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Terence Patrick Murphy

James Joyce and narrative territory: The distinct functions of lost time in “An Encounter” and “The Sisters”

In this paper, I explore the notion of lost time in critical accounts of narrative fiction. The paper begins by briefly exploring the work of the representative New Critics Brooks and Warren on the description of past time. I then move to consider the story/sequence distinction in the work of narratologists such as Genette, Chatman and Bal. As a bridge to the major discussion, I introduce Michael Toolan's Narrative (2001 [1988]) which attempts to explore how aspects of the narrative are revealed through key lexicogrammatical choices. I attempt to build on Toolan's basic insight about the importance of thematically marked sentences in a brief re-reading of the narrative discourse of Joyce's “Eveline”. In order to resolve a central difficulty in Toolan's analysis, I put forward a theory of narrative territory – the creation within the narrative discourse of a differentiated spatiotemporal continuum for the story events. Within the conceptual framework provided by the concept of the narrative territory, I then contrast the distinct functions of lost time in James Joyce's unmarked order fiction “An Encounter” and his marked order narrative “The Sisters”.

Journal of Literary Semantics, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0341-7638
Volume: 33, 10/2004
Pages: 131 - 154

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