Narrative Space

Definition

Narrative space is space that tells a story — built form treated as a medium of narration rather than a neutral container. The founding formulation in the wiki comes via Stokes-Rees, adopting Dvora Yanow's thesis: buildings — "museums in particular – are both storytellers and part of the story being told; the museum is both a house of material culture and an artifact itself. It presents itself to be read and deciphered as an integral part of the narrative alongside the displays." The concept rests on the communicative theory of built form (Lawrence & Low): built forms are "tangible evidence for describing and explaining the often intangible features of expressive cultural processes" that "play a communicative role embodying and conveying meaning between groups." The corollary is a refusal of the container model: museum space is "not simply a lifeless container to hold objects and visitors, but a dynamic participant in the interpretation of culture and the experience of identity."

In Stokes-Rees's case study, the narrative character of space is produced spatially: the Museum of Macau's "physical characteristics and structure have determined the narrative logic of the exhibition space" — a directed route through three floors staging a linear national progress ("Genesis" → "Popular Arts and Traditions" → "Contemporary Macau"), a narrowing corridor whose opposing walls of Western and Chinese civilization converge on a video box reading "MACAU," and a rooftop climax where "the whole of Macau is in view." Through such spatial vocabularies, "the museum building, through its spatial layout, organizes time and ideology within its walls," and the building's design is revealed as "an active agent in constituting knowledge and experience."

De Certeau supplies the concept's deepest theoretical ground, from the other direction: not space that tells a story, but story as a spatial operation. For him "narrative structures have the status of spatial syntaxes" — stories "traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories" (his name for them, after modern Athens's buses: metaphorai). "Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice," and — the hinge between narration and built order — stories "organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it." Where Stokes-Rees's museum is a building that narrates, de Certeau's stories are narrations that build: they "carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places" (practiced place). His announced toolkit — the map/itinerary distinction, boundary-marking (bornage), enunciative focalization — is the analytic grammar narrative space still awaits.

Carley's chapter adds the concept's literary-architectonic register: narrative structured as architecture and architecture as narrative puzzle. Life A User's Manual "describes a Parisian apartment building" whose chapter sequence is fixed by the knight's tour of a ten-by-ten chessboard and whose contents by a Latin bi-square — the novel's narrative "underwritten by rigorous constraints" — with "the complex art of jigsaw puzzling, inaugurating a dialogue between the puzzle maker and puzzler, the writer and the reader": "The puzzle becomes a metaphor for the literary constraints superimposed on the narrative… The reader needs to approach each chapter of the novel as a puzzle piece that relates to a larger story or picture." Where Stokes-Rees's space narrates a nation and de Certeau's story organizes walking, Perec's narrative is space generated — rooms, contents, and sequence produced by rule-governed composition (voluntary-constraints).

Key Thinkers

• Emily Stokes-Rees — develops the concept through the Museum of Macau: spatial configuration as narration, the directed path, "time traveling," and the building itself as "an integral exhibit object."
• Michel de Certeau — the theoretical ground in reverse: every story as "a travel story – a spatial practice"; narrative structures as "spatial syntaxes" (metaphorai); stories as the labor "constantly transform[ing] places into spaces or spaces into places."
• (Discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log: Dvora Yanow, the thesis that museum buildings are "both storytellers and part of the story being told"; Denise Lawrence & Setha Low, the built environment as communicative; Michaela Giebelhausen, the museum building as "evocative entity… in dialogue both with its content and urban context.")

Related Concepts

• Exhibitionary Complex — the disciplinary face of narrative space: the directed route as "a highly directed and sequentialized practice of looking."
• Symbiotic Spaces — the chapter's master concept: the mutually beneficial relation of museum, nation, building, and narrative that narrative space enacts.
• Interior Architecture — narrative space makes interior architecture a narrative art: "the narrative path of national history is controlled by the internal route one is encouraged to take through the museum."
• Postcolonial Identity — narrative space's highest stakes: the spatial rendering of a national past as "natural" — "a past in symbiotic relation to the present."
• Interiority — "the physical structure of narration is characterized by interiority and the progression from a beginning to a finishing point" — narration itself as an interior form.
• Memory — narrative space as commemorative practice: visitors "participate in the creation and maintenance of collective national identity" (after Connerton).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Symbiotic spaces (Stokes-Rees 2018) — the source that names the concept in the wiki: Yanow's storyteller-buildings; Lawrence & Low's communicative built form; the MoM's directed route, converging corridor, in-situ fortress walls, and rooftop panorama; "the museum itself is on display."

• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — narrative forms as the required method for decorative conventions: "The logic of color conventions cannot be grasped by theories of identity without an equivalent consideration of decorative variety and the attention to occasion, both of which require narrative forms for their exploration" (p. 61) — where Stokes-Rees's museum narrates publicly and institutionally, Braham's domestic conventions (the masculine library, the wall of books) narrate identity privately, through "the negotiation of identity and its discovery through representations." The concept's domestic register: the home's rooms and décor as small-scale narratives of the occupant's character. See wall-of-books, interiority.

• Territory and inhabitation (Campos 2018) — the portable register: the tapestry as "a virtual window to another highly embellished narrative territory regardless of the actual environment within which it resided," passing "between multiple generations, reinforcing family mythologies through their narrative depictions" — narrative space not built but woven, carried, and hung: a designed narrative environment whose frame travels with the family it narrates. See liberated-interior.

• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the reverse register: not space narrating, but narrative building rooms — "In a sense, each verse is a room shaped by the sick body's desire to escape from itself" (p. 71). Where the museum's route stages a national story, Stevenson's verses are rooms produced by a body: each poem "take[s] place in the night nursery," "inhabit[s] the land of the counterpane," "climb[s] the stairs" — narrative as the interior's generative medium, its rooms fictioned into being by the body's desire. See ubiquitous-body.

• The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — the paused-narrative register: via Mieke Bal's narratology, the waiting room is where "the narrative remains stationary" — "a pause where our attention is directed toward the fact that the passage of time has slowed down, a disruption to the flow of time and function, and a silence in the construction of the narrative." Narrative space here is not the directed route (the museum) but narrative held in suspension: "The opportunity to construct narratives out of static scenes through repetitive waiting and minimal signs of activity – the checking of a clock or lipstick, an exchange of glances – sees the room as a threshold between stasis and movement." The waiting room is narrative space at its pause point — stories made from stillness rather than sequence. See waiting-room, liminality.

• Spatial Stories (de Certeau 1984/2006) — the narration-makes-space register: narrative structures as "spatial syntaxes" regulating "changes in space… made by stories in the form of places put in linear or interlaced series"; stories as metaphorai that "traverse and organize places"; "every story is a travel story – a spatial practice" that "organize[s] walks… before or during the time the feet perform it"; and the transformative labor — "stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places" (pp 78–81). The theory beneath both the museum's directed route (a story laid into place) and the visitor's wayward practices (a place re-practiced into space). See practiced-place.

• Touch, Taste, Smell (Brown 2018) — the tactile register: narrative carried not by spatial layout but by the surface of the object. Where the museum's route stages a national story and de Certeau's stories organize walks, Brown's touch regimes narrate object-biographies: "The feel of the object's surface (tool marks, damage, blemishes, areas worn from repeated use) brings to life the narrative of its life, context, and cultural value" — the visitor's hand as the reading organ, wear and damage as the text. The living-history museum (Old Sturbridge Village) extends the register from object to world: visitors "experience a former way of life, to participate in it, rather than simply observing it via a series of independent objects on display in a formal exhibit" — narration as inhabitable environment rather than directed route. See multisensory-museum, embodiment.

• Toward the immaterial interior (Jacobus 2018) — the monumental and bibliographic ancestors of the concept: the Greek temple as the second paradigm of conscious cultural narration — "As an embodiment of the gods, and through its form, sculpture, and inscriptions, each temple became a chronicle of a particular aspect of Greek culture. In this way, the Parthenon is the body of Athena, but it is also the book of Athens" — and Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève as the interior narrating the book itself: "In addition to the building's exterior acting as a virtual card catalog, the entire interior space tells a story that unfolds page by page, as if the visitor is perusing a book" — the directed sequence from the bust-garden (the "original human state") through the stair landing that thrusts the visitor "into Raphael's School of Athens painting" to the reading room, where the visitor "can pull books from the shelves and complete the dialogue with humanity's great thinkers." Where the museum narrates a nation, Labrouste narrates literacy itself — and the register thesis gives narrative space its media history: buildings were humanity's first storytelling medium before books displaced them, and "now interior architectural space was being defined and inspired by them." See cultural-registers, memory.

• Time travel (Massey 2018) — the rulebook-as-itinerary: the an Exhibit catalogue (ICA, 1957) as a foldout A0 map whose opening sequence narrates the visitor's own game — "1. Preplanning decided on the rules of the game, to be called an Exhibit… 2. an Exhibit as it stands, records one set of possible moves… 3. Visitors to an Exhibit are involved in a game: the game is the structure of the Exhibit." De Certeau's stories "organize walks… before or during the time the feet perform it" — here the story is printed on translucent paper to be unfolded in the hand while the feet navigate the Perspex maze, and its genre is openly prospective ("records one set of possible moves") rather than descriptive. The register also carries the concept's archival reflex: "a self-conscious historicism in the text; the artists are writing for posterity and for the future archive" — narration aimed at its own future reading (see populable-art-work, time-travel).

• Puzzle (Carley 2018) — the literary-architectonic register: the novel as apartment-house narrative generated by the knight's tour and the bi-square; "The puzzle becomes a metaphor for the literary constraints superimposed on the narrative"; each chapter "a puzzle piece that relates to a larger story or picture." See voluntary-constraints, oulipo.

Open Questions

• If the building is "an artifact" alongside the displays, what is the grammar of its narration — sequence, symmetry, elevation (the upward exit)? Can the same building tell different stories through different routes?
• Narrative space privileges readings ("the museum nonetheless privileges certain readings") — how much narrative agency does a visitor actually have, and when do wayward practices (playing, photographing, drifting) rewrite the story?
• Does narrative space require the museum's institutional frame, or do domestic and commercial interiors narrate too — and with what authority?
• How does narrative space relate to quadrature's anchored fiction — both orchestrate an occupant's movement and gaze toward a designed convergence point (Pozzo's marble disk; MoM's video box)?
• De Certeau: stories "make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it" — is the museum's directed route exactly that, a story laid into place before the feet perform it, and can visitors' wayward practices (Position D's hide-and-seek children) be read as re-practicing the route into a different space (practiced place)?