Why are characters so consistently

Why are characters so consistently spatialized in critical literature even when the critics—like Jameson and Hochman—have radically different ideological approaches to narrative? At first we might be tempted to reply that spatialization, at least when it is used in the broad way that I have used it here, may be an inherent part of our ways of making sense of the world. This is certainly Greimas’s contention, since he sees the four-part structure as a way of breaking down any concept into a series of related ideas (opposites, contraries, contradictions) that give it a firm meaning and allow us to use it to analyze objects and situ- ations.36 But if this is the case, surely all elements of narrative would be equally spatialized. And yet we will look long and hard before we find an instance of the spatialization of plot. Freytag’s famous but overused pyra- mid of rising and falling action immediately comes to mind, but this model has had little effect on the development of subsequent theories of plot.37 Likewise, although types of narrators and voices are sometimes described spatially because of the metaphor of the narrator’s perspective being contained“within”that of the author,38 spatial renderings of the relations between voices or types of speech within a text are extremely rare.39 It seems to me an obvious but rarely observed fact that characters are spatialized in critical discourse because we are used to thinking about people as located within space. Narratology depends on an understand- ing of bodies largely alien to each other and to their environment—the sort of radical spatial separation of bodies that I described in the previ- ous section in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Through this alienation they become distinct objects and enter into a thematic system of contrast.