A Critique of Recent Spatial Approaches to Flaubert and Related Theory of Fiction

By "spatiality," critics refer variously to a mode of perception on the level of fictional themes, characterization, and style, to a mode of construction on the level of narrative structures, and to a mode of explanation or appreciation on the level of the reader. An overview is given of several related concepts that are especially prevalent among critics influenced by structuralist and semiotic approaches to theory of fiction. The critique of current trends focuses on Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale for purposes of debate. Three factors have promoted current trends: 1, the concept of bibliographic space, where an implied narrator creates an a-temporal system of reciprocal relations by using numbered, turnable pages so that chronological order is not uppermost in determining narrative meaning; 2, definitions of an implied reader for whom intelligibility arises within the mental space of circularity, instantaneity, and simultaneity; and 3, irony, which suspends temporal duration to highlight the incongruities between initial blindness and final insight. Major spatial critics make dubious presuppositions about the normative nature of literary criticism, the supremacy of poetry as the standard for judging aesthetic excellence, and the spatiality of language itself. Consequently, spatial modes of reading fiction disclose a number of logical defects. Not all of the significant, successive elements in a novel can be juxtaposed at once in the mind's eye. Historical relativism and temporal processes can equally determine meaning. The phenomenology of the reading act involves linear temporal sequences that activate a causal chronological dimension of meaning. Unconscious elitism has led to pseudo-empirical classifications of the implied readers of fiction. And finally, recent spatialist criticism represents a self-serving strategy to guarantee that the public needs its practitioners. (MD)