![]() Nevertheless, he suggests that we can grasp the “tempo” of a narrative by tracing how it speeds up and slows down certain key events in the story. Genette reminds us that is there is, of course, no “actual” duration of a story. 3 The second way to assess the temporality of narrative is through a contrast in duration: how long the events of the story “actually” took versus how long the narrative spends narrating them. ![]() 2 Through such interruptions of chronology, Genette suggests, we discover “narrative’s capacity for temporal autonomy”-that is, for a vision of temporality that has been freed from the chronological order of both story time and lived experience. Differences in order produce “narrative anachronies” such as prolepsis (the anticipation of an event that will take place later in the story) and analepsis (the reference to an event that has taken place earlier). Order refers to the relation between the order of events in the story and the alternate order those same events are given in the narrative. Genette proposes the concepts of order, duration, and frequency as three primary ways of understanding the variety of temporal relations between “story time” and “narrative time” (or between fabula and sjužet). One of the most important formalist accounts of narrative time is laid out in Gérard Genette’s masterwork of narratology, Narrative Discourse. The fabula/sjužet distinction is one of the founding premises of narrative theory, where one may confront it in several different versions: for Seymour Chatman, it is the distinction between “story” and “discourse” for Gérard Genette, it is the distinction between histoire and récit (“story” and “narrative”) for Peter Brooks, it is “story” and “plot.” In each of these cases, though, the basic temporal division at the heart of narrative is the same: it is the difference between the time implied by the chronological happenings of the story and the time that reshapes that story in the telling. In the sjužet, those same events are rearranged, dilated, and contracted to form the narrative we are reading. The events of the fabula take place causally and chronologically. The Russian formalists were the first to distinguish between fabula and sjužet, or the raw events of a story and their plotted representation in a narrative. 1 Why? The story of narrative time begins with a crucial bifurcation in the very idea of a story. “Time is a universal feature of narrative,” suggests Mark Currie. In today’s critical landscape, time is a crucial and contested topic in a wide range of subfields, offering us indispensable insights into the history and ideology of modernity the temporal politics of nationalism, colonialism, and racial oppression the alternate timescales of environmental crisis and geological change and the transformations of life and work that structure postmodern and postindustrial society. ![]() Soon, though, formalist and phenomenological approaches to time would give way to more historically and politically attuned methods, which have emphasized modern time’s enmeshment in imperialism, industrial capitalism, and globalization. Time was first installed at the heart of literary criticism by way of narrative theory and narratology, which sought to explain narrative’s irreducibly temporal structure. Over the course of the 20th century, literary time has become an increasingly prominent issue for literary critics. In this way, literature can be read as a peculiarly sensitive timepiece of its own, both reflecting and responding to the complex and varied history of shared time. Time, in short, shapes literature several times over: from reading experience to narrative form to cultural context. ![]() In doing so, they also show us how prior historical moments were indelibly shaped by their own specific philosophies and technologies of timekeeping-from the forms of sacred time that informed medieval writing to the clash between national time and natural history that preoccupied the Romantics to the technological standardization of time that shaped 19th-century literature to the theories of psychological time that emerged in tandem with modernism to the fragmented and foreshortened digital times that underlie postmodern fiction. Transmitted across generations, literary texts cannot help but remind us of how times have changed. Then there is the fact that literature itself exists in time. The reading of that narrative may take its own sweet time. The narration of that story imposes a separate order of time (chronological, discontinuous, in medias res). Time is not a strictly literary category, yet literature is unthinkable without time.
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