Toporefs and Chronotopes

The Magician’s Nephew shows an interesting balance between fictional and real-world locations when visualised to show the chronotopic archetypes and topographic references. At the bottom left-hand corner of the visualisation, the metanarrative spatial type (corresponding with the preamble and postscript to the novel) has a cluster of named spaces associated with it. ‘Lewisham Road’ and ‘Baker Street’ are, in this context, intertextual: gesturing towards E. Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers and the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle respectively. The story tells ‘how all the comings and goings between our own world and the land of Narnia first began’ (p. 1). As such, of all the Narnia books, it deals the most explicitly with the relationship between fictional and realist spaces and the movement between the two. These references to other works, presented as ‘real’ in the diegesis, therefore serve to situate the narrative within a fictional continuum of other children’s literature.

This specifically intertextual spatial referentiality is absent from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, though the play between fictional and real remains ('America', 'Europe', and the 'Isle of Wight', for example, are all referred to from the world of Narnia). More revealing of the quest structure of the narrative, however, is the way in which references to countries in the fictional world — notably 'Calormen' and 'Narnia' (which is both the name of the world and a country within it) but also 'the Lone Islands' — occur from multiple spatial archetypes. Stitched through the text, these references to places never visited serve to give the world it depicts spatial coherence, despite its fantastical nature.