Dawn Treader

Dawn Treader

Magician's Nephew

Magician's Nephew

Deep Chronotopes Maps

In The Magician’s Nephew a large number of chronotopic spaces are in play. The chronotopes of 'threshold', 'castle', and 'idyll' dominate, followed by the 'public square' and 'parlour', (with 'encounter', 'metanarrative', 'wilderness', 'road' and 'anti-idyll' taking subsidiary roles). Thresholds are of great importance since they correspond to portals between different spaces and worlds. This is as true of the realist attic space that allows Diggory and Polly to crawl between houses to the door that traps them in 'Uncle Andrew’s study', as it is of the more fantastical 'Wood Between the Worlds' (or the pools it contains that allow one to drop into other universes). Chronotopic 'castles', in this reading, include 'the Hall of Images' in which Diggory awakens the ancient Queen Jadis (who becomes the White Witch when transported to Narnia), 'Uncle Andrew’s Study', and Uncle Andrew’s subjective experience of Narnia, which he finds unbearable. 'Idylls' constitute Narnia, as yet (mostly) untouched by Jadis’s evil.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, conversely, shows a marked bias towards the 'public square', followed by the 'castle' and 'parlour' chronotopes. The prominent role of the 'public square' is because much of the action takes place on the Dawn Treader itself –  with the ship functioning as this social space for a range of characters and voices from across Narnian society. This also goes some way to explain why, despite the fact that the novel is a quest narrative, the road plays a relatively minor role, and reinforces the common narrative function of the core space that hosts the episodic adventures: the ship in The Dawn Treader and 'the Wood Between the Worlds' in The Magician’s Nephew.

The tools used to make these visualisations are available on Github at
https://github.com/chronotopic-cartographies/visualisation-generators.