VanderMeer's Wonderbook, Chapter Four: Narrative Design (Continued)
The chapter ends with a discussion of time's role in fiction. To my thinking, it is worth discussing this in terms of two different qualities. The first is, of course, the arrangement of events as depicted in the story versus their actual chronology; the second is the rate of time being depicted. These two elements are each significant, of course, and can combine in many exciting and interesting ways.
Before we begin looking more closely at those specifics, I do want to think about the question of what it means when we speak about time in a story. Certainly, a story generally depicts events through time, but that must be an illusion. A five minute scene could be described in such detail it would take even the fastest reader an hour, while a century might be made to pass in a single sentence. This juxtaposition is a result of the reality that a story does not contain time, but instead describes it to the reader. A writer can have complete control over time in their story, can depict a frozen moment, completely stopping time, using the implication of what came before and what will follow. Or they can shuffle events around so that the reader experiences events that are disparate in time, but gain power by being presented together.
Every moment in a story must be written into existence, and how it moves to the next moment, or even if it does, is a choice the writer makes as well. Time can be presented as smooth, unobtrusive, or it can be uneven, flowing faster or slower at different moments in the story, or it may disassemble further, events falling out order or repeating in loops. Once it is understood that time doesn't really exist in the story, that it is purely constructed, it becomes clear that a writer is in complete control over how time works in a story.
Now, this can, as said above, be related to how the story is ordered. Epic structures are defined by their relationship to time, though the term gets used these days to describe the scale or stakes of a story. In a traditional epic, the story starts in the middle of the action, then returns to the beginning, then progresses to the end. Consider what a construction does in terms of the flow of the narrative. By beginning in the middle, the action comes up front, then, going back to the start provides a context to make the reader care and help them understand the stakes. From that point, the story moves to the end. As well, the circling back to the beginning can make the story feel larger. We have a sense of a greater span of time, and a sense of the story before the full context. This provides an effect similar to a camera pulling back to enlarge the scope of the frame, provoking a sense that what we have seen is a part of something larger.
(One point worth noting is that this structure is not about tension, though it can be used that way. While a modern writer might use time shifts to delay the climax or resolution to build tension and keep the reader's enthusiastic interest, the epic in it's earliest guises, particular as deployed by Homer, was almost entirely lacking in tension. See ":Odysseus' Scar", the first chapter of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis for a full exploration of this. Indeed, if you wish to look at how time has been and can be used by writers of many sorts, Mimesis is an incredible book.)
I think, as well, of Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet, where time is completely folded into itself. The book revolves around a single set of events, depicted and repeated in a changing order. One cannot be sure, reading, it of what is the present and what is the past, if the events are memories or fantasies. Time becomes utterly disjoint and the result is a novel that thrusts the reader into an experience that does not rely upon the plot, but the characters obsessions. The event becomes less important than the compulsiveness with the narrator is focusing as a mode of expressing a deep pain inside that character. The book uses time as few do, and shows quite clearly how a warping of the temporal fabric can open new possibilities for what a story can be.
Time in, these books, is warped in it's structure, creating a different relationship to time. Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is explicit about this, making the jumping through time a literal experience of the character, Joyce's Ulysses attempts to connect to time outside the book by binding itself to the cycle of a single day and depicting0 every moment of that day once. Other novels can jump about in time, moving between two or more character's stories set at different times (David Mitchell's novels, for example). Time can be shifted around in many ways, and that restructuring not only has impact but can be given specific meaning by the way it is used in a story. If one jumps, for example, between thematically linked scenes that do not connect in time, that provides a certain focus, while in another story, the shifting around may be to control the order in which knowledge is revealed to the reader. In some stories, for instance, one wants the reader to be less informed at the start than the characters, so you begin after they already know what is happening, but at some point it will be important for the story that the reader have a fuller understanding than the character's do. So, in the middle, the story goes back and shows how each character arrived to this point. Now, the reader is informed of all the character motivations and backstories, but the individual characters do not have that full a picture. Now, moving on, the reader can see what is coming, can understand the interactions in a way that the character's cannot. Consider this as a part of a story about a political movement falling apart. At the start, we are shown the movement together, functional. We see the character's in the context of unity, but when we get the backstory, we come to see that they really are not united. Character's have different goals and agendas, and becomes obvious that the unification presented in the first section was a superficial illusion. Now, as the story moves towards the end, it is clear to the reader what is motivating the individuals, and how those motivations are not aligned. The reader is able, then, to see the characters more clearly than they see each other, and has sympathy for the situation that they might not have had if they had never been shown that illusion of harmonious unity. Note that this is a slight variation of an epic structure in which the flashback to the start covers all the characters. In fact, one could do this in either of two ways: by telling all the stories interwoven as they happen, or by following each character individually alone. Or it could be something in between, like telling certain sets of stories in one sequence and then another set in a seperate sequence.
Notice how that epic structure is used here for a completely different and more specific set of purposes within the story than would have been traditionally intended. So, too, modern writers can use the same tools to do so many other things. Taking just the epic structure, again, suppose it were a mystery. It begins in the middle, after the crime has occurred, and the reader has a chance to try and solve the crime with the characters. Then, we go back and see the crime occur, revealing, to the reader, who did it, but not why. Now, the question the reader has is about the mystery of why this crime was done by this person, and the search for the criminal becomes transparent on one level, but in a way that brings focus to the question of whether the criminal will be caught. It may shift to a psychological thriller mode, or it might be that suddenly we are supposed to see the crime in a different light, siding with the one who perpetrated it. That same basic structure, a simple matter of moving the start of the story to the middle, is capable of doing many different things.
Indeed, when we move events in a story, when time is broken apart in this way, it allows for the meaning of each individual event to be set through context. This is even without getting into some of the more complicated ways time can be moved around in a story, or what it means to move time through memories or in dialogue versus in an externally narrated frame that is not grounded to one character. What is more, this is still just about the structure, not the actual communication of time. For that, we must look at the pacing of events within a narrative, a topic that we will cover tomorrow.
Before we begin looking more closely at those specifics, I do want to think about the question of what it means when we speak about time in a story. Certainly, a story generally depicts events through time, but that must be an illusion. A five minute scene could be described in such detail it would take even the fastest reader an hour, while a century might be made to pass in a single sentence. This juxtaposition is a result of the reality that a story does not contain time, but instead describes it to the reader. A writer can have complete control over time in their story, can depict a frozen moment, completely stopping time, using the implication of what came before and what will follow. Or they can shuffle events around so that the reader experiences events that are disparate in time, but gain power by being presented together.
Every moment in a story must be written into existence, and how it moves to the next moment, or even if it does, is a choice the writer makes as well. Time can be presented as smooth, unobtrusive, or it can be uneven, flowing faster or slower at different moments in the story, or it may disassemble further, events falling out order or repeating in loops. Once it is understood that time doesn't really exist in the story, that it is purely constructed, it becomes clear that a writer is in complete control over how time works in a story.
Now, this can, as said above, be related to how the story is ordered. Epic structures are defined by their relationship to time, though the term gets used these days to describe the scale or stakes of a story. In a traditional epic, the story starts in the middle of the action, then returns to the beginning, then progresses to the end. Consider what a construction does in terms of the flow of the narrative. By beginning in the middle, the action comes up front, then, going back to the start provides a context to make the reader care and help them understand the stakes. From that point, the story moves to the end. As well, the circling back to the beginning can make the story feel larger. We have a sense of a greater span of time, and a sense of the story before the full context. This provides an effect similar to a camera pulling back to enlarge the scope of the frame, provoking a sense that what we have seen is a part of something larger.
(One point worth noting is that this structure is not about tension, though it can be used that way. While a modern writer might use time shifts to delay the climax or resolution to build tension and keep the reader's enthusiastic interest, the epic in it's earliest guises, particular as deployed by Homer, was almost entirely lacking in tension. See ":Odysseus' Scar", the first chapter of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis for a full exploration of this. Indeed, if you wish to look at how time has been and can be used by writers of many sorts, Mimesis is an incredible book.)
I think, as well, of Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet, where time is completely folded into itself. The book revolves around a single set of events, depicted and repeated in a changing order. One cannot be sure, reading, it of what is the present and what is the past, if the events are memories or fantasies. Time becomes utterly disjoint and the result is a novel that thrusts the reader into an experience that does not rely upon the plot, but the characters obsessions. The event becomes less important than the compulsiveness with the narrator is focusing as a mode of expressing a deep pain inside that character. The book uses time as few do, and shows quite clearly how a warping of the temporal fabric can open new possibilities for what a story can be.
Time in, these books, is warped in it's structure, creating a different relationship to time. Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is explicit about this, making the jumping through time a literal experience of the character, Joyce's Ulysses attempts to connect to time outside the book by binding itself to the cycle of a single day and depicting0 every moment of that day once. Other novels can jump about in time, moving between two or more character's stories set at different times (David Mitchell's novels, for example). Time can be shifted around in many ways, and that restructuring not only has impact but can be given specific meaning by the way it is used in a story. If one jumps, for example, between thematically linked scenes that do not connect in time, that provides a certain focus, while in another story, the shifting around may be to control the order in which knowledge is revealed to the reader. In some stories, for instance, one wants the reader to be less informed at the start than the characters, so you begin after they already know what is happening, but at some point it will be important for the story that the reader have a fuller understanding than the character's do. So, in the middle, the story goes back and shows how each character arrived to this point. Now, the reader is informed of all the character motivations and backstories, but the individual characters do not have that full a picture. Now, moving on, the reader can see what is coming, can understand the interactions in a way that the character's cannot. Consider this as a part of a story about a political movement falling apart. At the start, we are shown the movement together, functional. We see the character's in the context of unity, but when we get the backstory, we come to see that they really are not united. Character's have different goals and agendas, and becomes obvious that the unification presented in the first section was a superficial illusion. Now, as the story moves towards the end, it is clear to the reader what is motivating the individuals, and how those motivations are not aligned. The reader is able, then, to see the characters more clearly than they see each other, and has sympathy for the situation that they might not have had if they had never been shown that illusion of harmonious unity. Note that this is a slight variation of an epic structure in which the flashback to the start covers all the characters. In fact, one could do this in either of two ways: by telling all the stories interwoven as they happen, or by following each character individually alone. Or it could be something in between, like telling certain sets of stories in one sequence and then another set in a seperate sequence.
Notice how that epic structure is used here for a completely different and more specific set of purposes within the story than would have been traditionally intended. So, too, modern writers can use the same tools to do so many other things. Taking just the epic structure, again, suppose it were a mystery. It begins in the middle, after the crime has occurred, and the reader has a chance to try and solve the crime with the characters. Then, we go back and see the crime occur, revealing, to the reader, who did it, but not why. Now, the question the reader has is about the mystery of why this crime was done by this person, and the search for the criminal becomes transparent on one level, but in a way that brings focus to the question of whether the criminal will be caught. It may shift to a psychological thriller mode, or it might be that suddenly we are supposed to see the crime in a different light, siding with the one who perpetrated it. That same basic structure, a simple matter of moving the start of the story to the middle, is capable of doing many different things.
Indeed, when we move events in a story, when time is broken apart in this way, it allows for the meaning of each individual event to be set through context. This is even without getting into some of the more complicated ways time can be moved around in a story, or what it means to move time through memories or in dialogue versus in an externally narrated frame that is not grounded to one character. What is more, this is still just about the structure, not the actual communication of time. For that, we must look at the pacing of events within a narrative, a topic that we will cover tomorrow.
Comments
Post a Comment