Time draws the shapes of stories. Here’s a story everyone
knows: A young girl—gentle, somewhat naive—works in a kindergarten instead of
going off to university; she likes children and will probably marry before long
anyway—she’s pretty and comes from money. And indeed she’s soon engaged, to a
man who’s a bit older but a great celebrity. He’s a prince of England! His
family’s doctors determine she is a virgin, and his mother, not an easy woman,
is pleased at his choice. The girl is shy—reporters make her cry—but she does
her best. Which is very good—she is soon more popular than the queen. She
becomes pregnant before her honeymoon is over and is really very happy to be a
young mother. How beautifully she has risen to her role. People think of her as
a rare person who is worthy of her good luck.
But
wait, there’s more. She discovers that her husband has been seeing an old
girlfriend on the side. She grows bitter, develops eating disorders takes
lovers of her own. After much struggle, she and her husband divorce. She is
still the princess of people’s hearts. Reporters, excited by her story, chase
her and her lover through a tunnel, and the car crashes and she is killed.
Public love has killed her.
But
wait. Her husband, who has never been happy, settles down at last with the
woman whom he has loved all along. She is dowdy and no longer young, and she
suits him very well. He once sent her bawdy messages on his cell phone, and
they were a joke to people. Public love, he decides, is beside the point.
I offer these three paragraphs as simple examples of how a
story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate.
Where the teller begins and ends a tale decides what its point is, how it
gathers meaning. Yogi Berra’s famous bit of hope about a ball game—it ain’t
over till it’s over—is the storyteller’s dilemma. When is it over? And of all the choices a writer makes, a story’s
allotment of time can be the least conscious. This book is meant as a reminder
of the range of what is possible, a reflection on richly various visions and
methods.
My
own fiction has made me brood on this topic with the necessary intensity of
someone who’s unwittingly chosen the hard way. I’m interested in how fates roll
out over many years and am drawn to write fiction that takes on the task of
compressing whole lifetimes into short stories or chapters. It’s pretty easy to
see how this might be done badly—thinly imagined, clumsily summarized—and
sometimes difficult to see how it can be done at all.
The
work of this has led me back to the elementary notion that all fiction has to
contend with the experience of time passing. First one thing happens and then
another: that’s a story for you. This parade of events is what distinguishes
the narrative impulse from the purely lyrical one. A poem can carry out its
investigations within an endless moment, it can abide in stillness if it wants
to, but fiction pretty much has to unfold in sequence. A story can arrange
events in any order it find useful, but it does have to move between then and
now and later.
In
his novel The Red and the Black,
Stendhal prefaces one of the chapters with the epigram (attributed to
Saint-Réal) “A novel is a mirror that is carried along a road.” It’s an awkward
image—I’ve always imagined someone hauling a heavy pier glass over a
nineteenth-century highway—and for years I thought it was just another way of
saying art is a mirror held up to nature. Later I saw that it’s the road that Stendhal is pointing to—the
long and winding trail that keeps a writer on the move, toting that mirror over
hill and dale—and the road is time.
Here’s
a tale in its most basic shape: In the fullness of summer, a happy grasshopper
sings and dances all day, and when he sees an ant working to haul a grain of
wheat to store for winter, he invites the ant to take a break and party
instead, insisting there’s plenty to eat right now, why worry? When the cold
weather comes, the grasshopper has no food at all and he dies watching the ant
eat its stored food. No mercy from the ant. It’s a traditional plot—a crucial
choice and its outcome. A decision is rewarded or punished. Aesop’s moral here—think ahead—is illustrated by the
progression of cause and effect. The high-stepping grasshopper, however well he
sings, is swept along by the causality of story. And time is its agent, summer
to winter.
The
reckless grasshopper made his choice. E. M. Fortser, in Aspects of the Novel, famously says that if we’re told the king
died and then the queen died, that’s a story, but if someone says the king died
and then the queen died of grief, that’s a plot. Plot likes causation. We read
anything looking for a pattern of events, and through it a meaning—the reason
someone is bothering to tell us this. Plot is how a writer indicates the ways
she or he thinks the world works.
So
how much time does it take for an outcome to manifest itself? Some results
happen instantly; some take decades to cook. I seemed to have grown up with the
sense that most short stories—from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” to
Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”—were organized around a single scene or a brief,
tight arrangement of scenes. But I knew there were counterexamples, stories
that skipped across decades; Chekhov’s “The Darling” took place over a good
twenty years or so. (I had discovered Chekhov as a teenager and he was one of
the authors who made me want to be a writer.) I did naturally think that novels
all had longer time spans than stories, until I encountered James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel that took place in a
single day, all seven hundred and eighty-three pages of it. Tradition,
resistance to tradition, private experience, and innate belief go into any
author’s choice of how many imagined minutes or years a story needs to make itself
clear and felt. How much time it covers has everything to do with what it
means.
In
our daily lives, anyone reporting an episode knows this. We can narrate what
happened during, say, a lovers’ quarrel by staying within the confines of the
scene itself, or by harking back to earlier times, earlier causes and effects,
other characters’ histories. A bad storyteller will make us beg just get to the point, and a good
storyteller will make us beg for more. Technique is needed, and the same skills
will not serve for all approaches to time.
To
talk, as any writer does, of capturing, framing, and leaping across time, is to
lean on metaphors to report on the ephemeral. It’s the fiction writer’s task to
put the reader through the strangely desirable misapprehension that three
decades have passed during the five hours it took to read certain pages. Albert
Einstein said, “Us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and
future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.” No mortal can really
cut or slow or speed up time. Why do we think we’ve lived through all the years
of David Copperfield’s youth? This suggests—and I’ll try to say more about
this—that time is always in some way the subject of fiction.
Kierkegaard famously said—in a quote I’ve used as this
book’s epigraph—that life can only be understood backward but has to be lived
forward. However, fiction (this is one of its consolations) imagines for us a
stopping point from which life can be seen as intelligible—the “complete quiet”
(another translation of Kierkegaard calls this the “necessary resting place”)
that allows for understanding, the angle of retrospect, which is the
storyteller’s premise. A story is already over before we hear it. That is how
the teller knows what it means.
Because
meaning is determined by where a story ends, I want to look at time in fiction
by considering this question of duration, the span of time selected for a
story’s events. All the dilemmas in organizing time are grounded in this first
decision about how long it takes. When I started looking at favorite works of
fiction, I came up with a few basic categories for time spans, handy labels.
This book will look at classic time (a brief natural span—a month, a season, a
year—handled in scene-and-summary), long time (decades, lifetimes), switchback
time (moving back and forth among points in past and present), slowed time
(brief instants in detail), and fabulous time (a way to think about
nonrealistic fiction). These are meant as convenient subdivisions of an endless
reading list. I want to look closely at the techniques needed for each category
and to think about what draws writers to their choices.
My list pretends in no
way to be the final cut in possibilities—there’s no tent big enough to cover
what fiction can do with time.
I’d
like to come back at the end to consider the notion of time as content. Writing
this has convinced me that any fiction writer, obliged to evoke the experience
of time passing, is up against the human conundrum of time slipping away, what
Buddhists call impermanence.
I want to look more closely at stories whose plots
directly address remembering, forgetting, and wasting time, as well as fiction
featuring imaginative play about time’s rules. A crucial last example will look
at the contrast in how different cultures measure time. Some final remarks
about containment borders, finality, and death will bring the book to its
close.
