Narrating space and motion in contemporary Asian British novels: a cultural narratology of motion

摘要

This study develops a context-oriented narratological semantics for the narrative enactment of human motion – in short, a cultural narratology of motion – in contemporary Asian British novels. Assuming that literary texts are inextricably interlocked with their cultural contexts, it elaborates a trialectics of motion, that is, a heuristic theoretical model designed to account for the fundamental multidimensionality of human motion in extratextual cultural reality and literary representation. More precisely, this trialectics conceptualizes the cultural and literary phenomenon of human motion as emerging from the combinatorial interplay of spatiality, agency and temporality. This study defines the combinatorial interplay of these three constitutive dimensions in extratextual cultural and narrative configurations of human motion as ontological vectoriality. The ontological concept of vectoriality is complemented by a narratological conceptualization of vectoriality, defined as the emergence of the narrative enactment of human motion from the combinatorial interplay of what Nünning (cf. 2008a: 19-26) refers to as the three constitutive dimensions of literary representation: the paradigmatic axis of selection, the syntagmatic axis of combination and the discursive axis of perspectivization. Building on cognitive narratology, this study argues that in literary texts, narratological vectoriality generates the illusion of ontological vectoriality – that is, of a character moving across space over time – in the reader’s mind.The cultural narratology of motion further differentiates between different types of narrative vectors – namely intended, experienced and imagined ones – in order to capture the ontological complexity of the narrative enactment of real-and-imagined (sensu Soja 1996) movements in three contemporary Asian British novels analysed in detail: The Impressionist (Kunzru 2002), A Life Apart (Mukherjee 2008) and The Pleasure Seekers (Doshi 2010). Due to the frequently minimalistic mode deployed for the narrative representation of transnational migrations in these novels, this study assigns particular saliency to characters’ mental mobility as one crucial resource for the semanticization of such migratory movements. In addition, the study brings together cultural topology and postclassical narratology in its reconceptualization of storyworld topologies as narratopologies, that is, as agentive space-time configurations emerging from the narrative representation of myriad real-and-imagined movements across the storyworld. In the absence of detailed accounts of the migratory movements themselves, such narratopologies constitute a second major resource for the cultural semanticization of the protagonists’ transnational migrations from India to Britain (or vice versa). All in all, this study shows that the interdependent narrative representation of space and motion in contemporary Asian British novels can be made accessible to contextualized narratological scrutiny by combining a cultural trialectics of motion with a vector-based narratological model.