The Construction of the Novelistic Space in Élémir Bourges's Sous la hache: A Reading in The Light of The Bakhtinian Chronotope

This work aims to discuss certain aspects of the construction of the narrative space in the traditional historical novel Sous la hache (1885), by the French writer elemir Bourges (1852-1925). To achieve this goal, we start with a close reading of the literary text in the light of the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope (Bakhtin, 2014, 2018). Thus, we identify the main chronotopic occurrences so as to analyze in which ways the chronotope collaborates in the construction of the narrative space. In other words, how these occurrences are linked to the representation of reality, typical of 19th-century productions, and to the characteristics of the traditional historical novel (Lukacs, 2011). During this verification, we were able to observe that the chronotopes of the encounter, especially that of the threshold, or sill, engender the forces which confront one another as the plot unfolds, namely revolutionary and Vendean ones. The body of the crucified soldier and the mother waiting for her son's body, for instance, represent the meeting of two worlds on a collision course, two ideologies, two chronologies which clash at the instant of a threshold. Therefore, we can conclude that the space in Sous la hache constitutes the source of construction of the narrative itself, either by characterizing the time and the characters, or by anticipating or triggering facts.