Timing: How Long and How Often?

Abstract

Time plays a fundamental part in narrative fiction. The sequential related events of plot imply the passing of imaginary time (what theorists call story time). Narratives take time to tell and receive. Writers create narratives in time, and if the stories of their lives and authorship are recorded, they become part of the non-fiction narrative of literary history. Alternatively, much of what we believe we know of a remote time may be derived from a narrative dated from that period. Genres as well as writers have their times, and very often criticism’s narratives about the rise of a genre or the disappearance of another intersect with history. Readers, too, are rooted in their own cultural times and locations, which in turn affect what fictions they read and, to some extent, the way they read them. Finally, many narratives are set in a particular time, which becomes an intrinsic part of the fiction’s setting.¹ Despite these commonsense connections of time and narrative, the ‘time’ discussed by narrative theory has little to do with the ‘time’ of history. When they refer to ‘time’ in narrative, most theorists mean some combination of the temporal unfolding of narrative in the act of reading, the duration of time depicted in the plot, the pace at which the narration relates the events of the plot, and the order or disorder of the events of story time. Narrative theory relies on the conceptual division of story time (the time that transpires in the imaginary story world of the plot) and discourse time (the amount of narration expended on the relation of the story events—really a quantity of pages, though it would have a variable correlate in reading time).