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The Pace of Fiction The Pace of Fiction Narrative Movement and the Novel BRIAN GINGRICH Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Brian Gingrich 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952991 ISBN 978–0–19–885828–7 ebook ISBN 978–0–19–189914–0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858287.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. 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

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