The Space in The Raven by Tristetrickster (February, 2012)

After reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven (1945), I was left with a mixture of feelings, such as uncertainty and anxiety. The fact that I was not sure of what the cause was for what I was feeling, puzzled me. Even though this is a poem that deals with the pain of losing a beloved one and the torture of not being able to let go, I started to wonder if my feelings towards the poem were caused by more than just empathy for the mournful man of the story. That is when I noticed the literary space of the poem; the whole story is carried out in a small and gothic scenario which had an effect on the way I perceived the story while I was reading it, by making me feel, somehow, anxious and insecure.

Space is defined in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English as “the area in which everything exists, and in which everything has a position or direction.” Space in real life is noticeable, changeable; it can affect or modify our behavior, in some aspects, depending on social or environmental factors inherent to the spatial context in which we interact. In the narrative poem The Raven, as in any piece of narrative, real and virtual spatial instances turn into language, into a narrative space.

We can find insightful remarks relating to the space in literature in Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the Chronotopes (1937), for example, from which we understand that both writers and readers take from their cognitive encyclopedia in order to assess the images of space conveyed in the narratives which occupy them; writers do it because they rely on their readers’ ability to evoke those images, just as they have done. 

In the same order of ideas, psychologist Duane P. Schultz says:

Los factores sociales y ambientales influyen en el comportamiento humano, pero no lo dominan de forma absoluta. Reaccionamos a los estímulos en razón de expectativas aprendidas previamente […,] codificamos y representamos simbólicamente los sucesos externos, previendo que una conducta particular producirá una respuesta determinada. (417)

We react to the world according to patterns we have already internalized in different circumstances of our lives or through other people’s experiences we are acquainted with. For instance, if we find ourselves alone at night walking through a dark alley in the street, we might get nervous and start walking faster, as experience tells us this might turn into a dangerous situation, should a stranger appears, for example. We tend to react positively or negatively to different atmospheres or locations, and our reaction is going to depend on our perceptions because of the concepts we have associated to those places. Unconsciously, we recognize these situations and factors surrounding our daily events and respond to them automatically. Now, can we react in the same way when reading? Is the dark alley going to have the same impression it has on me in real life, as when reading about it? Is it possible that the feelings I have towards The Raven might have been influenced by this scenery in which the story is developed? The answer is yes at least to the last question.

The Raven takes place in an ordinary studio, where a trace of darkness can be perceived; along with the use of suggestive epithets and other vocabulary, the speaker characterizes the mood of the scenario: a dreary midnight, purple silken sad curtains, forgotten books, and the quietness of the room, to name some examples. A door and a window are also mentioned through the narration of the events, and although these are opened at some point in the poem, there is nothing more we are presented with outside those limits; they remain closed most of the time, leaving the reader with nothing but the image of a dark, closed and mysterious room where a perturbed speaker addresses an unknown visitor: “And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,/ That I scarce was sure I heard you’- here I opened wide the door; -/ ‘Darkness there, and nothing more.’” (19-21).

The literary space is a fact, not as something concrete, but as an abstraction, for it occurs in an intangible context created by a narrator, supplying the reader with a general background in which an action takes place. Ricardo Gullón states:

El espacio literario es el del texto; allí existe y tiene vigencia… una de las funciones del yo narrador consiste en producir ese espacio verbal… Toma consistencia el espacio verbal a medida que los hechos estilísticos trazan en el texto una figura visible. (2)

This visual aspect of verbal space depends on the description writers provide, and that is what makes readers have a clear image of the environment in which the story is taking place.

In the same order of ideas, Gullón states:

… el espacio es, en sí, una abstracción derivada de las realidades en que nos movemos. Si puede ser imaginada, es que puede ser pensada, y “entendida”; al menos hasta cierto punto. Si traducimos “espacio” por “universo”, “mundo”, “escenario”… estamos escapando por la puerta falsa y degradando la cuestión, reduciendo lo intangible a lo tangible. (3-4)

            Once the reader is presented with this “realities in which we move,” this literary representation of space, he is capable of submerging in it, internalizing every aspect of it and adopting that world’s reality as his own, always that he understands the meanings of the language and is able to evoke the images it conveys in more or less vivid ways. At that moment, the reader takes the reality of this intangible world up to the same level of consciousness in his schemata where the internalized patterns of his own tangible world rest.

This means that when we read a text, the literary space described or defined in that story can affect us in the same way space in the real world does because once this spatial perceptions reach our subconscious, there is no difference between real and fictional space but reactions to different situations or scenarios.    

            As I read Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, I “thought” of the lonely room of melancholy furnishing which window and door opened to the darkness, and this thought reached images of the dark on my mind, of both actual and metaphorical doors opening to the night, and then there was no difference between the real and the fictional, and then I was left with a mixture of uncertainty and anxiety. I was scared of being in the room. 

Works Cited

Gullón, Ricardo. Espacio y Novela. España: Imprenta Clarasó S.A., 1980. Print.

Poe, Edgar A. The Raven. USA: Doubleday, 1984. Print.

“Space.” Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. 4^th ed. 2006. Print.

Schultz, Duane, and Sydney Schultz. Theories of Personality. Cengage Learning, 2008.