Spatial Narrative In Possession:A Romance

A.S.Byatt(1936—)is a distinguished contemporary British novelist,poet,and literature critic.Byatt’s Booker prize-winner and dazzling bestseller Possession: A Romance,a modern campus novel,fascinating for its plentitude of ideas and complicated narrative strategies,is the study target of this thesis.Possession: A Romance concerns primarily with an academic quest of two contemporary scholars on two Victorian poets,the essence of which in genre portrays characteristics of travel novel.Thus spatiality possesses a significant position in the narrative.The contemporary space,the Victorian space,and the mythological space,of different modes of existence are structured and interwoven simultaneously and in parallel.places shifting during the travel of the quest,movement and change within the time-space as integration,and spatial writing techniques in the narration.However,interpreting one of them or each of them metaphorically is not the purpose of this study.This thesis,based on close reading,elaborates on the structuring of space in the narrative of Possession: A Romance under guidance of Gabriel Zoran’s spatial narrative theory which has distinguished space vertically in three levels: the topographical level,the chronotopic level,and the textual level in his “Towards a theory of space in narrative”.These three levels of space attend to specifically three perspectives: topographically,places which are mapped and that keep shifting during the travel of the quest;chronotopically,movement and change within the time-space as integration in the quest;textually,spatial writing techniques in the narration.The structuring of topographical level of space enlightens on geographical oppositions and different modes of existence: city and village,center and periphery,and real places and mythological spaces.Byatt represents city by mainly London and Lincoln as academic,suffocating metropolitan space,and constructs Seal Court of Lincolnshire as natural and nostalgic village.They both demonstrate in their own way of desire to “possess” the past.The second oppositional relationship lies between the central places and the periphery places.The center places are mainly portrayed by cities and villages,meanwhile the periphery places aredepicted through North Yorkshire coast and Brittany.The former reflects post-modern community,and the latter historicized geology.All above discussed places are real,which denotes different mode of existence from the mythological spaces.Mythological spaces such as the city of Is,the garden of Proserpina are spaces constructed through adaptations of myths,fairy tales and legends.The level of chronotopic space consists of synchronic and diachronic relationships.Synchronic relationship analyses states of movement and rest exhibited through every synchronic point of the narrative,which consequentially contribute to generalization of characters’ and space’s states being either positive motion or negative rest.Diachronic relationship focuses on movement,axes and powers through the whole quest in the narrative.The textual level of space elaborates on spatiality writing from three aspects:(1)authorial awareness of selectivity of language through multiple texts and genres;(2)linearity of the text,or the sequential structure of space in temporal continuum;and(3)here-there spatial perspective: perspective shifting between the “world” of the narration and the “world”of the text as a whole;within the text,perspectives swifts between foreground and background.Byatt has orchestrated a map of places for the quest,and established their senses.Movements of multi-dimensional time-space impose on dynamic and dramatic effects on structuring space.Spatiality writing offers profound insight to the narrative of Possession: A Romance.Byatt’s refined manipulation of space in the narrative of Possession plays very significant role in constructing history by text.