Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz (Bochum)

Space and the Subject in Recent Fiction: The Spatial Positioning of Narrators and Focalisers in Contemporary Novels

1

The "Spatial Turn" in socio-cultural studies has been exploring the link of individuals and communities to places, their importance for identity, and the connection between the 'four dimensions' of spatial and temporal parameters. Around 1970 a new philosophical focusing on space and place emerged. Michel Foucault pointed to the importance of place during the ongoing investigation of the significance of time; literary scholarship and cultural studies incorporated the theories of space by Henri Lefèbvre, Gaston Bachelard, Edward Soja and David Harvey.¹ More recently, "the [literary] postmodern chronotope" (Smethurst 2000) has been interrogated, and Edward Said accentuated the interaction of time and space in human experience:

Before the beginning of textual analysis the terms 'situatedness' and 'relationality', which the following argumentation will repeatedly use, have to be defined. A protagonist is situated by the narrator or finds him-/herself situated in a specific location, for instance the home, a house, a room, or a garden and open grounds. The sensations awakened in a central character by his / her being located in a place may reach from detailed memories to emptiness or detachment. I would therefore like to speak of a narrator's or focaliser's 'personal geography'. It includes a figure's individual concept of the surrounding space with him / her in it. In what way a character does or does not 'relate' to a place, its peculiarities and the objects contained in it will emerge as a crucial question. A relatedness or unrelatedness in the subjective perception may express itself by posture, movement and involuntary or unguarded reactions, but seldom in spoken words. As the details of body language are being narrativised these silent manifestations become the more telling for the reader. Whereas 'relationality' is usually understood as the connectedness of human beings (or maybe with animals) my exploration restricts itself to a persona's relatedness to spaces and material things with special emphasis on the self-centred subjective view.

In each of the five novels selected here, two of which are British and three Irish, 'suppressed history' emerges as an important issue. The interrogation starts with a novel from the late 20th century and proceeds to narrative works from the 21st. They have mostly been studied for the working of individual memory and as postmodern historiographic fictions. Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1988) thematises a revisionist image of a controversial elitist circle in England during the 1920s and '30s, Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child (2011) shows the liberalisation of same-sex relationships in the past one hundred years.

In this essay I wish to argue that the analysis of the subject's spatial (self)positioning in contemporary British and Irish fiction yields new insights for the interpretation of the characters' situation including self-perception and relation to the environment. A character's individual exposure respectively secret observation may be historically influenced or shaped by the impact of an event memorised in the narrative; by comparison, the subject's (un)relatedness, I contend, is revealed in the text through the positioning of the self in material space. For the purposes of this article attention is directed to interior spaces of buildings, sometimes with the extension to gardens. Man-made structures – in contrast to those that pre-exist in nature such as land- or seascapes exempt from human influence except in discourse – challenge the subject's response and self-fashioning. The way in which a character relates to narrated spaces also betrays his / her social (self)image without explicitly focusing on interpersonal relationships; conversely, in imaginative literature, the subject's perspective constructs place. The novels which form the sample use "[a] language which is capable of inscribing the spatial relationships which produce and support the human communities who in turn become custodians of space" (West-Pavlov 2010: 197-98). Whether the concept of "deiXis" implies ambiguities regarding the relationality of the individual is to be examined in and subsequent to my reading of these texts.

2

Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day has become famous for taking memory and history centre-stage. The first-person narrative of the past and the ways of an English aristocrat and his ancestral home from the butler's point-of-view proved exciting for large audiences. Here I wish to consider the narrativisation of Butler Stevens's self-positioning in the noble mansion.

Position in the literal and the figurative sense of the word is at the core of Stevens's self-reflexive and often narcissistic musing (e.g. Ishiguro 1993: 149; 201). Aiming at the ideal of embodying a "gentleman's gentleman" (Ishiguro 1993: 32), "who aspires […] to a 'dignity in keeping with his position'" (Ishiguro 1993: 169), he strives with various kinds of mannerisms for constant perfection in rendering service and to produce "that balance between attentiveness and the illusion of absence" (Ishiguro 1993: 72) that he defines as the essence of good waiting – not only at dinner table, but in his whole life.

Stevens's self-importance staged by way of self-marginalisation is perfectly addressed by himself. The minutely described illusion of one's absence in the supposed view of the ruling class, the appearance that one is not there and not noticed, curiously emerges as an individual's pride of place; it is expressed in Stevens's servile attitudes with regard to the upper classes and his overbearing manner towards his subordinates. With similar contradiction, the I-narrator, to whom a certain distance is established, puts constant emphasis on the spaciousness of the country house where he serves. It includes banqueting hall, dining room, breakfast room, drawing room, billiard room, smoking room, study and library on the ground floor alone, with the butler's working place in the pantry and the housekeeper's sitting room tellingly situated underground (e.g. Ishiguro 1993: 85). This roomy largeness sharply contrasts with Stevens's infinite endeavours to take up as little space as possible. The narratee, an unknown nameless listener to the butler's story, however, cannot be mistaken about Stevens's imagined mastery over this aristocratic house.

The narrator's situatedness on the margins of what he is convinced is the nave of the great wheel of civilisation, namely the noble estate where the best of the nation is represented, enables him to become aware of secret developments and moods, even if he often cannot follow the details of the discussions. Stevens also overhears parts of confidential conversations on the first floor although "[t]he bedroom doors of Darlington Hall are of a certain thickness" (Ishiguro 1993: 95), and habitually listens cautiously for an instant trying to decide whether it is an appropriate moment to knock on the door. He consequently neither enters the French delegate's room, where the latter confers with the sceptical American, nor does he knock on Miss Kenton's door when he hears her crying (Ishiguro 1993: 212): whenever emotions are stirred he intends to remain outside – spatially as well as empathetically. Yet only on extremely rare occasions is he deliberately avoided or physically excluded (Ishiguro 1993: 227). It happens at obviously the most precarious moment during these meetings when the British Prime Minister is brought together with German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and Lord Darlington contributes to arranging a visit of King Edward VIII in Berlin to meet Hitler (cf. Ishiguro 1993: 225). Although his master had sent Stevens out of the room it also becomes the hour of greatest triumph for the butler, which he proudly remembers even in July 1956, since "as I stood there pondering" it was "at this moment that I had indeed come as close to the great hub of things as any butler could wish" (Ishiguro 1993: 227).

At crucial points the correlation between the narrator's situation or bearing and the plot becomes evident: Stevens always remains standing, even when he – considered by the company a representative of the common people – is interrogated by the gentlemen who discuss the drawbacks of democracy. A quite unusual positioning on the morning following this interview when Darlington apologises to his self-belittling butler for having exposed him to the uncomfortable questioning about politics enhances the importance of this scene. Stevens portrays it in retrospect as exceptional: "Lord Darlington came into the billiard room while I was up on a step-ladder dusting portraits" (Ishiguro 1993: 196) to start a conversation with the butler, who stands as if frozen in his posture. The employee is, to express it in spatial terms, looking down on a defeated Darlington who has wearily seated himself in an armchair, appearing troubled and haggard, but still convinced of the righteousness of his controversial attitudes ("Democracy is something for a bygone era", Ishiguro 1993: 198). Always devoted to his master, the butler's humble uncomprehending acceptance is his creed; even though obviously new worldwide disaster overshadows Darlington (Hall), yet "I remained stationary" (Ishiguro 1993: 201). The static position will be his until the end.

The only occasion when Stevens is asked to sit down tellingly happens at the beginning of a conversation with Mr Cardinal, Darlington's godson, later killed in the Second World War, who arrives at the Hall upset by a "tip-off" about Darlington's siding with the Nazis and wants to confide his concerns to the butler (Ishiguro 1993: 220). An investigative journalist, he is not allowed by his godfather to attend the secret meeting late in 1936, the occasion on which Stevens could not enter the drawing room to serve the gentlemen. Since his service was not required he was unable to move:

These circumstances show the doubtfulness of the occasion and a need for security in a 'fortress', which the butler – obviously insufficiently on this occasion – tries to fulfil by 'guarding' and supervising the entrance to the manor. Its space becomes more reassuring in the same measure as the times instigate confrontations – and later memorising attains an unreliable vagueness. The image of the 'X' deictically epitomises this reciprocal function: certainty as supposedly linked to the spaces of Darlington Hall and uncertainty to the times of the late 30s – and again the mid-50s.

The butler's ghost-like existence (an old-fashioned German expression for a faithful and efficient servant is actually "Hausgeist"), continuously expressed by deportment and relation to spaces, appears as 'place-bound' (Harvey). The events of the framing narrative, that is Stevens's journey to the West Country twenty years later in his American master's car, expose a defensive person, whereas his former 'ideal butler' self, still emphatically portrayed by him, has become a 'mere' narrative for his narratee, who remains undisclosed. During his trip, when his subservience is no longer expected, he is much less sure of himself. Conjuring up the past he cannot evade contrastive environments while driving on country roads or discussing with residents in rural pubs and guest houses, or when he finally meets Mrs Benn, formerly Miss Kenton, who does not want to return to Darlington Hall. Only the higher-grade servant's role with his positioning in the space of the estate could assess his desired identity.

3

The high-Victorian country house in the century between 1913 and 2008 in Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child (2011) gives rise to the characters' socio-historical reflections, expressed through multiperspectivity and time shifts in the third-person narrative with varying reflector figures and dialogues; yet the work is suffused with architectural description and spatial clues to its comprehension. One of the novel's objectives, a critic claims, is "to tell the lives of a diverse range of characters whose condition may be interpreted through the lens of their transforming architectural surroundings" (Eeckhout 2012: 2).² In fact, the spaces the different focalisers occupy and the way they relate to buildings and designs prove decisive for view and aspect: the capitalist owners of Corley Court – second-generation knighted entrepreneurs – display pride of place, and the heir Cecil Valance leads his guests around the estate in a guided tour with a mixture of conceit and sarcasm. Visitors, however, who are members of the upper middle classes like the Sawles feel impressed and – in the case of the mother Freda Sawles – intimidated. She lives with her children Hubert, Daphne and George at 'Two Acres' on the outskirts of London in more modest circumstances and feels irritated by the visiting young aristocrat's demeanour in her home:

The narrative shows that it is by no means the homoerotic relationship of the two young Cambridge students alone that causes the mother's vexation. Cecil's casual attitude of a quasi-proprietor also expressed in the careless treatment he gives his room as a guest at Two Acres (only two!) contrasts with Freda's own sensitivities when she later visits Corley Court where her daughter Daphne, who married Cecil's brother Dudley after the poet had been killed in action, has become mistress of the manor (Hollinghurst 2011: 173-74). Out of the hearing of their hosts even relatives by marriage criticise the Victorian building, its furnishings and atmosphere as "a forbidding place" (Hollinghurst 2011: 185) and are finally glad to leave it behind with its historic 'burden' of a hegemonic aristocratic tradition.

Daphne, a disinterested observer here, escapes a little later together with an artist from husband and stately home. Dudley Valance, who has inherited place and title, is dissatisfied with the old-fashioned Victorian mansion and relentlessly modernises the property, yet deserts it after significant social changes make themselves felt in post-World-War-I England.³ In the 1950's and '60s often abused as "a Victorian monstrosity" (Hollinghurst 2011: 268) it is sold to the public authorities and becomes a boarding prep school, a development that had prior to the outbreak of the Great War been deplored by the classes who inhabited and even those who only temporarily stayed in these mansions:

In The Stranger's Child the spatial consciousness and positioning of the characters is not only subjective and varies according to temporal or socio-historical developments, but spaces are by the subjects experienced as fleeting.

A favourable judgement concerning change is pronounced by those who as members of the lower classes formerly had no access to the Great Houses till well after 1945. "No one, it was felt, could want to live in such a place, but as an institution of learning it was pretty much ideal" (Hollinghurst 2011: 269) is the opinion of a new arrival such as Peter Rowe, who immediately starts to research its history. In the late 1960s Rowe and Corinna Valance, lower middle-class respectively aristocratic offspring, teach together at Corley Court and play 'Valse Sentimental' at the piano sitting literally side by side (Hollinghurst 2011: 299-300). However, Rowe, with an alien perspective and from the temporal distance of the late sixties, places himself outside the stately home and regards it with the look of a connoisseur: "He passed the Headmaster's sitting-room, which must once have been a principal bedroom of the house: its high Gothic oriel looked down the axis of the formal gardens, which now survived only in photographs but had once been a dazzling floral maze." (Hollinghurst 2011: 268) By Peter Rowe the house's past glory is even in its decay, which he deplores, still admired from an expert's point-of-view as one of the Imperial "treasure houses" (Trimm 2009: 206, on Darlington Hall): a work of art to look at, to tax and appreciate, but not to consider a home. Corley Court's historical value is enjoyed without regret for the political and social changes that dispelled and alienated the former proprietors. The country house in this view already becomes part of the 'museum culture' while it is put to pragmatic use. The organising consciousness behind the narrative arranges for a romanticised scene which does not come without ironic symbolism as a result of the disparity between authorial and figural mindscape:

This lower-middle-class gay character who remains unaffected by – in a reviewer's words – 'crumbling England' gives off a "palpable aura of regret" (Mendelsohn 2012: 289), albeit only from the viewpoint of an art historian and without the nostalgia following a personal relinquishment.

Inside the former family seat, Corinna, offspring of knighted ancestors and probably the daughter of a war hero and poet, hesitates to address the change in conversation with her colleagues.

4

In the following I investigate the relation of space and narrator / focal perceiver in fictions by Irish writers. Anne Enright's novel The Gathering (2007), which has received much critical attention, tells the subject-centred personal story of a woman's family in the present tense – a confessional narrative resulting from the first-person narrator's mourning upon her brother's suicide and funeral. Alternating between the more remote past – the 1960s –, the recent past, and the present – the nineties and beyond – her memories of about thirty years ago and renewed emotions dwell frequently on places and bodies in an amazingly expressionistic way. The protagonist's view of formerly familiar spaces and the situation of characters in them appear as reliable in contrast to her visual memory of persons or the crucial event, for which she declares herself an unreliable narrator (Enright 2007: 1).⁴ Yet the attribution of stability only applies to the protagonist's memory of spaces, while her birth place itself, which she wishes to tear apart and demolish, has constantly been altered: "The architecture of the family home, 'all extension and no house', mirrors the messy relationships at stake in the novel" a critic summarises (Cahill 2011: 177).

The narrator's statements about childhood places and the spatial positioning of individuals convey above all the straits and narrowness of her Irish family of origin, which is very different from her own new home, as is the materiality of the two houses.⁵

Space, distance, and its opposite, stifling tightness and crowdedness, play an important part also in Veronica's interfering romantic imaginations about the youth and amorous adventures of her grandmother (Enright 2007: ch. 5), as well as about her own adult life with husband and two daughters (e.g. Enright 2007: 133). During the retrospective memories which overwhelm her during the visit in her childhood home her feelings alternate between oppressiveness and a desired but unconquerable distance. "I walk through the dimness of our childhood rooms and I touch nothing. All the beds are dressed and ready. The girls slept upstairs and the boys on the ground floors […]" (Enright 2007: 24). Places and objects are preserved unchanged and suggest an unbroken idea of 'home', hated though it may be. The subject's memory, in contrast, has been disrupted by a crucial event which, despite its cruel effects, fitted the framework of her home's socially agreed disregard for children and suffering. In the narrator's detailed description of the different rooms as well as in the body language of mother and daughter, which are highly meaningful, the absence of any friendly impulse or sign of warmth is striking. The past corporeal childhood experience – not only Liam's, but also Veronica's, whose suffering was somatic – is linked with these rooms in a way which betrays contradictoriness of emotions or appearance and reality, of violence and a rigid order by suppression of the undesirable. Textually, the connectedness of bodies and places reveals itself in the words 'trans-gression' and 'tres-passing', which point to the fact that a border has been violated, a body invaded – 'here' and 'then'.

Inside her own and her husband's house Veronica is after the news of Liam's death haunted, while she shuns and abhors the closeness of the living (Enright 2007: ch. 20) and keeps roaming the neighbourhood like a ghost. The most spectral site remains, however, her grandmother Ada's hateful house in Broadstone, where she was sent by her overburdened mother and spent much of her childhood together with her elder brother Liam and her younger sister Kitty, surrounded also by her granny's husband and Ada's friend of her youth and possible lover. Clear and certain though as her memory of the place is, inversely "this place offer[ed] little security" (Cahill 2011: 178), so that she now detests and longs to destroy it. The remembered emotion, however, – if it can be called an emotion, because the imagery unveils human indifference towards children and the place's engulfing agency – resurges as soon as she thinks of Ada's home: "There was a terrible boredom about the house, and I could never rid myself of it. Boredom lurked in the corners, and in the path to the garage, and in the little back yard" (Enright 2007: 143). The focaliser's consciousness and her disclosure to the narratee, whom she addresses as the reader of her uncertain memories (e.g. Enright 2007: 1), draws literally step by step near the site of one single instance, which changed her own and especially Liam's life, yet – as she knows – is symptomatic of her family. Every little detail of Ada's "good room" in Broadstone is visualised, preceding this one moment: its situation in the house, the decoration, the furniture and its occupation by the different inhabitants and their habits, the colours and light. "On this particular day I was variously bored on the stairs, or at the dining-room table, or in the hall, before I got bored again and decided to go into the good room. What struck me was the strangeness of what I saw, when I opened the door." (Enright 2007: 143) Veronica's nine-year-old brother, in a mixture of astonishment and fright, is being sexually abused by Mr Nugent, Ada's frustrated admirer. Strikingly, boredom is in the narrative not linked to time, but to rooms and to outdoor places. Isolation surrounds the child even when she lives together with five other people. Concealment of grave mysteries in the family such as an uncle in the lunatic asylum and the financial dependence on Ada's landlord / lover in addition to the generally repressive social culture create this climate of depressed emptiness. After Liam's abuse observed by young Veronica both mother and grandmother avoid the presence of the two children, in spite of the fact that the narrator's home always proves too small for so many people; a keyword with the Hegartys is "clean". In the narrator's perception especially dead bones are "clean" (e.g. Enright 2007: 1). Getting now 'lost' like her brother, formerly abandoned and then abandoning, Veronica feels unable to go back to her husband and daughters after having come to Brighton.

The last room where the protagonist locates herself in her memories is 'terminal' in the literal sense: adjacent to the South Terminal of Gatwick airport she checks into a hotel "where you could live for the rest of your life. You could stay there until they found you, and they would never find you – why should they?" (Enright 2007: 254) – in a space representing the perfect 'non-place' that mirrors indifference to the neglected and silenced individual. There definite spatial and temporal borderlines in regard to a subject are being deconstructed and lead to a process of dissolution. Veronica's wish that struggles with her decision to tell her siblings upon her return what happened to Liam in the house in Broadstone (Enright 2007: 259) is to annihilate herself in total anonymity, as her brother, who could only be identified by his dental records, did in the sea where he went with stones in his pockets.⁷ Her retrospective pondering about herself and the loss of Liam ends in her death wish: "I do not want a different destiny from the one that has brought me here" (Enright 2007: 260). Torn between the obligation or wish to return, a yearning for geographical distance – 'flying' – and the urge to communicate what she still sees – or imagines seeing – she has decided to narrate events and effects from an uncertain memory: "I feel it roaring inside me – this thing that may not have taken place" (Enright 2007: 1). Compelled by this urge she eventually makes a compromise with regard to her presence: when she is 'gone' she will be there in written signs, if not in person. The 'absence / presence' topic of corporal reality, which emerges as central during the process of narration, is thus realised in the dead and in the surviving mourner.

5

Barry's The Secret Scripture has to be briefly pointed out here as another imposing example of a spatially distorted narrated universe reflected in a private testimony.⁸ The first-person narrator is at a crucial time in her life banned from the community and placed in a hut – secluded from society and singled out by what she experiences. As with Barry's literary works in general, Irish history and Irish tragedies are the material of this novel. Roseanne Clear, the protagonist, a Presbyterian and ancient writer of her autobiography, finds herself as a young adult continuously excluded from human company following Irish independence (Barry 2009: 230-32). When her marriage to a Catholic and Irish nationalist is annulled by the catholic community's "death sentence" (Barry 2009: 234; 250) the verdict, in an act of exorcism, condemns her to live alone in a tin hut on the outskirts of Sligo for many months. "The hut was like the centre of a huge clock" (Barry 2009: 228), she writes about 70 years later, describing her abode as a dehumanised metal casing in the midst of a mechanised social environment deprived of human empathy.

The hut to which the hero of Ancient Light withdraws is the place of contrastive experiences: like other secretive rooms he can call it "a bower of bliss" (Banville 2012: 56). In Banville's novel as in The Secret Scripture the validity of Edward Said's statement that geography and memory are overlapping areas of a human being's experience becomes manifest. Banville's protagonist and narrator Alexander Cleave happily retreats to a decaying shack in the forest as love-nest for an affair with his friend Billy's mother, a married woman more than twice his age – he is fifteen at the time –, because it "would make such a secure trysting place for Mrs Gray and me" (Banville 2012: 8). Metaphorically speaking, Ancient Light is "a novel criss-crossed with ghost roads and dead-ends" (Clark 2012: n.pag.) – like Eclipse or The Sea, which can be defined as quests in space to understand the past; in these novels reminiscences of dead persons and lost moments are joined to the recapturing visualisation of different places. Thus, "a particular intersection of space and time – the secret tryst, the trusted friend betrayed" (Benfey 2012: n.pag.), becomes the hallmark of Ancient Light. From the beginning, however, it is noticeable that many important elements appear fuzzy and delusive in the first-person narrator's memory, except for the details of places and the way he experienced them. Even the identity of the person who becomes central for his life is at first uncertain in his perception – was it Bill's mother whom he saw passing on her bike, or not? (Banville 2012: 4). Cleave's visual memory of the time of the year when he first saw Cotter's place (Banville 2012: 10) or the Grays' house is quite obviously faulty – it must have been spring and not autumn (Banville 2012: 16). Of the places, by contrast, the narrator seems to be sure. "I recall the day I first saw the [Cotter] house" (Banville 2012: 9) in his friend's company – a romantic, perhaps Gothic spot that in spite of the adventurous boys' discoverer instinct announced a "premonition" of being haunted, if only "by the Lady Venus and her sportive boy" (Banville 2012: 10). Even for the community of two lovers it is not a true locus amoenus.

Leafing through the papers titled The Invention of the Past, allegedly "the unauthorised biography of Axel Vander" (Banville 2012: 54), Cleave decides that the imaginary is overruling empirical experience: biography is fiction and memory, at best, a "muddied well of facts" and, at its worst, "mendacious" (Banville 2012: 54).⁹ Spatial reality, by contrast, appears distinct in his mind. The temporal remoteness from the events surrounding Mrs Gray and his first love affair cannot shake or blur the palpable memories of the places where he and Celia Gray met and how they moved in them when he was fifteen years old. In vain does he try to recall what he was thinking of, if anything, when Mrs Gray took him into her car (Banville 2012: 34), but the surroundings of their first (chaste) kiss in her station wagon under the trees is fixed in his topographic memory, as is their later love-making in that place. Cramped spaces in lush and yet strange outdoor nature exhibit "odd, how in a place so narrowly circumscribed as ours there were parts where one tended not to go" (Banville 2012: 35). On the surface he refers here merely to the geography of his home town. The accomplishment of his sexual initiation in this spot leaves him just amazed, noticing "[h]ow piercingly the birds' voices rang through the hollow wood" (Banville 2012: 36). A second place apart from the interior of the car to be considered an odd precursor of their refuge in the wooden shack is a very unromantic part of the Grays' home:

The visualisation of the car and the laundry room, part of an ostentatiously banal, unappealing and mechanical universe, seem bizarre as locations for stunning experiences till then unfamiliar to the protagonist. Therefore, according to him, his memory of the sensations overwhelming him in this locality might even be an amalgamation: the Cotter place, found to be more adequate, may instead have been where he was situated, "lying among sunken things at the bottom of a deep cistern" (Banville 2012: 40) after his first acquaintance with sexual passion. Seduced by Celia Gray, the boy – in the man's retrospective – expresses reminiscences of emotive situations during 'their' summer, and he achieves to recapture them in spatial terms. Visual memories of the setting in the laundry room prosaically also mark the end of their affair, when Billy's prying little sister detects them (Banville 2012: 220).

Repeatedly, writing the lovers' bodies in relation to place serves to emphasise the importance of sensual perception and accelerates the narrative development:

Cotter's place appears 'natural' for the protagonist's desires, when car and stowage were definitely 'awkward'. The significance of light in the haven of Cotter's hut reveals the narrator's spatial and perceptual position as well as allusively the meaning of his erotic experience, whose tragic hue is analeptically disclosed to him only many years later. To "ancient light", which arrives from the depth of space and originated millions of years ago, any inhabitant of a human dwelling has a natural right, be the place ever so humble or its residents quite unusual, as his beloved knows:

This is 'their' site of love-making during one spring and summer, on a "mattress on the floor at the Cotter house" (Banville 2012: 40) where they lie facing each other. The pastoral is the protagonist's habitat and one of Banville's favourite frames of mind. Therefore passages dedicated to the poetic description of surroundings in nature carry much of the emotional impact of love and lust, yet also of peacefulness and the extraordinary which the narrative transmits: "There was a river in our wood, a secret, brown, meandering stream …" (Banville 2012: 147) opens one of the passages that leads to an erotic scene even a reader's memory of Constance Chatterley's encounter with Oliver Mellors cannot eclipse.¹⁰ The couple's "days of innocence" (Banville 2012: 149) pass in this bower where nobody will seek or find them. Symbolically, and in congruence with the sexual subtext, the hut, where untamed nature has reclaimed its rights since it has almost become part of the overgrowing vegetation again, is exposed to the unlimited force of the elements in thunderstorms. It has divested 'civilisation' to a degree that the shabbiness of its interior and the state of dilapidation resist pure idealisation.

The novel's lyricism and descriptive spatial precision decrease towards the end: when, on a 'formal' occasion, Alexander Cleave in his Sunday best meets Mrs Gray, dressed like a lady, engaging in a solemn conversation with him, it seems – unlikely enough – to be at her house in town – but how could that be? (Banville 2012: 208-11) It becomes evident how the celebration of his mistress's body, of his own corporeal ease and pleasure – resembling John Donne's lyrical I's "new-found-land" – correlates with a precise memory of places. The inverse correlation also proves true. In regard to the 'formal' terminal scene of the affair the elderly Cleave can no longer be sure of his geographical memory, while he exactly remembers the physical discomfort caused by the clothes they are wearing and the topic of mortality Celia Gray wishes to converse on. This contains a meaning of which the protagonist is unaware at a time when she is for him still the romantic "daemon lover". His bliss emerges as an ephemeral state that ended tragically; her withdrawal leaves the protagonist angry and puzzled until he learns as a middle-aged man from Billy's sister – now a nun – that he had deceived himself, because the woman he loved and desired was fatally ill and her departure final. His recognition of a grotesque misapprehension shows that it is not only memory one cannot trust, but that his own self and the ideas this self had harboured 'betrayed' him. This knowledge can only be acquired when the disappointment about his being abandoned by his mistress is dispersed as a delusion rooted in his own mindscape.

6

To conclude: firstly, the spatial situatedness of the perceiving or narrating persona is linked to the body and corporeal sensations. The most important ones are pleasure, pain, violence, sexual and nonsexual abuse, illness, birth and death. But there is also a connection of spaces to experienced conditions of constraint, duty or relaxation, to awareness of clothes, objects and carriage. The observation of the protagonist's physical situation is essential for the making of a subjectivity in which 'perception is reality'. In the texts I have been dealing with the concern with the body and physical presence in relation to space, reaching a peak in Ancient Light, varies considerably: Stevens's self-presentation evades all closer reference to corporeal details of his own, except position in relation to spaces and posture.

Secondly, West-Pavlov's chiastic pattern of the literary 'deiXis', applied to these novels, proves elucidating, because it serves to clarify the time / space, respectively memory / spatial-positioning relation. Regarding Ishiguro's, Hollinghurst's, Barry's and Enright's narratives the statement is pertaining that where memory of persons and occurrences threatens to fail, either fades into the imaginary or becomes unreliable, the perception of places, spatial circumstances and 'things' – dead matter – proves firm and sharp.¹¹ In the visual picture of the 'X' emblem the memory of the past and the portrayal of spatial situatedness are juxtaposed in the same but reversed way as assurance and unreliability are. Paradoxically, the shape of a place itself may become insecure and in the long run prove unstable, because it may be superseded by obsoleteness, decay, demolition or repurposing, while the spatial materiality's effect nevertheless remains reassuring for the subject. From Michel Foucault to Henri Lefèbvre and Edward Soja the fluidity and malleability of space and place has been uncovered; perceived spaces emerge as a product of culture and the beholder. The subject's portrayed experience of man-made structures, however, is often firmly 'grounded' on his / her personal geography. In the case of some protagonists memory is clinging to the materiality of places and the objects therein, as we have shown. One of these objects is the body.

In Ancient Light the visualisation of places only begins to fade parallel to the experienced decline of the emotional intensity which formerly accompanied corporeal sensations. Contrasting with Veronica Hegarty's traumatised revulsion in The Gathering regarding sex and the body, a feeling which is linked to her hatred of houses, positive address is in Ancient Light extended to places and situatedness. Correspondingly, the bodies of the narrator Axel Cleave as well as the beloved woman receive the same regard and attentiveness as the pleasure of sensuality and their position in places common and uncommon. This narrative consideration illuminates the verified spatial position of the self as sign of a positive intra- and inter-subjective experience.

Nonetheless, situatedness, so important for the constitution and self-assurance of the subject, often follows the heteronomous determination dependent on a wider social or national condition. While to the novels' central character the memory of the past presents itself as explicitly separate and singular, with the subject often remaining unsure about recollections when lacking social affirmation, spaces are above all experienced as communal and societal, usually due to defined regulations. This observation is confirmed ex negativo when a protagonist's voluntary dissociation from society accompanied by a withdrawal to a secluded space, or an imposed isolation in a remote place emerges as central in the subject's awareness. The cogent relationality of an individual – that humans are social beings – is attached a special meaning through his / her spatial positioning, which is socially determined either as assigned space, as exile, or as sanctuary. The semantics of individually experienced space and of portrayed spatial position thus convey fundamental meanings, which contrast with but are frequently complementary to the subjectivity of temporal memory. To uncover the correspondences and dissimilarities in these relations has been the aim of this article.

Bibliography

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Clark, Alex. 2012: "Review of John Banville's Ancient Light." The Guardian. 11 September 2016.

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Notes

¹ In my articles on representations of space in contemporary British fiction, most of which appeared in the yearbook Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics between 2009 and 2014, I have discussed theoretical approaches by these authors.

² A second critic maintains: "They [the architectural features] clearly mean a lot to Hollinghurst, too: in all of his novels, tender descriptions of buildings and interior-design schemes and artworks have a pointed symbolic function. In particular, the great piles built by prosperous and appetitive Victorians […] seem like reproachful reminders of a more confident era" (Mendelsohn 2012: 286). Considering the latter part of this statement I would contend that there is a fascination and eagerness on the writer's part to study 'the Victorians' and their architecture rather than an implicit reproach on account of their "greater aesthetic confidence", as Mendelsohn believes.

³ Eeckhout (Eeckhout 2012: 4), whose article discusses the details of architecture and their significance, points at the discontinuity of ownership and habitation as an indication of the "queer" disconnection between family and habitation (both Valances, like most of the male characters, are homosexuals).

⁴ For an extensive analysis of the connection between trauma and memory in Enright's novel see especially Harte (Harte 2010).

⁵ Cf. Harte (Harte 2010: 189-90) for the structure of the family Veronica has founded, and Bridget English (English 2013: 219; 221) for the material peculiarities of her new home. I consider the protagonist's experienced coldness a characteristic of either place to which she (hardly) relates.

⁶ Harte also explores the wider familial and social context of sexual child abuse including the environment's responsibility and the strategies of cover-up which also traumatise and victimise the helpless witness (Harte 2010: 198-99).

⁷ In the article by Bridget English attention is drawn to the signifying contrast between congested rooms and open spaces in relation with the topic of death and guilt (English 2013: 207 and n. 10).

⁸ My dealing with The Secret Scripture in the article "The Humble, Gender, and the Local in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction" (forthcoming) also takes into consideration the silenced incarceration of the traumatised "fallen woman". Like Barry's book Enright's narrates gaps of Ireland's suppressed national history.

⁹ For an analysis especially regarding topics of memory and identity see Haekel 2014: esp. 250-53.

¹⁰ In a 2012 interview with Alice Gribbin in the New Statesman Banville mentioned that he believed D.H. Lawrence tried to write sex, "with appalling results" (Gribbin 2012: n.pag.).

¹¹ I consider a statement by Ulrike Tancke on The Gathering valuable also for the topic of spatial significance in the other texts discussed here. Her comment corroborates the ambiguity of spatial awareness when she writes that the materiality of places – visual, olfactory, or tactual – intrudes and interrupts the narrative "with its physicality" and is often negatively connotated in Enright's text, but that despite this disturbance of the narrator's flow of memories "there is a sense in which the material can be read as a means of grounding her narrative […]. The function of the material is a reassuring, solidifying device […]" (Tancke 2015: 113).