1 Introduction

A unique proposition of travelling back in time, without a time machine or any futuristic contraption, to be offered the possibility of swimming twenty-four hours into the past (Eco 310); such a prospect, to manipulate and rework the very linear flow of time, and space is presented with ease by Umberto Eco in his The Island of the Day Before. The novel thus immediately strikes a cord with the philosophies of time and space with not just this idea of time travel, but also with numerous discussions on the very concept of time-space. But these ideas gradually develop into an oppressive form with the protagonist, and representative of the postmodern heroRoberto, being thrown into a state of paranoia by his, simultaneous, excessive obsession and constant terror of this time-space predicament. The novel thus focuses on how time and space proved to be oppressive and restrictive, both in real life and in the narrative fiction. Observe the world around and one can easily detect the looming presence of space and time. The ticking of numerous clocks, calendars being updated, birthdays and anniversaries being celebrated, schedules being set, numerous scientific debates on the structure of the universe, personal spaces, living spaces, narrative spaces all these are testimonies to the hegemony of spacetime. The very medium of time-space is becoming a controlling entity over human existence. Compared to the early periods when time and space were a scale to assess the universe and it diverse phenomenas, today these have evolved into the very standard for order in life and in fiction. This resulted in the imposing of several restrictions

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generated by the standards of space and time. This study attempts at unearthing how space and time prove as oppressive, restrictive entities and how Eco through his novel The Island of the Day Before attempts to break free from time-space constrains. The novel challenges the absolute nature of time-space. But it would prove to be insufficient to use it as the only referent to study the oppressive nature of time and space and the subsequent protests against it. Thus a need arose to scrutinize the author and his mentality towards space and time standards. Umberto Eco is a world renowned semiotician and a bestselling novelist of fictional works including The Name of the Rose (1983), Foucaults Pendulum (1989), The Island of the Day Before (1995), Baudolino (2001), The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005), and The Prague Cemetery (2011). His specialization in medieval history and semiotics also resulted in his production of several non fiction works like A Theory of Semiotics (1976) played a vital role in popularizing not just the branch called Semiotics but also established Eco as a world renowned authority over the topic. A close inspection of his methodology and style, in his novels, points to the fact that he can be included among postmodern writers of fiction. His fictional works, including the focus of this project The Island of the Day Before, fit perfectly into the category of postmodern fiction with their fragmented narrative, intertextuality, pastiche and radical critique of linear and absolute timespace. The Island of the Day Before proves more than compatible to the literary anthology of postmodern fiction. Its association with time-space demolition is also very explicit; we can find numerous discussions and debates relating to the ideas of

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space and time in a straightforward way. These add impetus to the dissent against time-space and are vital to this study. The main plot dealing with the quest for finding a solution to the longitudinal problem becomes a quest for ordering life itself based on time and space. The presentation of subverted histories by Eco, who is indeed the master of this form, indirectly challenges historical narratives with their focus on linear time. To add to all this is the intellectually challenging chaotic structure of the novel. The very presentation of such a novel which defies chronological ordering is to be considered a radical response to time-space dominance by Eco. Ecos typical preoccupation with signs and ambiguity is to be observed in the very title of the novel, which points towards an Island of the Day Before. The texts concern with space and time is evident in the very title itself. Postmodern fiction challenges the absolutist notions of time and space. The questions of past, present and future; the ideas of three dimensional, congested or elaborate, spaces, have all contributed to postmodern discussions on time and space. Time and space are treated as non linear and fragmented in works of postmodern fiction. The use of various innovations in style and narration effectively dismantles the oppressive presence of space and time in postmodern fiction. This was a gradually evolved process of radical protest, a study of the novel form and the representation of space and time in it thus became essential for understanding postmodern techniques of dissent against time-space order. With such a study of the representation of time and space in fiction, a link could also be established with scientific and philosophical debates regarding space and time which were simultaneously reflected in works of

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fiction. Such a scientific discussion aided to formulate the idea of a Spacetime Continuum. It is the combination of space and time into a single continuum. Herman Minkowski, a mathematician and former tutor to Albert Einstein proposed this concept, Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality (Petkov 81). This proposal of combining space and time into a single concept of spacetime would enable this study to carefully analyze the dominant presence of time and space in fiction. The study would be deficient without the use of this unique proposition which would in no way hinder the analysis of works of fiction, but would make it more fruitful venture. The dissertation thus focuses on how Eco effectively Zaps the spacetime grand narrative and reduces its dictatorship over human sensibilities. Through the process of Zapping, which is a typical postmodern act of breaking up the linear narrative and its oppressive influence, Eco challenges the various ideologies associated with spacetime. This thesis is also an attempt to unearth the various methodologies utilized by Eco to demystify spacetime. Chapter One: Spacetime Inception: A Historical Analysis deals with the numerous scientific, philosophical, and cultural studies related to spacetime. These are essential to understand the various ideologies related to spacetime; which would in turn enable an analysis of the gradual ascendance into the role of an absolute entity, an oppressor, by spacetime. The focus of this chapter will be on the various debates surrounding the Absolute or Linear nature of spacetime, headed by Isaac Newton, and

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those dealing with its Relative nature, led by Albert Einstein. The chapter deals with the discussions surrounding the illusionary nature of spacetime. These would enable further discussions on the studies made by science and philosophy, on spacetime, getting reflected in fiction. Chapter Two: Spacetime Dissection: A Generic Excursus is meant to enable in the further understanding of the oppressive and restrictive presence of spacetime in fiction. The chapter concentrates on spacetime and its numerous theories, ideologies and studies getting reflected in fictional writing. Special focus is laid on the novel form. Emphasis is also given to the numerous authors of fiction whose philosophies and ideas replenished spacetime studies. The gradual decadence of spacetime from a state of power can be observed in this chapter. To facilitate a clear understanding of this degrading process, the chapter is presented as more of a chronological study beginning with the study of spacetime in the contenders for the first novel like Robinson Crusoe and Pamela. This continues with a brief study of early Romances, Realist novels, Naturalist fiction, Modernist writing and Postmodernist fiction till the novels of Umberto Eco. Through such a careful analysis of spacetime in fiction the aim is to generate numerous ideas on the gradual protest against the restrictions of spacetime, which would evolve into an open ridiculing and severe critique of this concept in postmodern fiction and in Ecos The Island of the Day Before. Chapter Three: Spacetime Oblivion: An Ecoan Semiosis focuses on spacetime as it is represented, and simultaneously demolished, in the novel The Island of the Day Before. The chapter outlines Ecos attempts through his novel to break the dominance

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of spacetime. Special focus is laid on Ecos use of postmodern techniques, semiotics, and his own unique style of presentation to disrupt and destabilize spacetime. It relates how Eco adds to the postmodern contempt for spacetime and its disregard for the various spacetime constrains. The chapter discusses how spacetime ideologies and their subsequent restrictions are hurled into oblivion by Eco. The concluding chapter outlines the basic ideas discussed in the study. It tries to tackle the text and to use its subtle references to formulate an answer to why Eco, in particular, and postmodern writers, in general, have total disregard for order which spacetime can bring into a narrative.

7 Chapter 1 Spacetime Inception: A Historical Analysis

Science and philosophy are inseparable from the analysis of spacetime in Ecos The Island of the Day Before. Spacetime and its ideas of linearity, absolutism has roots in the concepts of science. Science and philosophy were one and the same for a considerable period of time. The preoccupation of early philosophers (scientists) was to find answers by observing the world all around; a world which was constantly in a state of flux. By careful examining of this phenomenon of change, the seeds of spacetime ideas began to sprout. It was thus observed that with change there was also something that seemed to be passing, an entity that was behind all this change, the phenomenon of spacetime. Our everyday perception of the universe comes from looking up at the sky to see the Sun in the daytime and, more profoundly, to see thousands of stars in the night sky.some of the oldest questions since the beginnings of human thought are: How large is the universe? Did it ever begin? What are the principal constituents of the present universe? Will (space) time ever end? (Frampton 1). From the time when man started to radically question the world around him and its numerous mysteries, he observed that nature was in a constant state of flux. The space which he inhabited was continuously forming, demolishing, and re-forming itself through a certain period of time. This prompted him to ponder over the very

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center of these magical transformations in nature. This culminated in the discovery of the phenomenon called change which was constantly happening around in nature. With the idea of change came the concept of spacetime. Change has always been a consistent phenomenon. It is an obvious fact that spacetime and its presence can only be perceived through observing this change that is happening all around the world, up in the cosmos, and in the universe beyond. But it is highly essential that change and spacetime both are to be observed, analyzed, and judged. Only through the careful scrutiny using the senses and reason, we can determine the presence of change and the passing of something, that something called spacetime. Spacetime, as we know it today, was not so dominant before. Philosophers and Scientists may debate on the question of when spacetime began. But that is a completely different and complex question with a number of answers, each contradicting or supporting the other. Spacetime needs to be perceived and observed and the whole question of its origin can be set aside for the more important one of how it was considered by human beings, how it became a dominant phenomenon, how it governed human thinking and consciousness, and how it became a powerful entity that controlled our very existence, our life, our death, and our history. Scientists agree that civilization actually began with the end of the ice age, some 12,000 years ago. Progress from a prehistoric state was made possible because man was inquisitive; philosophy was always in the blood of man. He perceived the changes happening in nature, the change from light to darkness, the movement of the heavenly bodies, and the endless yet periodic cycles of life and death. Living in a

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social setup generated a sense of order and this need for order further gave strength to studying the changes happening around and especially the influence of spacetime. Aristotle was highly concerned with the changes that happened in nature. This change seemed to prompt us to believe in the presence of spacetime. Aristotle said: Whether, if soul did not exist, time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted (Aristotle 29). Thus he proposes that when we are ready to observe, perceive and record change, we can easily understand the passing of spacetime. But when we disregard change and quit observing the passage of spacetime, it ceases to exist. Human reason and intellect thus plays a vital role in our understanding of spacetime. Aristotle claimed that time is the measure of change but also that time is not change because a change may be faster or slower, but not time (Aristotle 32). He advocates the notion that there is no time apart from change (41). Aristotle considered spacetime as a natural entity similar to matter itself, something which is hard to divide and something which is continuous. He said, In respect of size there is no minimum; for every line is divided ad infinitum. Hence it is so with time (Aristotle 36). Aristotle also propagated the notion of absolute spacetime. He believed that events determine the passage of spacetime, the period between two events which when measured gives you the exact spacetime for these events to happen. Aristotle might have been considering the natural events that took place all around nature. The seasonal cycles and other such natural phenomenon could have been predicted thus

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with some accuracy (Gaarder 107). Thus with the ideas of Aristotle, who dominated world thinking and philosophy for a considerable amount of time, the notion of spacetime being absolute got a firm foundation. Aristotle also considered time to be a separate entity from space. Later on his ideas were widely challenged; it became clear that there was no such thing as absolute spacetime because it cannot be perceived directly. We evaluate and understand spacetime differently, spacetime is different for different people, even when two people are observing the same event their evaluation of spacetime would be different. Christian Theologians who had their deep faith in divine power of God behind the creation of the universe, believed spacetime also as an entity created by god. St. Augustine was of the opinion that spacetime never existed before our universe was created. But he does not hesitate to share his confusion with the philosophers of his time regarding the definition of spacetime when he says: What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know (Augustine 18). St. Augustine had a very subjective view of spacetime. His ideas on spacetime can be related with those of Aristotle. He firmly believed that spacetime is nothing in reality but exists only in the minds apprehension of that reality. Spacetime gradually started to dominate over our consciousness and thus a need arose to generate methods to measure it, to contain it, to dominate it. Not all human beings who lived in societies at that time felt the need to record spacetime. Some were quite happy with observing the single most powerful entity that was seen producing change- the sun. It was the giver of life, the destroyer, and the perpetuator

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of life. Observing the sun and its shifting from one position in the sky to the next was more than enough to understand the passing of spacetime. But while living in a civilized setup one felt the need for proper spacetime-keeping. Clocks were made in the Middle East and Africa some 5000 to 6000 years ago. The need for order prompted men to make clocks. Agriculture, religious festivities, and other social activities required some kind of order; this order was provided by the keeping of spacetime. Spacetime was always present, but even when man tried to measure it he could never explain what it was, or where it could be found. But spacetime can be measured with relation to some matter, or the motion of matter. The notion of spacetime continuously flowing started to strengthen then, this was assisted by the invention of the hourglass and the water clock. In an hourglass, the flow of sand, which was carefully measured, reminded us of the flow of spacetime. The water clocks were designed in such a way that the measured dripping of water governed our measurement of spacetime. Hence spacetime was equated with the flow of particles, of matter. The ideas of the philosopher Heraclites ring out clearly now. He had argued that the only thing that was basic in nature was change and flow of spacetime. Everything flows said Heraclites. Everything is in a state of flux and thus we cannot step twice into the same river (Gaarder 54). Still spacetime was mostly perceived through the cyclic, regular occurrence of certain phenomenon. The seasonal cycle was vital in this, together with the observation of the cosmos- the sun, the moon, and the stars. The wonders of the sky

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(and the space beyond) were numerous. Cosmology thus played a vital part in forming the concept of spacetime. The stars and their different constellations were considered to signal some incident that might happen later in spacetime. The eclipse of the moon also helped in determining days, months, and years. Religion too started to take root, with its faith grounded in the human perception of change and the passing of spacetime, spacetime which was just one among the entities which served the all powerful perpetuator of this change- God. With the onset of the 17th century, discourses on spacetime started to expand considerably. Much of the debates were confined to Europe. Notable contributions to this behalf were made by Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Leibniz. Rene Descartes had a unique explanation of why spacetime produces changes or why time continuously changes while space remains more or less intact. He was of the opinion that God continuously re-creates everything after a certain period of spacetime and hence everything is seen to change with spacetime. Material bodies have the property of spatial extension but no temporal endurance, according to him. He thus concluded that time was a kind of sustenance or re-creation. A continuous process of change which was carried out by the divine will of God. But 17 th century physicists Isaac Barrow and his famous student Isaac Newton rejected this connection between spacetime and change. Barrow was of the opinion that spacetime was beyond and independent of change, an entity which had existed even before the creation of the universe. Newton further proposed that spacetime was not a material substance. This theory of Newton and Barrow is called as the Substantival theory of spacetime.

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Isaac Newton and his theories proved to be vital in the understanding of spacetime. His three laws of motion revolutionized the scientific way of observing spacetime. Newton believed in the concept of absolute time but refused to accept the possibility of an absolute space. Newton said Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable (Newton 128). His theory on absolute time is called as Absolutism. Timelines were based on the concept of absolute time. Until the twentieth century this concept of absolute time, as propagated by Newton and Galileo, prevailed. Galileo used the pendulum cock and a water clock to measure spacetime. These clocks helped him to further propagate his theories on absolute spacetime. The precise motion of a pendulum was calculated in proportion with his own pulse rate in an experiment which he conducted in 1583. The workings of the water clock are recorded in his work Two New Sciences (1638). These experiments and their apparent success prompted Galileo to believe that spacetime is the same for all reference frames (absolute spacetime) (Galileo 64). Later with the laws of motion by Isaac Newton in the late seventeenth century, scientific ways to calculate spacetime was conceived. The laws of Newton were used in physics to calculate linear spacetime. Linear spacetime is similar to absolute spacetime and hence is considered universally applicable to everything dealing with spacetime. In Newtons words: Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external and by another name called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is

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some sensible and external measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year (Newton 156). With this new parameters of linear spacetime established, science now had a novel way of observing and calculating the duration between events. It was a highly influential finding by Newton and it received appreciation from the scientific circle. Clocks thus began to be recognized as devices capable of measuring spacetime, linear spacetime. This was a period of a whole new scientific revolution of experimentation and analysis. Proof of every hypothesis was provided and hence science became more accurate and popularly acceptable. This influence of science dominated over the masses and their ideas on spacetime. Newtons laws were even used to study the motion of celestial bodies. His ground breaking laws on gravity and motion hence opened a new chapter in the study of spacetime. Newtons absolutism was refuted by Gottfried Leibniz. His studies were also based on change. Leibniz proposed his theories on spacetime which he considered to be relative; he said I hold space to be something merely relativeas an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions (Jolley 39).Newton challenged the theories of Leibniz with his remarks on spacetime: Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, always remains similar and immovable (Jolley 39). Leibniz objected to Newtons views and proposed his relational theory of spacetime. His argument again was that spacetime was not an entity which had an

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independent existence. It too depended on the happening of events no matter how irregular they were. Leibniz considered the overall ordering of events as time. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant considered spacetime as a form of human intuition. He considered the relationship of spacetime with the human mind, a unique concept at that time. Spacetime, for him, was more how the mind of a person perceived it. Kant felt that human senses could only perceive the world through spacetime. In his Critique of Pure Reason he says that the representation of space cannot be obtained from the relations of appearance through experience, but this outer experience is itself first possible only through this representation (Kant 45).Kants idea was that we can never observe the presence of spacetime but can experience change, and the events that happen in spacetime. He was of the opinion that spacetime was more in the psyche rather than in the physique. There is no actual physical perception of spacetime but we experience the world as a series of processes in spacetime. This was a whole new idea on the way of observing spacetime. The conscious mind was vital here and spacetime became a meta-physical entity. Change happened not when the physical object actually changed but when the mind perceives the fact that an object now different from its former state and has changed. While the theories on the concept of spacetime advanced, instruments to measure spacetime were also evolving simultaneously. Mechanical clocks, which made use of weights and springs, began to appear in the late 1300s. The first clocks did not have hour or minute hands, but later clocks included these also. In 1656, Christian Huggens invented the pendulum clock for popular use. These clocks were

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much accurate compared to earlier varieties. Clocks were vital for navigation purposes also. The knowledge of spacetime and that too accurate spacetime helped sailors to reach their destinations safely and on time. In 1761, John Harrison succeeded in inventing a small clock accurate enough to use for navigation at sea. This added a whole new dimension to spacetime and spacetime keeping. Accuracy was vital at sea where there were no actual landmarks to determine ones position. The only true companion to the sailors being the pole star, but it was not enough. Thousands of ships were lost at sea or were destroyed because of the inability to calculate precise spacetime. With the invention of the chronometer by Harrison, navigation became easier. Thus the quest for spacetime, in a way, assisted sea explorations. Such explorations would later assist in colonization and imperialism is another aspect of this altogether. By the early 1800s mechanical parts identical to each other were produced which facilitated the mass production of clocks. Clocks became cheaper and popular. Families could now afford for them, spacetime started to become more personal, in a sense a consumer item. From here begins the steps which would lead to todays lack of regard for spacetime. The concept of linear spacetime, as promoted by Barrow, Newton, Kant and other philosophers and scientists was still strong during this period. This strengthened the place of the concept of linear spacetime in the mentality of nineteenth century European science and philosophy. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, people continued to believe in absolute spacetime. With Albert Einstein science found new ways to challenge the

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notions of absolute spacetime. Albert Einstein was a German physicist whose path breaking findings on the general and special relativity paved way to a fresh understanding of spacetime in science. He demonstrated spacetime as not being an absolute entity which flowed at a fixed rate (Parsons 113). He proved that spacetime, is relative to the degree of motion of the observer (depending on the position of the observer, distances either seem to compress or stretch, and clocks to run faster or more slowly) (Parsons 113). Spacetime measurements thus could never have absolute, universal meaning. This groundbreaking theory in science put an end to absolute spacetime. Spacetime became more personal, each person who experienced an event in spacetime must perceive it differently. Stephen Hawking in his A Brief History of Time says The theory of relativity, however, forces us to change fundamentally our ideas of space and time. We must accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space (Hawking 52) To quote Hawking again: the discovery that the speed of light appeared the same to every observer, no matter how he was moving, led to the theory of relativity and in that one had to abandon the idea that there was a unique absolute time. Instead, each observer would have his own measure of time as recorded by a clock that he carried: clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree. Thus time became a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measured it (Hawking 60).

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Relative spacetime is considered with regard to some motion. This is similar to the measuring of spacetime using the rhythmical motion of a pendulum, a clock or the motion of the heavenly bodies. Relative spacetime is against the notion of absolute spacetime and hence it may not be accurate. It will vary from person to person. The theory of relativity is grounded in the study of light and its speed. The speed of light is now used to measure spacetime. Henri Bergson was of the opinion that spacetime as it is experienced by the consciousness is entirely different from the spacetime which we have come to take for granted through the configurations of clocks and calendars. Subjective consciousness is vital to understand spacetime and to actually experience it. Bergson supported the claims for the union of space and time into one entity called spacetime. He was of the opinion that through our subjective perception of spacetime we can experience spacetime as it really is: a continuum in which past, and present interpenetrate or melt into each other (Parsons 111). Bergson calls this duration. Another development was in the concept of relationship between space and time, a unique concept of space time was formulated. In the very words of Hermann Minkowski who played a vital role in promoting this concept of the union of space and time: Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality (Petkov 81). Minkowski was Einsteins former tutor and his ideas helped Einstein in formulating his theory of Relativity which demonstrated and further expanded on the claims that space and time are inseparable: time and space

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needed to be understood as inseparable: as a combination of three-dimensional space plus a fourth dimension of time (Parsons 112). Scientific discoveries in the field of astronomy aided in the understanding of the universe and through it the concept of spacetime. Edwin Hubbles observations suggested the possibility of a Big Bang as the reason behind the origin of the universe and with it the birth of spacetime. In this period heated debates were also held on whether spacetime is real or just an imaginary construct. The philosopher John Ellis Mc Taggart was foremost in this debate. He joined the long line of early philosophers including Zeno, Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel by claiming that spacetime did not exist. Philosophers including Mc Taggart claimed that the passage of spacetime was mere illusion and the only real entity was the present. He argues that the relationship between the past, present, and the future is continuously changing, but spacetime is based upon this relationship between past, present, and the future. A concept which keeps on changing and has no firm base to stand upon is a false concept; hence spacetime is merely an illusion. In the words of Mc Taggart from his The Unreality of Time, Position in time, as time appears to usare distinguished in two ways. Each position is earlier than some, and later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either past, present, or future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. But an event, which is now present, was future and will be past (Sherover 282).

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Mc Taggart further asserts his claims by saying, it because the distinctions of past, present and future seem to be essential for time, time is unreal. Mc Taggart implements his theories on spacetime to study the concept of history. He observes that historical events have same spacetime characteristics as made up stories. Stories and histories are based upon the past, present, and the future; concepts which he proved as ever changing, hence histories, which rely on the memory of the past, which varies from person to person is no better than made up stories (Sherover 278285). The advancement in science has facilitated the better understanding of our universe. The quest for understanding our origins thus becomes a quest to crack the confusion surrounding spacetime. Stephen Hawking and his revelations regarding the Big Bang have proved to be vital. He considers the logical possibility that spacetime might have had its beginning with the Big Bang since an earlier time simply would not be defined (Hawking 64). According to him, the laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future. Events are described as things that happen at a particular point in spacetime. While spacetime is unique for all events, it too is affected by the events that happen in the universe. Thus Hawking makes it clear that our views of the nature of time have changed over the years. Hawking uses the second law of thermodynamics, which says that in a closed system disorder, or entropy, always increases with spacetime, to put forward his unique concept of the Arrow of Time. He says that, The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that

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distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time (Hawking 187). His view on the Psychological Arrow of Time is very insightful, according to him the psychological arrow of time, is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future (Hawking 188). Recent debates have been held on discussing whether the universe really had a beginning and with it did spacetime too began, and also whether with the end of this universe spacetime too would end. Scientists have put forward the concept of the Big Rip a phenomenon to happen some trillion years in the future. But these scientific theories indirectly give strength to our notions regarding the ever continuing presence of spacetime. Their assumptions that spacetime might have begun with the Big Bang prompts many to place spacetime besides the question of our origins and the concept of change. The general theory of relativity supports this claim; it says that spacetime, and the universe began with the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. Before the Big Bang there was no spacetime. Kari Enqvist is of the opinion that in the theory of relativity, the concept of time begins with the Big Bang the same way as parallels of latitude begin at the North Pole. In the twentieth century scientists have found solutions to Einsteins general theory of relativity that helped in propagating the concept of closed loops of spacetime. These loops or closed curves in spacetime allows a person to go forward continuously in spacetime until one arrives in ones own past. Gdel argues for the unreality of spacetime. Physicists of the twenty first century are more inclined towards the belief of spacetime being unreal. They consider it as not a fundamental

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part of nature. Debates are held on this issue and most philosophers seem to agree on the presence of spacetime, but like St. Augustine they too are unable to define what spacetime is. Thus a gradual ascendance of spacetime into the state of a grand narrative can be observed. From science, which is in itself an influential discourse over human lives, spacetime ideologies shifted their attention to the social structure and the human psyche. Such ideas started to govern the very functioning of the society and hence became embedded in our sensibilities. The probability of such ideas and studies getting due representation and reflection in fiction was high. While the fictional universe tried to portray the world around as truthfully as possible (initially), spacetime was utilized as a mode to order events and perceptions in a narrative. A symbiosis was the vision behind such a cooperation, but unfortunately it did not take effect due to numerous reasons.

23 Chapter 2 Spacetime Dissection: A Generic Excursus

While science and philosophy formulated numerous theories on spacetime and formulated its status as a grand narrative, the fictional universe was catching up simultaneously with its faithful representation of scientific theories on spacetime. This too was a gradual process and a process which followed the gradual decline of spacetime ideologies in fiction. The careful analysis of spacetime in fictional writing would be fruitful if a careful analysis of the novel form is to be done. A novel too like any other genre in literature got influenced by the various ideologies associated with spacetime. Yet realization would dawn later on in fiction and the protest would be radical and ruthless against the linear and absolute nature of spacetime. An existence caught in endless cycles of life and death has compelled humanity to nurture an ambition for immortality. For an artist the key to immortality lies in art itself; for true art is true creation, a piece of life, a fragment of Spacetime. Consider the pictures on the Grecian urn, the urn which stands for the unravishd beauty of art, which Keats had observed; they were not mere pictures but fragments of space and time, signifying an artists capability to capture life and to store it for all of eternity: when old age shall this generation waste/ thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe/ than ours, a friend to man (Keats 34). Life is rich yet it can only be experienced for a fleeting period of time. Whatever was observed experienced, and felt was to be thus systematically recorded and preserved. These became works of

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art, science which held fragments of spacetime and in capturing them the writer too achieved longevity. Painting, poetry, prose fiction, and the various genres of art emerged. But of all the other genres which capture life, the novels flexibility is one factor that contributes towards its power to manipulate spacetime. Observe the words of D.H.Lawrence which highlights the power of a novelist over others, Being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet. The novel is the one bright book of life (Lawrence 197). Events are perceived by relating them to the spacetime where they occur. A novel records events and projects them in a fictional universe where the spacetime of the real world fuses with that of the world of fiction. Each novel is a universe in itself, where the writer has formulated her/his own unique spacetime. Reading a novel is close to experiencing an event from the point of view of another person. The novel genre can be scrutinized to study the dominance of spacetime over literature. Spacetime relies on the phenomenon of change; change brings in a need for order. In fiction, spacetime has dominated over the general ordering of things; the content, structure, themes, narration, characterization, and the plot, infusing a kind of restriction. A struggle to break free from the restrictions imposed by spacetime can be observed in Modernist and Postmodernist fiction. But while novelists try to dispose off with the conventions by spacetime, they rarely disregard the inseparable state of spacetime in literature. Space and time were viewed as separate entities and treated separately by early novelists. The influence of time can be observed in the linear narration of

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events which are uniformly spaced and often chronologically presented. Narrative space also had a strict order, with action taking place in a setting which never changed much for particular events being presented. The setting was mostly realistic and was described in detail to enhance the realistic aspect. The narrator remained mostly omniscient and the narrative space held the presence of the author and his ideologies (an ideological space). A single unchanging point of view was promoted in the early novels. Spacetime was presented as an absolute entity where the action unfolded; events were described realistically with some order to produce a definite meaning. These early novels utilized the concept of spacetime to structure a mould in which later novels could be produced. Ian Watt in his The Rise of the Novel lists candidates for the title of first novelist, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. He explains that these writers had generated a unique style radically different from early prose fiction. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes was also a visionary attempt at novel writing. Set in sixteenth-century Spain, this precursor to the later novels was more than a mere attempt at prose fiction. It is a highly experimental piece which is rated today among postmodernist metafiction. Don Quixote is a mock-chivalric novel where the author makes fun of earlier chivalric romances. The spacetime of the fantastic gets interwoven with that of the realistic in the novel. Yet emphasis is on linear narration and absolute spacetime. The many digressions in the form of stories told by minor characters provide a break from linear narration. The authors ideological space is Christian and highly moralistic. Don Quixote explores the nature of real and imaginary

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spacetime. Still, the works by Defoe, and his contemporaries are considered works which achieved the stature of the unique form called novel. Ian Watt is expounds that characters in a novel can only be individualized when they are set in a particular spacetime. A unique spacetime was emphasized in the structuring of early novels, which held a mirror to the times and dealt with a contemporary spacetime. The precursors to the novel, as it emerged in the eighteenth century, discarded the use of a current spatio-temporal setting. The early prose fiction utilized timeless stories; thus past experiences and events influenced the incidents which were narrated as events happening in the present, while prose romances which were precursors to the novel relied on circumstantial events. These differed from prose fiction in approach by stressing on the principles of cause and effect. The novel became closer to real life spacetime. Watt describes spacetime playing a vital role in the characterization of novels. Characters developed in the course of spacetime. Detailed descriptions of actions performed by various characters in a novel were related to a careful analysis of spacetime and the order which it brought into the narrative. Watt says, The attitude to time in early fiction is very similar; the sequence of events is set in a very abstract continuum of time and space, and allow very little importance to time as a factor in human relationships (Watt 24). Watt proposes that in the late seventeenth-century there was a detailed study of history, generating a sense of the past and the present. This was a unique ideology of spacetime. The need to order novels in the form of historical texts thus deep rooted in the sensibilities of writers and the reading public. Later, the theories of

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Newton aided to scrutinize spacetime from the minutest of angles. A large and rich past which stood for the lengthy duration of events, already happened in spacetime, was dissected to consider and evaluate even the minor incidents which were avoided as insignificant along with thoughts which played inside the minds of people (characters). This facilitated the representation of incidents which happened during a short span of spacetime in novels which mostly dealt with wider historical incidents. Thus a vast space time was effectively dismantled into smaller fragments to accommodate minute packets of spacetime. In his novels Daniel Defoe fused a historical perspective, with its larger canvas, with the close view where incidents in the life of a character and their thoughts, however insignificant, were presented. A passage from his Robinson Crusoe underlines this statement: I had also arrived to some little diversions and amusements, which made the time pass a great deal more pleasantlyI had taught my Poll, as I noted before, to speak; and he did it so familiarly, and talked so articulately and plain, that it was very pleasant to me; and he lived with me no less than six-and-twenty years.My dog was a pleasant and loving companion to me for no less than sixteen years of my time, and then died of mere old age. As for my cats, they multiplied, as I have observed, to that degree that I was obliged to shoot several of them (Defoe 287).

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Thus even in a narrative of epic proportions like Robinson Crusoe; Defoe took special care to discuss the minute details in the life of the character. With detailed historical references, Defoe presents the unique actions and thoughts of his characters to structure a narrative which can be placed in relation to some particular spacetime and thus attain status of detailed biographies, recordings of events happened in the past. Observe how Defoe presents his novel as: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a mixture of history and biography, objective spacetime combined with subjective spacetime. He never regarded his works as novels but as histories. Such novels played with the concept of histories and with spacetime being portrayed in them (Goring 56). Absolute spacetime was challenged to an extent by such early novels. Defoe never kept much sense of exact dates and the exact spacetime where incidents occurred, he used incidents which had happened in the past and re-created it in his novels. Spacetime was re-molded into a new form. Yet Robinson Crusoe promoted linear spacetime, incidents followed a chronological order. Defoe was particular about the spacetime where the action unfolded. Emphasis was given to describe it in detail to such an extent that it might mimic real spacetime. Incidents were presented considering carefully ways in which such events happened in real life situations. A fictional space was manipulated to generate the feeling of real space. Richardsons novels also adhered to linear spacetime concepts. He presented events in his novels on a larger and much detailed timescale. According to Ian Watt Richardsons Pamela uses an epistolary style of narration which is highly

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unconventional and could challenge spacetime constrains in fiction. Yet Richardson sticks to his detailed timescales. Each letter in the novel contains the day and time of its composition. Richardson thus championed an absolute spacetime where events happened chronologically. He concentrated on the inner spaces of mansions and houses and described them in detail. This can be considered as an attempt by the author to capture a more restricted subjective spacetime rather than the wider historical spacetime. Fielding approached, the problem of time in his novels from a more external and traditional point of view (Watt 26). A major innovation which he introduced in the treatment of time was the use of an almanac in his creation of Tom Jones. Nearly all of the events in the novel are ordered chronologically which points towards the authors appreciation of linear spacetime. Spacetime increased its dominance over the novel form providing a pseudo guarantee that an ordering in spacetime with relation to real spacetime would enable the author to exhibit his work as more genuine or authentic and, to an extent, historically accurate. Fielding delivered considerable interest to the setting and spatial aspects of his novels. Interest was taken to demarcate places which replicated real life spaces. Popular writers of this period included Jane Austen who introduced a female spacetime where the perspectives of a woman dominated. All her novels are narrated from the perspective of female characters and dealt with middle class space and life. But her spacetime was congested; events were confined to a minimum area, the middle class circle. Her works followed a linear narration with traditional endings

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culminating in marriages of the main characters. Walter Scott brought in a historical dimension to novels. He manipulated with actual historical spacetime and with the events recorded to have occurred in the past. Historical characters were misplaced from their timelines as in the case of his Kenilworth, where we find William Shakespeare appearing far ahead of his times. His novels are the precursors to modern subverted histories which played with the idea of historical spacetime. Thus novels in the early period concentrated on realistic depiction of characters and events. Contemporary spacetime reflected in these novels and its characterization. The past was observed and re-created, the idea of the future being ignored. Spacetime was linear and more realistic. A fictional spacetime was rarely represented, except to an extent in the novels of Walter Scott. Experimentation in form and attempts to break free from the structure of spacetime is seen during this period in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. The novel was miles ahead of the times and is today regarded among postmodern novels for its innovations in technique. The novel cleverly broke the monotonous linear spacetime based narration. The narrative is fragmented and broken. An excellent example of metafiction, the novel constantly reminds us of its fictional status, thus confusing the narrative. Tristram Shandy, the protagonist reflects: I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all,who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of every thing which concerns you. It is in pure compliance with this humour of

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theirs, and from a backwardness in my nature to disappoint any one soul living, that I have been so very particular already. As my life and opinions are likely to make some noise in the worldI find it necessary to consult every one a little in his turn; and therefore must beg pardon for going on a little further in the same way(Sterne 5). Sterne uses several spacetime schemes in the novel. It uses the innovations in printing by presenting a blank page, a marbled page, a misplaced chapter, wavy lines which disrupt the flow of the text and thus distorts the linear spacetime narration. Digressions are numerous and these disrupt the flow of spacetime. Narrative spacetime merges with the self reflexive spacetime of the author. The novel is structured thus so as to ridicule the linear nature of spacetime. The protagonist Tristram Shandy is born only as the novel concludes, while most of the plot narrates the incidents leading to it. Mid nineteenth-century witnessed the rise of the Romantic novel and, later, the Victorian novel. Romanticism concentrated on an imaginary spacetime. Gothic fiction produced popular interest; Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights had a gothic setting and spacetime. The novel also experimented with the techniques of narration. Emily Bronte used a frame narrative which combined aspects of first person and third person point of view. Subtle shifting of the point of view broke the numerous constrains of linear spacetime. The novel is mostly narrated in flashbacks which enabled the author to manipulate with spacetime. The possibilities of the psychological spacetime was explored by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, and by Herman Melville, who

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also brought in the spacetime of the great abyss into the narrative of the novel, in Moby Dick. Victorian period produced novelists like Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy. Novels were serialized and this prompted novelists to incorporate mini-climaxes in every episode or issue where a part of the novel appeared. This method indirectly, yet effectively, stretched spacetime to its limits; numerous incidents could be narrated with little concern for the spacetime where they occur. Unfortunately Dickens, Hardy, and Thackeray followed a linear narrative technique. The spacetime they depicted was contemporary and realistic. The spacetime was industrial Britain in the novels of Dickens. Hardy made some innovations by creating an imaginary spacetime called Wessex. Dickenss A Christmas Carol can be considered as the first novel which presented possibilities of time travel; the episode of the three ghosts who take Ebenezer Scrooge to his seemingly probable future, present, and past is an episode to be read in relation to the concept of time travel. Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass made good use of a fictional spacetime setting; it contained moments frozen in spacetime, or spacetime being slowed down considerably in the episode where Alice the protagonist returns to the real world only to find spacetime unaltered . Gustave Flauberts 1857 novel Madame Bovary was a milestone in the experimental novel category. It introduced a cinematographic technique in narration where multiple events are narrated in a single moment of spacetime by juxtaposing

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incidents one after the other. The popular agricultural fair scene in the novel revolutionized the study of spacetime in fiction. Flaubert was successful in presenting numerous events in one particular spacetime, this he achieved by breaking up the temporal sequence by, cutting back and forth between various levels of action (Frank 2). Here the author effectively challenges and refutes linear and absolute spacetime and supports a relative spacetime, where events happen simultaneously. In the agricultural fair scene, according to Joseph Frank, the time flow of the narrative is halted (Frank 2). Events are made to unfold simultaneously and these are presented in a single spacetime. The novel thus demonstrated how the flow of spacetime can be disrupted or fragmented or stretched to its limits to accommodate numerous events happening simultaneously. The basic realistic setting is kept intact by Flaubert and this technique is confined to only one chapter, yet it proved inspirational to later modernist writers including James Joyce, who implemented the technique on a larger scale in his epic masterpiece Ulysses. Realism and Naturalism continued to prevail during the later half of the nineteenth-century. Realistic fiction promoted a spacetime which was compatible with the contemporary realistic setting of that period. Realism attempted to present life as it really was and hence focus was on ordering events in linear spacetime. Incidents which were mostly everyday or commonplace found prominence in such novels. Details of setting, spacetime, or character were described in minute details to make the work seem more real and authentic. Naturalism was an extreme form of realism.

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George Eliot and William Dean Howells are the pioneers associated with the realistic movement in the novel. Emile Zola is named with relation to naturalism in fiction. With the rise of the 20th century the seeds of modernism had started to sprout. The modernist moment would grow stronger until the 1950s when it would be dethroned by postmodernism. Yet we cannot completely separate a particular movement in fiction from another. There is no complete breaking up or separation but only an evolution into a newer and better form which would reflect the tides of the times. Modernist authors tried to dislodge the various constrains imposed by spacetime on the narration of a text. They mostly ignored chronological ordering. The events and incidents in the lives of the characters were presented in a fragmented form. Most of these novels did not have a particular beginning or ending. The traditional heroes or protagonists were absent from the narrative space and in their place was introduced the anti hero. Modernist writers were also against the absolute representation of reality using detailed setting, props, environment in order to give a sense of the actual spacetime. The essential belief in the goodness of man, the order of things, and other such humanitarian concepts were shaken with the terrible outcome of the two world wars. Philosophers, thinkers and scientists including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Max Plank, Albert Einstein, and Jean Paul Sartre played a major role in shaping a modernist sensibility, especially in fiction. There was massive disillusionment during this time which affected the novelists also. There was a general disregard for order of any kind. The human conscious and

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unconscious mind with its unique spacetime was observed and represented in the novels. Authors mostly concerned themselves with fragmentation of experience and thought. Streams Of Consciousness became popular in the writings of fiction. A term first used by William James to describe the perceptions and feelings of the active mind in a person, which are like the waters of the river, in a state of motion or flow. Novelists like Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust experimented with form using the technique of stream of consciousness. Through this method there was a shift from the description of the physical reality of spacetime as perceived by the senses to the psychological spacetime which the mind perceived. With the focus shifting to the observations of a single mind, spacetime was becoming more subjective. The very order of things which time and space brought into a novel was being disrupted by the illogical, yet vivid, descriptions of perceptions of characters in novels of such kind. This highlights that spacetime was more in the observations of the mind, and that it differed from person to person. Virginia Woolf supports this view in her essay Modern Fiction. She expounds her interest in the inner reality of the characters and the importance of the mind and its perception of spacetime through the senses: Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi- transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture

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of the alien and external as possible? [ ] Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness (Woolf 106-7). The modernist novel also tried to comprehend and evaluate spacetime. They were concerned with the artificiality imposed by linear spacetime in narration. As Ford Madox Ford noted, what was wrong with the novel, and with the British novel in particular, was that it went straight forward (Ford 192). Events seem to happen in a linear way but we never identify them so. Experiences and memories of the past intervene with the present experiences in most cases; the mind can also take us to a supposed future outcome or event and thus blend our present with images of the future. Thus, modern novelists often tried to break the sequence, to put things out of order, to work from the present back into the past, to dissolve linear time (Matz 62). Modernist novels were thus a kind of rebellion against the order imposed on form and narration by spacetime; they were thus highly experimental yet did not completely disregard spacetime. The protest was against the notions of linear and absolute spacetime. During the late nineteenth-century spacetime achieved popular and mass attention. In the 1880s spacetime became standardized; this was done in order to synchronize the running of trains, to enhance the working of factories, and thus, to order life itself. Clocks around the world were synchronized, spacetime was standardized. This resulted in people seeing spacetime as a powerful entity that

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controlled their activities thus there was a general sense of resentment towards it. People started to equate freedom to a break from the monotony and linearity of spacetime. What also happened was that, People came to feel that they had within themselves a private time that was different from public time. Public time was lived by the clock; private time was idiosyncratic, and free (Matz 62). Writers of modernist fiction mostly concerned themselves with the realm of private time. The attitude towards spacetime was changing with the theories of Albert Einstein, who proclaimed spacetime to be relative and not linear. Jesse Matz observes this new attitude towards spacetime in fiction in the episode where Quentin Compson smashes the watch given to him by his father in William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury: When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfathers and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desireI went to the dresser and took up the watch, with the face still down. I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them into the ashtray and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray. The watch ticked on. I turned the face up, the blank dial with little wheels clicking and clicking behind it, not knowing any better (Matz 63). According to Matz, when Quentin smashes the clock-time, William Faulkner was establishing norms for modernist writers and imploring them to do the same by

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defying chronological and linear spacetime. In her work Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf also expresses her desire to break free from the bondage of linear temporality and to explore a whole new spacetime as perceived by the consciousness. Writers thus focused on building up a new spatio-temporality, stress was laid on the examination of the present moment which could only be read in association with the past. Memories associated with the past may be flawed because the human consciousness does not have the capacity to retrieve past events from the memory in its exactness. We are reminded of Marcel Proust and his work In Search of Lost Time. Marcel Proust is a pioneer in the study of the working of time in novels. He himself claimed that his novels always carried an invisible form of time in them. As Joseph Frank observed: He [Proust] has, almost invariably, been considered the novelist of time par excellence (Frank 6). According to Joseph Frank Proust was highly obsessed with the study of time and his obsession is said to have led to his encountering of certain quasi-mystical experiences which provided him with a spiritual technique to transcend the effects of time and thus to escape from the domination of time. Further, By writing a novel, by translating the transcendent, extra-temporal quality of these experiences to the level of esthetic form, Proust hoped to reveal their nature to the world (Frank 7). Proust and his experiments with spacetime were indeed revolutionary. His novels literally taught his readers about the importance of the past in perceiving and understanding the present. He observed that it was only when a certain event, which was experienced in some past spacetime returned to combine with an experience in the

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present moment did we actually comprehend reality. Edmund Wilson says that the work Remembrance of Things Past was not just a mere novel on time but was Prousts invention to conquer spacetime, a work of art which would remain untouched by the ravages of spacetime. Proust aimed at creating a work which would stand closer to real spacetime as experienced by people in their daily lives. To make his work more real, he paid special attention to characterization where Proust brought in some revolutionary experiments in spacetime. Proust never presented one character as appearing throughout the narrative of the novel, instead a character is made to appear after a long gap in narration. This indirectly generates a sense of spacetime having passed with relation to the characters. As Joseph Frank clearly describes in his Spatial Form in Modern Literature, To experience the passage of time, Proust learned, it was necessary to rise above it, and to grasp both past and present simultaneously in a moment of what he called pure time. But pure time, obviously, is not time at all it is perception in a moment of time, that is to say, space (Frank 10). This question of remembering the past correctly destroys the idea of linear spacetime, modernist fiction proves that the past can never be truly and exactly recollected. When incidents and events which happened in the past cannot be recollected as it is in the present, the narration of incidents one after the other in an orderly fashion in fiction would seem too artificial.

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The catching hold of the present is a tricky predicament. Spacetime cannot be easily distinguished from the present, the past, and the future. What is the present now has already become the past within the spacetime we contemplate about it and what is to be the future is already becoming the present within the spacetime that we are using to perceive the present. Writers have always faced the dilemma of generating the impression of the present in the readers. Some tried to achieve this by the detailed description of events and incidents, and thus to capture the exact shape of these moments; while others focused on the portrayal of intense moments in their works of fiction, these were presented in such a way that they defied change for a certain period of spacetime which could then be identified as a prolonged incident happening in the present. Pioneers of modernist fiction like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf implemented the concept of epiphanies in their novels. Woolf described these epiphanies as moments of being. In such moments time was made to stand still and characters were able to distinguish these moments from the continuous flow of incidents in spacetime and thus to experience them to the fullest (Parsons 37-38). Writers of modernist fiction thus toyed with spacetime by making it stop abruptly or by projecting it quickly into the past or the future. In most modernist novels linear spacetime sequence is broken by including short scenes which included long descriptions of events. In such scenes a number of events occur. Modernist writers thus try to defy the temporality of modernity. It was a protest against the mechanization of life during that period as a result of modernity. Human life was being restricted to the ticking of clocks; spacetime was becoming more relevant than

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life itself. Thus the aim was to get unshackled from the dry rut created by a linear spacetime and to explore the possibilities of a more vibrant and free spacetime where human capacities, ideas would achieve free expression. As Jesse Matz observed: The hope was that breaking linear sequences could help people toward a fuller sense of open possibilities toward a sense of the way things could have been otherwise, and yet might change; or a truer sense of the past, in all the ambiguity memory contributes to it: or, finally, a keener sense of the richness of the present, and how one might even make time seem to stop by appreciating all of the being in any single moment (Matz 67). Modernist novels tried to explain small packets of spacetime. The modernized city life provided with the idea of a fast changing, rapid paced life where spacetime is also simultaneously changing at a rapid pace. To project a piece of life, true to reality, writers of modernist fiction had to describe an array of people and places simultaneously. For such a description spatial form was necessary. Through this, spacetime was effectively stopped and the urban spaces were described in vivid detail. The readers had to connect these descriptions and to understand them by juxtaposing them, not in time, but in space. James Joyces Ulysses presents such a predicament. In one of the chapters the author presents a panoramic view of Dublins inhabitants and the daily routine life of Dublin. The chapter lays a maze-like narrative of incidents which are to be analyzed as a single picture. The incidents are not ordered or sequenced in time. Unlike normal narratives with an ordered plot. Ulysses takes

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a fresh non linear approach towards describing events in spacetime. In Ulysses James Joyce discarded the possibilities of an ordered time sequence in narration by placing a number of events which, while relating to one another, are devoid of any particular ordering in spacetime. He leaves it to the readers to put into pieces all these references and cross-references in order to acquire any sort of meaning. Joyce puts an end to a linear narrative style and can be seen continuously breaking up the narration throughout the work. This seems to be his method of protest towards the monotony established by absolute or linear spacetime which promoted a chronological ordering of events in fiction. Joyce is also successful in informing the fact that in real life, events do not happen one after the other in an orderly fashion. But incidents do happen simultaneously in spacetime. The tendency of alienation slowly crept into modernist fiction; where a person or character found itself terribly alone in a spacetime of their own construct. The Kafkaesque settings of the novels of Franz Kafka, where there is no rational explanation to events that happen in a particular spacetime and which might seem familiar or contemporary, are good examples for this. His novels The Trial, The Castle are filled with spaces where strange incidents happen which are beyond any logical explanation. Absurd fiction of Albert Camus, including novels like The Outsider, The Plague and others, contributed to the whole idea of the meaninglessness of life and subsequently of that of spacetime. In such fiction, spacetime got personified into something threatening. Meursault, Joseph K. and a whole lot of other characters who struggled against a universe which was indifferent to human existence were in a

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way protesting against the meaninglessness in the blind following of the authority of spacetime. Spacetime was, wholly remade in the mind- to become but projects of the alienated human consciousness (Matz 70). What modern fiction does through such experimentation and protest is that it helps the readers to understand and discard the complacency that had set in. This kind of complacency made readers of fiction take everything for granted, even the idea of the linear nature of spacetime. Modernist novels paved the way for postmodernist fiction by setting itself, for the first time by any method of fiction, against literary norms and conventions. Modern novelists tried to make the readers observe the changes as they happened inside the text itself. Through the perception of the changes a reader became aware of the presence of spacetime, it was not linear or absolute spacetime but relative and fluctuating spacetime. The one real advantage of viewing objects in space is that it brings a certain level of order into things. With modern novels this tendency was challenged. In a world where there was no order at all the prospect of an ordered form in literature would seem out of place. Thus with modernism the hierarchy of absolute spacetime began to decline. It is highly reasonable that contemporary issues, ideologies, theories, popular culture do get represented partially or fully in fiction. The novel with its flexibility and wide space can always afford for the inclusion of such topics. While we observe postmodern novels sparring with form, structure, style, order and such boundaries, we can still observe the fact that these novels too have space to include life- either partially or fully; life with all its vibrant issues, personalities, and ideas. With life

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comes the concept of change and with change comes the idea of spacetime. It is true that in postmodern fiction there is a more radical rejection of the cultural certainties on which western life had been structured. The certainties of reason, order, humanism, science, and religion were disowned extensively during the period of postmodernism. The influence of spacetime had already begun to erode with the writings of modernist fiction. Spacetime had brought in a kind of form and order into the realm of fiction. While they rejected it or ridiculed it, writers could never fully disregard its presence. The concept of linearity in spacetime was disowned yet writers could use spacetime as a concept for experimentation in postmodern fiction with its lack of temporal sequencing, intermingling of spaces, and fragmentation. A study of spacetime in postmodern fiction can be achieved only by concentrating on these techniques styles. Linda Hutcheon is of the opinion that postmodernism is a contradictory enterprise. It is contradictory because postmodern art, including fiction, repeatedly make use of, and later discard, conventional methods and ideas. She calls it a rereading of several works of art which had already been written in the past. Thus postmodern fiction brings back events which had happened in a spacetime in the past to a period which is in a different spacetime. An ironic effect is generated from such presentations. Hutcheon considers the majority of works in the postmodern tradition to be historiographic metafiction which self-consciously distorts historical events, personalities and so on. According to Brian Mc Hale this kind of distortion or manipulation of history (which relies on spacetime and events happening in

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spacetime) can be achieved through Apocryphal history, anachronism, and also by Magic Realism in which history and fantasy mingle with each other (McHale 16-25). In an Apocryphal history, spacetime of events in the past are distorted or subverted to produce a reading from a new perspective. Here the certainty of events happening in spacetime is challenged. What we have always regarded as events are the highly debated, reported, and important historical incidents which a majority had perceived in spacetime; this is a kind of blind following of an absolute spacetime. But in an Apocryphal history multiple perspectives are utilized. A plot (very familiar) will be narrated, based on a spacetime in the past, from the point of view of a narrator who observes it from a different angle in spacetime. Consider The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. In this novel, which is a historical account of incidents set in the period of the Second World War, the narration is made from the point of view of a butler named Stevens. He narrates incidents which had happened in the mansion of his master, where he too had played a small, but significant, role in the matters which were related to Britains policies during the Second World War. What we get is a new history, a new account of events, a new spacetime being projected on our senses; a manipulated version of spacetime, the past, and history. Magic Realism too can be observed to present us with a spacetime where the familiar is seen flowing with the fantastic. Notable figures in this genre include Gunter Grass, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J.G. Ballard, Thomas Bernhard and others. Magic Realism originated from South America

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where novels were written which projected a spacetime in which there were surrealist elements. Salman Rushdie considered Magic Realism to be a product of third world consciousness. A marginalised space was coming up to the fore with a completely distorted narration of history, which many had regarded as true, and some had considered elitist. Magic Realism, as the name suggests, also contained realistic elements, yet these were molded differently using postmodern techniques of the unreliable, yet, self-conscious narrator and by the abandoning of linear narration in spacetime. In characterization also there is a genuine methodology followed by magic realist writers. Characters are mostly empowered with magical powers which helped them to distort the space and time of their narrative. The narratives of such characters are mostly fragmented and jumbled up with a shifting and contradictory point of view, circular and repetitive time scales, labyrinthine plots, the doubling of events (Travers 219). Salman Rushdies Midnights Children is to be considered a seminal work in Magic Realism and postmodern fiction. It deals with the story of 1001 children born at midnight of August 15, 1947, the day India received independence. The incidents in the novel are not narrated in a realistic fashion and disregard the chronological ordering of spacetime. There are often sudden jumps made into the future and the past; the novel even ends in an ambiguous fashion with the narrator Saleem Sinai predicting his future. Saleem is an unreliable narrator; hence the events that he has narrated are not to be taken as events which had actually happened in spacetime. He narrates the history of his family which spreads out to around 70 years. This is another

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example of how history can be fiction and fiction history. A spacetime of 70 years is used to narrate events happening in three countries India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Questions can be asked on the reliability of the events in spacetime which have happened over a long period and a wide space. This also points towards the unreliability of grand narratives. Magic is in itself a term that signifies something extraordinary. In fiction, supernatural events, characters, fantastic creatures are all considered alongside the term magical. Magic realism is dominant when observing fiction where reality is questioned, a fantastic interpretation of reality is done. Whatever considered to be natural is made to seem quite super-natural. Magic realism seems to question the very credibility of the use of language to portray the world in a realistic framework. No matter how perfectly suitable language is for communicating ideas or representing reality, it is still unable to capture life to the fullest. The artistic possibilities of this limitation are exploited by magic realism. Events are presented in a spacetime where the very authenticity of absolute spacetime or linear spacetime is questioned. In magic realist works spacetime is presented as both historical as well as fantastic (immortal, timeless). Spacetime is presented as cyclic and not linear. Incidents recur and the characters seem to be caught in a spacetime which offers not much possibility for redemption. Consider the structure of Gabriel Garcia Marquezs novel One Hundred Years of Solitude; the novel has an abrupt beginning, with the incident of the firing squad, and this is followed by a very long flashback. This testifies to the fact that spacetime is not ordered or linear, in the magic realist world spacetime moves, yet the

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pattern of its movement is irregular and labyrinthine. The past seems to be ever present and, occasionally, the future seems to have already happened. In Marquezs novel, certain events keep returning to the framework of the present, even as we observe spacetime turning the leaves of generations. The constant shifting in narrative as presented in a chaotic spacetime points towards a reality which is outside the realm of spacetime. The repetition of events already happened in a particular spacetime can be seen in Ben Okris The Famished Road. Azaro, the spirit child, his father and his mother all have similar experiences of fighting with spirits of the other world. The recurring image of the novel seems to be his fathers boxing matches with mortal and supernatural beings. The novel expertly amalgamates the fantastic and the real spacetime. Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse also presents elements of magic realism. Hesses presentation of the Magic theatre, where the fantastic mingles with the seemingly real, can be cited as a forerunner for magic realist novels which would be written later in the era. Magic realism points towards abolishing this world view of a limiting spacetime where boundaries dominate. Magic realism is a critique of the possibility of representation in that it blurs the boundaries between what is magical and what is real and thus calls into question accepted definitions of either (Marshall 180). Magic realist writers never fully disregarded history, but they paced their preoccupation not just with the past but also with the present hence a new hybrid spacetime evolved where events actually happened in no- spacetime, a spacetime

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which is familiar yet fantastic, a different universe where a different spacetime worked. Such efforts by writers of postmodern fiction can be seen as attempts to reduce the authority of spacetime, an entity which was master to all is now made a slave in the hands of writers who show us how easy it is to dethrone spacetime from its position of power. The dreadful state of a society governed by order which has been imposed by spacetime can be seen in Anthony Burgesss A Clockwork Orange. In the novel, which is dystopian, there is a severe criticism upon the ordering of the society and how the people might become violent, soulless occupants if an authority tries to radically order things in spacetime. This kind of excessive ordering reduces humanity to mere machinery and hence was disregarded by postmodern novelists. There is also a corruption of the present in postmodern fiction. It disorders the linear coherence of narrative by warping the sense of significant time, kairos, or the dull passing of ordinary time, chronos (Sim 124). Kairos is associated with novels like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, which relies a lot on epiphany and disclosure. Chronos is associated with realist writing which follows a linear narrative pattern. This also undermines the fact that postmodern writing is characterized by temporal and spatial disorder. Postmodernist writers also use the technique of fragmentation in order to reduce the significance of ordering events in spacetime. Plot, character, setting and theme are all mashed-up into a form which challenges the very notion of ordering, linearity and absolutism. Postmodernist writers have disregarded the wholeness and completion associated with traditional stories and prefers to deal with other ways of structuring narrative (Sim 127). They do this

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using several techniques, one is the use of multiple endings where the novelist challenges the very notion of linearity; postmodern novels never really end. There are also other methods to make a novel open ended, inconclusive and free of the domain of linear spacetime. This is done by, breaking up the text into short fragments or sections, separated by space, titles, numbers or symbols (Sim 127). What this does is that it confuses the reader on the reality of the space where events are unfolding, a questioning of the very nature of order and spacetime is generated and this leads to further disregard of the authority of spacetime. Take Donald Bathelmes Snow White. Barthelme uses the fragmented narration which includes methods like collage. He includes various discourses including advertisement boards in the narrative space of the novel. Metafiction, a postmodern construct, expertly reminds the reader of the fictional status of a work. It reminds the reader time and again of its own conception. In metafiction the writer gets directly involved in the narration, can be seen often interacting with the reader seeking their opinions or giving advices. The narration hence loses its flow, spacetime gets disrupted. An attempt is made by the writer, who had scripted the work during a certain period of spacetime, to communicate and to participate in a spacetime which would comparatively be in the future. The writer interacts with the reader while s/he reads the work, hence at a moment in the now or present. This expertly disrupts our notions of past, present, and future in the domain of spacetime. Thus spacetime in terms of hours, days, years is replaced by durations which can be contracted into an eternity or dilated into a moments

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epiphany. A work which utilizes metafiction also attempts to fuse a real spacetime with the imaginary reality of the text. This can also be regarded as an attempt to include the humanistic concerns of traditional narratives with the completely contrasting narrative of postmodernism a fusion of spacetimes. Italo Calvinos If on a Winters Night a Traveler came towards the end of a body of writing which had been largely devoted to exploring the relationship between text world (Travers 210). The novel by Calvino is cited as one of the best examples regarding the meta-narration or metafiction. The novel: Playswith all the conventions of the discourse of fiction: psychological characterization, linear narratives, the assumption of a real world that is being transcribed. All are abandoned in favour of pure playfulness, which is manifested through the novels fusion of real and imagined scenes, its false correspondences, its microscopic depiction of objects and bodily gesture, and its leitmotific, almost musical narrative structure. (Travers 211). Relativity triumphs here, where the text as such is not just a mere island, a self contained space, but a multiple universe of spacetimes. An intriguing feature of postmodernism is the desire for theorists to practice what they preach and for artists to preach what they practice (Sim 235). This is highly relevant when read in relation to Umberto Eco. His semiotic space with its universe of signs gets due representation in his novels. There is a blurring of boundaries between academic and fictional writing. Umberto Eco has always

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fascinated his readers with his versions of subverted histories, he can be regarded as a modern day potter who moulds and remoulds the clay of history and plays with the realm of spacetime. Eco has always shown interest in pursuing matters or topics related to the Middle Ages. This tendency to represent the middle ages in works of fiction postmodern fiction is highly popular. Ecos The Name of the Rose expertly fuses the medieval, the semiotic, and the postmodern realm into a single work. It pays homage to traditional plots by using a framework of a murder mystery which is used as a backdrop to foreground the ideas of the author. The mystery is related to the investigation of bizarre murders, in a gothic monastery of the Franciscan monks, by a Benedictine monk William of Baskerville (resounding The Hound of Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a Sherlock Holmes mystery). William too is a character structured around the likes of Holmes, the power of deduction is to be observed in both. William is assisted by a young novice Adso (who is the Doctor Watson of Ecos narrative). The focus of attention is always on the labyrinthine library of the monastery. The library can be regarded as a representative of a temporal maze. Spacetime in postmodern narrative does not exist as a complete entity, self sufficient in itself. There is no pattern in such a spacetime. There is no linearity and hence the plot is made more confusing and complicated. In a labyrinthine view of spacetime, spacetime has no beginning or end, yet it is not circular time. A work of metafiction where a text with its own spacetime is placed inside a text with a different spacetime creates a sense of a maze or labyrinth.

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The plot of The Name of the Rose is complicated with the missing of the key to solving the mystery which is Aristotles famous lost book on comedy, which was considered as a threat to the ideologies of the church. This novel is the first of its kind from Ecos universe which would continue to challenge notions of spacetime and its linearity. The plot of the murder mystery, the characterization of William and Adso (Holmes and Watson), the labyrinthine library, the text of Aristotle all are contained in a single spacetime of the novel which gives us the impression not of a single spacetime but of multiple interrelated spacetimes seen in a symbiotic relationship. Ecos Foucaults Pendulum continues with this tradition with a suspense filled thriller, a complex ridiculing of secret sects and myths related to the Holy Grail. While in The Name of the Rose it was the library which represented the labyrinthine feature of the novel, this novel by Eco is in itself a complex maze. The narration is done by Causaubon a scholar who is researching on the topic of the Knights Templar, a topic which has achieved mythical identity, and who is also a businessman in Milan. His thirst for knowledge is limitless and he is ready to pay any price for the information that he seeks. He is assisted by Jacopo Belbo and Diotallevi. Their popular pastime is ridiculing of anyone who takes himself seriously. The issue of metafiction and multiple spacetimes arises when in an episode the three friends enter into their computer all the information, all the hermetic plots that were ever written. The result is an amalgamation of information, of spacetimes into an alternative history a subverted mass history. The information they get is presented as a much more perfect and ordered history. But the fact is that the characters themselves acknowledge the

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fact that they have recreated history which is a true presentation of false facts. The world of absolutes comes tumbling down and with it the absolute nature of historical spacetime. Temporal disorder, fragmentation, vicious circles, labyrinthine metafictional narratives are some techniques which the narrators of postmodern fiction have used to toy or play with the presence or absence of spacetime. Linear and absolute spacetime has disintegrated thoroughly, yet whenever the question of form or narrative space comes up in fiction the problem of spacetime appears. In postmodern fiction there is a total collapse of firm foundations, principles and paradigms. With it the dominance of spacetime also fades. Postmodern writers appear to be utterly undetermined on the sense of spacetime. While in modernist fiction spacetime was subjective concentrating on a private time, Postmodern novels took things further by seeing unlinearity everywhere: now, not only personal time but public time melted into flux, as writers stressed the ways that it too, had no basis in reality (Matz 141). Umberto Ecos The Island of the Day Before is in this sense a final response to all the confusion surrounding spacetime in fiction; scientific debates on spacetime which got due representation in works of fiction find a culmination in this novel. The Island of the Day Before is the final nail on the coffin of the dominance of spacetime.

55 Chapter 3 Spacetime Inception: An Ecoan Analysis

what did you expect to see? (Matthew 11:7).

This is one of the questions that Umberto Eco presents before the reader through his novel The Island of the Day Before. This is no mere questioning of the readers sensibility of a text but also of her/his awareness of the presence of spacetime in a narrative. The Island of the Day Before is a typical postmodern novel, with all its constructs, including fragmentation, pastiche, textualized history, non linear narrative and a labyrinthine framework. Postmodern fiction has always tried to disown the numerous constrains imposed on its creation by the ideologies of spacetime. Through this novel which was published during the mid 1990s, a period when postmodernism had already wrecked havoc on the concept of spacetime, Eco displaces the dominance of spacetime in narration. Eco literally plays with the ideologies of spacetime and entangles and jumbles it up within the narration. By doing so, Eco successfully belittles the very presence of a grand narrative like spacetime. In a spatiotemporal maze set by Eco, spacetime and the numerous ideologies associated with it fades into a state of absence. Eco does this through challenging the notions of history, using several metafictional techniques and through effective foregrounding of various debates related to the question of spacetime. Thus through the presenting of

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spacetime in an excess in the narrative of the novel, Eco underlines the illusionary nature of this excessive presence called spacetime. Ecos text also deals with not just the narrative techniques associated with spacetime, but also with the scientific ideas related to spacetime. Are we capable of travelling into our past, our yesterdays? Is it possible to travel into the future? Is there any reality in past or history? While science fiction works usually deal with the theme of spacetime-travel, popularized by H. G. Wells in his The Time Machine, science especially physics has always been unsure about the possibilities of it. Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and many modern physicists have propounded on the possibility of spacetime-travel by using the theories of Einstein, quantum mechanics, and latest technology. Observe Stephen Hawking as he propounds on the possibilities of time travel: Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I'm not so cautious. In fact, I'm more like the people who built Stonehenge. I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do - at the fourth dimension. It's not as hard as it sounds. Every attentive schoolchild knows that all physical objects, even me in my chair, exist in three dimensions.

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Everything has a width and a height and a length.But there is another kind of length, a length in time. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years. And the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension (STEPHEN

HAWKING: How to build a time machine). But Ecos preoccupation is not with the very act of spacetime-travel, but by using it as one of the major themes in the novel he expertly dictates to us our pseudo notions regarding spacetime. For Eco spacetime is more of a metaphysical entity, it is more in the psyche of the men who contemplate on it. Teachings of J. M. E. Mc Taggart and Julian Barbour, which regard spacetime as mere illusion, are to be considered here to decipher Ecos ideas. Mc Taggart in his The Unreality of Time presented his views on spacetime being an illusion. Julian Barbour also expounded on the unreality of spacetime in his book The End of Time. Using several of scientific ideas, narrative postmodern strategies, and his masterful story-telling Eco dethrones spacetime from its position as a flawed grand narrative. In The Island of the Day Before Eco presents a complex pastiche of historical narratives, semiotics, romance, philosophy, scientific discussions and religious debates. Eco faithfully follows the popular postmodern technique of using a romantic tale as backdrop to foreground numerous complex ideas. The main plot deals with the life and experiences of Roberto della Griva. Robertos ship, the Amaryllis, gets

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destroyed at sea by a storm. With the help of a fellow ship-mate Roberto escapes on a wooden plank. The twist in the tale is made right at its onset by Eco, the waves do not carry Roberto safely to land but he arrives instead on board another ship called the Daphne. Thus literally Roberto gets ship wrecked on a ship. He explores the ship to find it fully provisioned with barrels full of pure water, a huge collection of exotic plants, fruits and birds, and food enough to sustain him for a long time (time until Eco decides to dispose of him). Roberto finds that the ship is anchored in a bay which separates two pieces of land, one of which is an island. On further exploring the ship Roberto understands that the crew is missing, and so is the boat. To add to all this Roberto does not know how to swim; all escape routes are thus cut by the narrator (Eco). Thus, for the present, Roberto is all alone on the ship. With nothing to do he starts exploring the Daphne in detail, simultaneously narrating his life story. Roberto is a Quixotic figure who had a great taste for romances during his youth. He was the only son and heir to the Pozzo di San Patrizio family who belong to the minor nobility, and who were lords of the vast estate of La Griva which was situated along the border of Alessandria. Roberto gets his first lessons in swordsmanship and horse riding from his father Pozzo. A typical day for Roberto would be in spending: time without friends, daydreaming of distant lands as he wandered, bored, through the vineyard, or falconry if he was hunting swallows, or combating dragons as he played with his dogs, or hidden treasure as he explored the rooms of their little castle or fort, as it could also be

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called. His mind was inspired to wander thus by the dusty volumes of romances and chivalric poems he found in the south tower (Eco 21). A Carmelite occasionally visits the family and Roberto is given lessons on the ways of the world. This Carmelite introduces Roberto to a certain powder of sympathy. On an occasion when Pozzo cuts himself while polishing a sword, this Carmelite uses the powder to heal him. The powder is not applied on the wound as such but on the blade which caused the wound, it is effective and Pozzo miraculously heals. The Carmelite explains that the powder (or unguent), adhering firmly to the sword, drew out those virtues of iron that the sword had left in the wound, impending its healing (Eco 22). This powder of sympathy would later prove vital in Robertos understanding of the quest for longitudes. Roberto later formulates the image of an evil twin brother Ferrante on whom he blames all the evil and misfortune that befalls him. This can be regarded with relation to the psychoanalytical concept of the doppelganger or the alter ego. Ferrante would later play a major role in the plot. Roberto is forced to participate in the Thirty Years War because of his noble and chivalric father Pozzo. At Casale, where they arrive and stay during the war, Roberto befriends Saint-Savin, a skeptic and atheist. His theories against religion have a profound influence on Roberto. Robertos father dies valiantly at war, but his sacrifice seems quite wasted because in the larger picture of the war, which benefits only the powerful lords, contributions made by many are forgotten. Roberto gets injured during the war which affects his eye power, bright light of the day becomes unbearable for him. Later Saint-Savin is

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accidentally killed and Robertos wooing of a local village beauty becomes a disaster. Heartbroken and confused, he leaves for his estate at La Griva. After the death of his mother, he settles all his accounts and leaves for Paris. Paris Transforms Roberto. Here he learns more about science and much about the powder of sympathy. Paris provides him with hope of re-kindling his amorous thirst and he falls for Lilia who would become Robertos unattainable beloved, a lady to whom Roberto never opens his heart. Robertos speech on the powder of sympathy at a Paris club catches the attention of the authorities headed by Cardinal Mazarin. He is a ruthless individual whose sole wish is to gain power over the sea by cracking the longitudinal problem. He threatens to put Roberto in prison unless he agrees to act as a spy on behalf of the French authorities to obtain the answer behind the problem of the longitudes by boarding a ship called the Amaryllis which is heading on an expedition funded by the British. Roberto gets on the ship and spies on a certain Dr. Byrd, who is using the principles of the powder of sympathy to calculate the longitudes. But misfortune befalls the Amaryllis and it gets destroyed by the storm. Except for Roberto all are consumed by the waves of the sea. Robertos solitary existence on the Daphne is disrupted on finding Father Caspar, who was hiding on board. He is a Jesuit priest and a philosopher who is also seeking the answers to the longitudinal problem. Roberto gets educated on numerous topics by Father Caspar and it is from him that Roberto comes to learn of the curious paradox related to the Island. According to Father Caspar the Island that they observe is the Island of Solomon. Father Caspars highly believable ramblings

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fascinate Roberto to such an extent that he starts to believe Caspars claims on the prime meridian. According to Caspar the prime meridian is passing right through the area near which the Daphne is anchored. The Island and the ship are hence on two different time scales. Roberto slowly realizes that the time scale of the Island and that of the ship where he stands have a difference of nearly twenty four hours. Thus the Island that he sees is actually that of the day before or he is observing a yesterday. The Island and the spacetime paradox which it offers becomes an obsession for Roberto. The idea of his setting foot on the Island of the day before, or his travel to his yesterday thus becomes his sole purpose. But both Roberto and Father Caspar cannot swim. There is no boat on the ship, the absence of which and of the crew is revealed by Father Caspar. The crew had abandoned ship when Father Caspar fell gravely ill, when he gets stung by an insect on one of his visits to the Island. Taking Caspars illness to be the signs of a plague, the Crew abandons him on the ship and takes refuge on the Island; only to be brutally murdered and devoured by cannibals. Father Caspar recovered from his illness later on but without the boat he too was unable to reach the Island. Roberto is later forced to take swimming lessons but fails to learn much. Father Caspar suggests the use of one of his contraptions, an underwater bell which would work like a modern day diving suit to reach the Island. Roberto and Father Caspar part, yet Caspar never emerges from the sea after submerging in it using his underwater bell.

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Roberto is alone yet again. With prospects of escape all around, yet prospects which in themselves seem illusionary, Roberto decides to do whatever he can to reach the Island. A swim to the Island is regarded by him as a trip from an uncertain future, a painful present into an all rectifying yesterday. By such a spacetime travel Roberto weighs his possibilities of possessing his beloved Lilia also. Yet on finding it impossible to swim due to the strong currents which surround that area of the sea, Roberto decides to give up on his hope of reaching the Island. After freeing all the birds on the Daphne, he succumbs to the embrace of the sea and of death. He planted his feet against the wood, thrusting himself forward to move away from the Daphne, and after following the side of the stern, he left it forever (503). Ecos novels usually deal with a medieval historical theme. In The Island of the Day before, Eco presents historical incidents like the Thirty Years War and the quest to find a solution to the longitudinal problem. But the history presented is not an exact account of events that had happened in the past, or were the exact events as recorded by historians. It is mostly a critique of historical narratives. Through the representation of historical events as textualized history or fictional history, eco expertly destroys the very sensibility of chronological ordering of events in spacetime. It is a questioning of the arranging of events in a linear spacetime. Eco presents a subverted history in which Robertos personal experiences are more vividly described rather than describing in detail the actual historical events. The very linear nature of spacetime is challenged by Eco through the presentation of a subverted history. The historical narrative is not ordered, incidents are not narrated with absolute clarity, and

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jumps are made from a spacetime in the present to a one in the past and back numerous times during the narrative. These kind of techniques together with the presentation of history from the perspective of a fictional character Roberto adds to Ecos total disregard for historical narratives and thus for linear spacetime. In the opening chapter itself Eco underlines the claim that he is no admirer of exact dates which seem to be so vital for a historical narrative. With an uncertain beginning he questions the notions of chronological ordering in spacetime: Thus with Unabashed conceits, wrote Roberto della Griva presumably in July or August of 1643 (1). Eco keeps himself at a safe distance by presenting the narrative as a historical account of Roberto, yet what he proves is that history can be very subjective, it can vary from person to person. The unsure dates, the use of a non-committal term like presumably makes this historical narrative more uncertain. Eco keeps us puzzled over the spacetime in which the narrative unfolds. A historical event like the Thirty Years War is presented by Eco, but the focus is not on the events which are usually recalled in such a narration but on the marginal, farcical events which are mostly omitted from grand narratives due to their unimportance. It is Robertos history and hence incidents like those in which his father dies valiantly, yet without being remembered in the greater picture, is presented in detail: He (Robertos father) then rode outsideand galloped like a fury, his sword raised, against the enemy host.As proof of his courage, it was good; as a military action, very bad. A ball struck his forehead and he slumped (75). History

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as a grand narrative which affects the life of all human beings in a universal way is ridiculed by Eco. Ecos treatment of the historical incidents relating to the longitudinal problem is also quite subverted. During the mid seventeenth century efforts were going on to solve the mystery of the longitudes. Sailors could easily calculate the latitude using the positions of the sun and the stars in the horizon. But longitude calculation needed to be done by careful measurement of time. Ships got lost at sea or met with disasters. In The Island of the Day Before Eco, as the narrator, accepts that in those days this problem was a major issue: I imagine that in those days, and on those seas, more ships were wrecked than returned safely home (14). But his presentation of this quest for longitude is in itself a non linear and fragmented one. He mixes historical incidents with a huge amount of fiction. There is the detailed presentation of a certain powder of sympathy which was used to calculate exact time. The clocks which he finds on the deck of the ship testify to the fact that efforts were going on to produce a time-measuring device that would help solve the problem: The storeroom received light from another gun-port, and it contained clocks. Clocks. Water clocks, sand clocks, solar clocksmechanical clocksclocks moved by the slow descent of weights (149). Roberto himself realizes that these numerous clocks were indeed being used to find a solution to the longitudinal problem: What were so many clocks doing on a ship headed for seas where morning and evening are defined by the course of the sun(it should be) to seekel Punto Fijo!(the prime meridian) (152).

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What history tells us is that the solution to this problem was found by the mid eighteenth century. This would later assist in ordering regions in spacetime and indirectly facilitate colonization. Observe Cardinal Mazarin echoing the intentions of a French colonizer who seeks to sort things out with the answer to the longitudinal problem: The proof is that whereas we know enough perhaps of the New World, we know little of the Very Newhow empty of lands the other part of that globe still appears (187). Through this revelation Roberto comes to know about, the relentless struggle among the nations of Europe to gain that secret (198). With him we also come to know how the cracking of that problem made spacetime a dominant entity throughout the world. The question is what good did come out of such ordering in spacetime? The very presentation of the farcical methods used in a very serious manner by Europes elite scientists and thinkers points towards the meaninglessness of such ventures, quests to manipulate spacetime. Our memories of such actual events as narrated in historical texts is ridiculed by Eco. By mixing historical facts with fictional events of Robertos life, Eco also destroys our notions of history as a linear, purposeful process. It was all an elitist agenda to benefit only a few. The larger population was fed with an illusion of participating in the grand design of the world and was hence expertly hoodwinked. Roberto is Ecos representative of the postmodern man who has seen through the conceits and deceits of history, having seen history now as a place rich in whims and incomprehensible plotshe learnedhow treacherous was the great machine of the world, plagued by the iniquities of chance (108). By critiquing

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history Eco blurs the very boundaries that had separated history from fiction. History was seen as objective and universal. In the novel we find personal histories, textualized histories, non linear presentation of events and a general disregard for order, an order which was actually an illusion. This is a severe blow on the dominance of spacetime. Eco also critiques the various grand narratives including that of the church which used to persecute scientists who brought up theories which could prove fatal for the various teachings of the church. Eco expertly presents spacetime also as a grand narrative which had, has, and is still playing a dominant part in influencing our contemplation of the world around us. Grand narratives or metanarratives are being rejected in the postmodern period as illusionary. Grand narratives rely on the past to explain the present, while postmodernism does the reverse. There is a rejection of the past which was considered as a controlling and signifying force for the present time. Grand narratives present things as if happening in an ordered, actual spacetime with a beginning and end. This is a manipulation of our sensibilities into believing in a state of order and equality where everyone follows the same spacetime. Father Caspars views on the great flood, the genesis and his wrong notions of time are presented to ridicule the theological teachings of that era which were completely wrong and which presented a false picture of spacetime. Observe how Father Caspar believes time actually began with the creation of heaven and earth as mentioned in the Genesis:

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Life arrives on the fourth day, when the moon and sun and stars are created toseparate day from night.The sun and the moon, establishing our day and our night, were the first and unsurpassed model of all future clocks, whichmark human timea time that has nothing to do with cosmic time: it (human time) has a direction, an anxious respiration composed of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and not the calm breathing of Eternity (257). Father Caspars idea of god using the water from yesterday to cause the great flood is indeed very enlightening: God then took from this abysso the water of yesterdayand emptied it on the world of today, and the next day the same, and so on! (266). Eco presents spacetime also as a grand narrative which deeply influences our sensibilities and our very existence. Roberto is presented as the example for men who become intoxicated with the notions (wrong notions) of spacetime. The idea of the island which is set in a yesterday becomes an obsession for Roberto: the Island Roberto saw before him was not the island of today but that of yesterday. Beyond that meridian it was the day before! (337). From the Island, Robertos focus shifts to the yesterday which he craves to possess. Robertos intention seems to be a sort of time travel into the past where he can rewrite his life yet again, rectifying all his past mistakes. Robertos wish to live life anew through a trip back in time shakes his senses and affects his reasoning power, providing him false hopes and ridiculous possibilities: another illusion was forming. Roberto now was sure that the only

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escape from his reclusion was to be found not in unbridgeable Space but in Time. Now he truly had to learn to swim and reach the Islandto arrest the horrid advance of his own tomorrow (340). Spacetime ideologies take a sinister form and they offer escapist possibilities, the focus is shifted to rectifying of a past or hoping for a better future, there is a rejecting of the one important part which is living in the now or the present moment. Robertos attitude of considering his exile on the Daphne as an: endless today, whose future lay only in arriving, some tomorrow, at the day before (345). Eco presents us with the solution to escape from the clutches of the wrong notions of spacetime, which is presented as a grand narrative which leads Roberto to near madness. The solution is presented in a symbolic fashion: he (Roberto) flung into the sea all the clocks, not thinking for a moment that he was wasting valuable time: he was erasing time to favor a journey against time (502). This is to be considered as a reply to the state of confusion and paranoia caused by the ideologies, grand narrative of spacetime. Spacetime and its illusionary nature is further asserted by Robertos experience on his arrival on the ship Daphne; He must have slept twenty-four hours. This is only an approximate calculation: it was night when he woke, but he was as if reborn. So it was night again, not night still. He thought it was night still (2). Eco thus focuses on the fact that spacetime relies on our experiencing of events and these experiences generate in us a feeling of spacetime. When we fail to experience an event, the event ceases to exist and with it the presence of spacetime. Roberto sleeps for nearly twenty four hours on the Daphne after his ordeal at sea. He thus wakes up at night time,

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having slept the previous night. But he wrongly assumes it to be the same night that he arrived on the Daphne. The perception of change is thus vital in perceiving the passing of spacetime. Only on observing and analyzing change, we can discern the amount of spacetime that might have passed. Roberto becomes the voice of the narrator when he supports the notion of how important the phenomenon of change is in our perception of spacetime. While observing the Island, Roberto learns that only by perceiving change one can distinguish even the very existence of an object. Robertos poetic expounding on this fact and his support for the importance of perceiving change through ones own senses is seen when he exclaims colors depend on the object that affects them, on the light that is refracted in them, and on the eye that fixes them, thus even the most distant land appeared real to his excited and afflicted eyes.Perhaps tomorrow, or in a few hours time, that land would be different (66). While this points towards the importance of perceiving things in spacetime, it also questions the very concept of change. The phenomenon called change is represented by a constant flux, and spacetime relies on this idea of change. Thus spacetime exists with relation to eternal fluctuation. Spacetime is thus based upon baselessness. Eco thus cleverly makes up aware of the lack of credibility in the perception of events in spacetime Trust in a historical narrative is over. Thus the only method left is to represent a collection of images, styles which would generate the effect of the past in the present. Pastiche is thus used; it simulates and represents old spacetime in the present through the amalgamation of several forms. In the case of The Island of the

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Day Before, it is a pastiche of a historical novel, philosophical narrative, semiotic discussion, existential treatise, and chivalric romance. History with its spacetime mingles with a fictional spacetime. In the novel, the historical debates are fused with popular scientific discussions of that period. There are numerous debates on the existence of life beyond the earth, But what if, in the great void, infinite worlds are moving (139). Eco wrote this novel at the end of the second millennium, a period when similar scientific discussions were held on this topic, the novel thus reflects the spirit of the times. The longitude problem was a major topic of scientific discussion during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it also finds due representation in the novel. The use of the powder of sympathy, the method of the Jesuits and other such techniques are elaborately discussed. The romance of Roberto, Ferrante, and Lilia is interwoven with the other debates of the novel. An intriguing feature of postmodernism is the desire for theorists to practise what they preach, and for artists to preach what they practise (Sim 235). Eco is a world renowned semiotician and the novel The Island of the Day Before has a symbolic discussion of the orange dove. Ah, the dove was an image rich in meanings, all the more clever as each conflicted with the others (Eco 347). Thus begins Eco, taking his foot off the pedal for the duration of many pages to discuss on this symbol only. What pastiche does is that it makes a collage of several discussions, all in different spacetime, and presents a fragmented narrative. It effectively dumfounds the reader and dispatches her/him on a quest (a frustrating one) in search of coherence and order. Eco had already done this through his The Name of the Rose,

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where he sends the reader behind a string of clues. In the end, the hunt for a single textual meaning, or an absolute spacetime would prove to be pointless. Postmodern spacetime focuses only on the present moment. Spacetime would seem cyclic and fluctuating but there is no pattern as such. There is no coherence as such and no attempt is made to order the events being presented. Spacetime in non linear and hence an interpretation of the incidents presented and the obtaining of a meaning would be impossible. The reader is made an active participant in the narrative process; there is a merging of spaces, of the author and the reader. Eco as the narrator is seen interacting with the reader on several occasions in the novel. Metafiction is expertly used by Eco. The narrator is present throughout the novel breaking the flow of narration. Here we get a taste of his arrogance and sense of power: I will try to decipher his (Robertos) intentions, then use the terms most familiar to us. If I am mistaken, too bad: the story remains the same (8). Eco interacts with the readers and showcases how he can manipulate the narration of the text: unless the reader chooses to insinuatefrom now on I need him (Roberto) on deck full-timeI am freeing him from all illness, with authorial arrogance (280). The text takes the form of a labyrinth of texts (hypertexts) with multiple spacetime. In such a hypertext we can spot the use of intertextuality by the postmodern author. Eco also cleverly uses intertextuality, in The Island of the Day Before. Intertextuality is resorted to in postmodern novels to project the very process of writing fiction before the readers. It is a description of the fact that no text is self contained; it is a collection of texts. In The Island of the Day Before, Eco utilizes this

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technique of intertextuality when he presents references to his previous work The Name of the Rose: For the captain it was obvious that the books, having belonged to a plague victim, were agents of infectionhe had read of people who died by wetting a finger with saliva as they leafed through works whose pages had in fact been smeared with a poison (248). The text thus becomes more like a jigsaw puzzle. What this does is that it questions the need to order events in linear spacetime. The Island, which Eco presents as a timeless relic, a perfect illusionary, self contained text is never reached by Roberto during the course of narration. He sufferedbecause of the Island he did not have unattainablethrough its distancestood for a beloved who eluded him (68). Eco uses the framework of a labyrinth to distort wrong notions of spacetime. The temporal maze is popularly sought when dealing with existential ideas related to spacetime. The focus is only on the present moment. Metafiction, with its presentation of a text inside another text strengthens the notion of a temporal maze or spacetime labyrinth. This generates confusion on the exact spacetime and hence we start to treat spacetime as an unimportant presence. Roberto becomes the representative of the postmodern man who feels himself caught in a labyrinth. We observe that he is never actually living in the past, but the most vital part of his life is lived in the present, the now. In a labyrinthine spacetime there is no idyllic escape into a past or future spacetime, but the existence in the now.

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Eco strengthens the labyrinthine nature of the text by the use of multiple stories inside the text. In the novel we find Roberto himself engaging in the construction of a romance: He thought, namely, that he might construct a story, of which he was surely not the protagonist, in as much as it would not take place in this world but in a Land of Romances, and this storys events would unfold parallel to those of the world in which he was, the two sets of adventures never meeting and overlapping (367). Examine how we are presented with Umberto Ecos The Island of the Day Before, inside which is a narrators reframing of letters and notes by another person (Roberto), who himself presents another story where characters of his own creation take part in the action. A text within a text within a text, a labyrinth. What such a model of writing does is that it confuses the exact spacetime of the narrative, facilitating the rejection of spacetime as a dominant entity. Thus through numerous methods, by the use of science, philosophy, postmodern conceits Eco destabilizes the dominant state of spacetime both in the narrative field and in life at large (to an extent). The concept of relativity in spacetime relies on its association with scientific theories regarding the speed of light. Astronomical observations have proved that the light that we receive from the sun or the stars has to travel millions of miles in order to reach us, a period of spacetime is also spent for this. When we observe a star twinkling in the sky at night, it is not actually the star of today or this moment that we observe

74
but that of a spacetime far before this present, a long before yesterday. We can contrast this fantastic concept with Ecos presentation of an Island which is of the day before, an island of yesterday. Omitting the fact that both the scientific idea and Ecos fictional idea are fascinating, we find both steeped in illusion. A lot of our beliefs or our interpretations (misinterpretations) of scientific theories related to spacetime are based on illusions. Observe the problem of the longitudes or the quest to finding the prime meridian which Eco discusses in detail in the novel. Latitudes, longitudes, prime meridian are all mere illusions, constructs of human imagination. They are formulated just for the sake of convenience, for smooth navigation and for setting up of numerous unwanted boundaries. Gradually these concepts have broken from the barrier of mere utility value to become domineering entities. Spacetime thus began to influence our sensibilities. Eco is successful in proving that concepts like past, present, and future, associated with spacetime are just to facilitate our understanding of the wonderful universe around us. They are hypothetical theories, like the theories of Father Caspar. But innumerable Robertos, like us, become so enamored with such ideas that we become mindless slaves to spacetime and its dominance. The dominance of spacetime over the human psyche, social structures, culture, and science is overwhelming. Observe the number of books written on it, the numerous discussions on the topic of spacetime, scientific theories, philosophical propositions, fictional enrichments; spacetime has been made by us into a flawed grand narrative. Eco demystifies the grand narrative of spacetime and radically questions its relevance. Through his

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critique on spacetime in the novel he dethrones the state of powerful presence that spacetime holds and shuns this grand ideology to a marginalised state of powerless absence. Eco does not completely reject spacetime, but through his revelation of its unnecessary dominance over human psyche, our thinking and perceptions, he makes us aware of its illusionary nature, its gradually reducing strength and the need to channel its potentials. Realization is to dawn that spacetime is for man, not man is for spacetime. The New York Times reviewed The Island of the Day Before: Every age gets the classics it deserves. I hope we deserve The Island of the Day Before....Shipwrecked among archaic scientific nightmares and failed beginnings and dead ends of technology, we will recover the perennial hope of making sense of what happens to us (I). At the end sense has to dawn on us regarding spacetime, Ecos novel is an attempt, one among many to make us aware of the dominance of spacetime on our lives. Eco awakens our senses to observe the various wrong notions related to spacetime. Eco is not supporting chaos a state of total disorder by rejecting the order of spacetime, he is for the use of spacetime to reverse all its ill effects, the breaking of unnecessary boundaries imposed by spacetime, and the giving of free rein to the ideas in a human being and the promoting of a more flexible order of existence

76 Conclusion

The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco thus demystifies spacetime and the various ideologies associated with it. The text is a typical postmodern one where the narrative is fragmented and labyrinthine. Beyond the purpose of dethroning spacetime, what might be Ecos objective behind the presentation of a character like Roberto in a world or setting which has no particular order or meaning? What can be the motive behind disrupting the normal linear narrative in fiction and hurling spacetime into oblivion? Consider the character of Roberto. Roberto is a man who absorbed knowledge to which he was exposed as if he were a sponge, and was not distressed at believing in contradictory truths. Perhaps it was not that he lacked a taste for system; his was a choice (Eco 272). Observe how there is no questioning of knowing itself in Roberto, he never hesitates in taking in knowledge, he accepts everything without much doubts. Roberto does not consider the why? or what? while dealing with the process of knowing. Roberto conceded only half of his spirit to the things he believed (or believed he believed) keeping the other half open in case the contrary was true (Eco 272). We thus find in Roberto the typical postmodern man whose preoccupation is not with the questions of knowing but with the questions of being; as Brian McHale notes in his Postmodernist Fiction, a shift from an epistemological dominant to an ontological one. According to McHale, the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. The questioning of entities still remains, but the objects which are questioned changes. It is a questioning of the very

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world itself, of being, of existence. It is not that questions of knowing are completely omitted, but the priority has changed. Ontological questions are given more importance than epistemological questions. Of all the other characters in the novel, Roberto is different because unlike the others he is not self assured. Father Caspar has based himself on the teachings of the church and science, Saint-Savin stands firm on his atheistic attitude. But Roberto is always unsure; he is resigned and confused, in the end we see him finding consolation and faith in the illusionary idea of spacetime which he associates with the Island. He takes in anything and everything yet seems to accept nothing. He is controlled by no ideologies, yet he is always in one or the other state of crisis. The ship Daphne which is fully provisioned, which offers him safe abode, never gives him peace, he is seen always dissatisfied and mercurial. He seeks to escape from living in the present to a yesterday where he can rectify everything, future frightens him. To add to all this is his inability to swim. A swim to the Island of his yesterday is Robertos only obsession. This lack of ability to swim can be equated to the postmodern condition where an individual is seen lacking the skill to swim or to navigate expertly through the waters of his being or existence. His escapist attitude, state of confusion, lack of meaning in existence is typical of the postmodern man whose sole purpose is the questioning of his being. The novel in itself which fragments the narrative, questions the very restrictions being imposed on the narration by spacetime, and celebrates disorder can be seen as the perfect representative of the postmodern novel. The questions of

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knowing are entangled and negated by the labyrinthine narrative of the text. Distinction between what is real and what is fantasy is blurred and hence confusion arises on the very reliability of questioning to attain knowledge becomes meaningless. The presentation of Roberto who is a fictional character in a fictional world conceived by the narrator (Eco) searching for identity, who in turn creates another fictional twin brother Ferrante, who is also in a kind of quest for knowing in a world created by Roberto completely confuses the reality and challenges the very act of knowing. As Brian McHale says, the questions of knowing succumb to the proliferation of different worlds, which are hard to be distinguished as real or fantastic, and hence questions of epistemology succumbs to questions of ontology. Eco presents a character who has no base as such, who is continuously fluctuating; perfectly compatible in a world which lacks meaning or foundation, a world which is fragmented, where meaning is infinitely deferred. His unique predicament of being shipwrecked on a ship which offers possibilities of escape, but no escape can be seen as Ecos attempt to represent the postmodern world which is full of illusions ok escaping ones own predicament by knowing. Through Roberto Eco questions the very reliability of the act of knowing and foregrounds the need for questions of ontology, what world is this? What am I to do with it? And which of my selves is to do it?(Roberto or Ferrante?). Ecos text can be seen as an attempt to construct his own identity in a meaningless world. Roberto is to be taken as the focus of attention here to understand Ecos predicament. He too tries to attain the unattainable, the perfect Island which

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could be the representative of the unattainable identity which a postmodern man craves for. Knowing is not the purpose here but being itself and the questioning of being. Observe how Roberto finds an answer to his present condition, This was why he had been cast on the Daphne Roberto concluded. Because only in that restful hermitage would hereflect on the question(s) that free(s) us from every apprehension about not being and consigns us to the wonders of being (468). Only the radical questioning of our very being would enable us to construct an identity for ourselves. Roberto ruminates: What am I? If I say I in the sense of Roberto della Griva, I say so in as much as I am the memory of all my past moments, the sum of everything I remember. If I say I in the sense of that something that is here at the moment and is not the mainmast or the coral, then I am the sum of what I feel now. But what is what I feel now? It is the sum of those relations between presumed indivisibles that have been arranged in that system of relations in that special order that is my body (473). Roberto attempts to achieve a sense of being by travelling through spacetime. The traveling forward in spacetime to the Island metaphorically becomes a traveling backwards in spacetime. He never achieves it but in the process experiences what is being. Spacetime and the questioning of being is inseparable. Spacetime always brings with it the idea of positions, of presence and absence, of dimensions, of spatiality and temporality. A reading of Ecos The Island of the Day Before based on the various ideologies of spacetime is hence very illuminating. It helps us to

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understand Ecos universe as it is presented in his novels better. Through his presentation of a character like Roberto, in a fragmented world with a non linear spacetime, Eco seems to be attempting to present the essential condition of the postmodern man, who starts to realize the impossibility of any attempt to procure meaning. This thesis analyzed spacetime and its various aspects regarding its claims as an oppressive grand ideology. The study also focused on scientific, philosophical and cultural discourses related to spacetime. It was promptly deduced that scientific and philosophical debates on spacetime paved the way for its simultaneous reflection in literature and its subsequent domination over the fictional universe. Special emphasis was also laid on the scrutinizing of the dominating presence of spacetime in fiction as it evolved through the ages from early romances to postmodern fiction. Through a brief yet illuminating survey, the study found the gradual decline of spacetime dominance over the narrative structure, style and presentation of a novel. The analysis of Ecos The Island of the Day Before provided wonderful insights on the nature of spacetime. The study also found answers to how Eco used postmodern methodologies, combined with semiotics and personal flair to expertly demolish spacetime in his novel. The concluding chapter attempted to draw reasons behind the chaotic, meaningless, and fragmented world being presented in the novel by Eco. It was found that the main concern for a postmodern man is not knowing or the finding of meaning but being itself and the questioning of being. The idea behind this thesis was mainly to find the Hows? with minimal emphasis on the

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Whys?. The one great insight from this study is that sometimes the quest for the Hows? can be infinitely satisfying and enriching. The very process of finding coherence is to be considered as vital in this thesis. Acknowledgements are due to the wonderful novel The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco which provided one everlasting message on the reading of texts and of life itself Expect nothing, Enter, and Be Amazed!

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