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Despite the ever-increasing renown that Mikhail Bakhtin's works have enjoyed sinced his death in 1975,(1) his theory of the chronotope, which is based on the idea that spatial and temporal dimensions are as inseparable in works of literature as they are in Einstein's theory of relativity, has attracted few scholars' attention.(2)
The main use Bakhtin made of this theory in his own published works was in the study of literary history, where it served principally to demonstrate the "process of assimilating real historical time and space in literature [...and] the articulation of actual historical persons in such a time and space."(3) In this paper, I shall take as my working hypothesis the notion that the concept of the chronotope is not restricted to the analysis of novels, but, as Bakhtin suggested, can also be applied to "other areas of culture," especially that of painting, where time is just as "intrinsically connected" to space as in the novel.
In an analysis of works by painters and novelists, I shall suggest other uses and applications that can be made of the concept of the chronotope, outside of the historical perspective explored by Bakhtin himself. My hypothesis is, in effect, that the chronotope constitutes at once a metaphor of society and one of the principal generators of artistic meanings in both literature and painting. By moving from the thematic study of the chronotope as a certain cultural vision which informs a specific work (novel or painting) to a structural and semiotic study of the chronotope of the encounter, I shall argue that one can go beyond the "word-image" opposition, as Mieke Bal has called it,(4) and that one can talk about reading a painting just as one can speak of reading a novel. For the purposes of this paper, I shall choose one example of a famous meeting place, taken from Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, and confront it with spatial and temporal companions found in the works of Manet, principally in his Serveuse de Bocks and Un Bar aux Folies-Bergere. The advantage of this strategy is that it allows me to approach the problem of the generation and the interpretation of artistic meanings independently of distinctions of form and genre (a problem that Nelson Goodman leaves aside in his...