When trying to explain when and where a novel took place, Bakhtin spoke of the “chronotope,” the peculiar fusion of time and space which created and saturated the invisible landscape of fiction, shaping the thoughts of all who dwelled in it.

Almost all the assigned readings were by the renowned Russian scholar of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin. It would have been there-the foreground of his mind, a fictional place, set at a fictional distance from where the author writes and the reader reads and the photographer takes a picture.ĭuring the years the woman was studying literature in school, she had taken a class on fiction and the mind. For him, that image would not have been here-the room in which the photograph was taken at the precise moment the photographer released the camera’s shutter. Or perhaps he was not scowling at a shoe or a stain but, rather, concentrating on an image he had caught sight of in his mind’s eye. The woman speculated that he might have been scowling at the photographer’s shoes, or at a misshapen stain on the floor. He was scowling at a point just beyond the lower border of the photograph.

The photograph showed an older man wearing a clean white shirt and seated in a dark chair, with one hand holding the other in his lap. She thought this even though Murnane lived thousands of miles away, in Goroke, a town of some three hundred people, in western Victoria, and even though the man, with his bunched silver hair and his wasting English face, looked nothing like the black-and-white photograph in front of her, on the cover of one of his books. On certain evenings, the watching woman speculated that the writing man might be the author of the sentence, the reclusive Australian writer Gerald Murnane. The sentence was this: “Since then I have tried to avoid those rooms that grow steadily more crowded with works to explain away Time.” At the moment he glanced up from his page, the woman supposed him to be contemplating the look, or perhaps the sound, of the sentence he had just written. From where I sat, I had a clear view of him, and he, were he to look up from his writing, would have had a clear view of a house across the street, where a woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion was seated by a window, watching him write. The white curtains in his room were seldom drawn. On most evenings this past spring, the man who lives across the street sat at his small desk, turned on the lamp, and began to write as the light faded. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Misshapen chair face reveal