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The Chronotope THE CHRONOTOPE 5 how, in a particular genre or age, 'real historical time and space' and 'actual historical persons' are articulated, and also how fictional time, space, and character are constructed in relation to one another. 1 In some chronotopes, mainly those of travel, and The chronotope: fleshing out time uprooted modem life, time may take precedence over space; in the more idyllic, pastoral chronotopes, space holds sway over time.2 Although the chronotope can be useful in discussing both painting and film,S Bakhtin's concern in 'Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel' is with the literary text, in which, he says, 'spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, Introduction concrete whole' (FTC 84). The particular way in which these indi­ cators intersect in a text is what constitutes its characteristic Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope comes by analogy front chronotopes, which are also affected by historical factors such as Einsteinian mathematics, he says (FTC 84), and its etymology from/: attitudes to nature,geographical knowledge, and conceptions of the the Greek, 'chronos', meaning time, and 'topos', meaning space. Its.' human subject's interior life. literal sense, 'time-space', conveys the inseparability of the two•. The concept of the chronotope may he puzzling or hard to elements in any work of art. Bakhtin's use of a metaphor from, grasp because it seems omnipresent to the point either of invisibil­ Einstein's theoretical physics conveys the intellectual shift in; ity or of extreme obviousness. Bakhtin quotes Kant at the perceptions of history and geography which relativity ushered in. beginning of his essay: 'space and time [are] indispensable forms of Bakhtin discusses the chronotope mainly in the essay 'Forms o · any cognition' (FTC 85 n. 2), and adds in his own Conclusion: Time and Chronotope in the Novel', in The Dialogic lmagination,t; 'Without such temporal-spatial expression, even abstract thought is and in sections of 'The Bildungsroman', in Speech Genres and Othef., impossible. Consequently, every entry into the sphere of meanings Late Essays. In 'Discourse in the Novel', Bakhtin describes the, is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope' (FTC textual representation of the Renaissance in terms of its scientific, 258). Bakhtin here uses a kind of critical chronotope to discuss the shift from a medieval Ptolemaic view of the world, in which the swt' chronotope, that of the door which opens on to knowledge; as we revolves around the earth, to a modem Galilean view, in which the{ will see, he is often conscious of the everyday use of chronotopic earth revolves around the sun (DN 415). In contrast to the central expressions. However, what is suggestive about Bakhtin's essay is ized Ptolemaic world-view, where the world makes sense from his historical and generic charting of the chronotope. The subtitle single vantage-point, this modem view necessitated a particul to his essay, 'Notes towards a Historical Poetics', 4 shows that his kind of plural, relativizing discourse: interest is in how texts relate to their social and political contexts, rather than in simply drawing up a typology of how time and space Languages of heteroglossia, like mirrors that face each other, eac ,. relate to each other within different texts. reflecting in its own way a piece, a tiny comer of the world, force Bakhtin also shows how particular aesthetic forms, including us to guess at and grasp for a world behind their mutually reflecc,j ing aspects that is broader, more multi-leveled, containing more: conceptions of human subjectivity, come about at certain times; as and varied horizons than would be available to a single language or he says in 'Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book', for a single mirror. (DN 414) instance, 'Capitalism created the conditions for a special type of inescapably solitary consciousness. Dostoevsky exposes all the Both Galileo and Einstein 'shifted the boundaries of the ol falsity of this consciousness, as it moves in its vicious circle' (288). geographical world', and, while theformer is the presiding scientist The relations between time and space, and the human figures which for Bakhtin's discussion of dialogism, the latter is for the chrono,,l populate them, alter according to the text's setting in both literary tope. and wider history. The chronotope o era ee levels: first as Bakhtin describes the chronotope as the means of measurinl' the :meansby which a ex re resents history; second, as the relatjon :1 p 200 201 INTRODUCING BAKHTIN THE CHRONOTOPE between images of time and space in the novel, out of which any the French woman, who is a film actor, to be in Japan. The chrono­ representationof historymust be constructed; and third, as a way of topic representation of history in the film is that of film-making, discussin� the formal properties of thetextuself, Us plot, narrator, which includes both false and real documentary footage, and ang relation to other texts. when d1scussmg"'"the parocuhrr1iiitabil­ footage of the various war museums in Hiroshima and its Peace �of film as a chronotopic form, Robert Stam mentions both its Garden. This intersects with the romance narrative, which is own formal properties, which very clearly 'fuse' both 'temporal and chronotopically charged because the ,lovers are from different coun­ spatial indicators', and its material representational properties: 'the tries - separated by space - and meet with the knowledge that they cinematic chronotope is quite literal, splayed out concretely across will have to part. Their awareness of time threatened by space is a screen with specific dimensions and unfolding in literal time balanced by an awareness of space representing time, as the lovers (usually 24 frames a second), quite apart from the fictive time/space do not call each other by their names, but by the towns which specific films might construct'. 5 constitute their respective histories: the man is called Hiroshima by the woman, and she is called Nevers by him. The film's own time and space is constructed according to the logic of flashback as a History and the chronotope chronotopic representation of memory; the posture of the Japanese Although every text has its own chronotope or set of them, which man sleeping reminds the woman of the German soldier she loved interact dialogically with other chronotopes within and between during the Second World War, who was shot just before the liber­ texts, some texts are more fruitful to approach in this way than ation. Her flashbacks begin as unexplained moments, but become others, for instance those which are set at a particularly fraught more protracted and act more as narratives in their own right as the historical moment, which set out to represent a historical event, or film progresses. 7 which adopt one of the forms where relations between time and As for the third category, the film's own formal chronotope is space are especially clear, such as the road movie, or tales of time that of metafiction, as it is about film-making. Narratively, it has a travel. double plot: the present of the love affair, and the unravelling of The three central layers of Alain Resnais' film Hiroshima mon the past, which proceed together. Both elements of this third cate­ amour (1959) can be analysed using the notion of the chronotope in gory are so deeply caught up in the politics of the film, and its two its three forms: external historyas represented in the film; the film's other chronotopic categories, that it is almost impossible to separate own images of space and time; and the film's formal construction. them. The film thus unites what Bakhtin sees as a split in the Within the film, Hiroshima is both a place and a time; it is the city chronotope, between human public and private existence: the of the film's post-war present, and the moment of the atom bomb. public, historical events of the dropping of the atom bomb on This is made clear in the dialogue between the lovers: 'Were you Hiroshima, the occupation of France, and the Second World War there, at Hiroshima?' the French woman asks the Japanese man. in general are shown as inescapably part of the protagonists' Such a phrasing of the question only makes sense if 'Hiroshima' is personal histories and subjectivity. The film is, as its title suggests, seen chronotopically, and in a particularly charged way, as a loca­ a story of desire between countries, between tragic fates, or even tion in both time and space. The woman wants to know whether ' between historical events, rather than simply between two individ­ Casablanca the man was there the day the bomb was dropped, rather than uals. Its link with Michael Curtiz's 1942 film is signalled whether he was simply in the city at some time in the past, which by a scene in a bar of that name in Hiroshima, but this intertextual Casablanca is why she says 'at' rather than 'in'. hint also shows that whereas in the war is subordinated Hiroshima The three aspects of the chronotope are interlinked in the to the love story, in they are equally weighted. In his film, as is often the case. Resnais was unable to fulfil his commis­ discussion of the Greek romance, Bakhtin observes that, '[c]harac­ sion to make a short documentary film on the atom bomb, until teristically it is not private life that is subjected to and interpreted in Marguerite Duras provided a fictional structure for this 'false docu­ light of social and political events, but rather the other way around mentary', as she called it. 6 The film is about the making of a - social and political events gain meaning in the novel only thanks documentary on the bomb, which provides a narrative reason for , to their connection with private life' (FTC 109).
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