Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel by Carl Darryl Malmgren (review)

Studies in American Fiction121 Young Hemingway is the best book we have or are likely to have on Hemingway's early years. Now Reynolds is at work on a study of the transformative Paris years, a book worth waiting for. College of William and MaryScott Donaldson Malmgren, Carl Darryl. Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel. Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1985. 240 pp. Cloth: $29.50. "Paraspace." "Iconic Space." "Paginal Space." "Hypotaxis." Hyperspace? This book is not science fiction. It is not about computers. It may be about word processing. Carl Darryl Malmgren's Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel, in fact, is about the processing, distribution, and occupation (in words) of real and metaphoric spaces in fiction. The real space is that of the page on which words (and, sometimes, other signifiers) are printed. Malmgren calls this space iconic. The metaphoric spaces include what he calls narratival space, which includes the "world" of the fictional actants, topoi, and story, with the space of the story also including the concepts of fabula (the chronological fable or "story") and the perhaps non-chronological sujet (the order of telling or the "plot," as it is known in Russian Formalist theory). The metaphoric spaces also include the narrational space, which includes any speaker recounting the story, whether that speaker is fictional or authorial. Within narrational space are also discursive space (within which is the space of enunciation) and iconic space (real, not metaphoric, and including alphabetic, lexical, paginal, and compositional spaces, all of which exist on the actual page of the book). Discursive space is not entirely metaphorical, for it may include the perspective of the author (who is real, though the authorial presence is always only "implied," and so in fact may be merely metaphorical after all). Well, there is always paraspace, that is, the space (real or metaphorical ?) between the various "text spaces"; paraspace is the "space of the reader." Just to clarify things, there is the formula for fictional space: SF = Sw + Ss + SR. In each item, the subscript letters stand for Fictional, World, Speaker, and Reader. Now, everything is cleared up. Malmgren's book is really quite good. One may give in too easily to the temptation to make fun of the proliferation of terms, the presumably reductive formulas and schémas , and the confident assumption that fiction can eventually be described totally in a series of typologies—of Space (as Malmgren approaches it), of Actants, of Topography, of Genres, of Iconic Texts, and of Speakers and Idiolects—to say nothing of a "Grammar of Stories." But what Malmgren sets out to do he really does quite well. Despite some problems in the schematization of fictional space and the obvious novelty of the terms, the book is very readable, easy to follow, and very useful in its descriptions of the experiments (in, most would say, point of view, using a pre-structuralist terminology) of Henry James, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and others who got fiction into the modernist epoch, as well as the subsequent experiments of such authors as Anais Nin, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, William Burroughs, Walter Abish, John Barth, and Raymond Federman. Moreover, Malmgren's analysis of the move from a pre-modern to a modernist fiction seems excellent once one gets accustomed to the terms he uses. "Although the fictions of James, Stein, and Faulkner," he writes, "are structurally, stylisti- 122Reviews cally, and thematically very disparate, they can be linked in terms of their respective elimination of 'authorial' speaker as source of wisdom and arbiter of value within a fictional space" (p. 104). What this means is that the traditional (implied) author controlling a text for readers is dropped out in the later James, and in Stein and Faulkner. In James (say, The Ambassadors) the space of discourse becomes part of the fictional world (James-as-James drops out, to be replaced by Strether's consciousness). In Stein's "Melanctha" the dominance of "enunciation" displaces Story by its repetition of recurrent motifs and continual re-beginnings. In Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, one finds "a systematic assault upon, respectively, the temporality of story and the unimodality of discursive space...