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SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

line in paint. We give motion to the line in space and, depending on
its direction and our reading habits, it will lead us into the past or into
the future. For literate English speakers, time moves from left to right
on the page. For literate Arabic speakers, time heads in the opposite
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direction. Virginia Woolf drew three fused rectangles that resemble
a geometric barbell to represent the structure of To the Lighthouse. In
Langer’s terms, Woolf’s drawing is a spatial symbol for the novel.
Langer’s idea of the symbol was not conventional. She was a student
of Alfred North Whitehead and used the word “symbol” to denote
anything from which a human being could create an abstraction. Al-
though Langer addressed literary art, she did not formulate a theory
of narrative.
Most contemporary scholars prefer to leave the definition of nar-
rative vague. It is as if the problem of isolating its features has become
too bewildering to manage. In their book Living Narrative, Elinor Ochs
and Lisa Capps recognize that many literary texts (of which To The
Lighthouse would be one) blur the formal categories of classic narra-
tives. Ochs and Capps allow that “the boundaries of narrative are
fuzzy” and that “narrative along with other forms of discourse allows
authors and protagonists to imagine possibilities, weigh alternatives,
shift mindsets, and act without knowing what lies in the future.” 16
Ochs and Capps distinguish elements often cited as necessary for nar-
rative: a discourse in which an agent acts intentionally within a tem-
poral frame. Nevertheless a list of unrelated intentional acts by an
agent would not be a story. They must be yoked together. Bruner also
refused to be tied to a strict definition of narrative: “There is wide-
spread agreement that stories are about the vicissitudes of human in-
tention.” But what exactly does this mean?
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If I intend to catch the bus this afternoon, it means this is my plan

15 Christian Dobel, Gil Diesendruck, and Jens Bölte, “How Writing Systems
and Age Influence Spatial Representations of Actions: A Developmental,
Cross-Linguistic Study,” Psychological Science 18, no. 6 (2007): 487-91.
16 Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Sto-
rytelling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6.
17 Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, Massachuse s:
Harvard University Press, 1986), 13.

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