The Shape’s the Thing

Abstract

The search for signs of significance in the contents of the Voyages comes up, we have seen, against the obstacle of the multidimensionality of the real world. But clearly the novels do manage to recount journeys more or less successfully. Starting instead from the finished form, might it not be possible to seek an understanding of the spatio-temporal issues? Such formal features as the footnotes and illustrations may prove illuminating; and there also exists a method for demonstrating the narrative and fictional times of novels like Voyage au centre de la Terre or Le Chancellor. More precisely, by graphing the internal time of the text (the time of the events) against the ‘time’ or ‘space’ of the fiction (as measured by the amount of text occupied), one can get a very good idea of the overall plot. (See Appendix A for further details of this method.)