3

3.4. Narrative Time: Duration

A preliminary approach to story duration would define it as the relationship of proportion between the duration of the happenings in the action and the textual space devoted to them in the narrative. It is clear that in the case of written narratives, speaking of duration amounts to speaking of length, of number of words, lines and pages.[1] We should also determine the comparative amount of overall textual material and story, since a variety of materials (digressions, commentary, etc.) may be told alongside with the story. Sometimes these materials acquire an autonomy which interferes noticeably with the duration of the story, increasing the volume of the work through nonnarrative discourse — for instance, in the digressive chapters which open each book of Fielding's Tom Jones. Here, however, we shall concentrate mainly on the relationship between the duration of the action and that of the story.

Our preliminary approach to that question, however, somewhat disregards the complexity of discourse structures. At textual level, time may be fictionalised; the telling of the story may be a story in itself, and the time of the action may be measured with respect to this fictional time which surrounds the act of narration. Speaking of "narrative time" is ambiguous: we may refer either to the idealised reading time or to the represented time in which the narrative discourse unfolds. As this fictional time may have its own variations of order and duration, the formula for story duration can be extremely complex. This only means that time can be subjected in narrative to an infinite modulation. But while a small amount of experimental narratives seek to explore the complexities which underlie the representation of time, most narratives yield themselves to analysis using a relatively simple set of concepts.

The speed of the narrative consists in the relationship between equivalences between the duration of the action and the idealized duration of the reading process. The ideal coincidence at all points between the speed of the action and that of the narrative would give us an isochronous narrative, a narrative without variations of rhythm.[2] Simultaneous reporting of sports is a non-literary instance; the interior monologue is a literary one.[3] But it is more usual to find narratives with variations of speed or anisochronies. Anisochronies will involve a passage from summary to ellipsis, from scene to description. These are the four basic movements described by Genette:

We could schematize the temporal values of these four movements fairly well with the following formulas, with ST designating story [action] time and NT the pseudo-time, or conventional time, of the narrative:

pause: NT = n, ST = 0. Thus: NT > ST

scene: NT = ST

summary: NT < ST

ellipsis: NT = 0, ST = n. Thus: NT < ST.

The formulae seem to fit neatly, though some remarks are required. According to our definition, these movements would be movements of the narrative text and not of the story proper. This brings along a number of conceptual modifications we shall incorporate to our model as we examine each narrative movement.

First of all, concerning pauses. A pause is the interruption of the telling of the action, while the narrative discourse goes on. The story is the transmission of the action; when there is no action (or, more precisely, no narrated world) being constructed, as in a digressive pause, there is no story, while there is still a narrative text—narrative, because the materials woven into it, story and digression, are organically linked into a communicative act which is mainly narrative. Pauses made of nonnarrative materials, materials alien to the narrated world, are digressive pauses which should be distinguised from those which do not divert the reader's attention from the narrated world.[4] There are, of course, descriptive pauses which are narrative insofar as the elements described are a part of the narrated world. There are also narrative pauses, which are caused by the interruption of one story line by another. These interposed lines may be used iconically, as susbsitutes for the amount of time suppressed in the line they interrupt, or as an device to delay narrative progress, introducing a pure pause.

Scene is one of the basic movements of novelistic narrative. This consists most frequently in an alternance of scene and summary, with the first scene marking the beginning of the first narrative and creating a reference point for the reader.[5] There are two basic methods to create the scenic movement: dialogue and detailed narratorial presentation, often through subjective focalization. These methods may be used to build several types of scenic rhythm: scenes consisting basically in dialogue, or narratorial presentation, or subjective focalization, or any mixture of these modes. A scene is a dramatic technique, used to show the action to the reader, while summary involves a measure of abstraction, interpretation and gives therefore a greater impression of mediacy, of telling.[6] We shall approach this matter again in the section on narrative distance.

With respect to scenes, we should note that the identity between the time of reception and the action time rendered in the scene is hypothetical, a constructed convention. The two temporalities are rarely to be measured by the clock, and their coincidence in scenic presentation is best described as an illusion of coincidence.[7] This would seem to contradict the very definition of scene. In a scene, the duration of the time of reception should in principle be used iconically to signify the duration of action time. And it is so, with the proviso that iconicity is also a constructed relationship of signification. It may use more "natural" elements of the signified, but it articulates them in an arbitrary structure, just like symbolism. This is why we usually get so many "accelerated" scenes, most noticeably in dramatic or filmic narrative, without any breach of verisimilitude. Generic conventions determine the latitude which can be given to this supposed identity between represented time and representational time.

Be as it may, scenic narrative requires a presentation without noticeable gaps, one which provides a kind of immersion into the fictive world, at maximum distance from narrative mediation (and, therefore, from both authorial digressions and from omniscient summary). This maximum distance from the narrative presence can be effected mainly by two means: immersion in the characters' verbal world and immersion in the character's unspoken perception of the narrated world. In the first case, we get a dramatized dialogue with a minimum of narrative indications, which usually involves external presentation of the characters. Dialogue seems to impose a recognizable rhythm of its own, and the varying proportion of dialogue in narratives determines to a great extent their rhythm.[8] In the second, the scene is filtered through the consciousness of a character, a focalizer, and the impression of scenic time is created through the sequence of his narrated perceptions, thoughts and emotions.

The detailed presentation of contemporary narrative may result in a phenomenon which is the opposite of the "compressed" scene: an expanded scene, in which the telling is noticeably longer than the action time represented, a kind of slowed-down action. This is frequent in experimental novels (e.g. in the French nouveau roman). Stream of consciousness may be used to create these slowed-down scenes, since the writer can exploit the ambivalence between the situation remembered by the focal character and the much shorter memory flash which retrieves it and which is the immediate object of narrative presentation. In the case of stream of consciousness, rhythm also undergoes the doubling imposed by the focal filter on all aspects of the story: there is the rhythm of the representing thoughts, and the rhythm of the action represented. The latter is presented through the former, and both interact dialectically to create the final impression of scenic rhythm in this narrative mode.

Summary is perhaps the most basic of all narrative movements: a folk narrative, the telling of an adventure or a myth are in principle summaries of the respective actions; the representing discourse is shorter than the represented act. Novels or films usually compress the actions they tell, and could be described as having the basic structure of summaries. Even scenes, we have noted, often are disguised summaries. But of course there are specific sections which stand out in their context as an effort to compress time in order to reach a part of the action which is more interesting or tellable. In the classical novelistic narrative, summaries are often used as a starter (for instance, in Jane Austen), while the more crucial events in the action tended to be portrayed scenically. A summary may have different aspectual colorings. There are mutative summaries, which tell of transformations in states of affairs, purely durative summaries, or iterative summaries which are used to tell only once actions which are habitual.[9] It so happens that summary, the "purest" form of narrative, is usually the marginal element of literary narrative, the necessary scaffolding which will set the stage for the subsequent scene. Therefore, it will rarely contain the bound motifs of an action; its function is orientative with respect to the reader. Moreover, the place of summary is more and more restricted in contemporary narrative, which tends to do away with transitions between scenes,[10] and anyway tends to evaluate in quite different ways the tellability of events and to modulate the narratorial presence in more elaborate ways. The use of summary implies that the happenings are filtered through an interpretive mind, be it the narrator's or the character's (for instance, in a subjective analepsis). This may be a reason why the role of summary is restricted in modernist narrative, which favours the restriction of evident authorial presence.[11]

We have already dealt with ellipsis, which can be described as the consequence of temporal selection perhaps more adequately than as a "rhythm". Most ellipses are not noticed by the reader, being the necessary requirement for the possibility of narrative in the first place. Other ellipses are more noticeable because they involve "tellable" motifs or events. In literature, these ellipses are often the result of intertextual elaboration: whatever becomes evident can be suppressed for the sake of economy in subsequent narrative styles. The dynamic use of ellipsis therefore relies on the reader's literary competence.[12] Most dynamic is the kind of ellipsis which opens a narrative gap involving the reader's curiosity. These gaps are often a key element in sustaining narrative interest. They can be either provisional or permanent. A narrative could in fact be described as a system of informational gaps which control the reader's attention.[13] It is worth noting that these narrative gaps need not involve a noticeable break in story continuity — as ellipses generally speaking don't. An ellipsis involves the suppression of events and motifs in a narrative line, but a narrative may well disguise the ellipsis by picking up another narrative line. Therefore we could classify ellipses into explicit or implicit, with the added case of hypothetical ellipses.[14] This classification does not address the issue of the relative significance of the ellipsis (whether it involves key motifs, traditionally sanctioned catalytsts, etc.). Particular kinds of ellipses will result from the combination of these principles of classification.[15] There are other possible classifications, of course. For instance, the length of time suppressed can be determinable or indeterminate, and this either implicitly or explicitly... In general, we can say that concerning ellipses, as in other aspects of narrative structure, a text gives us clues as to which is the relative significance of its figures and motifs, by adhering to some specific subgenre, a code which governs coherence and reading expectations.

These concepts provide a basic kit of tools to measure story time, but of course the variety of experience of story time is not exhaustively described with them. Time, for instance, closely interacts with aspect: a summary, for instance, may be given a variety aspectual slants: inchoative, durative... We must also take into account the interaction of this structure with the precise nature of the actions whose temporality is being described. Time can be associated, for instance, with the living experience of a characater through the use of actorially focalized narrative, or it may be mapped onto the most objective temporal framework available, real history. In analysing narrative time, therefore, we should try to define not merely the simple semiotic structure of that time, but to capture the temporal imagination of the narrative in question, its construction of time as Bergsonian durée or psychological time determined by our various vital or emotional relationship with events.[16] Rhythm, on the whole, depends not only of the mathematical relationship between action duration and textual lenght, but also on the nature of the events which are told and the relative importance the narrative gives them taking into account the reader's expectations and general narrative conventions.

[1] Cf. Genette's definition, "the connections between the variable duration of these events or story sections and the pseudo-duration (in fact, length of text) of their telling in the narrative" (1980: 35). See also Tomashevski (1982: 194).

[2] Genette, who introduces the term (1972: 123), declares isochronous narrative to be a chimaera. This is closer to the truth if we take into account second-level temporality, which introduces its own variations of rhythm.

[3] Cf. Cohn 1978: 219. Cohn notes, however, that the interior monologue is a flexible form which may easily accomodate variations of rhythm (1978: 240).

[7] Cf. Tomashevski 1965: 281; Lanser 1981: 200.

[8] Cf. Stanzel's concept of profile: "the profile of a narrative results from the sequence of narrative and dialogue blocks" (1984: 69).

[10] Genette 1972: 130 ff; Friedman 1955.

[13] Cf. Sternberg 1978: 236ff; Eco 1981: 289ff.

[15] E.g. Genette calls "parallipses" those ellipsis involving a bound motif which do not involve a break in the narrative line.

[16] Cf. Toolan 1988: 88; Ricœur 1984: 120-30.