The Scales of Time and Place in "Here"

As writers and readers of literature, we've come to know time and place as two fundamental building blocks of narrative. And although there isn't a rule of narrative without an exception or at least one attempt to defy that rule (a whole novel taking place in a single second, poems and novels going backward in time, place-less narratives (?)), without time and place, narrative ceases to exist, or if not cease, then it must retreat and live in the margins to make space for and privilege something else (sound, image, word-play, collage) to carry a piece of language art through.

I found the idea of time and place and their role in narrative, or rather the lack of one, in Here particularly interesting. On one hand, time and place stand at the very core of the book, though both on very different scales. Place, the very project of Here, does not change (meaning, we do not move from one place to another)--the book points its lens at one specific plot of land (and especially one specific living room) for the entirety of its length. In this way, the land and the house become a theatrical stage. What does change is time. Time, in Here, moves backward and forward, instantaneously (sometimes within the same spread, we become privy to windows leading into several different times of history and future at once), and on a grand scale. Its range spans from 3,000,500,000 BCE to 2213. The single place, then, naturally changes as time passes.

What intrigued me was the seeming lack of narrative in the book (I'm sure a conscious choice on McGuire's part--I don't want to get into themes here), despite the strong sense of both time and place. Aren't we grounded? Doesn't time pass? Aren't those two things the main prerequisites for narrative to happen? So why does so little seem to happen? Of course, the dialogue is minimal and the action is very minimal--the comic works almost as a series of overlaid and stylized photographs--but that can't be it. What I think it is...it is as if there was a certain scale and distribution of time and place within the narratives of Western society that we have been conditioned to throughout its history of storytelling (by plays, movies, other books), and anything outside of those limits seems suspect.

Of course there's plenty of narrative in Here, but because it's not on a scale we're used to, we are likely to question it. We might be only slightly uncomfortable when the scale is out of proportion to what we're used either on the plane of time (I'm thinking the short story "Bullet in the Brain") or on the plane of place (I'm thinking the movie Dogville). But what happens when the scales of time and place are both relative extremes? Do they still work together or do they begin to hinder each other? And what happens to narrative then, and why? These are some questions I am, thanks to Here, still working through.