Discourse on Spatial Form of Jhabvala’s The Householder:Adaptation and Mutation

Time and Space are two important elements of narrative and narrativity. Most of the time, we all understand narrative in terms of Time. The first step towards the understanding of narrative is to understand the chronology of events in fabula and their presentation in syuzhet. But Joseph Frank had successfully triggered off a series of questions, a new way of looking at the narratives with his essay ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature.’ Studies had attempted to show relation between spatial form and language, structure and reader’s perception. Mapping out new implications, it is also shown how spatial form is related with “New Criticism, Formalism, Structuralism, phenomenology, myth criticism and linguistics.” (Smitten 16) Joseph Frank made an attempt to earn spatial form an important place in the tradition of literary criticism. Although Frank applied the concept of spatial form, first of all, to T.S. Eliots’s The Waste Land, he also propounded that the similar principle applies to modern fiction as well.