THE NARRATOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF TIME

Transcription

1 THE NARRATOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF TIME The books that might help you here are: - Gérard Genette s Figure 3 (see the passages devoted to time in Nouveau discours du récit ): this is the scientific source in which the treatment of time as drafted in the following pages originates. - The chapter concerning time in the Cordesse/Lebas/Le Pellec handbook is probably the best option. - The chapter devoted to time in the handbook by Claire Patin and Terence Hughes (see bibliography at the beginning of your booklet): an easy, synthetic read. - A good general introduction is to be found in David Lodge s The Art of Fiction (see chapter on time). 1. Generalities First, you have to remember that when working on time in the narrative prose of fiction you have to rely on a triad: - Story time (WHAT?): the time of the events, i.e. the narrative contents as they are supposed to have taken place. - Narrative time (HOW?): the way in which those events are organised temporally in the text; this concerns the linguistic dimension of the novel, the time it takes for the reader to read the pages. - Narration time: the moment of narration, as linked with the act of narration itself. This might sound a bit cryptic here but will appear more clearly in the coming examples. Now, the narratological analysis of time addresses the RELATIONSHIP between these elements. 2. Story time and narration time The first thing that you might want to wonder about is the relationship between story time (the WHAT of time) and the moment of narration. Three possibilities may be envisaged here: - Retrospective narration: when the moment of narration takes place AFTER the moment when the events took place. This corresponds to the most frequent type of narration, and this is the case in the examples seen in the booklet (fictional autobiography, Bildungsroman, etc.). The tense used here is the past. - Simultaneous narration: when the moment of narration takes place AT THE SAME TIME AS the events take place. The act of narrating and the events coincide, and the impression is that you are witnessing the events as they take place. This goes along with the use of the present tense, and corresponds to what you find in the Penelope chapter at the end of Ulysses. This can also be seen in the chapters that are presented as the transcript of Elizabeth Cree s trial in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. - Predictive narration: this is a limit-case instance that can be found in brief passages, or in experimental novels, when the moment of narration takes place BEFORE the moment when the events take place.

2 3. Story time and narrative time This is the most interesting point, in the narratological study of time, and it is made up of three categories: order, duration and frequency Order By definition, the fictional events (i.e. the events of the story as they are supposed to have taken place in the story) are ordered chronologically. In life, chronology applies, and in the realistic novel, it is supposed to apply too: events follow one another according to the laws of (con)sequence. Most of the time, the order of story time is the same as that of narrative time, in which case, the narrative presents the events chronologically (this corresponds to a narrative in which the principle of linearity is respected). In Dan Leno, for example, the events in chapter four (if you skip the first paragraph) are told chronologically. What you get is the story of the protagonist s early life till she is introduced to the world of the music hall. Still, the order of story time and narrative time may not correspond, in which case, we are presented with disorder or what G. Genette calls anachronies, which correspond to inversion/lack of fit in the narrating. As you know, there are two types of anachronies: analepses and prolepses Analepses Those are also called flashbacks. They correspond to a moment of departure from a first chronological level. In other words, an analepsis takes place when the narrative describes an event, and then breaks from the evocation of this event to EXPLICITLY (by using phrases like on the day before, 10 years before that, or a date, etc.) move to a preceding epoch in story time. In other words, instead of following the law of order and continuing with the next event, the narrative jumps back in time. Such devices are present in most narratives, and they tend to concentrate in certain types of novels, e.g. the Modernist novel, in which psychological realism imitates the way in which a memory repeatedly plunges into the past (see Joseph Conrad s Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim). In Dan Leno, there are not so many analepses, but you can find a nice one on page 116. In the central paragraph, the scene takes place in 1880, and we are presented with Babbage s ambitions. Now, at the bottom of the page, in the paragraph starting with the narrator s question So how had it come to be created? Here we notice a shift in time, from the simple past to the pluperfect. And the answer makes the temporal break very explicit: Charles Babbage had once been found, which is taken up a few lines down with He had once declared that. We have here a traditional analepsis, whose purpose is to explain or give a context for an event that appears at this point in the text and that might appear to be incomplete or insufficiently explained. Generally, analepses are used for explanatory or contextualising purposes: they are meant to give consistency and plausibility to the action, which is the case here. In other circumstances, they are meant, as underlined above, to give an impression of psychological realism. Anyway, what you must remember is that when dealing with analepses in particular and with narratology more generally, you have to do two things, systematically: 1. IDENTIFY THE DEVICE 2. EXPLAIN WHAT IT IS MEANT FOR, in other words USE/EXPLOIT IT. There is no point in finding analepses if you are not going to explain their function/effect on the reader, etc. Of course, the same applies to prolepses Prolepses

3 As with analepses, prolepses imply an explicit break from a first narrative level. This happens very often with omniscient narrators, when a narrator says things like Many years later, such or such a thing would happen. Real prolepses are fairly rare, in that they correspond to some sort of divine prerogative, i.e. that of knowing the future. A very nice prolepsis is to be found on page 23 in Dan Leno, when the impersonal narrator, at the end of a brief chapter, tells the reader: Yet how was it that, less than twenty years later, Dan Leno was suspected by the police officers of the Limehouse Division of being the murderous Limehouse Golem? Here, the purpose of the prolepsis is, of course, to create suspense for the reader and raise his/her expectations. Contrary to analepses, prolepses tend to introduce a logic of the information gap and, instead of giving information, they provide uncertainty. Of course, this is very fitting for a narrative that, in many respects, is a detective novel. Now, prolepses may not be mistaken with what is known a proleptic hints (leurres in French). Those refer to devices in which a departure from the first temporal level is not explicit but IMPLICIT and implicitly opens lines of inquiry. This is the case, for instance, at the very end of chapter 34, when Dan Leno says: Well, it s a very funny thing, Peggy. But, believe me or believe me not, I think you saw the shadow of a woman along he Radcliffe Highway. (208). There is no real prolepsis here, as the text does not say explicitly: the Limehouse Golem will be discovered to be Lizzie, but only suggests that this is the case. By pointing towards further developments in indirect ways, the text strengthens the sense of mystery characteristic of a detective novel. Please note that, generally, detective novels use another type of proleptic hint which, instead of pointing towards the truth, drags red herrings across the trail (i.e. misleads/waylays the reader). This is called a snare (un leurre in French), which raises false expectations, delays the resolution of the main enigma, and heightens the sense of both suspense and surprise. This is the case, for instance, in John Cree s fake diary, at the end of chapter 22, when the narrator (supposedly Mr Cree) asks: what if I allowed her [Lizzie] to witness one of my own great acts? Would she make a good audience? (129). Here, by suggesting that Lizzie could be a witness to the murderer s acts, what happens is that she is disqualified as a murderer herself. This delays the revelation that it is Lizzie herself who is the murdered and that the diary is a fake Duration It is possible to compare narrative time and story time in terms of duration. In other words, you have to put the time it takes for the events in story time to happen in relation with the time it takes for the reader to read the words/lines evoking them (narrative time). There are 5 possibilities, according to Genette. They are classified from the fastest to the slowest underneath: Ellipsis In this case, there is some story time, but there is no narrative time, i.e. something took place, but there is no text to narrate it. Here is a relevant example: For, just a few hours after I had met John Cree, at first light, the body of Little Victor Farrell was found in a basement area two streets away [ ] (102). Here, the prolepsis is linked to an ellipsis, as what happens during those three hours is not narrated at all. The effect is one of extreme speed, which creates an information gap. Once again, this is one of the hallmarks of the detective novel Summary A summary corresponds to the situation in which ST>NT (i.e. story time is longer than narrative time). This is a fairly quick mode of narration when the narrator chooses not to give too much importance to

4 an event and pass over it very quickly. For example, at the beginning of chapter 2, the text evokes in one page (one minute s read) what took place over several months in The effect is to produce a background for the main information on which the narrator does not want to concentrate, but which is nevertheless necessary Scene A scene corresponds to the following situation: ST = NT, in other terms, there is a correspondence in the duration of story time and narrative time. This is namely the case of passages in which the characters discourse is represented. With direct discourse, in fact, it takes approximately the same time for the reader to read the lines as for the characters to say the corresponding lines. Through this device, what happens is that emphasis is given to a special theme or moment in the action. The scene is then used to single out a passage for its dramatic purpose, as is the case with all the extracts from the trial in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem Stretch With the stretch (ralenti), ST<NT, which corresponds to the type of slow motion effect to be found in films. This is the case on page 281, when the narrator takes a full page to describe what happens in an instant (the moment when Aveline Mortimer dies accidentally onstage). Here, of course, there is a sense of slowing down and of distortion. This is a way to underline the importance of the instance, and also to grant it some sort of a hallucinatory dimension (in some texts, this may have a nightmarish effect, etc.) Pause The narrative pause corresponds to the situation in which there is no story time, while there is a great deal of narrative time. This is the case with the famously long descriptions of the realistic novel (and particularly Balzac s novels, in a French context). In other words, the pause corresponds to the extreme of the absence of speed. There are not so many descriptive pauses in Dan Leno, which is a fairly dramatic novel, but the description of the round Reading Room of the British Museum corresponds to a lull in the action, when nothing much takes place by way of incident. There is a pause in the narrative, and the function of the passage is essentially atmospheric. What should be borne in mind is that those categories are rarely to be found individually, but in relation with one another. Those differences and contrastive relations should be analysed, and their effects accounted for systematically Frequency The third type of relationship between story time and narrative time concerns frequency, i.e. the number of times an event takes place in story time, and the number of times it is present in narrative time. There are, according to Genette, three possibilities: Singulative The singulative mode of narration corresponds to the case in which an event in story time took place once, and it is narrated once. This is what is to be found most often in most narratives. This is the case in the passage on pages 85 to 86 relating the execution of the Jewish scholar that, by definition, only

5 happened once, and that the narrative chooses to narrate once. In this way, the episode is singled out in its dramatic intensity Iterative The iterative mode of narration concerns the case in which an event took place several times, but is narrated once. In the second paragraph on page 7, the narrator refers to the various enquiries conducted by the police. Still, he/she chooses to narrate this once: They had followed their customary procedures. They had followed their customary procedures They had set bloodhounds on the scents of the putative murderer [ ]. This passage refers to a series of actions, which were repeated (happened n times), but are presented once here. In French, this would imply the resort to the imparfait. The use of the iterative mode implies that no special attention is paid to the series of actions, as opposed to what happens with the singulative and with the repetitive Repetitive With the repetitive mode of narration, an event that took place once in story time is narrated several times (narrating n times what happened once). You will realise that this corresponds to a way of emphasising the event that is being described by dwelling on it. It grants some obsessive dimension to the event, and singles it out. This may contribute to the building of a very strange, hallucinatory atmosphere. In Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, the fact that the first and the last paragraphs deal with the same event (Elizabeth s execution) introduces a repetitive dimension and makes this dramatic scene even more dramatic. Once again, what should be borne in mind is that those categories are rarely to be found individually, but in relation with one another. Those differences and contrastive relations should be analysed, and their effects accounted for systematically.