(Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature) Elana Gomel-Narrative Space and Time_ Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature-Routledge (2014).pdf

Narrative Space and Time

Space is a central topic in cultural and narrative theory today, although in most cases theory assumes Newtonian absolute space. However, the idea of a universal homogeneous space is now obsolete. Black holes, multiple dimensions, quantum entanglement, and spatio-temporal distortions of relativity have passed into culture at large. This book examines whether narrative can be used to represent these impossible spaces.

Impossible topologies abound in ancient mythologies, from the Australian Aborigines dream-time to the multiple-layer universe of the Sumerians. More recently, from Alices adventures in Wonderland to contemporary sci-ence ctions obsession with black holes and quantum paradoxes, counter-intuitive spaces are a prominent feature of modern and postmodern narra-tive. With the rise and popularization of science ction, the inventiveness and variety of impossible narrative spaces explodes. The author analyses the narrative techniques used to represent such spaces alongside their cul-tural signicance. Each chapter connects narrative deformation of space with historical problematic of time, and demonstrates the cognitive and perceptual primacy of narrative in representing, imagining and apprehend-ing new forms of space and time.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the connection between nar-ratology, cultural theory, science ction, and studies of place.

Elana Gomel is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Ameri-can Studies at Tel-Aviv University, Israel

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6 Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican LiteratureDanny Mndez

7 The Cinema and the Origins of Literary ModernismAndrew Shail

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9 Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic PhilosophyMetaphysics and the Play of ViolenceDaniel Tompsett

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25 Narrative Space and TimeRepresenting Impossible Topologies in LiteratureElana Gomel

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Narrative Space and TimeRepresenting Impossible Topologies in Literature

Elana Gomel

NEW YORK LONDON

RoutledgeTaylor & Francis Group

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataGomel, Elana.Narrative space and time : representing impossible topologies in literature / Elana Gomel. -- First edition.pages cm. (Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature ; 25)Includes bibliographical references and index.1.Space and time in literature.2.Imaginary places in literature.3.Place (Philosophy) in literature.4.Narration (Rhetoric)5.LiteratureHistory and criticism.6.Science fictionHistory and criticism.I.Title.II.Title: Impossible topologies in literature. PN56.S667G66 2014809.3'8762dc232013036106

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For my mother, Maya Kaganskaya 19382011

Contents

Introduction I: Space 1

Introduction II: Time 26

1 Layering; Or the City of Two Tales 39

2 Flickering; Or Ghosts of Space 60

3 Embedding; Or the Pocket Universe 92

4 Wormholing; Or the Darkness Within 116

5 Sidestepping; Or Dimensions of Divinity 143

6 Collapsing; Or Urban Black Holes 172

Postscript: A King of Innite Space 203

Notes 205References 209Index 223

Introduction ISpace

EVERYDAY WEIRDNESS

Of the ten dimensions that superstring theory requires, nine are spa-tial dimensions and one is time (Steven S. Gubser, The Little Book of String Theory, 62).

According to general relativity, there must be a singularity of in-nite density and space-time curvature within a black hole (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 47).

Two things can be separated by an enormous amount of space and yet not have a fully independent existence (Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 122).

The three quotes above are from books written by practicing physicists. They do not describe some remote science-ctional corner of pop culture. They describe the world we live in.

The new imagination of space is not limited to the pages of Nature. Mul-tiple dimensions beyond the usual four of space and time, black holes, and quantum entanglement have become cultural icons (Kaku 9). There is a Black Hole game for smartphones; Quantum Leap is the name of a popular TV series; and the list of books, movies, and websites dealing with multidimensional reality could easily ll the rest of this volume.1

Not only do we read about such impossible spaces, we regularly visit them. Every time we log in, we enter cyberspace, which is, in its own way, as weird as black holes and quantum uctuations. Cyberspace collapses distances, substitutes semantic propinquity for topographical proximity, abolishes directionality, and can be regarded as possessing less or more than three dimensions.

2 Narrative Space and Time

And yet, when we turn to the cultural and literary studies devoted to the issue of space, we encounter the old Newtonian standby: the universal and homogeneous medium, an empty vessel lled with meaning by human activity (Kern 131). Initially inspired by the sociological work of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, the study of space has gained popularity in the humanities (see James-Charraborty). But most studies of space concen-trate on what Lefebvre called spatial practice: that is, the way in which physical space is parceled into cultural and social sites (Lefebvre 33). Space is reduced to place.

Literary history, however, provides ample evidence that spatial imagina-tion is not limited by the physics of Newton and the geometry of Euclid. Long before Einstein, Riemann, or Hawking, literature had represented spaces that are every bit as impossible as those described by contemporary physics. In one of the foundational narratives of Western culture, Dantes The Divine Comedy, the topology of the Inferno is twisted like a Mobius strip (or more accurately, a Klein bottle).2 As Virgil and Dante reach the bottom of Hell, where Satan sits frozen into the eternal ice, they start climbing down the monstrous gure, only to nd that they are, in fact, heading up:

I raised my eyes, believing I should seethe half of Lucifer that I had left;instead I saw him with his legs turned up (The Inferno, Canto 34,

8890).

This twist is not gratuitous but is an important element in the poems overall theological meaning, indicating an ontological transition from the state of damnation to that of redemption.3 Impossible topologies abound in ancient mythologies, from the Australian Aborigines dreamtime to the multiple-layer universe of the Sumerians. Most religions partition space into two unequal regions, sacred and profane, which differ topologically as well as ontologically (Eliade; Berger).

But while nding impossible spaces in ancient myths, fairy tales, or medi-eval romances is an easy task, they seem to dwindle as we approach the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the age of realism. It is not that they disappear altogetherone of my contentions in this volume is precisely that the spatial poetics of Victorian literature is far more diverse than our conventional critical focus on place allows us to see. Certainly, Alices adventures take her into some topologically uncharted territory where dis-tance and directionality do not obey the rules of Euclid. Nor do the maze-like castles of the Gothic novels, such as Walpoles The Castle of Otranto (1764) or Monk Lewis The Monk (1796), correspond to the simple veri-ties of Newtons absolute space. Still, with the triumph of realism and the concomitant victory of empiricism in science, it became possible to dismiss the Gothic and Victorian fantasy as somehow deviant, contrary to natural law, marginal, and delusional.

Introduction I 3

But with the rise of modernism and especially postmodernism, it is New-tonian spaces that nd themselves receding to the margins of literature. Franz Kafka develops the claustrophobic labyrinths of the Gothic into a spatial template for the feelings of powerlessness and loss that bedevil the modern subject. Jorge Luis Borges creates the spatial icons of postmod-ernismthe microcosmic Aleph, the endless Garden of the Forked Paths, and the innite Library of Babel. And contemporary science ction (SF) is inconceivable without black holes, micro-universes, and quantum paradox-es.4 Non-Newtonian spaces dene the postmodern spatial imagination.

And yet, there has never been a sustained study of narrative techniques used to represent such spaces, or of their cultural signicance. This book is meant to ll this gap. It is a study of the narrative and cultural poetics of impossible spaces, which I dene as textual topologies that defy the New-tonian-Euclidean paradigm of homogenous, uniform, three-dimensional spatiality. These are spaces that refuse to be mere places.

GRASPING THE UNGRASPABLE

Gaston Bachelard, in his classic Poetics of Space, suggests that litera-tureand literary theoryshould focus on the sorts of space that may be grasped (Bachelard xxxi). By this he means spaces that we inhabit: the house, the countryside, the city. But houses may be haunted, warping past into present, natural into supernatural. The countryside may be dot-ted with fairy mounds in which the inside is bigger than the outside and time speeds up or slows down. And cities may be doubled, superimposed upon each other, or torqued into inescapable labyrinths. From ghost stories and fairy tales to the urban phantasmagoria of Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, China Miville, Haruki Murakami, and many others, the literary imagina-tion refuses to conform to the familiar topology of everyday life.

And this topology itself is no more real than fairy mounds; in fact, it is less real. We know now that Euclidean geometry is not true in the real world (Smolin 2006; 41); and that space is not what we once thought it was: it is not absolute, isotropic, three-dimensional, or independent of the objects it contains (Greene 2004; 123). There is no separate space and time at all but only spacetime, a unied medium of the universe. Below I will discuss in more detail the revolution in modern physics that started with Einstein and quantum mechanics and has been gathering momentum, constantly modifying and enriching our understanding of the nature of physical reality.

But, one might argue, these are just esoteric mathematical abstractions, unrelated to the warm, fuzzy phenomenology of spatial experience. Per-haps we are so hardwired by evolution or bound by what Kant called our intuitions of time and space that we are incapable of imagining non-Newtonian spaces or non-Euclidean topologies. Physicists occasionally are


so carried away by their own mathematical prowess that they underesti-mate the capacity of narrative. Physicist Michio Kaku, having written an entire book on the new science of spacetime, perversely advises his audi-ence that they are wasting their time reading it: higher-dimensional spaces are impossible to visualize; so its futile even to try (Kaku 10).

Most scientists, however, have more respect for narrative. Nobel Prize winners Steven Weinberg, Frank Wilczek, and George Smoot, notable the-oreticians Stephen Hawking, Lee Smolin, Leonard Susskind, Lisa Randall, Steven S. Gubser, Brian Greene, and many others have written accessible books that utilize the capacities of natural language and narrative to rep-resent the contemporary scientic picture of space and time. They are fol-lowing the example of Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species (1859) was written in the educated laymans idiom of his day, and even Albert Einstein, parts of whose Relativity (1920) may be understood without mathematical training. Paradoxically, it is scholars of the humanities who tend to deny that epistemic revolutions in the understanding of space have any bearing upon narrative representation. Most discussions of spatial practices situate them within the notion of prototypical human experientiality (Fludernik 323). Lakoff and Johnsons classic exploration of spatial metaphors bases them upon human anatomy (1980). Similarly, Leonard Lutwack, in enu-merating the physical properties of space that are imaginatively utilized in literature, limits them to the obvious Newtonian coordinates: extent, verti-cality, horizontality, centrality, a-centrality (Lutwack 3944).

Sometimes the limiting of the poetics of space to the Newtonian para-digm is motivated by animosity to science. Peg Rawes, in Space, Geometry and Aesthetics: Through Kant and Towards Deleuze (2008), for exam-ple, juxtaposes the metaphorical use of geometry in philosophy to what she calls reductive forms of scientic thinking (1). A more sophisticated articulation of this argument may use one science against another: neuro-biology against physics. What if our brains are so hard-wired that we can only function in three-dimensional, Newtonian space? The use of cognitive science and neurobiology is a relatively new development in the humanities, which until recently had been hostile to any suggestion of biological essen-tialism. But now there has been a backlash against the linguistic relativism of Whorf and Sapir, with more attention paid to the inbuilt limitations of embodied cognition and perception. Elizabeth Grosz, in her recent book on Darwinism and the humanities, for example, utilizes the concept of operational space, which is structured only by the kinds of movements and actions a body is capable of undertaking (179).

But in jettisoning the false notion that human nature is innitely plas-tic, we risk falling into the opposite extreme. Human beings are animals, of course, but we are narrative animals. Our operational spaces are as much a product of the stories we tell ourselves about the world we live in as they are of our sensory capacities; or rather, the two are closely intertwined. There are now convincing scientic arguments that human spatial thinking

Introduction I 5

is quite heavily inuenced by culture, and more specically, by language (Levinson 18; see also Kavanaugh). The very fact that non-Euclidean geom-etries and non-Newtonian topologies can be represented mathematically militates against the idea that our spatial imagination is eternally limited by biology. Mathematics, after all, is also a human language.

But the best proof that we can function perfectly well in a non-Newto-nian space is everyday life. Increasingly, we live in sorts of space that may not be grasped in Bachelards senseor rather, may not be grasped by the narrative paradigms inherited from the nineteenth-century realistic novel. Video games, movies, the Internet, and global transportation constantly recongure our spatial perception.

Gilles Deleuze was one of the rst to point out the inuence of the cinema upon the topology of social space, thus making clear how the development of non-Euclidean geometries becomes more evident with the new narrative space generated by video technology (Duarte 2012). According to Duartes analysis of Deleuze, the latters innovation consisted in seeing audiovisual technology as a site for the generation of new spatial imaginaries, including narrative spaces shaped by non-Euclidean geometries (Duarte 2012).

Rapid transportation and dense urban areas generate what Paul Virilio calls the devaluation of territorial space (1980; 68). This is not a new development, however; it goes back to the rise of the industrial metrop-olis. Nineteenth-century urban neurs, such as Charles Baudelaire and Charles Dickens, mapped out the labyrinthine topography of the new city, in which the conventional distinctions of inside/outside, public/private, self/Other have been challenged by both social and technological upheavals (see Chapters 1 and 6 in this volume).

Cyberspace is another domain whose topology is non-Euclidean and yet capable of being processed by the human brain and incorporated into sensory experience. In her revolutionary exploration of cyberspace and narrativity, Marie-Laure Ryan points out that the potentially n-dimen-sional space of computer memory is, in fact, a better model for the way the brain constructs the space of narrative than the linearity of conven-tional narratological schemes (1991; 232). For a growing number of peo-ple, everyday experience is dened not by the operational space of our bodies but rather by the simultaneity, semantic propinquity, and instant accessibility of cyberspace. Google Earth and similar sites negate distance by allowing real-time viewing of any geographical location, while Face-book does the same for human interaction. There are even games and apps meant to simulate multidimensional spaces.5 As early as 1984, in his groundbreaking SF novel Neuromancer, which coined the term cyber-space, William Gibson depicted new spatial experiences that negated the supposedly unbreakable connection between Newtonian absolutes and human perception. As one of the rst sociological studies of the online world accurately claimed: In this place, time and space are meaningful in different ways (Markham 54).


But as appealing as life online might be, my book is not about it. Nor is it about the impact of cinema, transportation technology, or theoreti-cal physics upon literary imagination. Rather, I am making a claim that is both more general and more specic: that representation of impossible spaces is an integral part of the narrative poetics of modernity and post-modernity. It is more general because it is not limited to the impact of technology or science upon literature, arguing instead for an integrated view of the cultural eld. It is more specic because my focus is on nar-rative techniques deployed to represent impossible spaces in the medium of the literary text.

It might appear somewhat perverse to choose literature, rather than cinema or video games, as the locus for exploring new forms of spatial representation. My reason for doing so is twofold. First, since movies, games, and cyberspace depend on technological advances, it is easy to lapse into the naturalistic fallacy of opposing technology to the body. But nature is simply history under a different name. Absolute space and time, which we take to be natural constants, are a historical aberration, arising out of a specic articulation of reality in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries. Moreover, no sooner were they formulated than they came under attack. In this sense, this book attempts to reconstruct a neglected chapter in the cultural history of space. With the exception of such groundbreaking studies as Stephen Kerns The Culture of Time and Space, 18801918 (1983), there are few works that attempt to link scien-tic revolutions in the conceptualization of spacetime with new forms of artistic and literary representation.

Second, my focus on verbal texts is meant as a contribution specically to narratology or theory of narrative. Recent studies of narrative space by Brian Richardson, David Herman, and Brian McHale, based on ctional-world theory, have already moved away from regarding realistic represen-tation as the baseline of narrative. Nevertheless, Newtonian space (or as Brian Richardson calls it, mimetic space) is still privileged over other spatial vocabularies, which are regarded as either perverse aberrations or avant-garde innovations. But mimetic space is a parochial construct whose dominance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coincided with, and was reinforced by, the reign of literary realism. And this reign did not go unchallenged. The subversive and marginal genres of the Victo-rian Gothic and fantasy created a spatial vocabulary radically at odds with mimetic space.

With the shift from realism to modernism and eventually postmod-ernism, impossible spaces have become central to spatial representation. It is only the naturalistic bias of narratology that enforces their mar-ginalization. The typology of impossible spaces I offer in this book is a step toward a narratology that discards its dependence upon the outdated notion of realistic mimesis and, in doing so, comes closer to the physical reality of spacetime.

Introduction I 7

TWO-IN-ONE

In 1959 C. P. Snow coined the term the two cultures to describe the rift between science and the humanities.6 Since then, it seems, the rift has grown to the depth of the Grand Canyon. Mutual incomprehension has given way to the active rejection of science by religious fundamentalists, New Age mystics, and some postmodern philosophers. And yet, the very vehemence of this rejection is a testimony to the pivotal role of science in modernity.

Consider two quotes. In 1938 the famed modernist architect Siegfried Giedion writes in his Space, Time and Architecture about the space-time feeling of our period and denes cubism as an artistic equivalent of Ein-steins special relativity:

Space in modern physics is conceived of as relative to a moving point of reference, not as the absolute and static entity of the baroque system of Newton. And in modern art, for the rst time since the Renais-sance, a new conception of space leads to a conscious self-enlargement of our ways of perceiving space. It was in cubism that this was most fully achieved (436).

And here is contemporary physicist Brian Greene describing the impact of Einsteins general relativity:

By replacing the cold, mechanistic Newtonian view of space, time, and gravity with a dynamic and geometric description involving curved spacetime, Einstein wove gravity into the basic fabric of the universe [ . . . ] Breathing life into space and time by allowing them to curve, warp, and triple results in what we commonly refer to as grav-ity (1999; 76).

Both writers make the same case: that science and the humanities are linked through the common matrix of culture that also includes technol-ogy, politics, religion, economy, and the material conditions of life. Both demonstrate this linkage by their style. Giedion calls Newtons system baroque: an adjective that ascribes an artistic sensibility to a physical theory. Greene represents Einstein as breathing life into space and time, invoking a complex layer of interwoven images and narratives, from the Sistine Chapel to Frankenstein.

The notion that narrative representation is impacted by science hardly requires proof. Darwin, Einstein, and Heisenberg are as central to the mod-ernist revolution as Kafka and Joyce. Susan Strehle analyzes how physics has transformed twentieth-century thought, including philosophy, linguis-tics and literature (8). Other scholars have traced the transformations wrought by other sciences, particularly biology (Beer; Morton; Levine).


But my project here is somewhat different. Rather than following the one-way vector from science to literature, I will explore the common cul-tural substratum that includes both. This is why the individual chapters in this book bring together such seemingly unrelated subjects as Heisenbergs uncertainty principle and colonialism (Chapter 2); multidimensionality and spiritualism (Chapter 4); and urbanism and gravitational collapse (Chapter 6). I argue that there are common narrative templates that underlie these disparate phenomena and that circulate from science to popular culture and back again. Literature does not passively reect the ndings of science but participates in the cultural exchange of meaning and form that stitches the social fabric together. As Cartwright and Baker put it, the notion of inuence works both ways [ . . . ] scientists employ literary devices and literary imaginative constructions (drawn from a common culture) in their work (286).

However, I do not subscribe to the strong constructionist view that sees science as an unprivileged form of cultural discourse (Levine 1988; 2). Nor do I want to revisit the science wars of the 1990s, in which the work of Richard Rorty, Evelyn Keller, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and other philosophers and historians was used to argue that scientic ndings are mere cultural constructs with no epistemological validity beyond the social milieu in which they originate. I believe that science alone can make veridi-cal claims about the nature of reality that are subject to empirical testing. It is precisely this epistemological authority that makes science so inuential in modernity and that enables our spatiotemporal intuitions to be constantly modied and reshaped by its ndings. However, I also believe that the epis-temological question as to the universal validity of scientic knowledge is largely irrelevant to the cultural and literary inquiry into its dissemination and impact. As many recent studies point out, science generates a set of identiable cultural forms [ . . . ] that can be subjected to cultural analysis (McNeil 277). Both Newtonian and Einsteinian models of spacetime had profound cultural and literary implications, and these implications were reected back to science itself. The loop of inuence, correspondence, and convergence operates as an intracultural mechanism, based on what Alfred Nordmann calls a close affinity between literary styles and scientic para-digms as schemes of thought and practice that organize phenomena and orient perception (Nordmann 366). The fact that, as I believe, Einsteins mathematical model of spacetime describes the world more accurately than Newtons tells us little about this affinity.

Scientic theories and ways of thinking percolate into society at large by a sort of cultural osmosis that empowers science, even as it misinter-prets and occasionally misuses it. Darwinism has been vehemently denied; relativity has been misunderstood as meaning that everything is relative; quantum mechanics has been abused by cranks. But the revolution in our imagination of space and time effected by Darwin, Einstein, and Heisenberg

Introduction I 9

is real, no matter how distorted their ndings become by passing through the murky medium of ideology, faith, and sheer ignorance.

Acknowledgement of the unied eld of cultural narrativity that includes science as its central component is steadily transforming narra-tive theory. Strehle cogently argues that to characterize the way reality has changed at the intersection of physics and ction is inevitably to select and to interpret. It is to construct a paradigm, invent a terminology and a focus (8). Recently several theoreticians proposed such new paradigms. In her discussion of computer science and its relevance to narrative, Marie-Laure Ryan enlists science as a metaphorical repertory of narratology, a source of cognitive frames that expand our thinking about literature and textuality (1999; 115). Similarly, Franco Moretti in Graphs, Maps and Trees (2005) adapts concepts from statistics, geography, and evolutionary biology to offer a new reading of literary history. But while inspired by them, my project differs from Ryans and Morettis in its object of study. Both Moretti and Ryan analyze spaces of narrative: cultural sites where narratives are generated, such as cyberspace (for Ryan) and the literary system as a whole (for Moretti). I focus on narrative spaces as represented in individual texts.

Narrative is just as capable as science of envisioning and representing non-Newtonian spaces and non-Euclidean geometries. What narrative cannot do is test the epistemological veracity of these spaces and geom-etries. Fortunately, nobody expects it to. Shielded by the presumption of ctionality from the burden of proof, writers have been free to dip into the metaphorical repertory of science, adapting the language of physics, mathematics, and biology to their own ideological and cultural needs. That these adaptations are never technically accurate does not matter. Metric signatures, nonlinear equations, and Riemann manifolds do not have pre-cise narrative equivalents, but when physicists and mathematicians translate their ndings into ordinary language, they draw upon the already existing paradigms and modify them with new knowledge. When, as we shall see in Chapter 6, modern metropolises become black holes, the physical meaning of the term cannot be separated from its narrative deployment. There are no two cultures of science and the humanities: there is only one culture, a complicated semantic ecosystem, in which mathematical formulae and narrative templates feed on each other.

LIFE IN A VOID

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physics of space was dominated by the feud between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Newton considered space and time to be absolute and independent of the properties of objects that they contain:


Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature ows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: [Absolute time is to be contrasted with] relative, apparent, and common time, [which] is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.

Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything exter-nal, remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or measure of the absolute spaces; which our senses determine by its position to bodies [ . . . ] Absolute and relative space, are the same in gure and magnitude; but they do not remain always numerically the same [ . . . ].

Place is a part of space which a body takes up, and is according to the space, either absolute or relative (Newton, Principia).

Leibniz, on the other hand, considered that both space and time do not exist in their own right but are merely convenient ways to describe pro-cesses and relationships. Leibniz views have been seen as preguring Ernst Machs and Einsteins, even though this is not entirely accurate. But in any case, it was Newtons absolute space and time that became foundational in the development of the realistic novel.

As Ian Watt showed in his classic study The Rise of the Novel, New-tons and Lockes concepts of uniform time and space were reected in the artistic praxis of the emergent genre of realism (24). Many critics, such as George Levine, Susan Strehle, and others, emphasized the congruence between literary realism and the Newtonian vision of time and space: Realistic ction represented the Newtonian cosmos in all its causal conti-nuity (Strehle 15).

The mimetic space of the nineteenth-century realistic novel is the empty background to the unfolding of human histories and creation of human places. Geographically and socially speaking, it is not homogenous. The complex topography of the realistic novel is the subject of innumer-able studies that map out the boundaries between the private enclosure of home and the public bustle of the street in Thackerays Vanity Fair (1848); between the rustic countryside and the lure of London in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy; between England and its colonies in Rudyard Kiplings Kim (1900). As Franco Moretti points out in his encyclopedic Atlas of the European Novel, 18001900, Space is not the outside of narrative [ . . . but] an internal force, that shapes it from within [ . . . ] in modern European novels, what happens depends a lot on where it happens (1998; 70). But by space he means place. India or Wessex, St. Petersburg or Sohoall these places differ in their architecture, geography, climate, language, mores, and degrees of poverty or prosperity. But they all share absolute space, linear time, and continuous causality.

Introduction I 11

And these constraints of topology also have important consequences for the way in which both individual and collective histories are represented. As Moretti points out, space is not a container, but a condition [ . . . ] a constraint of history (1998; 191). Narrative space is inseparable from nar-rative time; as Bachelard puts it poetically: In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time (8).

Newtonian absolute and homogenous space implies an equally abso-lute linear time, whose uniform passage underpins the progressive view of history. The teleology and causality of progress is inscribed in the goal-oriented plot of the psychological bildungsroman no less than it is in the anthropological writings of Edward Tylor and the philosophy of Herbert Spencer. But progress is a fragile concept, challenged by sudden and cata-strophic transformations of history, by wrenching cataclysms or revolution-ary leaps and bounds. If the nineteenth century was the age of realism, it was also the age of revolutions, both conceptual and social.

These revolutions were rst articulated through realisms rebellious sib-lingthe Gothic. In the Gothic, space is not Newtonian: it is twisted into claustrophobic mazes, inescapable dungeons, and haunted castles where the past collides with the present. The brooding landscapes of the Gothic express the fears, foreboding, and insights that have no voice in realism. And the Gothic is not alone; later in the nineteenth century it is joined by other nonrealistic genres, such as fantasy, SF, the ghost story, the lost world novel, and others. All of them utilize impossible narrative topolo-gies. Rosemary Jackson, in her pioneering book Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981), brings together the formal and the ideological aspects of these genres. Formally speaking, literary fantasies have refused to observe unities of time, space and character, doing away with chronology [and] three-dimensionality (Jackson 1). And in terms of content, fantasy is all that is not said, all that is unsayable, through realistic forms. This cultural unsayable includes perverse desires, social violence, and unconventional gender and psychological identities (Jackson 26).

Gothic and Victorian fantasy foreshadow many of the narrative tech-niques of postmodernism. Charles Maturins Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and James Hoggs Confessions of a Justied Sinner (1824) decenter the epistemological alignment between perception and topology (see Chap-ter 2 of this volume). Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) manipulate distance, size, and directionality. Edwin Abbotts Flatland (1884) and H. G. Wells The Time Machine (1985) construct ctional worlds of either fewer or more than the familiar three dimensions. Ghost stories by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Mrs. Oliphant, Rhoda Broughton, M. R. James, Henry James, and many others create a paradoxical narrative spacetime, riven by aws and discontinuities. George MacDonalds Christian fantasies Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895) imbue physical multidimensionality with spiritual sig-nicance (see Chapter 5 of this volume). Postmodern impossible spaces are


not the product of contemporary technological developments; they have a historical pedigree going back to the Victorian Gothic.

This genealogy demonstrates that the rebellion against Newton, which culminated in Einsteins special and general relativity, was a long-term paradigm shift (Kuhn 1011). Such paradigm shifts, even if they origi-nate in the inner workings of scientic inquiry, always involve broader cul-tural and social forces. As Felipe Fernandez-Armesto argues in Millennium (1995), his historical panorama of the last one thousand years, the fall of the Newtonian cosmos and the fall of Western hegemony are interlinked:

As the epistemological empires of certainty buckled and crumbled, the human and territorial empire of the Atlantic powers teetered and tumbled. I think these were not just similar or parallel but actually linked phenomena (Fernandez-Armesto 469).

Newtons mechanical vision of the universe was embedded in [ . . . ] empiri-cismthe doctrine that reality is observable and veriable by sense-percep-tion (Fernandez-Armesto 464). Similarly, literary realism was underpinned by what George Eliot called right reason, which is a right representation of the co-existence and sequence of things (The Inuence of Rational-ism). Right reason and right representation crumbled together but it was a long, drawn-out process. The impossible spaces of postmodernity sprang from the nineteenth centurys gradual disillusionment with empiri-cism, realism, and progress. As Gillian Beer shows in her nuanced discus-sion of the transition from realism to modernism, the change was incubated throughout the Victorian period:

Among Victorian scientists we uncover anxieties about the relativity of knowledge, about determinism, about imagining a stochastic uni-verse instead of a teleological one, about manifestation, symbol, and discourse [ . . . ] These anxieties rened (and shared) the conditions necessary to the rise of modernism and of quantum mechanics alike (1993; 195).

It was a slow revolution but an inexorable one.The literary revolutionaries were not always on the margins. Among them

was the writer who is often classed among the most important of Victorian realists and, just as often, among the progenitors of contemporary urban fantasy. I am speaking of Charles Dickens, who is the subject of Chapter 1 in this volume. More than any other Victorian writer, Dickens is attuned to the catastrophic temporality of revolution and violence, to the contingent unfolding of multiple histories that refuse to follow the predetermined master narrative of progress. His distorted and phantasmagoric urban spaces reect his dissident social sensibility. He is an explorer of impossible topologies who boldly goes where no Victorian realist has gone before.

Introduction I 13

Dickens narrative poetics parallels the scientic revolution of his great-est contemporary: Charles Darwin. Their stylistic similarity has been noted by such scholars as Gillian Beer and George Levine. But perhaps the most important aspect of this similarity lies in their perception of space and time: the organic jungle of the city for Dickens, the tangled bank of life on Earth for Darwin.7

EVOLUTION OF DISSENT

Darwin was not a physicist. He had nothing in particular to say about motion, acceleration, frame of reference, and other physical aspects of the universe that were reinterpreted by Einstein, away from the Newtonian paradigm. Nor was he a mathematician like Georg Bernhard Riemann, whose 1854 lecture ber die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen (On the Hypotheses Which Underlie Geometry) introduced a non-Euclidean geometry.8

Nevertheless, besides the obvious importance of Darwinism for biol-ogy, ethics, religion, and philosophy, it has also profoundly impacted the Western view of temporality: the impact that is still felt (painfully, in many quarters) until this very day. It is not by accident that H. G. Wells foun-dational The Time Machine (1895), discussed in Chapter 4 of this volume, brought together Darwinian evolution and multidimensionality to repre-sent the emerging new concepts of time and space. And as we shall see below, science today is incorporating Darwinian insights even into cosmol-ogy and physics.

Darwins dangerous idea, to appropriate the title of Daniel Dennetts book, was to elevate contingency to the mainspring of history. He was not the rst to suggest that species develop into other species: Robert Chambers proposed something similar in his Vestiges of the Natural History of Cre-ation in 1844. But Chambers idea was evolution by law: a purposeful, teleological development, following a predetermined plan toward higher forms. His was an evolutionary equivalent of the idea of progress.

Darwins evolution, on the other hand, is radically contingent. It follows no specic path; it leads to no necessary improvement; it is powered by natu-ral selection, which adapts organisms to specic and local conditions with no foresight for the future. There are no absolute rules and no invariant laws. It is this aspect of evolutionary theory that was most distressing to the Victo-rians and remains most controversial today. Biologist and philosopher J. L. Monrod points out that most people nd it emotionally hard to deal with the notion that the universe is, at its very basis, random and accidental:

The aspect of evolutionary theory that is unacceptable to many enlightened people, either scientists or philosophers, or ideologists of one kind or another, is the completely contingent aspect which the


existence of man, societies, and so on, must take if we accept this theory (394395).

The late great science writer Stephen Jay Gould was tireless in explaining the crucial distinction between evolution and progress. In his masterpiece Wonderful Life (1989) he reruns the tape of evolutionary history six times, every time coming up with totally different outcomes, none of which include the emergence of Homo sapiens. The more we learn about the his-tory of life, the more contingent, random, and chaotic its course appears to be. No surprise that the so-called Intelligent Design position proclaims, in its very name, its opposition to the conclusions of Darwinism, which shows that nature is neither designed nor intelligent.

Darwins notion of history is implicitly opposed to Newtons absolute spacetime, which is governed by divinely ordained laws. Newtons space-time is deterministic: provided we know the initial coordinates and veloc-ity of an object, the three laws of Newtonian mechanics will enable us to calculate its position at any moment in time.9 The point of Goulds thought experiment is precisely to show that evolutionary history does not obey any such laws and is therefore radically nondeterministic. Victorians understood it very well: the famed physicist William Herschel disgustedly called Darwinism the law of higgledy-piggledy. The second part of the nineteenth century saw a mighty push to rewrite Darwinism as a theory of progress.10 Unfortunately for the proponents of evolution by law, it required the ditching of natural selection, and no scientically valid alter-native mechanism has been proposed to this day.

As the British Empire is reaching its peak, contingency and accident are continuing to eat away at the absolute space and time of realism. Already implicit in the labyrinthine plots and warped spaces of the Gothic novel, con-tingency is reinforced by the experience of rapidly growing industrial cities where unexpected encounters, unlikely coincidences, sensory overload, and shifting topography are the order of the day. And Charles Dickens develops a new poetics of space to represent this rapidly evolving urban ecology.

It is not clear whether Dickens read Darwin, but Darwin certainly read Dickens. In her Darwins Plots, Gillian Beer elegantly demonstrates the conuences and parallels between the two:

Evolutionary theory is rst a form of imaginary history [ . . . ] the organization of Origin of Species seems to owe a good deal to the example of one of Darwins most frequently read authors, Charles Dickens, with its apparently unruly superuity of material gradually and retrospectively revealing itself as order (6).

The same forces of mutability, unpredictability, and chance shape Dick-ens social universe and Darwins biological one. Even though it would take almost fty years for these forces to be incorporated into the physical

Introduction I 15

picture of the world, the shape of the imaginary history has been irre-vocably altered by The Origin of Species and, with it, the shape of the imaginary space.

MELTING INTO AIR

No matter how we date modernism and how we connect it to the wider notion of modernity, its descriptions call for a language borrowed from the new, post-Newtonian physics. Relativity and uncertainty are the two most frequently used terms in critical studies of modernism, instantly evok-ing Einsteins special and general relativity and Heisenbergs uncertainty principle. In his exploration of the modern sensibility, epitomized by revo-lutionaries, utopians, nihilists, fascists, and physicists, Marshall Berman describes the world unmoored from its foundations in absolutes:

I have tried to show how all these people share, and all these books and environments express, certain distinctively modern concerns. They are moved at once by a will to changeto transform both them-selves and their worldand by a terror of disorientation and disinte-gration, of life falling apart. They all know the thrill and the dread of a world in which all that is solid melts into the air (Berman 13).

The quote from Marxs The Communist Manifesto in Bermans portrait of the spirit of modernity brings together epistemological, social, and artistic revolutions. Later on, Berman documents how modernist art tried to rec-reate for itself the immense transformations of matter and energy that mod-ern science and technology [ . . . ] have brought aboutthe ambition of futurism, cubism, the Russian avant-garde, and literary modernism (145). Stephen Kern traces the multiple links and parallels between the revolu-tionary transformations of time and space in science and the arts that were explicitly invoked by artists and philosophers:

In a lecture on the historical signicance of Einstein, Ortega linked perpectivism and the general theory of relativity [ . . . ] The two doc-trines signied a breakdown of the old notion that there is a single reality in a single absolute space [ . . . ] Ortega himself was inuenced by, or noted parallels to, Riemann, Lobachewsky, Mach, Einstein, Uexkull, Proust, and Joyce, and shared their restlessness with conven-tional notions about a single space or point of view (Kern 151).

But in fact, the situation was more complex than a simple path from Ein-stein to cultural relativism and stream-of-consciousness would suggest. In a sense, Ortegas lecture was an example of creative misreading. Einstein did in fact revolutionize our notions of time and space and created the single


category of spacetime that henceforth has to be seen as the basic unit of ontology. He did dethrone Newtons absolutismnot by proving Newtons laws of motion wrong but by reformulating them as a special case of a more general mathematical description of reality. But he did not undermine determinism in the same way as Darwin did. In fact, he did the opposite. The theory of relativity does not mean that everything is relative. It means that any observation is relative to the observers position in spacetime. The difference between the two has profound implications.

Einsteins 1905 paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies is the foundation of the special theory of relativity. It posits that there is no privi-leged or absolute frame of reference and that the speed of light is constant. All the strange consequences of relativity we are familiar with from pop cul-turetime dilation when an object approaches the speed of light, the twins paradox, the relativity of simultaneityfollow from this theory. But the most profound implication of the theory is that space and time do not exist. What does is a single unied category: spacetime. Any event can be designated by four coordinates (three spatial and one temporal), in effect making time into another dimension of space. Einstein wrote in Relativity: From a happen-ing in three-dimensional space, physics becomes, as it were, an existence in the four-dimensional world (Relativity, Appendix 2).

The philosophical consequence of this reduction of time to space is deter-minism. I will discuss determinism in more detail in Chapter 5. But suffice it to say that this aspect of relativity was not lost on contemporary philoso-phers and writers. Henri Bergson, for example, critiqued the reduction of time to space as contrary to the lived experience of freedom and agency. His books, especially Creative Evolution (1907), were inuenced by the Darwinian concept of exible, multidirectional, contingent history, which he believed could be experienced through durational subjective time.

Nevertheless, Einsteins theory was the scientic picture of the world at the turn of the century, and narratively speaking, it had two interesting and somewhat contradictory consequences. On the one hand, it put an end to Newtonian absolute space and time, helping to usher in such new literary and artistic techniques as stream-of-consciousness, cubism, and cinematic montage. On the other hand, as I will discuss in Chapter 5, spacetime was also co-opted by mysticism, becoming the foundation for a new breed of religious fantasy. These two aspects of relativity are well summarized by the contemporary physicist Brian Greene. According to him, Einstein lib-erated us from the determinism of classic mechanics by concluding that Newtons ideas of absolute time and absolute space are wrong [ . . . ] space and time are in the eyes of the beholder (2004; 47; emphasis in the origi-nal). But this does not mean that the future is open-ended and contingent, as it is in Darwin. The future already exists. Greene offers his own striking analogy of what the four-dimensional spacetime is:

Rather than viewing spacetime as a rigid ip book, it will sometimes be useful to think of it as a huge, fresh loaf of bread. And in place of

Introduction I 17

the xed pages that make up the bookthe xed Newtonian slicesthink of the variety of angles at which you can slice a loaf into paral-lel pieces of bread [ . . . ] Each piece of bread represents space at one moment in time from one observers perspective. But [ . . . ] another observer, moving relative to the rst, will slice the spacetime loaf at a different angle (2004; 58).

Perhaps a loaf is more appetizing than a book, but just as a book is already written, a loaf is already baked. The determinism of H. G. Wells The Time Machine (1895) and George MacDonalds Lilith (1895), both discussed in Chapter 5, stems from the assimilation of time to space. The result is a four-dimensional deterministic continuum, in which character is reduced to a moving point of view, able to see but unable to act. The fact that both novels were written before Einstein indicates, once again, the parallelism in the development of literature and science.

The non-Euclidean topology of spacetime was further developed by general relativity. Einstein presented his eld equations in 1915 to the Prussian Acad-emy of Science and published them a year later. General relativity explains gravity as the warping of spacetime and uses Riemann geometry to describe it. It brings together gravity, time, and space and demolishes Newtons con-viction that time and space are mere containers for objects moving in the void. Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek summarizes Einsteins insight:

According to Newtons second law of motion, bodies move in a straight line at constant velocity unless a force acts upon them. The general theory of relativity modies this law to postulate that bodies follow the straightest possible paths through space-time (so-called geodesics). When space-time is curved, even the straightest possible paths acquire bumps and wiggles, because they must adapt to changes in local geom-etry. These bumps and wiggles in a bodys space-time trajectory [ . . . ] provide, according to general relativity, an alternative and more accu-rate description of the effects formerly known as gravity (100).

The popular legend has Newton discover gravity when hit on the head by a falling apple. Its historical provenance is murky but the story has one thing right: in Newtons vision, forces, such as gravity, propel solid objects, such as the apple, through inert space. Einstein proved that space is anything but inert. It took quantum theory, however, to demonstrate just how lively it is.

QUANTUM DISARRAY

Quantum theory emerged from Max Plancks 1900 suggestion that light is emitted in discrete packets or quanta. It was followed by the discoveries of Niels Bohr and Louis de Broglie. By the 1920s physicists recognized the irreducibly dual nature of light: both waves and particles.


In 1927, Werner Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle, which states that it is impossible to measure both the position and the velocity of a subatomic particle. It is important to stress that this is not an epistemologi-cal but an ontological principle: in other words, it is not that our knowl-edge of the particles position and velocity is limited by our instruments but that it is theoretically impossible to measure both because the very act of measurement interferes with the condition of the system. In other words, uncertainty is written into the very fabric of the universe. Heisenberg wrote: Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature (28).

Quantum mechanics sees particles not as miniature objects but as prob-ability wave functions which are collapsed when observed. Its revolution is even greater than that of relativity because it destroys our intuition that matter is solid. Rather, the basic stuff of the universe is something as intangible as probability!

Einstein was not receptive to quantum uncertainty. His famous state-ment about God not playing dice with the universe was misinterpreted as being about God.11 But in fact, it is about dice. He objected to contingency and randomness as an organizing principle of the universe. Having demol-ished the determinism of Newton, he was not ready for the determinism of his own theory to be demolished by the weirdness of quantum mechan-ics. Nevertheless, repeated experiments have conrmed that the uncer-tainty principle is valid. Such recent discoveries as quantum tunneling and quantum entanglement demonstrate that the fabric of spacetime is stitched together by probability uctuations rather than by anything solid.

Features that we normally think of as being so basic as to be beyond questionthat objects have denite positions and speeds and that they have denite energies at denite momentsare now seen as mere artifacts of Plancks constant being so tiny on the scales of everyday world (Greene 1999; 29).

Spacetime is not only non-Newtonian; it is not even Einsteinian. In fact, Frank Wilczek objects to using the term spacetime because it carries too much semantic baggage, including a heavy suggestion of emptiness (74). The actual world-stuff is anything but empty: the primary ingredient of reality is alive with quantum activity [ . . . which] is spontaneous and unpredictable (ibid).

Few scientic discoveries have been as abused by pseudophilosophers and peddlers of snake oil as the uncertainty principle. From pop self-help books such as The Secret to obscure postmodern prevarications (spoofed by Alan Sokal in the notorious Sokal hoax), quantum mechanics has been variously interpreted to mean that there is no objective reality; that God exists (or doesnt); that one can get what one wants simply by thinking about it; or all of the above.12 This has led many scientists to dismiss the

Introduction I 19

cultural implications of quantum mechanics as so much babble. In dis-cussing the Sokal hoax, Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg trenchantly remarks that mathematics works in quantum mechanics just as well as it did in Newtonian mechanics; it is just a different kind of mathematics: By rational processes today we obtain a complete quantitative description of atoms in terms of what is called the wave function of the atom (1996).

But Weinberg himself could not abstain from offering up his own philo-sophical reading of modern physics in Dreams of a Final Theory (1993). This reading is quite different from the philosophical conclusions reached by other physicists as accomplished as himself (in particular, Hawking, Susskind, and Smolin). They may all agree on the equations, but they do not agree on what these equations mean.

Once mathematics is translated into narrative, it is drawn into the eld of cultural poetics whose rules are quite different from those of pure sci-ence and where creative misreading is as important as technical accuracy. And these rules are as independent of individual intention as physical laws. Postmodernism and the self-help industry are powerful social and cultural forces. One cannot wish them away by pointing out their scientic inac-curacies. One may regret the fact that millions of people have become acquainted with quantum theory through The Secret, but it is a fact. It is legitimate to point out that many postmodern philosophers invoking quan-tum mechanics have a very hazy idea of what they are talking about. It does not mean that their philosophy is thereby devoid of inuence.

Susan Strehle suggests a more nuanced approach for analyzing the inter-section between quantum theory and the humanities: convergence. By approaching science as a set of aesthetic principlesan approach wide-spread among scientists themselveswe can isolate a subset of literary texts or philosophical speculations that abide by the same set.13 In her view, quantum theory and quantum literature (which she calls actualist) share an underlying ontology in seeing the world as discontinuous, statis-tical, energetic, relative, subjective, uncertain (8). One can argue with this particular list or with its derivation exclusively from physics (surely Dar-winism has something to do with the shift to a more energetic, relative, and subjective ontology!). But at least it brings quantum spacetime back to where it belongsthe center stage of cultureand keeps the analysis of its implications from being bogged down in science wars.

HETEROTOPIA, UTOPIA, ATOPIA

The parallel developments in science and the humanities are exemplied by the changing forms of social space. Michel Foucault was one of the rst to point out that the conceptual and social revolutions of postmo-dernity have fractured the social spacetime, producing histories that are neither subordinate to [ . . . ] nor homogenous with [man], and causing


the fragmentation of the space and the folding over of each separated domain upon its own development (Foucault 1972; 69).

This fragmentation begins with the epistemic uncertainty of narrative spaces that hover on the brink of realism but undermine it through the manip-ulation of point of view. In the early twentieth century, with modernism, cubism, and futurism in full swing and Einstein reshaping physics, it seems to be on its way to becoming the central modality of spatial imagination.

But in the same period, the social equivalent of the Newtonian space-time has a surprising and scary renaissance: utopia. The idea of utopiawhich means both good place and no placeoriginated long before modernity, with Plato and Thomas More. But modern utopias were quite different from their classic predecessors: they were not merely dreams of a perfect and unchangeable society but actively ideological projects, linked to the dynamic political movements of the rst half of the twentieth century: Communism, Nazism, and fascism. Utopian ideologies tried to restore wholeness to the fragmented social spacetime. Despite their self-image as harbingers of the future, they hungered for a return to the Newtonian para-digm of deterministic and teleological history. As Clive James wrote in his moving tribute to the intellectuals who opposed the totalitarian dream:

The ideologists thought they understood history. They thought his-tory had a shape, a predictable outcome, a direction that could be joined. They were wrong (xxiv).

Of course, proponents of modern utopias squabbled furiously over what, exactly, this shape was, but the important feature they all shared was the belief that it existed and that it was to be incarnated in the social fabric. The future utopian society was to be as homogenous and free of structural tensions as Newtonian absolute space; the future utopian time was to be as immune to change and contingency as Newtonian absolute time. Soviet utopias, analyzed in Chapter 4 of this volume, provide a perfect example of the yearning for stability and homogeneity which could only be achieved by ruthless puricationnot just of actual dissidents but of everything that disrupted the uniformity of social spacetime. But the more difference is purged, the more it spreads, requiring more and more extreme measures of containment. In its uncompromising adherence to the Newtonian para-digm, utopia, paradoxically, becomes an impossible spacewormholed with zones of irreducible otherness.

Such zones are described by Foucault in his seminal essay Of Other Spaces (1967) as heterotopias. Heterotopias have been misunderstood to mean something like utopias, but only better: zones of fuzzy diver-sity and mutual acceptance. But Foucault is quite clear that heterotopias are simply inclusions of difference within the normative social spacetime, where the rules that regulate both spatial practices and the spatial imagi-nary are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted (Foucault

Introduction I 21

1967). They are actually existing places, many of them quite unpleas-antjails, boarding schools, cemeteriesand they are utopian only in relation to the law which they challenge. Heterotopias are black holes of the social imaginary where ordinary spacetime is stretched, manipulated, or fractured. And they are seeds of time and change: heterotopias begin to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time (1967). Utopias have their own heterotopias, which are institutionalized as necessary and concealed as shameful. They are known as concentration camps.

But utopias are gone in postmodernity, and while heterotopiasother placesstill exist, they have lost much of their subversive power because of the extreme fragmentation of the social spacetime, effected by commu-nication technology, economic inequality, zoning, border clashes, immigra-tion, and many other processes. Richard Robinson suggests a new term for the fractured social spacetime of postmodernity: atopia.

Atopia [ . . . ] suggests an anomalous nowhere place, which does exist, but which evades the taxonomising language of sovereign spatial histories. Atopia is often an affective term, with a historical empha-sis on dispossession and deterritorialisation in Central and Eastern Europe, but it avoids the ethical and political connotations of uto-pia and dystopia, which speak of aspirations toward a totalising idea [ . . . ] Nowhere is a political territory which is given aesthetic form (Robinson 67).

The microcosm of atopia is the global city, the postmodern metropolis where the extreme deformation of the social spacetime has gone so far as to generate the imaginary collapse of all distinctions into one impossible distorted continuum.

Utopia, atopia, and heterotopia offer a rough framework for classifying social spaces. But narrative spaces are more varied. There are many dif-ferent kinds of impossibility, many different topologies of the nonrealistic narrative imagination. All of them trail long histories, going back to the Gothic rebellion against the Newtonian-Euclidian paradigm of realism. All of them are intertwined with scientic revolutions in our understanding of space and time, just as much as they are intertwined with social, artis-tic, and cultural shifts and clashes of modernity and postmodernity. This volume discusses ve aspects of postmodernity and links them to specic techniques of spatial representation:

Uncertainty. The uncertainty principle was perceived as part of a long-standing epistemological debate in Western culture regarding the nature of knowledge. The objective view encoded in the omniscient narrative per-spective of realistic ction had been under attack long before Heisenberg and Einstein, who seemed to give scientic authority to radical relativ-ism. However, uncertainty was also generated by the dynamics of cultural


encounter in Western colonialism. These different sources of epistemologi-cal uncertainty were refracted through the artistic legacy of the Gothicthe process discussed in Chapter 2 of the present volume.

Uneven development. One of the main changes in the transition from the Newtonian to quantum paradigm is the emphasis on the irreducible contingency of history. The idea of uneven development, of diverging time streams of history, each with its own speed and direction, entered the cul-tural eld in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 3 discusses its embodiment in a narrative structure where different spacetime continua are embedded in each other.

Historical determinism. Twentieth-century utopian ideologies worked on the assumption that historical events occur in discoverable, uniform, unfaltering patterns (Berlin 102). Since history manifestly does not work this way, much of the century was spent waging war on chance. Chapter 4 discusses this war and its consequences in relation to literary utopias.

Secularization is, of course, one of the most frequently highlighted aspects of modernity. However, there is a somewhat neglected part of this process: the coming-together of religion and pseudoscience that gener-ates various cults and movements, from spiritualism to Scientology. The power of this coming-together has been underestimated and its literary consequences largely unseen. Chapter 5 shines light on this dark corner of secularism, to discover there a surprising tenant: the physical concept of multidimensionality.

Catastrophe. If any term has been overused in discussions of postmoder-nity, it is this. Catastrophe, apocalypse, collapse permeate both theory and popular culture. One of the most frequently deployed images to describe the lurch of civilization toward some ultimate catastrophe is the black hole. It has been used to represent genocide (Wyschogrod 1998); PTSD (Car-uth 1996); or simply Hell (the 1995 movie Event Horizon). What happens when cities fall into the black hole of social and economic collapse is dis-cussed in Chapter 6.

But what of Chapter 1? It has a somewhat different function: as an instantiation of the kind of narrative analysis this book performs. For it is important to stress that my project is not a cultural history but a cultural poetics of the narrative representation of space.

THE SPACE WE LIVE IN

The physical space we inhabit today is weirder than anything dreamed in the physics familiar to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce or even to Thomas Pynchon and Norman Mailer. To begin with, this space is multidimen-sional: some versions of string theory posit eleven spatial dimensions, some even more. We cannot see these dimensions: they are rolled up on

Introduction I 23

submicroscopic scale. But the knowledge that they existor may existis a potent spur to the narrative imagination.

Our space is riven by black holes. Theoretically predicted by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916, christened by John Wheeler in 1967, and popular-ized by Stephen Hawking in 1988, black holes have been shown to exist throughout the universe: the center of our galaxy is a giant black hole. A black hole is the result of the gravitational collapse of a massive star from which nothing, not even light, can escape. At the heart of a black hole is a region of spacetime called singularity where laws of nature as we under-stand them break down. No surprise that such a monstrosity has captured the imagination of philosophers, lmmakers and writers in an age when collapsesocial, economic, or ecologicalis a byword in our imagining of the future.

The universe we inhabit may be just one of manyor perhaps, one of the innite numberof other universes. The notion of the multiverse, beloved of SF writers, rests on the so-called Many Worlds solution to the puzzle of quantum uncertainty. It suggests that when the probability wave of an elec-tron is collapsed to determine its position, a parallel universe splits off. In the Many Worlds paradigm, everything that could happen does happen. Hugh Everett proposed the Many Worlds solution to the quantum mea-surement problem in 1957. But the notion of alternate histories had been a staple of SF long before that; in 1935 Murray Leinster wrote a short story, Sideways in Time, dramatizing the concept. Moreover, virtual histories, based on the what if question, had been known among professional his-torians for at least a century (Gomel 2010; 9599). The convergent evolu-tion of the humanities and sciences within the shared cultural ecosystem is not to be underestimated.

But if the idea of innite parallel universes and innite versions of your-self creeps you out, there is another concept of the multiverse. Perhaps universes are born from each other through black holes, each with a slightly different set of physical laws. Lee Smolin and Leonard Susskind have suggested different versions of this theory. Smolin has become famous for importing the Darwinian concept of contingent history into physics. Perhaps, he writes, there are as many universes as there are biological spe-cies, each with its own genome of physical laws and constants:

General relativity also has an innite number of different solutions, each of which is a spacetimethat is, a possible history of the uni-verse. Since the geometry of spacetime is a dynamical entity, it can exist in an innity of different congurations and evolve into an inn-ity of different universes [ . . . ]

If so, it would mean that physics was more like biology, in that the properties of the elementary particles would depend on the history of our universe (Smolin 2006; 126127).


In his latest book Time Reborn (2013) Smolin goes even further in the direction of making physics more like biology and assimilating proper-ties of space to the contingent unfolding of time. Henri Bergson would not recognize Smolins physics or biology but he would be in agreement with his emphasis on the irreducible temporality of the cosmos.

All these spaces of postmodernity are in constant ux, as science rede-nes its world picture. But it is easy to become so enchanted with science and technology as to overlook the long narrative histories trailed by the rebellion against the Newtonian paradigm. New spaces are not so new. The revolution in the cultural imaginary of space started long before sci-ence gave it its epistemic imprimatur. Postmodern narrative topologies have evolved from many and diverse sources: the deant antirealism of the Gothic and Victorian fantasy; the mystical universe of spiritualism; the physics of Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr; the philosophical challenge of Darwinism; and last but not least, the experience of social upheavals which undermined the comforting belief in progress. Not only is narrative capable of representing impossible topologies, contrary to the many defenders of natural (i.e., Newtonian) space. In many ways, narrative is ahead of sci-ence, providing a semantic armature for imagining and representing new forms of space and time.

THE TIME WE LIVE IN

In his 1981 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Fredric Jameson suggested that literary theory should move beyond the distinction between form and content and analyze formal sedimen-tation of meaning (5). Since all cultural artifacts are socially symbolic acts, generic and narrative structures are not semantically neutral but bear the inscriptions of cultural and social historymuch like the history of oods, tectonic shifts, and continental drift is inscribed into geological sediments (ibid).

Jamesons neo-Marxist framework imposes a particular interpretation of history (or rather History, a teleological construct of Marxs economic theory). But his notions of sedimentation and of the content of the form have proven to be remarkably fruitful and durable. One only needs to men-tion such books as Brian McHales Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and Con-structing Postmodernism (1991), which dissect nonrealistic ctional worlds for clues to the cultural dominant of the era; or the numerous studies of the Gothic conventions in their cultural contexts, such as David Punters The Literature of Terror (1980) and The Gothic (2004).

The poetics of impossible spaces spans more than two hundred years. No sooner did the spacetime of realism establish its dominance than it was challenged by the Gothic and fantasy. With the advent of modernism, challenges to conventional space in literature exploded (Kern 132). Joyce,

Introduction I 25

Kafka, Andrei Bely, and numerous other modernist writers rejected the Newtonian-Euclidean paradigm and its reassurance of clear denitions (Harbison 73). Postmodernism is the heir to these developments.

Such persistence of narrative structure(s) testies precisely to the sedi-mentation of its meaning, which is historically determined and yet exible enough to adapt itself to new contexts. Rather than viewing postmodern-ism as a decisive historical rupture, I consider the evolution of impossible spaces throughout the period we roughly call modernity as a sign of continuity, reecting in their narrative forms some constant feature of the period. This feature is lack of constancy.

The foregoing sketch of the changing scientic picture of the world has emphasized not some single momentous breakthrough but the process of change itself. Relativity dethroned classic mechanics but relativity is not the nal word; it still has to be integrated with quantum theory. Quantum theory itself is undergoing perpetual modications. Superstring theory may be correct or it may not be. Space might have eleven dimensions, twenty-six, or perhaps only four after all. We may wake up tomorrow to nd that Smolin is right and laws of nature evolve. Or we may discover that we are living in a hologram, as proposed by Leonard Susskind and Charles Thorn. Or . . . The all that is solid melts into air phenomenon is, as Marx cor-rectly surmised, the only solid thing about modernity. And there is no uto-pia in sight to dam the ood of history.

This process of change along with its different aspects is precisely what is sedimented in the poetics of impossible spaces. This process has been conceptualized in different ways: Edith Wyschgorod and Cathy Caruth used trauma to describe the uneven and catastrophic lurch of history and its effect upon narrative. Another common term is Maurice Blanchots the disaster, which describes it through quasi-topological metaphors: the disaster [ . . . ] is outside history, but historically so (40); it is the unknown (5) that disrupts both time and space: late is early, near far (58). Walter Benjamins screaming Angel of History is often invoked as an image of time out of joint. But I prefer what Lev Trotsky bluntly called permanent revolution: the accelerating crescendo of change that has been sweeping through social and epistemological spacetime and that has left its deposits in the layered congurations of space and time in narrative.14 When the even ow of time is churned and broken by the rapids of a revo-lution, space becomes rebellious, its uniformity challenged by strange and exotic topologies. Impossible narrative spaces are generated when a revolu-tion is projected from the temporal axis onto the spatial axis of narrative.

Introduction IITime

SPEAKING OF (IN) TIME

Perhaps the question should have been asked before but it is inevitable. What does it even mean to speak of the narrative representation of space? Isnt narrative temporal by denition?

Paul Ricoeurs classic study Time and Narrative argues that it is:

The world unfolded by every narrative work is temporal by deni-tion [ . . . ] time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays features of temporal existence (3).

Many postmodern scholars have taken issue with this statement, trying to prove that postmodern narrativity somehow escapes its phenomenological link with temporal existence. According to Paul Smethurst, for example, postmodern literature responds to a shift in sensibilities from a predomi-nantly temporal and historiographical imagination to one much more con-cerned with the spatial and the geographic (Smethurst 15). This shift in sensibilities was rst diagnosed by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), which links it to the supposed postmodern anomie and loss of the teleological metanarrative of utopia.

As I argued in my last book Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination (2010), I see no way for narrative to freeze into a static spa-tial form (Frank). In fact, the experience of new narrative media, espe-cially of video games, shows that techno-creation of elaborate spaces does not undermine the temporal progression of action; in fact, it enhances it by allowing multiple converging or diverging plots. Narrative is always tempo-ral and the narrative representation of space cannot be separated from its representation of time. If post-Newtonian physics merged space and time into the single entity of spacetime, narratology should do the same. And in fact, it has, by developing the concept of the chronotope.

The concept was proposed by Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin in his essay Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel, rst published

Introduction II 27

in Russian in 1975 but probably written much earlier. Bakhtin denes the chronotope as the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial rela-tionships that are artistically expressed in literature (Bakhtin 15). Bakhtin acknowledges that he borrowed the concept from Einstein and calls it almost, but not entirely a metaphor (ibid). By using this careful qualier, he neither conates narrative theory with the exact sciences nor disavows the connection between the two.

As he explains in his essay, subtitled Notes toward a Historical Poet-ics, space and time are as inextricably connected in narrative as they are in the physical world:

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 esh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope (84).

Within the unied structure of the chronotope, setting, plot, and charac-ter are inected by a particular articulation of temporality. Moreover, the chronotope of the text acts as the conduit between the writers individual vision and the cultural and social context, reecting the collective interpre-tation of temporality but refracting it through the texts own agenda.

In his careful analysis of the implications of Bakhtins concept, Bart Keunen emphasizes its usefulness in unifying the temporal and spatial aspects of narrative that have been sundered by classic narratologys preoc-cupation with the plot:

A chronotope is an imaginal construct or entity representing a tem-poral process that occurs in a spatial situation. It is exactly because of the fact that every action, every development of time is expressed through spatial changes that we should consider chronotopes to be the essence of narratives (13).

In his essay, Bakhtin analyzes several specic chronotopes, ranging far and wide in literary history: from the Hellenistic adventure romance, to the picaresque novel, and to Dostoyevsky. In each case, the chronotope turns into a powerful conceptual tool, able to pry open the tangle of plotlines, character actions, narrative voice, and point of view that together consti-tute the literary text. Bakhtins analysis shows how these formal elements reect not just the individual writers vision but also an actual historical chronotope of the contemporary culture, thus demonstrating that the use-fulness of the concept is not limited to literary studies (16).

Indeed, nowadays many disciplines make use of Bakhtins concept. In his recent portrait of Moscow during the terrible year of 1937, for example,


historian Karl Schlgel invokes Bakhtin (who was touched by the Terror as was everybody living in the USSR at the time) and uses the notion of chronotope as a conceptual framework for his writing of a synchronous history that makes it possible to think of place, time and action together and to present them as such (Schlgel 3).

But for narratology, the concept requires some ne-tuning. In his own analysis, Bakhtin often does not distinguish between different levels of the text, treating plot events and stylistic tropes as if they were of the same weight in constructing the narrative spacetime. Recent developments in ctional-worlds narratology offer additional tools for a more nuanced analysis.

WORLDSPOSSIBLE AND OTHERWISE

My starting point is the concept of the storyworld derived from the work of David Herman (2002; 2012). The storyworld is the overall ctional ontology inscribed in a narrative text. When we read a work of literature, we do not merely follow the events or characters: we enter a new world. Interpreters of narrative do not merely reconstruct a series of events and a set of existents but imaginatively (emotionally, viscerally) inhabit a world (Herman 2002; 16). Like Bakhtin, Herman emphasizes that the world-creating power of narrative is not limited to literature: all narratives proj-ect worlds; we just apply different criteria of evaluation to these worlds, depending on whether we consider them ctional or not (ibid). The chro-notope is the underlying spatial and temporal infrastructure of the story-world, which also contains characters (or actants), places, and plotlines, all embedded in the narrative spacetime.

The world-centered approach to narratology has revolutionized the study of narrative by shifting its focus from mimesis to poiesis, the creation of independent ontological domains which may or may not correspond to the cultural reality. Lubomir Dolezel in his book on narrative ontology states that the basic concept of narratology is not story but narrative world dened within a typology of possible worlds (31). Important contribu-tions to this approach have also been made by Thomas Pavel (1986), Carl Malmgren (1991), Ruth Ronen (1994), and Brian McHale (1987; 1992).

Pavels classication of narrative worlds is particularly intriguing. Draw-ing upon Saul Kripkes semantics of possible worlds, he suggests that c-tional ontologies can be described through a set of modal relations which dene how congruent they are with the real world. Realism, for example, generates possible textual worlds:

Realism is not merely a set of stylistic and narrative conventions, but a fundamental attitude toward the relationship between the actual world and the truth of the literary text. In a realist perspective, the criterion of the truth and falsity of a literary text and of its details is

Introduction II 29

based upon the notion of possibility (and not only logical possibility) with respect to the actual world (4647).

He further proposes that ctional ontologies can be broadly classied into possible (realistic), impossible (fantasy), and improbable (SF). Pavels ontol-ogy consists of a universe composed of a basean actual worldsur-rounded by a constellation of alternative worlds (64).

The problem, of course, is that we have no idea what this base is, or rather, we have many ideas, which change with time, place, and the belief system of the writer. Pavels denition of realism assumes that there is a cul-tural and historical uniformity in the perception of the actual world. This is not the case. The actual world was Newtonian 150 years ago but not today. Should we, then, reclassify Middlemarch as fantasy? If a time machine is ever built (and some physicists argue that it is theoretically possible), will Wells The Time Machine become realistic?

Impossible storyworlds cannot be seen as always belonging to the genre of fantasy. Nor can fantasy be dened by opposition to reality, the actual world, or natural law. Rather, as Dolezel suggests, we should view all sto-ryworlds as constructs: there is no justication for two semantics of c-tionality, one designed for realistic ction, the other for fantasy (19). In Victorian culture, the Newtonian-Euclidean model was seen as a scienti-cally valid description of reality (even though the scientic consensus was beginning to crack in the second half of the nineteenth century). There was an alignment between reality and realism, which ensured that such novels as George MacDonalds Lilith (1895) and H. G. Wells The Time Machine (1895) were automatically marginalized as fantasy because of their impos-sible chronotopes. But Jorge Luis Borges or Haruki Murakamis writings are not usefully classied as fantasy, even though their spaces are equally impossible from the point of view of realism. The alignment between the

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(Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature) Elana Gomel-Narrative Space and Time_ Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature-Routledge (2014).pdf