PARTISAN REVIEW
267
harbors an internal schema, is, in itself and as a whole, a schema of
the world.) As far as passages such as the one quoted above, are
concerned, it would be equally possible to say that the protago·
nists are inserted for the purpose of justifying the setting.
It
seems likely that Emily Bronte was just as interested in
writing about a setting that inspired her as about a human drama.
It is even conceivable that in creating
Wutherz"ng Hez"ghts
she was
first of all
intent on depicting an old house on the moors, for
which, after all, the novel is named, and that the characters were
introduced as a means to this realization. Must such a proposition
be deemed preposterous? Have the aims of novel writing been
established definitively and for all time? -Isn't it more likely that
the novel is a hybrid form of representation, and that among the
ranks of its practitioners are to be found poets and painters as well
as historians and amateur psychologists?
It
seems to me that the question is not whether some nov–
elists have a special fixation on inanimate things and on settings,
but rather how the novel as a medium is equipped to accommo–
date such tendencies.
Time is usually said to be the dimension of the novel. True, it
is a peculiar sort of time--a time collapsed, telescoped, reversed,
juggled, and annihilated. Yet time predominates. But space, as far
as prose narrative is concerned, is much more elusive, and ambi–
guous. How does the novel realize spatiality? Other art forms such
as painting or cinema fill out a sort of pseudospace: the work can
imitate, more or less adequately, the space of the world; moreover,
as a framed object, it occupies some part of that space. But what
space does a novel fill--the space occupied by the physical book,
pages bound in cloth or paper? Or is it the dimensions of the
printed page itself, so many lines of so many inches across, with so
many letters per inch? But can we then say that the fiction is
somehow constituted within these printed characters?
This has to be nonsense, of course. Fictional space exists in
the mind alone--regardless of whether we are speaking of a novel
that gets written or one that is being read. Author and reader are
not so far apart in this respect, though this is not to say that the
reader experiences the writing just as the author imagined it in the
creative act. Yet when we speak of fictional space another ambi-
