actions and thoughts of Clarissa and Septimus, Stephen, Bloom, and Molly (as
well as a host of others). As readers, we may imaginatively inhabit their space
and time, to become what Peter Rabinowitz and James Phelan variously
call the "narrative audience" that participates in "the mimetic illusion" (Phelan
5).4 As with any text, the horizontal narrative is reconstituted in the process of
reading. Its attendant meanings are consequently dependent on what Brooks
calls the reader's "performance" of the text (37), what Ross Chambers refers to
as the "performative force" of the narrative (4-5), and what Phelan identifies as
"narrative dynamics." But in bringing the horizontal narrative to life, the reader
(like the writer) nonetheless remains in a different space and time from that of
the characters.

The vertical axis of narrative involves reading "down into" the text, as we move
across it. The vertical does not exist at the level of sequential plot, but rather
resides within, dependent on the horizontal narrative as the function that adds
multiple resonances to the characters' movement through space and time. The
palimpsest—a tablet that has been written on many times, with prior layers
imperfectly erased—serves as an apt metaphor for the vertical dimension of
narrative. Instead of the single textual surface of the horizontal narrative, the
vertical narrative has many superimposed surfaces, layered and overwritten like
the human psyche. Freud's image of the psyche as the "mystic writing-pad"
serves equally well-for with this mechanism, the written impression remains
embedded, but hidden, in the wax beneath the clean plastic siate ("A Note").

The point of these tropes is not to suggest a simple equation of the horizontal
narrative with consciousness and the vertical narrative with the unconscious.
Rather, they suggest that every horizontal narrative has an embedded vertical
dimension that is more or less visible and that must be traced by the reader
because it has no narrator of its own. Although not yet named as such, the
vertical narrative has been the focus of much recent post-structuralist, feminist,
Afro-Americanist, and Marxist narrative theory.5

Although interwoven, three distinct strands of the vertical narrative can be

usefully separated for purposes of analysis: the literary; the historical; and the
psychic. Both the literary and historical aspects of the vertical narrative involve
reading the horizontal narrative's dialogues with other texts, interpreting, in
other words, the various forms of intertextuality that Kristeva introduces in her
tropes of spatialization. Whether consciously or unconsciously produced by the
writer, these dialogues exist as "the mosaic of quotations" that traverse the text.
They are the layered surfaces beneath and within the horizontal narrative, but
they are not narrated by it and may seem tangential to it. When consciously
intended by the writer, these intertextual resonances establish an indirect com-
munication between writer and reader, with the characters and events of the
horizontal narrative as points of mediation. Such resonances do not usually
exist in the mind of the characters—in the space and time of the horizontal
narrative. In Mrs. Dalloway, for example, it is the reader who "narrates" the story
of Septimus as Shakespearean fool, as scapegoat, as sacrificial lamb and
Christ figure within the anguished postwar landscape.

The literary aspect of the vertical narrative exists first of all in relation to genre.
The writer's and reader's awareness of genre conventions exists as a
chronotope, a space-time, within which the specific text is read—for its invo-
cations and revocations, its uses and rescriptions, its repetitions and play. We
read, for example, The Voyage Out, Woolf's first novel, within the grid of the
Bildungsroman as a story of development that progresses conventionally
through courtship and engagement, only to veer suddenly away from the mar-
riage plot, in having its protagonist die at the end. More broadly, all literary texts
exist—however centrally, ambivalently, or marginally—within one or more
literary traditions or cultures. Horizontal narratives, consequently, have an
indirectly narrated vertical dimension that accomplishes a dialogic engagement
with what has been written before. In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis
Gates proposes the term "signifyin(g)" to identify a culturally specific form of
intertextuality, a mode tied to the African-American oral and written traditions of
speakers and writers self-reflexively and intentionally playing off the discourse
of others in the tradition. The epistolary mode of Alice Walker's The Color
Purple, in which Celie writes letters first to God and then to her sister, not only
dialogues with such epistolary inscriptions of rape as Richardson 's Clarissa, but
also signifies on the oral frame of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, in
which Janie narrates the events of the story to her friend Phoebe, and on the
story of incest in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. More generally, we recognize
that intertextual reference may be highlighted or muted, intentionally or
unintentionally present, collaborative or revisionist. But common to all
intertextual resonances is a story of dialogue narrated by the reader that takes
place outside the spatial and temporal coordinates
through which the characters of the horizontal narrative move.

The historical aspect of the vertical narrative represents a similar mosaic of

quotations, one that refers to the larger social order of the writer, text, and
reader. Such a mosaic may involve reference to a specific historical event
that the text reconstructs—such as Morrison's retelling in Beloved, with key
departures, of Margaret Garner's attempt to kill her children when faced with
their and her own retum to slavery in 1856. Or, more broadly, this historical
mosaic may involve what Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls "cultural scripts" layered
into the horizontal narrative (Writing Beyond the Ending ix-xi, 1-19). DuPlessis'
term acknowledges the part that "story" plays in both ideological and
oppositional discourses. These political resonances that traverse the text
might include interlocking narratives of race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality,
religion, and so forth—stories, in other words, that reproduce, subvert, and
otherwise engage with the dominant and marginalized cultural scripts of the
social order. For Fredric Jameson, such narratives constitute what he calls the
"political unconscious," by which he means the "buried and repressed" narrative
of class struggle present in trace form on the surface of the text (20). His
assertion that narratives of class struggle subsume all other stories is
dangerously bounded, but his call for the critic to read the text for signs of its
repressed political scripts is useful. In Beloved, the vertically embedded
cultural scripts or textual unconscious include many "stories" of race and gender
relations: for example, the master's right to violate slave women; western
theories of black and African inferiority and bestiality; pattems of slave
resistance; white women's liminal position between race privilege and gendered
alterity. Whether these politica! and historical narratives are buried in the text or
openly scripted, reading this aspect of the vertical narrative allows for an
analysis of the text in dialogue with "its historical and social coordinates," as
Kristeva advocates (Desire 36).

Reading the psychic aspect of the vertical narrative involves recognizing that a
text can be read as a linguistic entity structured like a psyche, with a conscious
and an unconscious that interact psychodynamically. Freud's concept of the
psyche as perpetually in the process of splitting suggests that nothing is ever
lost, but only forgotten.6 Analogically speaking, the text is, like a dream,
the result of a negotiation in which the desire to express and the need to
repress force a compromise that takes the form of disguised speech. The
text, then, can be read as a site of repression and insistent retum. Freud's
grammar for the dream-work—
the mechanisms of displacement, condensation, non-rational modes of
representability, and secondary revision—is useful for decoding disguised
expression (lnterpretation of Dreams 311-546). These mechanisms are often at
work in the enigmatic textual sites that deconstruction unravels to subvert
underlying binaries. As Shoshana Felman does in her reading of James's The
Turn of the Screw, textual gaps, silences, knots, and aporias can be read
vertically to gain some sort of access to the textual unconscious.

This is also, I would suggest, what Kristeva is doing in her integration of

Lacanian psychoanalysis, Bakhtinian dialogics, and Barthesian semiotics
in Revolution in Poetic Language.7 Kristeva inverts Lacan's axiom that the
unconscious is structured like a language to suggest that the text is structured
like a psyche. Language, she argues, always engages in a dialectical interplay
of two modalities, the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic—that oral and
rhythmic dimension of language that exists prior to and outside a system of
signification—harkens back to the pre-oedipal period of the child's desire for the
matemal body. The symbolic—that meaning-centered, instrumental aspect of
language that exists after the child grasps the principle of signification—reverts
back to the oedipal period when (according to Lacan) the child's realization of
sexual difference allows for the acquisition of language based on a system of
differences govemed by the Law of the Father ("Signification of the
Phallus").8 Reading for the interplay of the semiotic and the symbolic—newly
and differently constituted in every text—is one form that reading the
vertical narrative can take.

A relational reading strategy based on the compositional history of the text—the

chronotope of the writer—offers another mechanism for reading the psychic
dimension of the vertical narrative. Instead of privileging the "final" text as the
"definitive" one, we can read the various versions of a text as an
overdetermined palimpsest in which each text forms a distinct, yet interrelated
part of a larger composite "text."9 Freud's concept of dreams in a series as
being part of a larger dream-text that can be interpreted is useful (lnterpretation
of Dreams 369, 563). He suggests that the mechanisms of the dream-work
govern the relation among the dreams and that "the first of these homologous
dreams to occur is often the more distorted one and timid, while the succeeding
one will be more confident and distinct" (369). Freud's grammar can be adapted
to read what gets repressed on the one hand and worked through on the other
in a series of drafts preceding a published text. Tracking the various versions of
the same story can reveal a process of conscious or self-conscious self-
censorship whereby textual revision of the horizontal narrative represses or
further disguises certain forbidden elements that remain as part of the vertical
narrative. Reading the composite "text" involves reconstructing the "story" of
condensation, displacement, and secondary revision from one version to
another. In short, earlier versions of a text can be read vertically as the textual
unconscious of the horizontal narrative in the published text. For example, H.
D.'s "Madrigal Cycle"—a triptych of three autobiographical novels about her life
during the teens—forms a composite text in which the last one she wrote (Bid
Me to Live [A Madrigal]) represses the stories of lesbian desire and illicit
motherhood that are fully narrated in the earlier texts, Paint It To-
Day and Asphodel, both of which she ultimately considered to be "drafts" for Bid
Me to Live.10

Conversely, a writer's repeated retum to the scene of writing a particular story

can be read as a kind of repetition compulsion in which the earliest versions are
the most disguised, with each repetition bringing the writer closer to the
repressed content that needs to be remembered. Here, I am adapting
Freud's notion of analysis as a transference scene in which the analysand
repeats the symptoms and dreams produced by repressed materiai in a process
of "working through" that ultimately leads to conscious recollection of what has
been forgotten ("Further Recommendations"). This analogy between analytic
and novelistic transference is especially cogent in autobiograpbical narratives,
in which the split subject of the writing "I now" and the written about "I then"
perform the different roles of analyst and analysand in a kind of "writing cure."
Earlier or later versions of the horizontal narrative, in other words, can, when
read together as a composite text, give us access to tbe psychic dimension of
the vertical narrative. Joyce's autobiographical narratives about Stephen
D(a)edalus, for example, (including "A Portrait of the Artist," Stephen Hero, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses) constitute a composite "text"
in which the death of Joyce's mother and the son's remorse remain
unnarratable until the final text in the series—present only in trace forms that
can be interpreted with Freud's grammar for the dream-work.11

WHY SPATIALIZE NARRATIVE?

What do we learn by conceptualizing narrative in spatial terms? In contrast to

typological approaches, spatialization emphasizes the psychodynamic, inter-
active, and situational nature of narrative processes; it also provides a fluid,
relational approach that connects text and context, writer and reader. Spatiali-
zation is not, of course, the only way to produce such readings. Other interpre-
tative strategies have gained access to a text's literary and historical
resonances without resort to spatial tropes. Other critics, such as Ross
Chambers, have developed ways of reading what be calls "not the actual
historicity of texts, but the markers, within them of historical situation" (10). His
analysis of a text's contractual appeal and adaptation of Clifford Geertz's "thick
description" represents a different route to reaching some of the same
objectives. James Phelan's distinction between the mimetic and synthetic
dimensions of character as the reader experiences it represents yet another.
For Phelan, the mimetic aspect suppresses the reader's awareness of the
character as authorial construction while the synthetic foregrounds this
construction as part of a communication between author and reader (1-27, 115).
For him, it is the play between the mimetic and the synthetic that accounts for
narrative progression, a theory that assumes, like spatialization of narrative
axes, that the text operates on an interplay between two different
chronotopes—the mimetic world of the characters, and the synthetic realm of
the author and reader.

Spatialization can, however, go beyond these other metbods by facilitating

some new readings of narrative that might not otherwise exist. The notion of a
vertical axis embedded in the horizontal suggests the way in which historical,
literary, and psychic intertextualities constitute more than resonances attached
to the text associatively, suggestively, or randomly. Instead, they initiate stories
themselves—dialogic narratives "told" by the reader in collusion with a
writer who inscribes them in the text consciously or unconsciously. This, I would
argue, is the contribution made by Kristeva's graph of the writer/reader (hori-
zontal axis) and text/context (vertical axis). Moreover, the concept of interactive
horizontal and vertical narrative axes allows for a relational reading of the two
that produces a "story" not present in either axis by itself. For example, the
horizontal narrative of The Voyage Out is the story of failure, the Bildung that
ends in death. The vertical narrative, reconstructed by the reader, is the story of
rebellion, of Woolf's successful "voyage out" of the marriage plot, one that led
out of the drawing room and into the world of letters, as an initial declaration of
independence from the dominant literary and historical narratives of the early
twentieth century. The confrontation in this case between the horizontal and
vertical narratives constitutes a "story" of its own that is present in neither nar-
rative axis by itself.

A "full" reading of narrative axes is not possible in a bounded text because, like
the dream in Freud's psychoanalysis, the text's dialogism is unbounded, as is
the story of the intersections between the horizontal and vertical coordinates.
But a reading strategy based in the identification of horizontal and vertical nar-
ratives axes fosters relational readings, discourages "definitive" and bounded
interpretations, and encourages a notion of the text as a multiplicitous and dy-
namic site of repression and return. Such spatialized readings also allow us as
readers to construct a "story" of the fluidly interactive relationship between the
surface and palimpsestic depths of a given text--taking into account all the
historical, literary, and psychic resonances that are embedded within the
horizontal narrative and waiting to become narrated in the reading process.
ldeally such a story is made up of a sequence of relational readings that
at every point in the horizontal narrative examines its vertical component. The
richest insights produced by a spatialized reading strategy may well reside in
the way it potentially produces interpretations of the textual and political un-
conscious of a given text or series of texts. But in general, spatializing narrative
gives us a systematic way of approaching the various forms of narrative
dialogism and of (re)connecting the text with its writer and world. In Kristeva's
words, spatialization suggests an interpretive strategy that regards a text as
"a dynamic..intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed
meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the
addressee..., and the contemporary or earlier cultural context" (Desire 65).

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• 1.This essay presents the theoretical section of a much longer essay that
includes a reading of Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, forthcoming in Kathy
Mezei's Feminist Narratology. lt was originally presented at the lntemational
Conference on Narrative in Nice, France, June 1991.
• 2.For my purposes here, I am not suggesting a masculine/feminine binary for
time as space, as do Kristeva in "Women's Time" and de Lauretis in Alice
Doesn't (143). See also Winnett's critique of Brooks's model.
• 3.See for example Barthes's "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narratives"; Genette; Chatman; Phelan; and Brooks's discussion of
spatialization in Russian Formalism and French structuralism (Reading 16).
• 4.See their distinctions between the "narrative audience" (which accepts the
story as "real") and the "authorial audience" (which covertly remains "aware of
the synthetic"-that is, con¬structed-nature of the narrative) (Phelan 5).
Rabinowitz proposed the original distinction, which Phelan develops extensively
in relation to his work on the rhetorics of character and progression.
• 5.See, for example, DuPlessis, Brooks, Gates, Bersani, Chambers, and de
Lauretis.
• 6.This is, of course, a founding principle of psychoanalysis, made as early as
Josef Breuer's and Freud's jointly written (Studies on Hysteria (1895). See also
Freud's "Repression."
• 7.See especially Revolution (13-106), "From One ldentity to an Other"
(Desire 124-47) and "Motherhood according to Bellini" ((Desire 237-70). For
other formulations of the textual un-conscious, see Culler, Felman, Riffaterre,
and Jameson.
• 8.See especially Kristeva, Revolution (13-106) and "From One Identity to an
Other" (Desire 124-47).
• 9.For a different attempt to move textual criticism beyond the teleologica}
search for the "defin¬itive" text, see Jerome McGann's A Critique of Modem
Textual Criticism .
• 10.I have made this argument more fully in "Return of the Repressed in
Women's Narratives."
• 11.Like H. D.'s Madrigal Cycle, the different versions of the Dedalus narratives
can be read both ways, with both early and late texts serving as the textual
unconscious for the others in the series. See my "(Self )-Censorship and the
Making of Joyce's Modernity" in Joyce: The Return of the Repressed. The
essays in this collection provide examples of reading the vertical narrative axis
in its literary, historical, and psychic dimensions.