Marius Conkan
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
mariusconkan@yahoo.com.sg

 

 

Heterotopias: Making and Remaking Imaginary Spaces

 

 

Abstract: Space is no longer seen as a homogeneous construct with the capacity to resist dispersive forces. On the contrary, space is through its very nature heterogeneous. Having as a starting point different socio-political contexts, some researchers have addressed issues of fragmented, dispersed spaces, existential and reassembled spaces out of various incompatible emplacements. They have also dealt with geographies of exclusion, of migration and Otherness, with liminal spaces and portals, linking them to notions like mobile, hybrid and fluid identities that transgress and traverse these spaces. In the context of migration, concepts like border and nomadic or hybrid identity are questioned, as visions and perceptions on cultural and socio-political spaces have irreversibly changed. Portal-quest fantasy belongs, by definition, to the literature of space and illustrates symbolical migrations of characters from a primary world engulfed by a crisis towards a magical and miraculous secondary world. There are several types of spaces, like eutopian and dystopian ones that are part of the texture of these secondary worlds. Moreover, these secondary worlds become geographies of Otherness criss-crossed by fluid, hybrid and reassembled identities. Following a similar path as other researchers in literary theory and social sciences, I will use heterotopia in my study as the conceptual matrix in defining fantasy genre.

Keywords: Chronotope; Heterotopia; Fantasy World; Possible Worlds; Literary Genre.

 

 

The concept of space and the adjacent philosophical debates have sparked a massive interest in the topic coming from vast theoretical research areas, starting with social sciences and ending with the complex and fascinating field of astrophysics. In the introduction to Key Thinkers on Space and Place, Phil Hubbard and Rob Kitchin discuss how the terms space and place have become “totemic concepts”[1] in the attempts to explore socio-cultural relations.

The subtle debate between humanistic and physical geographers was fuelled by the very essence of space. In physical geography space is seen as a neutral container of social and cultural phenomena. But human geographers, like Anne Buttimer, David Ley, Edward Relph, Yi-Fu Tuan and Nigel Thrift, have approached the interaction between the individual and space/place, through phenomenological and existentialist methods, underlining the human experience of space and its theoretical implications. In the 1970s humanistic geographers managed to re-examine the notions of space and place. Their classical understanding had been reinterpreted to make room for new theories on the relationship between space/place and cultural, social and political phenomena. Space has become “the framing device in the creation of cultural imaginaries,”[2] and even “the everywhere of modern thought.”[3]

Space is no longer seen as a homogeneous construct with the capacity to resist dispersive forces. On the contrary, space is, through its very nature, heterogeneous. Having as a starting point different socio-political contexts, some researchers have addressed issues of fragmented, dispersed spaces, existential and reassembled spaces out of various incompatible emplacements. They have also dealt with geographies of exclusion, of migration and Otherness, with liminal spaces and portals, linking them to notions like mobile, hybrid and fluid identities that transgress and traverse these spaces. In the context of migration, concepts like border and nomadic or hybrid identity are questioned, as visions and perceptions on cultural and socio-political spaces have irreversibly changed.

Portal-quest fantasy[4] belongs, by definition, to the literature of space and illustrates symbolical migrations of characters from a primary world engulfed by a crisis towards a magical and miraculous secondary world. There are several types of spaces, like eutopian and dystopian ones that are part of the texture of these secondary worlds. Moreover, these secondary worlds become geographies of Otherness criss-crossed by fluid, hybrid and reassembled identities. Fantasy literature defamiliarizes and creates metaphors out of socio-political clashes, using portals as means of transition, dispersion and identity reconstructions. Fantasy literature is not immune to the negative content of the real world characterizing the epoch of each fantast. This type of literature will rewrite such a negative load by deploying mythical, miraculous and archetypal images. That is why fantasy fictions enable a relocation of the traumatic history into miraculous spaces. Characters live initially in a primary world of conflicts that is an image of clashes found in reality. They enter through a portal into a secondary world engulfed by a cosmic, mythical battle between Good and Evil that is a metaphor for tensions existing in the primary world. Solving this mythical dispute has consequences in the latter as it will be ontologically and positively transformed.

The attempt to define literature and literary genres starting from the spaces they depict is not a new endeavour. But new possibilities of exploring fantasy worlds can be found in Mikhail Bakthin’s famous definition of the chronotope:

 

We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. […] The chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time. The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic.[5]

 

Two essential features of the chronotope can be extracted from Bakhtin’s theory. On the one hand, it states the set of spatial and temporal relations inside fiction or, to be more precise, the nature and morphology of fictional space-time (we will later explain what the distinct features of fantasy chronotope consist of). On the other hand, the chronotope is at the core of determining literary genres, as it establishes dominant structures that separate and distinguish different poetics. Bakhtin’s definition is not complete, as he himself declares,[6] but some researchers have dealt exactly with this special feature of the chronotope that defines and outlines literary genres. 

There are several types of chronotope that enter the formation of a fictional world and cover a large array of spatial-temporal structures, from minor to major and from concrete to abstract: micro-chronotopes, minor chronotopes, major or dominant chronotopes and generic chronotopes.[7] As Joy Ladin points out, for the discussion at hand, one key role will take on the generic chronotopes derived from major and dominant chronotopes and that “can be abstracted from the individual works in which they appear and serve as the basis for categorization and comparison for those works.”[8] Bart Keunen will further elaborate on the generic chronotopes, categorizing them as plotspace-chronotopes: teleological and monological chronotopes and dialogical chronotopes.[9] Part of the first category that “characterize[s] traditional narratives in which the entire plot moves towards the final moment (the ‘Eschaton’)”[10] three other sub-types can be read: the mission chronotope, the regeneration chronotope and the degradation chronotope. Fantasy literature can be integrated in the generic sub-type of the mission chronotopes next to adventure novels and fairy-tales. What are the features of this mission chronotope, besides the fact that “the conflict is bracketed by two states of equilibrium”[11]?

Despite being a useful theory, explaining literary genres through retracing, in such manner, the functions of the chronotope would rather lead to a thematic interpretation. Hence, I will attempt to define fantasy literature as a genre starting from an understanding of spatial-temporal structures as being internal (abstract) laws of fiction. Following a similar path as other researchers in literary theory and social sciences, I will use heterotopia as the conceptual matrix in defining fantasy genre. Heterotopia is a less abstract and a more general spatial-temporal category than the chronotope and could specify and particularize fantasy fiction without excluding the idea that it exemplifies the generic sub-type of the mission chronotope. On the contrary, the mission chronotope is part of fantasy heterotopia. My presumptions start from the fact that fantasy represents a heterotopic genre and that, in this particular case, the chronotope can be replaced by heterotopia as a more accurate term to describe the general traits of this type of literature. 

In his book Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy Gary K. Wolfe reveals the first attempt to define fantasy as heterotopic: “‘Heterotopia’ was suggested by Robert Plank in 1968 as a convenient term for works of fiction that invent ‘not only characters but also settings.’”[12] Heterotopia presupposes a “displacement”[13] and holds spatial-temporal relations that are unprecedented and even non-existent in reality. Hence, heterotopia, seen through such a lens, receives a different space-time order and other governing and structuring laws. Maria Nikolajeva, another renowned researcher on fantasy, details the heterotopic features of this literature by emphasising the flexible nature of its spatial-temporal features:

 

Contemporary fantasy often involves a multitude of secondary worlds, heterotopia. The “hetero” of this recent literary term emphasizes dissimilarity, dissonance, and ambiguity of the worlds. Heterotopia denotes a multitude of discordant universes, the ambivalent and unstable spatial and temporal conditions in fiction. The concept itself comes from quantum physics. Heterotopia interrogates the conventional definitions of children’s fiction based on simplicity, stability, and optimism. By definition, heterotopic space is neither simple nor stable. On the contrary, it is intricate and convoluted, ever changing, ever shape-shifting.[14]

 

Fantasy worlds display completely new spatial-temporal structures, different from those found in reality and being in a continuous transformation. But these are not the sole traits of fantasy heterotopia. Nikolajeva deals rather with a heterocosm and its constituents: numerous secondary worlds containing just as many different in nature and structure spatial-temporal relations. In fact, the fantasy world in itself is a heterotopia and its numerous traits could become generic categories for this literature. In order to define fantasy as a heterotopic genre,[15] it is useful to turn to Michel Foucault’s understanding of heterotopia and the six principles governing other spaces.

In his 1967 essay Des Espaces Autres[16] the French philosopher explores a new perspective on real space, defining some emplacements as heterotopia. According to Foucault, time has been demythified through the transition from a mythical to a scientific and profane regime, but space has kept certain sacred reminiscences. One spatial entanglement where the sacred manifests is heterotopia or the other space (locus alter). All six principles on the nature of heterotopias can be found in the structure of the secondary world in fantasy, suggesting that this world is genuinely heterotopic.

Before looking at the distinct features of the other space, Foucault offers two rather ambiguous definitions of heterotopia, linking them to utopia. Firstly, both utopic and heterotopic spaces “have the curious property of being connected to all the other emplacements, but in such a way that they suspend, neutralize, or reverse the set of relations that are designated, reflected, or represented [réflechis] by them.”[17] Spaces represented in fantasy literature have their own ability to suspend, neutralize and overturn the set of relations found in real space. For example, Wonderland is an antirational, absurd version of the world Alice temporarily escapes from, as this world inverts the structures of language that lay at the core of thinking and designating the primary world. Despite the geography of Narnia defamiliarizing the primary world the Pevensies originate from, what sets into motion and links the constituents of this geography together is the magical-dyonisiac force of Aslan, as he neutralizes the excessively rational essence of the primary world (before entering Narnia, the Pevensie brothers did not believe in the existence of magic). Heterotopias are “sorts of actually realized utopias in which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are, at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed, sorts of places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable.”[18] Unlike the real heterotopias Foucault identifies and delimitates from other places in society, fantasy heterotopia is part of universe of the possible worlds and is being practiced and internalized through imagination. Fantasy heterotopias are the heterotopias of signifiers without reference (for example, gryphons and centaurs are not part of the known world, but they are the effects of its defamiliarization). In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion,[19] Rosemary Jackson places the fantastic (actually referring to fantasy[20]) in the realm of signifiers without a real reference, hence everything that does not constitute the semantics of words and reality will engage in erecting imagined heterotopias, like the ones J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis have created. The subversive character of fantasy, as Rosemary Jackson points out, finds an echo in the function Russell West-Pavlov attributes on heterotopia in his understanding of Foucault’s theory: “Heterotopias, situated on the borders of society, in a liminal position, reveal the limits of the Symbolic.”[21] In other words, both secondary worlds created by fantasts and the real heterotopias are subversive in their relationship with the Symbolic, as they actually reveal its limited/coercive nature. This would be an initial point in explaining fantasy’s compensatory manner of engaging with social level of existence, recasting the space of reality and enabling alternatives freed from the restrictions of reason and language.

Foucault’s first principle states that heterotopias exist in any culture and they are of two types: crisis and deviation heterotopias (like the psychiatric wards). Narnia can be seen as a crisis heterotopia, as the Pevensie brothers are summoned by Aslan in order for them to gain magical thinking and to enter a spiritual initiation that is impossible in a world marked by a crisis of imagination. Then again, Wonderland is a deviation heterotopia, similar to a symbolic psychiatric ward inhabited by schizoid creatures and where Alice’s identity and perceptions get distorted in a nightmarish manner. 

The second principle describes the way in which heterotopias receive, during the history of a society, different functions (Foucault exemplifies this principle with the function of cemetery). Fantasy literature, at the moment of its emergence in the 19^th century, was quickly labelled as children’s literature (some researchers today continue to use this terminology). But once cinema evolved and digital worlds were born, secondary universes (Wonderland, Neverland, Narnia) became visible and put to screen through advanced technology (like 3-D cinema), an element that enables the viewer (adult or child) to interact, through all senses, with the world created by the fantast. Cinema adaptations of fantasy novels offer the imaginary space a different operating mode as initially designated that of a textual construct used in a compensatory manner. Film projections come into contact with a real heterotopia (the cinema hall), wrapping the imaginary space into a rather less illusionary coat that manages to bring the viewer closer to what can be perceived as “reality”. Thus, fantasy heterotopia can be both real and imagined, as a product of technology and of imagination. There is a certain paradox in all of this, because rational instruments are used in the creation of territories of the impossible in order to reconcile and fuse together two rather opposite domains: science and imagination. 

As a third principle, fantasy heterotopia “has the ability to juxtapose in a single real place several emplacements that are incompatible in themselves”[22] (on the level of reality this principle corresponds to the theatre and the garden). In an analogy, Wonderland and Narnia are built through the hybridization and the interrelation of several cultural and mythic spaces. While Wonderland is a version of the Victorian society that has elements of the Greek Inferno, Narnia juxtaposes several mythic realms, from the terrestrial Paradise to the Arab world and from eschatological geographies (Christian or Greek) to the insular imaginary of Irish-Celtic descent.    Thus, fantasy heterotopia unlike the real one is not necessary an amalgam of incompatible places, but it rather recycles cultural spaces or includes structures from those apparently distinct spaces to confer them new imaginary features. Fantasy heterotopias either create a totalizing sense for the fantasy world that reflects, in miniature, the macro-world, or will reveal the metaphoric and metaphysic sense of narration imbedded in major textual surfaces.  

Foucault’s fourth principle is the only one that refers to a temporal dimension of heterotopias. The other space is linked to “temporal discontinuities [découpages du temps]”[23] and “begins to function fully when men are in a kind of absolute break with their traditional time.”[24] The heterochronia also characterizes secondary worlds in fantasy, as the characters enter these worlds by breaking with traditional time, in order for the temporality of heterotopia to be slowed down and mythically reconstructed (as it is the case for Narnia) or stopped and destroyed, as shown in Wonderland.

The fifth principle states that “heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that isolates them and makes them penetrable at the same time,”[25] meaning that heterotopias will impose certain restrictions of access: “Either one is constrained to enter, which is the case with barracks and prisons, or one has to submit to rituals and purifications.”[26] The secondary world is isolated from the character’s primary worlds through different portals that either open towards heterotopia (the wardrobe through which the Pevensie brother enter Narnia, the rabbit hole through which Alice falls into Wonderland) or turn into the places of return into the primary world from where the initial journey had begun (the wardrobe has in this sense a double feature). Hence, the portal is part of the definition of heterotopia (defined by Edward W. Soja as a real and at the same time imagined space[27]). Crossing points, like the wardrobe, the rabbit hole or the picture, towards the secondary worlds of fantasy literature have also, next to their thematic function in the narration, a cultural significance. The closing and opening system of the secondary, heterotopic space is contained by the image of the portal as it insures the transition from rational thought to magical thinking. Fantasy fiction reflects the limits between the self and non-self, between the conscious and the unconscious, between the inside and the outside.[28] The portal is therefore the merging point of all these borders and the colliding point of all contradictions in need of a solution. Through portals characters enter the unknown heterotopic realm where fears, traumatic experiences and identity conflicts of the primary world are put on stage. Such an initiation is often followed by a resurrection like the one found in The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings or in Harry Potter.

Foucault’s last principle confers to heterotopias a feature that oscillates between two poles. On the one hand, their role is to create “a space of illusion that denounces all real space, all real emplacements within which human life is partitioned off, as being even more illusory.”[29] This type of heterotopias can be found (in fantasy terms) in Wonderland, where we encounter a dystopian (a non-sense) realm that denounces Alice’s and the reader’s world as even more absurd (in general, all dystopias can be fitted into this first heterotopic category). On the other hand, heterotopias depict another space “as perfect, as meticulous, as well-arranged as ours is disorganized, badly arranged, and muddled.”[30] This type of compensatory heterotopias is Narnia, Aslan’s paradise created in opposition to a world poisoned by reason and where the Pevensie brothers initially live. But by inverting the relationship between the real and the imaginary and through the closing and opening system represented by thresholds, Narnia can be seen as an illusionary heterotopia revealing the real world as a simple figment of imagination. 

As E. W. Soja thinks “Foucault’s heterotopologies are frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent,”[31] he will explore the French philosopher’s concept in his book Thirdspace. Soja deploys the term thirdspace to define a space that is real and at the same time imagined, overlapping in a single spatial dimension, the first space (real space) with the secondary space (imaginary space). Through Foucault’s six principles, heterotopias reveal characteristics of a third space where  “subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious”[32] merge together. 

Fantasy heterotopias reflect, in a similar manner, such contradictions that are unified by defamiliarizing the primary world and through its transfer into a secondary universe. In other words, the possible and the impossible, the natural and the supernatural, the rational and irrational do not dichotomise, inside the fantasy heterotopias, their images or opposing structures. On the contrary, the primary world and the secondary world cease to exist, in traditional terms, as divergent territories, as their apparent contrastive nature semantically communicate and merge into a third space where contrast change into convergence. This quantum logic can offer a new basis for the interpretation of fantasy literature, as it allows us to see this type of literature not as the language of the impossible (as some researchers have), but it could shed new light on the link between reality and fiction. The portal is the mechanism through which the contradictions between the primary and the secondary world are neutralized. The rite of passage through a portal coincides with the emergence of a third space clustered under a semantic dialogue between the possible and the impossible, between the natural and the miraculous and between the “real” and the imaginary. 

Foucault’s principles insure an origin for the efforts to further elaborate on heterotopias, as this term has become the main object of interest in recent studies.[33] In his analysis on spatial social practices, Kevin Hetherington sees in heterotopia a “site of alternate ordering,”[34] containing “a distinct temporal frame.”[35] Heterotopias are “points of passage”[36] in the network of social space, through which “utopic practice is expressed and realised.”[37] In fantasy, secondary worlds display a radical alternate ordering and are spatial-temporalities erecting utopic constructions. Through their journey inside the secondary worlds, the characters’ identity is recreated in accordance to the axiological content of these worlds. A similar effect can be sensed in the characters’ world of origin. Being initially in conflict, the primary world is restructured through the characters’ initiation in the miraculous realm (as found in The Chronicles of Narnia).

What type of alternate ordering do fantasy worlds reflect? A potential answer can be found in Brian McHale’s definition of heterotopia as “the sort of space where fragments of a number of possible orders have been gathered together”[38] or as a “kind of space [that] is capable of accommodating so many incommensurable and mutually exclusive worlds.”[39] In this essential feature of heterotopia resides the ontology of fantasy worlds, as they are the result of the hybridization of several possible worlds. In Heterocosmica[40] Lubomír Doležel discusses several categories of possible worlds, but I will focus only on two that are useful for analysing fantasy literature: the possible worlds of religion and science. The first category takes on the shape of cosmological narratives, while possible world in science contain alternative designs of the universe.[41] In the possible world system, a special place is reserved for fictional worlds that are “artefacts produced by aesthetic activities.”[42] A possible definition that refers to both the construction modes and the particularities of fantasy worlds would state: fictional worlds in fantasy literature are aesthetically produced artefacts and include an alternate ordering through the intertwining of cosmological narratives found in religion and the alternative designs of the universe speculated by science. Such an approach can showcase a major and distinctive feature of fantasy literature as a heterotopic genre and can be tested on several secondary worlds (like Neverland, Narnia, Middle Earth or Fantasia). But my future researches into fantasy heterotopias will include Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism,[43] a theory that systematizes and unifies theoretical perspectives on real and fictional spaces with the concepts used in their understanding. 

 

Bibliography

 

Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Edited by Michael Holquist, Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981/2008.

Bemong, Nele; Borghart, Pieter; De Dobbeleer, Michel; Demoen, Kristoffel, De Temmerman, Koen; Keunen, Bart (eds.), Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, Gent, Academia Press, 2010.

Doležel, Lubomír, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible World, Baltimore and Londra, The John Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Foucault, Michel, “Different Spaces”, Translated by Robert Hurley, in Essential Works of Foucault (Vol. II): Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Edited by James D. Faubion, Translated by Robert Hurley and others, New York, The New Press, 1988

Hetherington, Kevin, “Moderns as Ancients: Time, Space and the Discourse of Improvement”, in May, Jon; Thrift, Nigel (eds), Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, London and New York, Routledge, 2001.

Nikolajeva, Maria, Aesthetic Approaches to Children’s Literature: An Introduction, Lanham, Oxford, Scarecrow Press, 2005.

Hubbard, Phil; Kitchin, Rob (eds.), Key Thinkers on Space and Place, London, Sage, 2011/2004.

Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London, Methuen, 1981.

McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, London and New York, Routledge, 1987/2004.

Mendlesohn, Farah, Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Soja, Edward W., Thirdspace, Cambridge, Blackwell, 1996.

West-Pavlov, Russell, Space in Theory, Amsterdam și New York, Rodopi, 2009.

Westphal, Bertrand, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr., New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Wolfe, Gary K., Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy, New York, Greenwood Press, 1986.

 

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

 

Notes