Deep Chronotopes

Unusually, the deep chronotope map for The Return of the Native contains all of the 12 available chronotopes – particular remarkable, perhaps, when considering its spatio-temporal constraints. This chronotopic complexity is typical of the long and narratorially diverse realist novel since it incorporates the chronotopes of the plots, subplots and narrative. For Return in particular it emphasises how differently the same, confined setting is perceived and experienced by the different characters. The places associated with Eustacia, for instance, compound into the 'castle' chronotope, those of Clym, the 'idyll'. The 'metanarrative' node is numerously connected via 'metatextual' edges (green dotted lines) which visualise the novel’s dominant narrator. Rather than existing as an absent voice, the narrator acts as a presence, a vantage point from which the Heath and its characters are portrayed. Similarly connected, but this time – as witnessed in the larger node size – textually dominant, are the 'road', 'threshold' and 'encounter'. Return is a text on the move, of meetings along the way, of arrivals and departures. Many of the novel’s most powerful or significant scenes occur in in-between spaces (Venn and Wildeve’s dice game on the Heath; Mrs Yeobright ignored outside Clym’s cottage; her death on the Heath). The human or character-based chronotopes are matched with a final key chronotope, that of the 'wilderness', a time-space resistant to human influence. As the text makes clear, the Heath is timeless: 'on Egdon there was no absolute hour of the day' (p. 420). Time, like the deep chronotopic map, is cyclical.