the media, can result in a blunting and debasing of our awareness. On
the TV, for example, we are constantly fed what Jean Baudrillard has
called simulacra —that is, copies or imitations of events, rather than the
events themselves—to the point where the copy becomes indistinguish-
able from the original.
In many novels, different times and places are juxtaposed with each
other, often through a process of alternation. In Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s
Eye (1990), for example, the past is projected and anchored through the
consciousness of the narrator, Elaine, who remembers her relationship
with her friend and tormentor Cordelia. Structured around flashbacks and
flashforwards (or analepses and prolepses), the novel projects back into
Elaine’s relationship with Cordelia, and forwards into her fantasies about
what Cordelia might be like now. Most importantly for our purposes here,
the past city (the one they knew as children) is juxtaposed with the present
one. The text refers to the fact that time is actually a space, ‘Time is not a
line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space’ (Atwood 1990, p. 3).
But there is no confusion about what has happened in the past, and what
is happening in the present—the novel keeps them quite separate. They
are anchored through Elaine’s memory, and held together in a storyline
which relates them unequivocably to each other.
Some experimental texts, however, emphasise time–space compression,
and represent several times and places simultaneously. In such texts there
may be rapid, and abrupt, transitions between different temporal and
spatial dimensions. Such expressions of time and place often powerfully
convey how perception and memory superimpose events and impressions
without necessarily ‘sorting them out’ into a linear narrative. They can
demonstrate, at a formal level, the historical depth of any place, and the way
disasters, wars, power struggles, achievements, migrations and departures
accumulate (like layers of rock) over the years. They also demonstrate how
globalisation has produced an intricate web of relationships between
places, both economically and culturally, beyond the boundaries of the
nation-state.
Let’s look at some examples of this kind of time–space compression.
Examples of time–space compression
My piece ‘Secret Places’ Figure 12.1 (Smith 2000; see p. 272) resulted from
a collaboration with artist Sieglinde Karl. It was featured as part of an
installation in a number of art galleries, was included as a visual image,
and was also featured in a recorded version in the gallery space (a record-
ing of the piece can be heard on my website, Smith Ongoing). The text
refers to a larger-than-life figure of a woman made from casuarina tree
268 The Writing Experiment