Louis Marin -Utopiques: Jeux D’Espaces

Ch. 1., Story and Description

It will be helpful to state explicitly the intended point of the following illustrations and explanations.

More’s Utopia is not being featured in this module because it is the most pertinent one for our modern age, although you may be surprised by the relevance of many of the responses More puts into the mouths of his characters. It is instead featured because Marin uses it as the basis for his own argument about the place of utopian speculation within a social environment that is structured by ideology, so it is both Marin’s method of analysis that you need to attend to, but also his general argument.

This set of slides relates to his first chapter, and to get an overview of how it fits into the overall structure of Marin’s book, refer to the Word file attached to the webpage.

The second part of your second assignment asks you to use Marin’s argument and method as a source of worked examples to guide your own analysis of the text that you are featuring.

The first diagram refers to the ‘syntagmatic’ organisation of the narrative – the term means the necessary sequence in which one element follows another through the narrative. However, this diagram only relates to the setting up of Raphael’s story of Utopus and the country that he founded. In other words, it refers to the framing of Raphael’s account given in Book One, not the details of Utopia itself given in More’s Book Two. It remains for you to consider how the following illustrations, extracted from the discussion taking place in Bruges, are best related to your own text, but the various comments here, together with the extended quotes in the Word file, should help!

Marin constructs the following plan in order to track what he calls ‘transformations’, and his first question is to ask how geography gets inserted into the narrative, and then to ask what significance can be attached to this process. At its most literal the transformation is said to be brought about by introducing a sequence within the network of names that provides a kind of temporality that is at one and the same time that of a discourse moving through a syntagmatic sequence and that of a story told by an actor. This anthropomorphises the syntagmatic sequence of the text – the names are simple marks along the way, but also significations for selected topics that feature in the voyage.

In more detail, Marin suggests that the narrative should be understood as a closed circle (refer to the previous notes in Word). This makes the point of departure corresponds to the point of arrival, and the repetition of a particular ‘mark’ – Portugal – is the linguistic substitute for a sense of simultaneity. The circle also achieves something else. The repetition of the same name in the story implies the co-presence of the same elements in an iconic space – the syntagmatic line of the narration, turned back upon itself, works so as to create a boundary, and a closed, internal, stable space, differentiating between an interior within which the geographical connections are mapped, and an exterior space that literally exists in the narrative as terra incognita.

Narrative Schema of Raphael’s voyage in terms of its sequence (syntagmatic view), p. 66.

> Portugal >

< Ceylon <

Calcutta AmericaA

B

A versus B

A versus Non-A

said versus non-said, determined versus non-determined.

Sense of transformation

Portugal > America > Ceylon > Calcutta > Portugal

It would be possible to introduce into this transformative operation various metrics indicating the relative significance of elements within the syntagmatic line. In so doing one begins to move towards an indication of the paradigmatic dimensions within the narrative – meaning the selection made at a particular point in a sequence from the range of possible alternatives then available or thought to be appropriate.

In the following slide, Marin uses the pre-description given by Peter Gilles as a source and simply illustrates these paradigmatic potentials in terms of the apparent distance said to exist between the names making up the overall syntagm, e.g. Portugal is said to be very far from America, while Ceylon is close to Calcutta.

Schema of Raphael’s voyage transformed in terms of narrative emphasis, the paradigmatic dimension, p. 67. Portugal

America

Calcutta

Portugal

Ceylon

America Ceylon

Calcutta

Portugal

At this point, Marin reflects again on the significance of the line and the limit created by this closed circle of names. The narrative sequence creates a linked chain in which each link appears to be the result of a binary selection between the marked term and a term that is not mentioned, e.g., Portugal versus a Not-Portugal, America versus a Not-America, etc. The experience of the narration enforces differentiation within the totality of differentiations constituting the overall schema, and this restores analogically, albeit selectively, the known world. Marin also notes that the closing of the chain reproduces the circle structure that one associates with the geographical world, but also, through the marked binaries referred to previously, their structure implies the existence of a non-world, i.e., non-narrative world which is being excluded.

Marin concludes that these simple diagrams intended to identify a model with the story illustrate how narrative is capable of providing an equivalent to a world and implying an underlying structure.

He moves on to consider the combination of story with geography. He starts by remarking that the four names given in the account of Peter Gilles trace the limits within which the story of the journey must be expressed, but they do so in a remarkable fashion: they develop an equivalence between story and geography through the circular structure previously identified.

Leaving the garrison where Vespucci left them, Raphael sets off with five companions across land and sea, travelling via villages, towns, and well-administered, and densely populated states, until they reach a zone of vast, baking deserts which extend on either side of the equatorial line. But once this zone is passed, little by little the natural world becomes more agreeable: the sky is not so glaring, the soil is covered by sweet grass, and the wild animals are not so savage. Finally, people appear, as do towns and villages, etc. and this pattern continues by earth and by sea. The following schema transcribes the syntagmatic line of the voyage.

America

A well administered garrison with a large civil population

Equatorial line

Schema of Raphael’s story of the voyage, p. 69.

desert

(a)(b)

states

(c)

towns

(d)

villages

(e)(f)

Ceylon

desertsoil covered with soft grass

civilised people

towns

villages

(a’) (b’) (c’) (d’) (e’) (‘f’)

The symmetrical organisation on either side of the equatorial line is almost a chiasma of villages, towns, and states on the one side, and of people, towns, and villages on the other. Inside the circular structure which envelops the totality of a geography known only through the place-names given, Raphael’s story traces a diametrical line between America and Ceylon, a line which redefines the equatorial line by separating the geographical space and the story space into a world and an anti-world like the surface of an invisible mirror. The following diagram is intended to illustrate these ideas of miroring and circularity.

Schema of Raphael’s story of the voyage, p. 70.

Calcutta Portug

al

America

Ceylon

ab

cd

ef

a’b’

c’

e’f’d’

Equatorial line

Structure of Raphael’s voyage in terms of its key names, p. 71.

Portugal

AmericaCeylon Equator

Construction of the representation given for the Island of Utopia, p. 77.

Table showing the stories within Utopia, p. 83.

Contacts with the Old World

Contacts with the Other World

Profane Origin Sacred End

Story of Foundation

Opening

Closing

Subject: Utopus

Story of foundation

Closing

Opening

+

Subject: Utopus

-

Exterior Assimilation Interior

Exterior Expansion Interior

profane sacred

trader warrior