Meander, Spiral, Explode. Jane Alison
her, pounded, defibbed, injected, until her thin body arched from the bed—alive.
When the cardiologist came back later, he looked pleased: they’d captured what kept going wrong and had an easy solution. Pacemaker.
Since then, twice a year I take her to the “device clinic” so a technician can test the tiny box of technology bulging the thin skin at her collarbone. We sit in a small room with illegible screens, my mother in her wheelchair, me on a stool. The technician types up codes, makes connections, then turns to her. I’m just going to speed you up a few seconds, he says. My mother raises her brows at me, but when he touches a key to make her heart race, her face goes still. Yet I see her eyes change, her gaze turn inward. After a moment he rolls back from his screen. How’d that feel? he asks. Well, she says, exciting. And I marvel at the power in his hand.
Ben Marcus calls the best stories “stun guns,” says they hold you “paralyzed on the outside but very nearly spasming within.” Yes. Think of what we can do. Our hands (as I type I realize that once I’d have said hand, but now most writing takes two hands: curious) can hold a reader fixed, making her feel not her own time but the time we devise. A story covering millennia can flit by in six minutes. A storyworld of just a minute can burn four hours in your life. It’s magic, but a magic that can be mapped, which I suppose makes it technology. For there are different speeds in narrative, and shifting among them—sedating a reader, making him race—is in our hands, to be done with skill, with care.
SPEEDS
Call them speeds or flows or even narrative hydraulics. Henry James knew how important scenes are, “scene” being one of narrative’s steals from drama, letting a writer portray an incident so that a reader almost sees it. After each scene, James said, a curtain can drop, and summary can let a writer hurry over moments that don’t deserve the stage. Scene summary; walk, run: a smart way to get through a novel.
Since James, narratologists such as Gérard Genette and Seymour Chatman have studied the differences between story time (how long an event in the storyworld takes) and text time (how long the telling on the page takes) and have named speeds according to the ratio between the two. There have been more refinements since (see Brian Richardson’s Narrative Dynamics for many essays on this, or Anežka Kuzmičová). But here’s a basic menu drawn from Genette and Chatman:
| gap | fastest | no text/much |
| story time | ||
| summary | fast | little text/much |
| story time | ||
| scene | “real time” | text time = |
| story time | ||
| dilation | slow | much text/ |
| little story time | ||
| pause | slowest | much text/ |
| no story time |
Starting at the middle: if an event in the story and its telling on the page take about the same time, we’re in “real time.” A scene usually comes closest to this, with dialogue, choreography, and slivers of description holding our attention as we “watch” the incident play out. The purest form of real time would actually be the transcription of a character’s diary entry or letter or some other page of print: then words on the story’s page would equal what’s “happening” in the story (printed words on a page), so text time = story time.
If a story’s events would take much longer than a reader spends reading them, the narrative speed is fast: summary. Here is the Australian writer Murray Bail moving quickly over several years in his novel Eucalyptus:
Early on [Holland] had packed his daughter off to the nuns in Sydney, until—for no apparent reason—abruptly bringing her back. At least in Sydney she learned to sew and swim and to wear gloves. In the dormitory she developed the eager way of talking, between girlfriends, and the uses of silence; on weekends at distant relations’ Ellen while scraping vegetables liked to overhear the stories told by men, and she could watch as lipstick was carefully applied. On the property she roamed about wild. He seemed to allow it. Then she became quiet: in her teens.
Seven or eight years here? Summary can be deadly dull, but Bail splices sensory glimmers into his to draw the reader in: gloves, scraping vegetables, lipstick.
I’ll take Bail’s “uses of silence” to move now to gap. This is the fastest, when the text goes mute and we can leap over eons of story time. White space! Overused often, but so useful. All sorts of things can “happen” in white space: a few minutes, a month, centuries—leaving a place for a reader to ponder or guess. On the other side of the gap, back in the stream of words, you might need to figure out what you missed. In Salarrué’s short-short “We Bad,” a sliver of space between the story’s halves equals several hours one night—but in this space, a man and his son are murdered. This we learn obliquely a few paragraphs after the gap: “In the nearby gully, Goyo and his youngster fled bit by bit in the beaks of vultures.” Salarrué doesn’t have to picture the murder. He makes us do it, makes us complicit.
So: scene = real time; summary = fast; ellipsis or gap = fastest. Now, back down the scale from real time. If the printed words showing a story event take more time to read than the event would: dilation. Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” about a book critic named Anders who gets caught in a bank robbery, is the best showcase I know of all speeds, especially dilation. (Try reading the story line by line, noting the speed of each.) Here is one of two specimens of dilation in “Bullet.” We’re mid-story, once the robber has grown annoyed with Anders; in the below lines we’ll start with real-time/scenic treatment (dialogue, narration) before making a deft switch. Anders has caught the robber’s attention and been told to look away:
Anders fixed his gaze on the man’s shiny wing-tip shoes.
“Not down there. Up there.” He stuck the pistol under Anders’ chin and pushed it upward until Anders was looking at the ceiling.
Anders had never paid much attention to that part of the bank. . . . The domed ceiling had been decorated with mythological figures whose fleshy, toga-draped ugliness Anders had taken in at a glance many years earlier and afterward declined to notice. Now he had no choice but to scrutinize the painter’s work. . . . The ceiling was crowded with various dramas, but the one that caught Anders’ eye was Zeus and Europa—portrayed, in this rendition, as a bull ogling a cow from behind a haystack. To make the cow sexy, the painter had canted her hips suggestively and given her long, droopy eyelashes through which she gazed back at the bull with sultry welcome. The bull wore a smirk and his eyebrows were arched. If there’d been a bubble coming out of his mouth, it would have said, “Hubba hubba.”
“What’s so funny, bright boy?”
Story time passes as we gaze with Anders at the ludicrous ceiling: we know this because the robber responds to Anders’s evident snickering: “What’s so funny, bright boy?” I’ve deleted several lines from the passage, yet it still takes a bit longer to read about the ceiling than for Anders to study it. Dilation: text time is greater than story time. Wolff dilates extravagantly a few lines later, when the robber (spoiler alert) shoots Anders in the head:
The bullet smashed Anders’ skull and ploughed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down