TIME IN THE NOVELS OF MILOS CRNJANSKI - Nottingham eTheses

CHAPTER FOUR
of the Novel". The chapter also has a
specific status in the whole work.
The specific status of the first chapter examined here
is its succestion of Rjepnin as a narratinc voice.
The
becinninc of the story is also specified in this chapter
when the narrator remarks. "Me&utim. sa tim ~ovekom
po~J.nje. u idu6em poelavl;Ju. ova prJ.~a" ("However. with
that man the story beeins in the next chapter" 61).
The
story wJ.ll not only be about the prince. his wife. the
emicre community. but also about the people of London.
and partJ.cularly "0 toj. oeromnoj. varoli. ~J.jJ.
;Ie
zaerlja;J bio smrtonosan za toliko ~jUdi
i lena" ("about
that huee town whose embrace was fatal for so many men
and women" 62).
Lancuaee and literary form are the wrJ.ter's raw
materials for the orcansiation of his work.
In this
first chapter Crnjanski distincuishes the story. the
events as they happened. from the text. the order in
which they are narrated in the novel.
The story becins
in Chapter Two of the novel. and not in Chapter One.
This distinction corresponds to the structuralist view
of time in the narrative structure of novels. as
outlined by Todorovi
There exists a "problem of time" because
two temporalitJ.es are found juxtaposed:
that of the universe represented and that
of the discou3!"se repl"esentinc it. This
4iffe3!"ence between the o3!"der of events
and the order of words is an obvious one.
but literary theory took it fully into
account only when the Russian P03!"malists
employed it as one of the chier indices
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