The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel

190 Pages·2021·2.536 MB·English

by  Brian Gingrich

The Pace of Fiction
The Pace of Fiction
Narrative Movement and the Novel
BRIAN GINGRICH
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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© Brian Gingrich 2021
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First Edition published in 2021
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Acknowledgments
Rachel Bowlby, Maria DiBattista, and Lee Mitchell helped me to imagine this book. It would
not exist without them. Lee, in particular, made me finish it.
Meanwhile, there were other generous people willing to offer commentary and answer
stray questions. Among them, I think now of Peter Brooks, Marshall Brown, Andrew Cole,
Jeff Dolven, Diana Fuss, Dan Hazard, Bruce Holsinger, Liz John, Claudia Johnson, Josh
Kotin, Caroline Levine, Andrew Miller, Deborah Nord, Hope Rogers, Garrett Stewart, Susan
Wolfson, and Michael Wood, as well as Jacqueline Norton, Aimee Wright, Neil Morris, and
the two anonymous readers at Oxford University Press. But I surely overlook many others,
and I ask their forgiveness as I also thank Dan Blank, Sarah Case, Caitlin Charos, Ellie
Green, Jared Greenberg, Jenny Huang, Roz Parry, Meagan Wilson, and the Sewanee English
Department for their heartening support.
I dedicate this, in memory, to Paul Schuyler Gingrich and Margaret Terry Gingrich. I hope
all that I do might carry something of their spirit.
I send the rest of my gratitude to Mariel, for whom my love has grown with each day (so
many days) that I’ve written these pages.
A portion of Chapter 5 of this book appeared in New Literary History, 49, no. 3, in 2018.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. Narrative Discourse, Literary History
Scene and Summary Resurrected
Traditions Classical and Modern
Lens, Loci, Foci, Ellipse
Narrative Movement and Modernity
2. Rise of the Scene-and-Summary Novel
Fielding and the Prosai-Comi-Epic
Goethe on Epic and Drama
The Novel Intersected
One Day, the West, and the World
3. Realist Pace
Reality Principle, Reality Effect
Senses of Scene
Middlemarch
In Which the Story Pauses a Little, and Looks Forward
4. Collapse of the Scenic Method
And When I Draw Up the Curtain This Time, Reader
Kindly Time
The Scenic Method
Wandering Steps and Slow
5. Epiphanic and Everyday Modernisms
Interepisodic
Epiphany
Everyday
By the Ocean of Time
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
2.1. Tristram sketches his story (Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 333).
2.2. At the intersection of epic and drama.
4.1. The scenic method in extremis.
Introduction
We talk about pace. We talk about it often today, talking about movies, stories, streaming TV,
or passing hours and days. We say that it speeds up and slows down, drags, disappoints, picks
up again. We talked about pace in, say, the eighteenth century. Maybe not “pace” explicitly,
but something like it. Fielding and Goethe, talking about movement in epic and drama, used
words like “leaping,” “still-standing,” “forward-striding,” “backward-grasping.” And,
between those two moments, between our contemporary cinematic or streaming or post-
postmodern conceptions of pacing and those eighteenth-century conceptions of pacings epic
and dramatic, people talked about the pace of fiction, the novel.
In fact, this book is not so much about how people talk or talked about pace as about how
the pacing of narratives led them to do so. It’s not about how to make pace or how pace is
best made, but about how transformations in pacing made and remade novelistic fiction.
How to make pace? I can point to the usual principles. Provide action in anticipation of a
deadline; keep the narrator “close” to the action; make the narrator’s voice dramatic; develop
several lines of action, either on a large scale (plot lines between Berlin and Brooklyn) or in
the moment (estranged siblings dining, waiters serving courses between speeches); imply
banality so that one suspects revelation; insert a digression in order to build tension; jump
between short scenes of conflict and mystery; forgo long development, use frequent
flashbacks; alternate short declarative sentences with longer ones, being liberal but not too
liberal with the commas, teasing the reader, delaying gratification, and, hopefully, landing on
precisely the right word. End chapters suspensefully but not melodramatically.
Still, the truth is, beyond the contemporary writing handbooks that offer such guidance,
few people have written much about what we call pace.1
What “we” call “pace.” Yes, there are issues. That “we” is very much Western, “pace”
perversely anglophonic; and “we” have talked about narrative “pace” explicitly for little
more than a century. The Westernness of the “we” will be addressed in due time. As for the
late-modernness and anglophony of “pace”: my aim here is to examine not a term but a
concept. More precisely: my aim is to examine, within narrative movement, a concept
belonging to a discourse significantly older and more expansive than the term itself. Terms
are historically belated, scattered inconsistently across languages, and they tend to come in
the twilight of what they describe. If the word “pace” was not in use throughout the full range
of the literary history that lies in this study, it was not for lack of a concept. Some potent
concept of pace was definitive for the moment I describe, and definitive for narratives within
it.
But terms do matter (they do, to an extent, shape their concepts), and pace is a term that I
use for a reason. There are alternatives. Critics over the past century have written
(remarkably rarely) about rhythm, tempo, duration, speed, progression …. Those terms, in
this study, will not be lost. But pace distinguishes itself. It is appropriately impressionistic,
bounding between metonym and metaphor. In the past it has meant something spatial (a step,
journey, or route; a passage between church pews), something temporal (a “space of time”),
something textual (chapter, canto, episode), and some act of stepping, passing, progressing,
ambulating, or racing.2 If today we know it as a rate of movement, a relation of spatial units
to temporal ones, that is because its mediation of space and time is so thoroughly embedded
in its own history. Still: however unique its range in English may be, pace has its cognates in
Romance languages (pas, paso, passo) and “step-” like counterparts in German and Russian
(Schritt, шаг).3 Pace in the sense of temporal movement is a concept shared (at least) across
Western cultures. And it is shared, precisely, in the realm of narrative tradition. One finds it
in writers’ and critics’ invocations of vitesse, ritmo, cadence, tempo, or темп; more, one finds
it in the movements of narratives themselves. Narrative (and history) created this term. Those
who think that they “know” pace do so because they have “felt” it in some form of narrative
movement.
So: pace, here, is not some simple rebranding of past critical efforts (rhythm, tempo,
speed … ); it continues those efforts in order to designate something more historically and
narratively well defined. For that very reason, I refuse any too-narrow definition of pace
itself. Call it large-forward-rhythmic-shifting-dynamic-temporal narrative movement. And let
me outline those elements only briefly, leaving the details to the footnotes, so as to move past
the formalities and get to the history of some pace of fiction to come.
Large. Actually, midsized is more accurate. Pace in prose fiction of the epoch I am
examining functions predominantly on an intermediate narrative scale.4 One can certainly
speak of pace on a smaller, “micro-” level of narrative, a level of sentences and poetic lines.
Pace, of course, is generated by syntax, meter, punctuation, phonemes, and stresses (and is,
of course, influenced by the semic, symbolic, and cultural-referential textures of words).5
Indeed, I will speak often of pace on the micro-level moving forward. But I will speak of it
there as something that typically accumulates, is subsumed by, and endures on a larger level
of narrative. This larger level is still not so large as to coincide with what one may call
“plot”—either in the colloquial sense of “plot summary,” a sequence of only the most
functional “nuclei,” or as turning points in a large narrative outline or design. Yes, pace is
generated by elements on this “macro-”level, but it does not endure there.6 One cannot really
detect pace on the level of a plot summary, and one hardly experiences pace as an
overarching logic or design. So, this is a “meso-” or “mid-level” pace. “Different scales
activate different structural features.”7 It is a mid-level scale, in constant exchange with the
devices and conventions of the micro and macro, that “activates” narrative pace.8
Forward-rhythmic. “Rhythm” (rythme, Rhythmus, ritmo) is the term that literary critics
have used most frequently to describe something like pace.9 I define it simply as a pattern of
recall developed in sequence. In literary narrative, phrases, themes, and units occur that recall
or repeat-with-a-difference other phrases, themes, or units that occurred previously in the
text; and that recurrence, if it happens enough times at the right intervals, suggests a pattern
across a narrative segment or whole. Rhythm, then, is a special diachronic case of what we