Can someone explain ‘chronotopes’?
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Think about a short story like Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” It’s set within a single room during the course of a couple of hours. This setting obviously plays into the feeling of confinement and tension it conveys.
Now think of an epic novel, like Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. It takes place over the span of many years, and its characters travel across the world. This fits its expansive, weighty themes.
Consider also something very different, like “The Stars My Destination”, a sci-fi novel in which the main character learns instantaneous teleportation. In this setting, time and space are de-coupled from one another, and the plot is able to traverse vast amounts of space in small time periods or vice versa. This unusual relationship emphasizes the new ways of thinking that the book attempts.
The concept of chronotopes is that in the setting of a piece of literature, time and space are inextricably linked, not only to each other, but to the meaning of the work itself. To change that relationship–to suddenly leave a tight family drama to describe a large battle on another continent, for example–is to change the nature of the whole work.
As an aside, the concept is essentially a metaphor taken from the theory of relativity in physics, but it’s a very loose metaphor and you probably won’t learn much by trying to force relativistic concepts onto literature unless they’re explicit already.
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