Such a radical departure from curre

Such a radical departure from current thinking about narrative space and setting obviously has implications for other aspects of modern narra­ tive. Ifembodied narrative space means that settings will always be sites of motion rather than static places with symbolic value, then narrative will always be in motion. Such motion will become the basis of narra­ tive itself. In an earlier chapter I noted Didier Coste's definition ofnarrative: "An act of communication is narrative whenever and o吵 吵 1imparting a transitive 归w of the world U 伽 拼ct of 伽 message produced.”33 This definition is merely a concise and direct statement of a narratological tradition of associating narrative and temporal change. My discussion in this chapter has suggested that in addition to temporal change, that narrative also necessarily involves the representation of spatial change-either as an actual movement, or as an imagined or hoped-for movement. A text that is spatially static is no more a narrative than a text in which nothing changes. It is in this sense, I think, that we can read Darko Suvin's observation about the importance of spatiotem­ poral setting in distinguishing narrative and metaphor. Considering border cases like the parable （“The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed . . .”）, Suvin argues that “The vehicle of this parable is a minimal story involving precise 与pace and time, whose characteristic is the deployment of hyperbole and paradox by which the least shall become the greatest given some preconditions. ”34 According to Suvin, a metaphor becomes a parable and thus a narrative only when it is located within a specific space and time: