This document summarizes and analyzes the novel The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner. It discusses the major and minor chronotopes of the novel. The minor chronotopes include places and history. Places include homes, apartments, castles, and cottages that represent the characters. Historical events provide context. The major chronotopes are realistic fiction and gothic fiction. Themes of identity and infidelity are explored through the protagonist Joe Allston's journey of self-discovery in Denmark. Overall, the chronotopes work together to examine themes of human nature and society through Joe's internal struggles and ultimate overcoming of his weaknesses.

1. Plot-driven vs. Character-driven Novels IV:
Comparative Analysis of Novels
日本アメリカ文学会東北支部６月例会
June 11, 2016 at Tohoku University
Mamoru “Bobby” Takahashi
& Stephen A. Shucart
Akita Prefectural University

2. acronyms
acronyms
a word formed from the initial letters or groups of
letters of words in a set phrase or series of words and
pronounced as a separate word, as Wac from Women's
Army Corps, OPEC from Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries, or loran from long-range
navigation.
TOEIC →Test of English for International Communication
TENOR →Teaching English for No Obvious Reason

3. acronyms
 The Spectator Bird (1974) →TSB
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) → CCH
 Chronotope
It is the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and
spatial relationships in language.

4. 1. Summary of The Spectator Bird
 It’s a sequel of All the Little Live Things (1967)
 In ALLT, Curt, the only son of Joe and Ruth Allston, died young.
 Joe and Ruth make a trip to Denmark to cure their sadness.
 Half of the novel is about their lives in their California house in 1974.
 Another half of the book is about their trip to Denmark in 1954.
 The story of Denmark is told as a form of diary that Joe wrote.
 Joe and Ruth find lodging at an apartment of a countess.
 They go to the castle that was owned by the countess’s brother and
discover why Joe’s mother emigrated from Denmark to the USA.
 Unlike CCH nothing so dynamic happens.
 The narrator’s action is just reading his diary while gun shooting and car
chasing happen from the beginning in CCH.
 The only dynamic action of the protagonist in TSB is walking with the
countess and kissing her once.

5. 2. The Minor Chronotope of The Spectator Bird
Minor chronotope means the motif of a novel.
We see different motifs of the novel that are
unified under the theme of the novel.
 Our memory is usually connected with time
and places in which things took place.
A place where the incident took place and the
time of its occurrence are, thus, indispensable
aspects for the person who recalls the incident.

6. 2.1 Chronotope of places
 The chronotope of places in this novel is mostly the types of residence: American home, Danish
apartment, Danish castle, and Danish cottage.
 The novel also includes other types of places such as a deck of a ship and idyllic farms and fields.
 These places create and suggest the physical and spiritual environment of the people who live in
them.
 American home in TSB is the house of Joe and Ruth. Different sort of people come to that house
and the visitors make clear contrast with Joe and Ruth.
 For example, Ben Alexander who is described as a rich and famous medical doctor, owner of a big
house and 600 acres of land is a man who gives parties on every weekend even though he is
already in his eighties.
 On the contrary, Joe is a retired book agent in his seventies whose treasure is his notebooks when
he was representing his novelists. Joe is described as a pretty much conservative man who dislikes
the pop culture in the sixties and seventies.
 Cesare is an Italian avant-garde writer that urges Joe and Ruth to come to live in the city and have
more fun.
 Locations other than the American home are mostly in Denmark. (One exceptional place is the deck
of a ship. ) The apartment, Castle, and cottages in Demark each represents the people who occupy
the place. We will see more about it in our discussion of gothic romance chronotope later.

7. 2.2 Chronotope of history
 Chronotope of national level history appears among the
personal history of the characters.
 The countess’s husband Erik was a quisling, a kind of traitor
against Denmark under the Nazi invasion.
 Thus WWII drops its long shadow over the countess.
 The fictional countess’s cousin is a real historical figure
Karen Blixen who wrote Out of Africa.
 The book was made into a film starring Meryl Streep and
Robert Redford in 1985. (It’s a moving story about this
woman.)
 When the countess listens to the radio, she hears the news
“most of which these days is about Senator McCarthy.” (79)
And the post-Vietnam war America is described as follows:

8. This is 1974, the age of infidelity, when casual
coupling and wife swapping and therapeutic
prostitution are accepted forms of violence as
normal as mugging and murder, when practices
that in my youth would have outraged two-dollar
whore are apparently standard in every middle-
class bedroom and are explicated, with diagrams, in
manuals sold in college bookstores, and celebrated,
with whinnyings and slobberings, in every novel you
pick up. (195)

9. 3. Major Chronotope
Major chronotope is the subgenre of fiction.
We can find the chronotope of realistic fiction
and gothic romance in this novel.

10. 3.1 Realistic fiction
 As Stegner made Joe say that Joe is Babbbitt, Joe’s life course resembles
Babbitt who is the protagoist of the novel of the same name written by
Sinclair Lewis in 1922.
 “The man who in all his life never did one thing he really wanted to.”
(209)
 As a realistic fiction, TSB has the theme of identity and infidelity.
 The first thematic element is about Joe’s identity.
 As Joe lost his son, he has no posterity. He also has lost his mother who
came from Denmark.
 Joe wants to know about her home country Denmark, especially about
the place his mother was born and raised.
 He learns that his mother was living with the family called the Sverdrops
and something caused her to move from Denmark to the United States.
 Joe wants to know about his mother when she was in Denmark because it
is the matter of his identity as a son of the immigrant from Denmark.

11.  The second thematic element is about
infidelity.
Even though this element is told tongue in
cheek, it isn’t too much to say that this novel
is centered around the issue of infidelity.
 In several pages of the novel, Stegner writes
that Joe disliked being controlled by Ruth.

12. “All right,” she said, appeased. “You’d better not
even go down to your study. Take a Jacuzzi and
wrap up warm and stay in bed all day.”
“Yes, Ma.”
She doesn’t like that response, which smacks
of irony and insubordination.
(160)

13. Joe is not a person who openly dissolves his marriage
but he is dissatisfied.
He secretly falls in love with the countess.
 He does not know what will happen to him if he
farther pursue his desire.
He simply wanted the poor countess to divorce her
husband and come to the United States.
 In the climactic scene, the countess tells him that she
can’t go with them because that will break Joe and
Ruth apart.
Then Joe realizes that he was wrong and goes back to
Ruth.

14. 3.2 Gothic fiction
Early in the novel, Stegner mentions the name of
Henry James:
I didn’t find what I went looking for in Denmark, but
I found there was something rotten in that state, as
elsewhere, and that the Danes like the rest of the
world are attracted to evil, are involved in it, even
feel dutiful toward it. If the ghost of Henry James
came demanding copy, I could tell him a tale of New
World innocence and Old World experience at least
as instructive as Daisy Miller.” (24)

15. As is The Turn of the Screw written by Henry James,
some parts of TSB are written in the form of diary and
this way of telling the story reminds us of the Gothic
fiction genre.
Even though the setting of the novel is 1954 that was
well before the cloned animal, Stegner portrayed the
old and new count’s crazy biological experiments using
his peasants.(The first cloned manna was a sheep Dolly
that lived from 1996 through 2003.)
The episodes of the awful experiments are described in
the Book Four, Chapter Two and the Book Five, Chapter
Two.

16. 3.3 Minor Chronotope and Major Chronotope
of TSB
 The minor chronotope of houses fits in the major chronotope of realistic and
gothic fiction in TSB. (The major chronotope is a collective whole of the minor
chronotope by definition.)
 The small apartment in Copenhagen is where the countess lives.
 The readers wonder why a countess lives in such a small apartment.
 The fact is that the countess has a story of disgrace behind the readers’ eyes.
 Joe also finds the hidden truth about his own mother when he visits the Castle and
the large farms and fields that are owned by the countess’s bother.
 The truth of his mother is related with the absurd experiments conducted by the
old count who is the father of the countess.
 The poor lives of the peasants are symbolically shown in their cottages while the
prosperous lives of the aristocrats are symbolically shown in the castle.
 Stegner presents the theme of identity by juxtaposing different levels of
chronotopes.

17. 4 Conclusion of the discussion of TSB
 Wallace Stegner compared the society of America in the 1970s and the
society of Denmark in the 1950s by using some different levels of
chronotope.
 Against the background of ever changing ethics and uncertainty in the
society, the novel provides the story of a man who could overcome his
own internal conflicts in the end.
 This type of inner struggle against his own weakness and overcoming it is
the archetypal pattern of character-driven novels.
 The premise of this novel is, thus, ethical nature of human beings wins
over the animal nature.
 In this sense, TSB essentially shares the same value with CCH.
 The point of this paper, therefore, has been to map out how Stegner is
juxtaposing different levels of chronotopic components in TSB and, as a
part of that process, to demonstrate how the central theme of identity
and infidelity is displayed in this character-driven novel.
 Through his protagonist-narrator Joe Allston, Stegner gives us faith that
we can keep ourselves from dropping down into a mere animal existence.
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