Spatiotemporal schemas of progress and stasis in Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot: on moving forward and going round
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article demonstrates how narrative sensemaking involves mapping social spaces onto physical structures with which they correspond image-schematically, focusing on the spatiotemporal coordinates of lines and circles as organizing principles of the storyworld in Rose Macaulay’s 1923 novel Told by an Idiot. This essayistic novel follows the Garden family from the late Victorian through the Georgian periods, reflecting on the interrelated patterns of circular stasis and linear progress that govern both generational dynamics within the family and their political, social and cultural backdrop. A key scene takes place on the “Inner Circle,” later the Circle Line, where two teenaged Gardens, Imogen and Tony, aimlessly ride the trains all day as they go round and round the looped track. The novel sets this pattern of circularity, repetition and stasis against that of the linear “Twopenny Tube,” now the modern Central Line, a route mainly used by commuters travelling to the city centre from outlying districts. I argue that Macaulay’s storyworld unites these two image-schematic structures of urban movement just as the model of history adumbrated in the text likewise involves a tentative union of stasis and progress. Macaulay thus establishes an isomorphic relationship between the spatiotemporal structure of Underground image schemas and the settings through which the novel’s characters move physically, socially, and historically. Reading fiction in this way, I propose, helps to uncover the role that spatiotemporality and isomorphic relationships play in patterning storyworlds, as the structures of the environments through which characters travel and within which events unfold are revealed as “significant forms” that figure in the encoding and decoding of narrative.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".