Spatiotemporal Schemas of Progress and Stasis in Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot: On Moving Forward and Going Round

Abstract

This article demonstrates how narrative sensemaking involves mapping social spaces onto physical structures with which they correspond image-schematically, focusing on the spatiotemporal coordinates of lines and circles as organizing principles of the storyworld in Rose Macaulay’s 1923 novel Told by an Idiot. This essayistic novel follows the Garden family from the late Victorian through the Georgian periods, reflecting on the interrelated patterns of circular stasis and linear progress that govern both generational dynamics within the family and their political, social and cultural backdrop. A key scene takes place on the “Inner Circle,” later the Circle Line, where two teenaged Gardens, Imogen and Tony, aimlessly ride the trains all day as they go round and round the looped track. The novel sets this pattern of circularity, repetition and stasis against that of the linear “Twopenny Tube,” now the modern Central Line, a route mainly used by commuters travelling to the city centre from outlying districts. I argue that Macaulay’s storyworld unites these two image-schematic structures of urban movement just as the model of history adumbrated in the text likewise involves a tentative union of stasis and progress. Macaulay thus establishes an isomorphic relationship between the spatiotemporal structure of Underground image schemas and the settings through which the novel’s characters move physically, socially, and historically. Reading fiction in this way, I propose, helps to uncover the role that spatiotemporality and isomorphic relationships play in patterning storyworlds, as the structures of the environments through which characters travel and within which events unfold are revealed as “significant forms” that figure in the encoding and decoding of narrative.

Keywords

• spatiotemporality
• rose macaulay
• told by an idiot
• history