Literary Space in the Absence of Description
Geographers, in their interaction with literature, generally tend to focus on descriptive passages, because they supposedly contain the essence of the geographical material in any piece of fictional writing. These topological descriptions act as barriers to what geographers can discover about other dimensions of a narrative, elements that also contribute to the creation of literary space. The result has been a tendency to overly focus on literature filled with descriptions of places and to overlook works where such descriptions are infrequent. In an inevitable replication of the classical dichotomy that sees time reflected in the narrative and space in the descriptions, geographers have looked mainly at how space is evoked in literature; they have tended to pay far less attention to different forms of spatiality. Our article analyzes the fictional writings of Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), an author whose work contains little in the way of descriptive passages but is rich in complex spatialities. In our examination of one of Bukowski’s favourite themes – entrapment –, we show that it is possible to understand literary evocations of space in the absence of extensive topological descriptions.