Space in the novel

There is no time without space or space without time. Bakhtin created the instrument of the chronotope, whose name, if not significance, is taken from Einstein's theory of relativity especially to study their interrelationship and thus began a new, though perhaps too systematic, ‘historical poetics’. Dostoyevsky has an original place here between Flaubert and Tolstoy, and his novels are used to show the chronotopes of the threshold and of the agora, or market-place, where the time of the mediaeval mystery and the carnival hold sway. In fact, Bakhtin is hardly innovating: he is simply changing the names of aspects already studied by other critics. Moreover he admits that these chronotopes are only specific cases and that there are others, complex and varied, in Dostoyevsky's work. Bakhtin is essentially considering geometrical space and has described only two particular relationships between time and space, but in reality space varies according to the frame of reference: it may be geometrical, topological, philosophical or perceptional. In the novels, space is human without philosophical or scientific pretensions; organised by the novelist, perceived and experienced by the hero, it assumes a variety of solid and living forms, such as isolated places, paths, outlines, colours, landscapes. Moreover, novelists vary in their treatment of space – it is not so much the appearance of space that changes in different novels, but the fact that each author gives space a different significance and relates it differently to time.