‘Once in the grave, the deceased has no more story’ (Segal 1993: 224)
Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope challenges both narrative models centred on temporality and proponents of the ‘spatial turn’ by insisting that time and space be con- sidered in their interdependency. For Bakhtin, it is the intersection of a specific temporal organisation with a particular spatial configuration that functions as a generative principle in narrative texts on two levels: major or generic chronotopes drive literary history by pro- ducing various genres, while minor chronotopes or chronotopic motifs yield plot elements within literary works. With regard to space, this means that rather than constituting a mere background or being ‘lived’ by the way a literary text’s narrator(s) or characters experi- ence it, it is seen, in concert with time, to give life to the inhabitants of the fictional world, determining – before and in excess of any experience they may have of this world – who they are and what they can and cannot do. The characters, in other words, are not in space and in time as though these categories can be abstracted from their socio-ideological con- struction, but of the particular time-space that encompasses them.
Notably, despite arguing that ‘in the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indi- cators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole,’ Bakhtin’s essay on the chronotope prioritises time over space, as is clear from its tautological title – ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope’ – and the remark that time is ‘the dominant principle in the chronotope’ (1996: 84, 86). This privileging of time, though, is more a matter of conven- tion – grounded in Lessing’s famous association of narrativity with temporality in the Laocoön, which Bakhtin cites approvingly (1996: 251) – than a necessary aspect of the chronotope. While specific chronotopes may be dominantly temporal or spatial, neither dimension is in itself primary or can do without the other: instead of time generating space or vice versa, it is their convergence that produces particular narratives and, in the socio- cultural realm, forms of life.
Whereas the chronotope appears to place time before space, Michel Foucault’s heteroto- pia – describing ‘places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable’ – is often regarded as speaking exclusively to spatiality (1998: 178). However, a closer
look reveals that this concept possesses a pronounced temporal dimension: ‘more often than not, heterotopias are connected with temporal discontinuities (découpages du temps); that is, they open onto what might be called, for the sake of symmetry, hetero- chronias’ (Foucault 1998: 182). From a Bakhtinian perspective, the question arises whether these two categories can in fact be so neatly distinguished or whether it would be more accurate to speak of heterochronotopias, as time only becomes perceptible in space and spatial relations cannot be experienced outside some form of temporalisation. In this regard, it is significant that Foucault struggles to designate the precise relationship between heterotopia and heterochronia: he begins, in the passage cited above, by arguing that the first ‘opens onto’ the latter, but then writes that ‘the heterotopia begins to function fully when men are in a kind of absolute break with their traditional time’ (1998: 182). This placing of heterochronia before heterotopia, as its condition of fruition, is repeated in the description of the cemetery as ‘indeed a highly heterotopian place, seeing that the cemetery begins with that strange heterochronia that loss of life constitutes for an individ- ual’ (1998: 182, my emphasis). Foucault’s attempt to order – in time or space – what are in effect structuring components of the same phenomenon is ultimately futile, as is shown by his subsequent lapse from speaking of ‘heterotopias and heterochronias’ as separate entities to distinguishing ‘eternitary’ (museums and libraries) and ‘chronic’ (festivals and vacation villages) heterotopias where the temporal dimension is an inherent aspect of the designated place (1998: 182). The fact that all the heterotopias mentioned by Foucault – as well as the utopia and the societal shift he traces from the temporally dominant nine- teenth-century order of chronology, history and spatial hierarchy to the new, spatial arrangement of simultaneity and localisation – could be analysed as what Bakhtin calls ‘the actual chronotopes of our world’ (1996: 253), leads me to suggest that heterotopias – as heterochronotopias – are always also, structurally, chronotopes, but ones assigned a specific ideological function. In relation to the larger, generic chronotope of a particular culturally and historically specific society, they may be seen as chronotopic motifs work- ing to ‘suspend, neutralize, or reverse the set of relations that are designated, reflected, or represented (réflechis) by them’ (Foucault 1998: 178).
To explore the consequences of this idea, and to further substantiate Bakhtin’s point that space and time cannot be thought separately, I take the grave – comprising burial or entombment sites for the dead, as well as the associated, ritualised processes of their con- struction, committal and maintenance – as a case study. In life and literature, the grave gen- erates particular stories and is assigned vital cultural and ideological functions. Far from being exclusively spatial, moreover, it is linked, like the cemetery (which is essentially an organized arrangement of graves), to the temporal discontinuity of ‘loss of life’ and the ‘quasi eternity in which (the deceased) perpetually dissolves and fades away’ (Foucault 1998: 182). After examining, in general terms, the grave’s structure as chronotope and potential heterochronotopia, I briefly look at four specific grave stories: Sophocles’ Antig- one and Oedipus at Colonus, Tahar Djaout’s Les Chercheurs d’os and Assia Djebar’s Algerian White. Bringing together classical and contemporary texts that depict the place of burial as a site of contention highlights not only the historical and cultural specificity of the grave as chronotope and heterochronotopia, but also its evaluative dimension – its
association with (sometimes contradictory) emotions and socio-ideological norms. The contended burial sites in Sophocles’ plays are seen to stage the tension inhabiting the chro- notope of the grave as simultaneously a site of closure in relation to biographical time and one of openness towards religious, historical and/or personal memorial afterlives that are not always compatible. In the contemporary novels of Djaout and Djebar, this tension forms the basis for a trenchant critique of the way reburial is used in post-Independence Algeria to turn the chronotope of the grave into a compensatory heterotopia that works, ideologically, to arrest time, unify meaning and privilege the deceased’s reified afterlife in national history over its more dynamic persistence in personal and communal memory. Looking at these texts through the lens of the chronotope and heterotopia not only eluci- dates the relationship between these two concepts, but enables a systematic comparative analysis of the functions the grave takes on in the narratives.