Datelines and Chronotopes

Every story has to occur at some time and in some place. An essential part of building a narrative world is establishing the time and place of the story. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin used the term “chronotope” for the combination of time and space in a literary work—“chrono” meaning “time” (as in “chronology”) and “tope” meaning “space” (as in “topography”). His concept of the chronotope went beyond the quiddity (the whatness) of time and space to include their quality (the what-kindness). Time and place may be left vague, as in most fairy tales, or it may be specific, as in many novels. The vagueness of the chronotope is part of the meaning of a fairy tale—it suggests that the story is in a way unhitched from the ordinary historical process, and so it’s easily available to serve as an archetype. The specificity of the chronotope in a realistic novel may suggest that the story should be understood as part of the historical process. (There’s much more to say about the variety of chronotopes, but that will have to wait for another essay.)

One way of establishing the time and place of a story right at the start is what we can call a dateline. Back in the days when we read newspapers, each story would begin with an indication of the time and the place of the event reported: for instance, the report might begin, “Chicago, February 4^th”; the story would follow.  A bare dateline isn’t common in novels, but it does occur. James Agee’s A Death in the Family begins with a prologue titled “Knoxville: Summer, 1915”. This prologue continues, “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child” (11), and so on for another six pages. As the editors of the book explain, “The short section Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which serves as a sort of prologue, has been added. It was not a part of the manuscript which Agee left, but the editors would certainly have urged him to include it in the final draft” (9). (This composite text is perhaps a problem for critics who are concerned with establishing the intent of the author, but it need not trouble us here.)

Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools begins with a slight variation of the basic dateline form; here the date is stated first, and then the place is stated at the beginning of the first full sentence: “August, 1931—The port town of Veracruz is a little purgatory between land and sea for the traveler, but the people who live there are very fond of themselves and the town they have helped to make.” The story, however, does not take place in Veracruz, which is merely the point of departure for the ship and the travelers. A dateline beginning specifies a point in time and the point in space, but a story will most likely extend both these initial points.

Often a dateline beginning will include something more than the bare date and place. For instance, the first sentence of Camus’ La Peste (The Plague) tells us that the events of the story are unusual (curieux): “The unusual events which are the subject of this chronicle occurred in 194., in Oran.” (“Les curieux événements qui font le suject de cette chronique se sont produits en 194., à Oran.” (11) For some reason, Camus specifies the decade in which the story occurs, but not the year. In some dateline beginnings, the time is specified but the place is indicated only by an initial letter.

Many dateline beginnings also introduce a character, usually the main character of the story. Here is the beginning of Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock: “One afternoon in October in the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diament gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.” (3) And Henry James’ The American: On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre.” (5) And Thomas Pynchon’s V: “Christmas Eve, 1955. Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and a big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.” (1)

A variation of the conventional dateline opening—perhaps a parody—is found at the beginning of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities: “There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was travelling eastwards, towards an area of high pressure over Russia, and still showed no tendency to move northwards around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions. The atmospheric temperature was in proper relation to the average annual temperature, the temperature of the coldest as well as of the hottest month, and the a-periodic monthly variation in temperature. The rising and the setting of the sun and the moon, the phases of the moon, Venus and Saturn’s rings, and many other important phenomena, were in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The vapour in the air was at its highest tension, and the moisture in the air was at its lowest. In short, to use an expression that describes the facts pretty satisfactorily, even though it is somewhat old-fashioned, it was a fine August day in the year 1913” (4). Musil is playing with the convention of the dateline beginning. The date of the story is of course significant: just a year before the beginning of the First World War. The details of the weather are perhaps symbolic of the brewing political crisis, or perhaps the regularity of the seasons contrasts with the turbulence of human behavior.

Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road doesn’t quite begin with a dateline; instead the beginning inserts the reader into the flow of an ongoing situation. Here’s the first sentence: “The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium” (3). The reader can deduce something about what’s going on: evidently we are reading about a theatre company; because this was a dress rehearsal we can assume that they are shortly to give a performance. In the following sentences and paragraphs the director addresses the cast: he congratulates them on their rehearsal and predicts that they will do well in their performance the next night. All this takes four paragraphs. The fifth paragraph begins: “The year was 1955 and the place was a part of western Connecticut where three swollen villages had lately been merged by a wide and clamorous highway called Route Twelve” (4). Here we have the dateline, but delayed so that the narrative begins in medias res.

Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest, the first novel in her Children of Violence series, has a dateline almost at the very end, when the heroine, Martha, marries Douglas Knowell: “In this manner, therefore, was Martha Quest married, on a warm Thursday in the month of March, 1939, in the capital city of a British colony in the center of the great African continent” (269). A conventional dateline beginning marks the importance of the start of the story; this late dateline marks the importance of the end and places the events of the story within the wider context of British imperialism and the imminence of World War II. The following two pages, which end the novel, deserve their own analysis, but that will have to come at another time.