The history of the American debate on “spatial form” in narrative, initiated by Joseph Frank in his essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945), is a theoretical approach that, lacking more adequate descriptive and analytical tools (as the structuralist and narratological analysis of literary texts would be later), turned out to be confusing and unnecessarily intricate. Its failure to clearly describe its object of study is due to problems in the nomenclature itself and confusion regarding categorical levels in the theoretical frame that was used.This paper analyzes the possibility of recovering the concept of “spatial form” as a useful descriptive and analytical tool – one that is not only defined in opposition to the temporal dimension of the diegesis but in the level of the textual composition of a literary work and its functioning after the praxis of reading; what Gerard Genette (“La littérature et l'espace”, 1969) defined as “(...) une spatialité littéraire active et non passive, signifiante et non signifiée, propre à la littérature, spécifique à la littérature, une spatialité représentative” (44).This concept of spatial form has to do with the distributional and positional relations among texts, within literary works that appear in a fixed way in printed and published work. Their “spatial” relations, nonetheless, exceed the contiguous sintagmatic succession of the texts on the page and in the book, in order to build in mente something that could be denominated “spatial form,” which has diverse and variable dimensions and has to do with the reader’s work.