A Matter of Time
Imagine a reader of fiction as a child in a red wagon, being pulled by the writer of that fiction, for when we read, surely our childlike senses are central to the journey. We are neither strapped in, nor pushed. We can jump out and cease the journey at any time, simply by putting down the book. We might lie back in the wagon, trailing our fingers in the grass, taking in only the sky as the wheels churn beneath us. We might lean forward in anticipation, trying to make out shapes in the distance and taking as many photographs as possible. This is how I see the relationship between writer and reader, a flexible one.
A plot-driven narrative arc, as set forth in The Poetics (Aristotle 230-248) with stasis, rising action, climax, and denouement, is essential, but plastic. To further my wagon analogy, a writer may pull us up such an Aristotelean mountain. But a writer may also pull us across a plain, or even into the sea, where we drift away from the writer’s effort and find we cannot stay afloat. I could even imagine a journey across deadly spikes, while the writer pelts the reader with rocks, though this is not the type of journey I would enjoy. Readers necessarily absorb the landscape differently depending on the shape of the arc, and what enjoyment they take is subjective. The narrative arc in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis begins at the top of the mountain and pulls us down the flatter and much less interesting back side. When Pam says to Alvy, “You know, sex with you is a really Kafkaesque experience,” (Annie Hall), she implies not just that it is depressing, but also that it climaxes early. Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights traverse more pensive plains. Character transformation occurs not at the tops of mountains, but in the depths of the plains; not as single climactic scenes or events, but subtler, sustained, and experienced by the reader through a backward-looking glance in time. The wagon journey seems uneventful, yet when it is over, you realize how far you have come. This matter of time propels my reading and writing efforts. It is a defining perceptual factor in art, and also a theme in my novel, Fic-tio-nary. My Gram character believes, as I do, that art and its lover define each other, like the passenger and the puller of the wagon.
Human beings need art. We are the most brilliant intellects on the planet, yet our cognitive faculties do not allow us to hold consciously at once all the experiences, value judgments, education, and sensations of a lifetime. Through art, they can be isolated and magnified so that we experience them as a single integrated whole. For example, for Christians, the letters WWJD serve as mnemonic for instant grasp of every tenet of Christianity. It is because of the bible’s literary characterization of Jesus, and centuries of painting, sculpture, and music that Christians so readily hold What Would Jesus Do. We can define art, widely, as any purposeful human-made object that commands such power.
Further, human beings’ emotional faculties are even more limited than our cognitive ones. Our emotional responses to art, whether we understand them or not, say more about us than about the art. In that way, art defines us. We need the emotional satisfaction that our metaphysical and epistemological perspective, what Ayn Rand calls our sense of life, is correct (34). There is sweetness in such certainty, even if, ironically, one’s sense of life is chaos and uncertainty. Orhan Pamuk describes it as finding a novel’s center. In seeking this center, the reader is “seeking the center of his own life and that of the world . . . [O]ne of our main motivations is the need to reflect on that center and determine how close it is to our view of existence” (163-4).
Insofar as art is skill, many creative endeavors come into play, such as architecture, photography, filmmaking, journalism, printmaking, video, and design of all kinds. When I describe art, however, I mean the fine arts. Accepting the performing arts—dance and theatre—as dependent on music and literature, I ascribe the superhuman power of art to painting, sculpture, literature, and music. Painters use a medium of paint on a two-dimensional surface and sculptors create in three dimensions, both art forms appealing primarily to our sense of sight. Music affects us physiologically, through our sense of hearing. The medium of literature is words, which enter our brain visually when we read a book, or audibly, if we listen to it, or tactilely if we read in Braille.
I agree with Ayn Rand in The Romantic Manifesto that art is a selective, stylized recreation of reality (36). If it’s good art, it can seem to us more real than reality. The realness makes people believe in things that don’t exist. They research degrees in Symbology at Harvard and write to Shirley Jackson asking for the time and date of the next Lottery. It makes Orhan Pamuk’s friend assume that Orhan resides at the same address as the hero of his novel (Pamuk 43). These are fictional demesnes mistaken as real by intelligent people. Think of how much history we visualize in our minds as art, forgetting that the beautiful paintings are not chronicles of fact, but an artist’s fiction, a visual abstraction. Because literature equals painting and sculpture in its power of abstraction, the three are often discussed together while music stands apart. The closer literature, painting, and sculpture approximate our metaphysics of the natural world, the better we find them, aesthetically speaking. Music works in reverse, there being no music, but only sound, in the natural world. Music meets our metaphysics and becomes art by purposefully distancing itself from the natural world. Designating music as cognitively special in this way makes sense to me, but I have come to believe it is literature that stands yet further apart.
The medium of literature is a deliberate chain of words which, unlike painting and sculpture, can only be experienced over time. In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster defines the novel by time, saying that a story narrates in time and an author “must cling however lightly to the thread of his story” (29). A novel, no matter its other attributes, cannot be divorced from time. A work of literature or music changes from start to finish, evoking all the human senses, taking us on a journey. As temporal experiences, literature and music seem more widely accessible than the other arts, reaching our emotions before or at the same time as our conscious awareness. It is this timing, the span of the journey and the simultaneity of emotions and awareness in literary art, most notably fiction, that I want to explore.
The writer’s manipulation of time raises a story to the level of art:
“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot . . . “The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king” . . . is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development (Forster 86).
Each of Forster’s examples retains the same story, but purposeful rearrangement of the timing in presentation allows for a great range of emotional response in the reader.
Joan Silber discusses in The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long As It Takes what she calls fabulous time, or the trope of time in conjunction with fantasy, citing Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as an example. Márquez uses repetition, exaggeration, and cosmic omniscient point of view as techniques “for handling time [to] hold up the tumultuous mass of his book” (Silber 76). Events that occur one hundred years apart also occur simultaneously in Márquez’s novel. And somehow, as readers, we believe it anyway. Márquez’s techniques are employed in service to this fantasy, this impossibility. His use of time as a fantasy element reminds us that everything may change, yet it is possible that nothing changes. Like that of Márquez, my writing has been described in workshops as Magic Realism, inclusion of mythical elements in an otherwise realistic narrative to explore the notion of what is real. While I think Fic-tio-nary holds up to that general definition, it is borne of an ordinary conflicted psyche rather than a Latin American quest to grapple with Colonialism, as this nascent genre suggests.
The writers of the Star Trek science fiction television and movie franchise love to stop time, rewind and replay it in a loop, send it off in parallel sequences, speed it up, and slow it down. While such time manipulation makes it convenient to extend the life of the franchise with new batches of actors and paradoxical story lines, it also serves to highlight the moral conflicts of its characters. If we have access to the future, does it change our decisions in the present? If we were endlessly repeating the same day, would we know it, and what would we do about it? If people with conflicting interests exist in the same space but at different rates of time, how would conflict be resolved? To me, the fantasy element of Star Trek is secondary to its philosophical themes. Time manipulation in the science fiction/fantasy genre supports that end. In Fic-tio-nary, I pose this moral conflict: If we could rewrite our lives with direct authorial control, wherein all the characters were different facets of ourselves, would those characters act as we predict? In other words, do we know ourselves as well as we think we do?
Of all genres, fantasy would seem to allow an author the most flexibility regarding time. Manuela Draeger’s In the Time of the Blue Ball, for example, dispenses with time as we measure it, and marks it by shapes and colors in a synesthesic, escapist reading experience. In Carole Maso’s Ava, events are realistic, but they proceed unhindered by and unhinged from the movement of time as we experience it in reality. Both leave me, as reader, adrift in the sea in the red wagon; in Draeger, a calm, whimsical sea, and in Maso, a deep, frightening one. In comparison, I hope that the fantasy of Fic-tio-nary is bracketed by realism. I want the reader to feel disoriented in wondering what is real, and thereby understand my protagonist’s perspective. Events in Fic-tio-nary cannot happen, except in the mind, but in reality our minds do play havoc with our sense of self. I believe our own human perceptions and experiences of time are diverse enough to encompass the fantastic, within a realistic story. We can remember events, reimagine them to meet our emotional needs, remember dreams we swear occurred in reality, envision the future, think about a future in which we remember the past, or a past in which we dreamed of the future, and sometimes we experience déjà vu or premonitions. We can carry on simultaneous relationships and harbor conflicting emotions and opinions--all remarkable ways that our consciousness deals with time. In other words, the stuff of our own heads can seem like fantasy. And it can provide fodder for realistic fiction. We cannot escape time, but as authors we can control the manner in which it drives our stories. In fact, these are the tropes I explore in Fic-tio-nary, which makes it a work of fiction about fiction, which I call metafiction, though scholars may disagree with me. I do not openly remind readers that the story is fiction, though my narrator does address the audience directly from time to time. To use the wagon journey analogy, I place a lot of mirrors in the landscape, which allow the passenger reflections of himself and, occasionally, of me.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic love story, The Great Gatsby, which Silber cites as an example of classic time, wherein “the span is short enough to be easily seen as a unity” and “the default mode in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction” (Silber 11), the past steps in to explain or compel the present. We don’t “go there,” as in a flashback, but it comes to us through past events as related by supporting characters. Like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead keeps us always in the present, a present that is driven by decisions made in the past. This style is sometimes termed “wooden,” I think because of the unadorned way it mirrors real life, and classic time is part of that realism. Economy of words gives more emotional weight to each word, and while Silber refers to classic time as “the default mode,” it is also the most demanding for the writer. I believe it is the highest form in the art of fiction. It requires the resolution of, if not a mastery over the writer’s own inner conflicts. I agree with Ayn Rand that “[t]he terrible inner conflicts from which artists suffer as much as (or, perhaps, more than) other men are magnified in their work” (41). Fic-tio-nary is, among all else, my attempt at personal resolution. At the same time that my protagonist rewrites her life, I am rewriting mine.
In switchback time and slowed time, the narrative stays in the present or switches between the present and the past, to varying effects. In switchback time, “[t]hen and now and further back are all partners with an investment in the outcome” and “one isn’t a footnote to the other” (Silber 45). The technique of shifting perspectives allows us to circle round the same events with increased knowledge, the backstory always changing and growing. Stephen King employs switchback time in his novel 11/22/63, wherein his protagonist switches between the present and 1963—a different version of 1963—each time the trip is made, depending on decisions the protagonist makes. Octavia Butler, too, uses switchback time to a similar end in Kindred, about a couple who are unwittingly removed from the present to the antebellum. Butler’s Dana character must ensure her very existence in the present by her actions in the past. In Fic-tio-nary, I use switchback time and flashbacks in equal measure. Sometimes I imply that the memory just described has been reminisced upon by the characters, so the reader is temporarily disoriented. Were we just there, or were we remembering having been there in the past? Other times I simply start a scene or conversation from a different time without transition. The juxtaposition of scenes in then and now and further back allow the reader to experience time the way my protagonist does.
In slowed time, “an often weighty past [gets] a glancing reference” and backstory is dispensed with, creating the effect of slowing the present (Silber 57). Hemingway, as Silber notes, is a master of slowed time. It is almost as if the time that is missing from a Hemingway story is its object, as in “Hills Like White Elephants,” a story about abortion wherein abortion is never mentioned, and “Winters in Schruns,” about the breakup of a marriage that is addressed directly only in the final paragraph of a narrative ostensibly about snow. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes how he achieves this time manipulation: “[Y]ou could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood (71). Hemingway’s description is one of reaching the reader’s emotional awareness before cognitive awareness. In Fic-tio-nary, I omit and I omit and it is deliberate, yet my propensity to do so in my writing has not yet been recognized as genius. Or, I am doing it wrong. Hemingway buries objects in the landscape of his narrative so that we feel them as we pass over in our wagon before we recognize their shapes. Perhaps I bury objects too deep to be found.
Virginia Woolf, in The Waves, collects moments of time, as on the crests of waves, perhaps leaving a foam or some objects for perusal, but the moments are ephemeral, and as we are drawn across the sand in our literary wagon, waves continue to crest and recede, similar in appearance, but comprising different elements. Separating my wagon journey analogy from that of the novel’s imagery is difficult. Metaphorically, Woolf reveals instability amidst a perennially stable action—the ceaseless tumbling of waves upon the shore. At various times in the narrative, six or seven friends gather. The group is basically the same each time, yet their changing external lives, self-reflections, and reflections off each other leave entirely different impressions. Woolf’s Bernard character says, “We have come together . . . to make one thing, not enduring—for what endures?—but seen by many eyes simultaneously” (127). The characters are brought into existence (133) for the space of an hour and then separated again. If meaning is to be found, it is in the moments Woolf stills for us. The wagon rider in my analogy must pay keen attention to Woolf’s landscape. If not, the waves will wash him out to sea indiscriminately. And perhaps that is one of the things The Waves asks us to explore. Are we “made and remade continually” (134)? If we are aloof, what endures? I agree with those who refer to this work as “experimental” for its preponderance of internal narrative over external plot. Yet it is not fantasy. Fantasy is as in Fi-ctio-nary, when my characters begin the spring day in a nondescript room of the mind and end it in an actual stone house in Iowa in winter, or when my characters embrace as three people and in so doing become one. Realism asks us to consider something that could have happened; fantasy asks us to consider something that could not happen. If The Waves hints of the fantastic, it is in the emotional response it evokes in the reader—the sense of self shaken. Like Hemingway, Woolf manipulates time to make the reader feel before he knows.
I am most fascinated by what I call metaphorical time in fiction. In metaphorical time, the span of time in the story is a metaphor for a different span of time, like the story of a life described in a single day. John Cheever’s short story, “The Swimmer” is the best example. Cheever’s Neddy character attempts to swim home from a party via the neighborhood’s backyard pools, a metaphor for “swimming” through alcohol addiction (he has a drink at every pool, which adds up to quite a few drinks). The action takes place in a defined span of the present, as in classic time, without switchback time. It is not exactly slowed time, as in Hemingway, either, because years are condensed into one afternoon. Neddy begins his swim in midsummer, the last hours of an afternoon, yet the seasons change and it is autumn by the story’s end. He seems to have lost a good deal of weight, and metal door handles have had a chance to rust in that amount of time. Neddy has a specious relationship with time. “Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?” (607). Cheever uses metaphor in this story to manipulate time, asking us to consider how and why time, and therefore truth, is lost.
Initially, I took the timing of events in “The Swimmer” at face value. Walking to my college English 101 class, carrying my carefully worded response essay, something astounding hit me. It was a matter of time. Neddy doesn’t swim anywhere, except, metaphorically, in alcohol. The professor who taught that class deserves credit for crowning what I call the moment I understood literature. Throwing my first essay aside, she said, “Write it right now” (because, time unrelenting, it was due that day).
In Fic-tio-nary, my Chime character, in the minute before she dies, relives her life as a deliberate rewrite, a work of art, in her mind. The rewrite is lived as one day, with characters she creates from facets of her own personality. In so doing, she gains new perspective on her experience and comes to know herself and others differently. Her vast imagination, of which in life she makes only marginal use, and which is often a source of melancholy, becomes the thing that saves her. My final aim in writing Fi-ctio-nary is to make the reader, upon finishing the story, want to read it again, to get back in the wagon and take the journey with greater awareness. Yet, if I am successful, the reader already will have felt the emotions of doing just that, through my protagonist. We are changed by the journey, the reader and I. It is a matter of time.
Works Cited
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Aristotle. The Poetics. Trans. Ingram Bywater. Random House, New York: 1954. Print.
Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Print.
Cheever, John. “The Swimmer.” The Stories of John Cheever. Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1994. 603-612. Print.
Draeger, Manuela. In the Time of the Blue Ball. Trans. Brian Evenson. St. Louis: Dorothy, a publishing project,
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Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York: 1925. Print.
Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1927. Print.
Garcia Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Print.
Hardwick, Elizabeth. Sleepless Nights. New York: NYRB, 1979. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast, The Restored Edition. Scribner, New York: 1964. Print
---. “Hills Like White Elephants.” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner’s Sons,
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---. “Winters in Shruns.” A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964. Print.
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Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943. Print.
---. The Romantic Manifesto. New York: New American Library, 1962. Print.
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“Star Trek.” Created by Gene Roddenberry. CBS Television Studios and Paramount Pictures. Television series and film franchise.
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1931. Print.
Zambreno, Kate. Green Girl. New York: Emergency Press, Harper Collins, 2011. Print.