Spatial immersion is often the result of a “madeleine effect” that depends more on the coincidental resonance of the text with the reader’s personal memories than on generalizable textual properties. Just as the taste and smell of a piece of madeleine dipped into a cup of tea took Marcel Proust back to the village of his childhood, a single word, a name, or an image is often all the reader needs to be trans¬ported into a cherished landscape—or into an initially hated one that grew close to the heart with the passing of time. (p: 121)
In the most complete forms of spatial immersion, the reader’s private landscapes blend with the textual geography ... [] ... The philosopher who pioneered the phenomenological study of the experience of space in literature, Gaston Bachelard, conceives spatial immersion in terms of security and rootedness. The titles of the various chapters of his book The Poetics of Space are all symbolic expressions of an intimate relation to a closed, enveloping environment: the house; drawers, coffers, and chests; nests; shells; corners; miniatures; and, in a conceptualization of open spaces as cozy habitat, “intimate immensity” and “the universe as house.” (p: 122)
These sedentary dreams stand in stark contrast to the “deterritorialization” and nomadism that have come to pass, under the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as the quintessential postmodern experience of space. Whereas Bachelard reflects on a “sense of place,” postmodern literature con-ceptualizes space in terms of perpetual movement, blind navigation, a gallery of mirrors, being lost in a not-always-so-funhouse, a self-transforming labyrinth, parallel and embedded universes, and discontinuous, non-Cartesian expanses, all experiences that preclude an intimate relation to a specific location. We could say that in Bachelard, space is sensorially experienced by a concrete, bounded body, while in postmodern literature its apprehension presupposes a dismembered, ubiquitous, highly abstract body, since real bodies can be in only one place at one time ... [] ... Yet if the nomadic, alienating space of postmodernism prevents an immersive relation, I would not go as far as to say that spatial immersion precludes travel. Textual space involves not only a set of distinct locations but a network of accesses and relations that binds these sites together into a coherent geography. A sense of place is not the same thing as a mental model of space: through the former, readers inhale an atmosphere; through the latter, they orient themselves on the map of the fictional world, and they picture in imagination the changing landscape along the routes followed by the characters. (p: 123)
... the textual universe cannot be a homogeneous Cartesian space with stable reference points but must be something more akin to the space of modern physics: a self-transforming expanse riddled with invisible black holes through which we are unknowingly sucked into parallel worlds. (p: 125)
In the most complete forms of spatial immersion, the reader’s private landscapes blend with the textual geography ... [] ... The philosopher who pioneered the phenomenological study of the experience of space in literature, Gaston Bachelard, conceives spatial immersion in terms of security and rootedness. The titles of the various chapters of his book The Poetics of Space are all symbolic expressions of an intimate relation to a closed, enveloping environment: the house; drawers, coffers, and chests; nests; shells; corners; miniatures; and, in a conceptualization of open spaces as cozy habitat, “intimate immensity” and “the universe as house.” (p: 122)
These sedentary dreams stand in stark contrast to the “deterritorialization” and nomadism that have come to pass, under the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as the quintessential postmodern experience of space. Whereas Bachelard reflects on a “sense of place,” postmodern literature con-ceptualizes space in terms of perpetual movement, blind navigation, a gallery of mirrors, being lost in a not-always-so-funhouse, a self-transforming labyrinth, parallel and embedded universes, and discontinuous, non-Cartesian expanses, all experiences that preclude an intimate relation to a specific location. We could say that in Bachelard, space is sensorially experienced by a concrete, bounded body, while in postmodern literature its apprehension presupposes a dismembered, ubiquitous, highly abstract body, since real bodies can be in only one place at one time ... [] ... Yet if the nomadic, alienating space of postmodernism prevents an immersive relation, I would not go as far as to say that spatial immersion precludes travel. Textual space involves not only a set of distinct locations but a network of accesses and relations that binds these sites together into a coherent geography. A sense of place is not the same thing as a mental model of space: through the former, readers inhale an atmosphere; through the latter, they orient themselves on the map of the fictional world, and they picture in imagination the changing landscape along the routes followed by the characters. (p: 123)
... the textual universe cannot be a homogeneous Cartesian space with stable reference points but must be something more akin to the space of modern physics: a self-transforming expanse riddled with invisible black holes through which we are unknowingly sucked into parallel worlds. (p: 125)
