The Chronotope of the Threshold in Contemporary Canadian Literature for Young Adults

Writers of young adult fiction almost inevitably focus attention on issues of identity and maturation, considering how their protagonists cross bridges from childhood to maturity and the kinds of experiences that accompany these transitions. As Victor Watson has asked, “Can anything ever be resolved in a narrative devoted to adolescence? If it is the nature of maturation that it is always in process and never complete, maturation narratives must accordingly be fluid, uncertain and open-ended. Maturation involves crossing the bridge—and a toll of some kind must be paid” (39). In all four texts under review here—two published as young adult fiction and two as crossover novels for adult and teen readers—female protagonists encounter points of transition that lead to new forms of identity, and, as Watson has argued, “small eddies of progress and clarity are likely to emerge in the narrative languages authors employ even when they are not self-consciously tracing their characters’ currents of growth and development” (40).

In my discussions of the four novels, I draw upon the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom all literary genres have distinctive representations of time-space that frame their characters’ thoughts and actions. He calls this enhanced awareness of temporal and spatial realities a “chronotope,” a concept that emphasizes the agency of individuals within the realities of space and time. According to Bakhtin, the key to living in the chronotope is to recognize the inseparability of space and time. We cannot understand the present without knowing the social, cultural, and political history of a particular place. At the same time, everything is dynamic: places, societies, cultures, and individuals all evolve in complex ways. We live in the world, attending to how past forces have made us who and what we are, conscious that we can grow, learn, and change as we continue the journey of life. As Bakhtin explains, “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically viable; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history. This intersection of the axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope” (84). The chronotope, he suggests, focuses on how we live in space and time and the kind of modes of existence we choose: either ones that are passive and closed or ones that are open to change, growth, and learning. In this way, the chronotope functions as “the primary means for materializing time in space” and “emerges as a centre for concretizing representation” (250).

Bakhtin later refers to the “chronotope of the threshold,” which is essentially “connected with the breaking point in life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life” (248). Linked with the notion of limen in Latin, a threshold is a liminal space that refers to a transitory, in-between state or space, characterized by indeterminacy, ambiguity, hybridity, and the potential for subversion and change. In her recent contribution to The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, Rachel Falconer considers the relevance of the “chronotope of the threshold” for how we read adolescent fiction:

Readers evince a heightened appetite for fictions that focus on the edges of identity, the points of transition and rupture, and the places where we might, like microcosms of the greater world, break down and potentially assume new and hybrid identities. . . . Bakhtin identifies the “chronotope of the threshold” as being associated with crisis and break in life; the moment of decision that changes a life, where time is felt as instantaneous . . . as if it had no duration.

(89)

Most contemporary young adult fiction represents adolescence as unfinished and open to the formation of new and hybrid identities. As Falconer comments, “Because young adult...