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Quote :"Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel"
It is precisely the chronotope that provides the ground essential for the showing forth, the representability of events. […] It serves as the primary point from which 'scenes' in the novel unfold, while at the same time other 'binding' events, located far from the chronoscope, appear as mere dry information and communicated facts […] Thus the chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space, emerges as a center for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel. All the novel's abstract elements—philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect—gravitate toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work.
The chronotope is kind of like a compass that guides us through a narrative. It has to do with time but also with space, and it's this association with space that makes it more concrete. The chronotope of the Iliad would be Troy during the time of the Trojan War.
Whether it progresses in a straightforward way or jumps back and forward, a narrative always involves some sort of movement when it comes to time. What Bakhtin is saying, though, is that time is linked with space: together, time and space give shape to the narrative. If they weren't part of the equation, then we'd just have a series of facts or events that don't have anything to do with each other.
Like Bakhtin says, there are lots of things about a novel that aren't concrete, like ideas and philosophical stuff. The chronotope, however, gives us something that we can get a handle on. With the Iliad, for example, we know exactly where and when we are: we're not in Troy in 1917, or in Persia during the Trojan War. We're in a specific time and space.