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.
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Narrative Discourse, Literary History
Scene and Summary Resurrected
Traditions Classical and Modern
Lens, Loci, Foci, Ellipse
Narrative Movement and Modernity
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
Realist Pace
Reality Principle, Reality Effect
Senses of Scene
Middlemarch
In Which the Story Pauses a Little, and Looks Forward
Collapse of the Scenic Method
And When I Draw Up the Curtain This Time, Reader
Kindly Time
The Scenic Method
Wandering Steps and Slow
Epiphanic and Everyday Modernisms
Interepisodic
Epiphany
Everyday
By the Ocean of Time
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Tristram sketches his story (Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 333)
At the intersection of epic and drama. 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 postpostmodern 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
often imagine synchronically or statically as pattern.10 It may tend toward the regularmetronomic, or toward the irregular-disruptive. In any event, it is not identical with pace. Pace, say, is a special case of rhythm; always a rhythm, as rhythm is always a pattern; but a pattern is not always a rhythm nor a rhythm always pace. What distinguishes pace from rhythm in general is that it moves forward toward senses of endings, projected moments of closure, climax, or nonnarratable resolution; it is uneven, affective, pulsing with will and desire …. At this point, pace ascends to its place in a well-worn erotic opposition between “masculine” narrative movement and more “feminine” rhythms.11 To the extent that narrative tradition and its theorization have perpetuated that opposition, it is a fact. At the center of this study there stands the feature of narrative that may be most easily codifiable as masculine. But then, if one keeps one’s eyes on it long enough, if one analyzes it …. Pace cannot be pace, its own caricature, forever. It seeks endings, professes to move forward, and then it doesn’t; it becomes something other, some perhaps even more potent rhythm or pattern. And then it is pace again, with a difference.
Shifting-dynamic. Pace also differs from mere rhythm (as rhythm from mere pattern) in its degree of dynamism. Narrative theorists have spoken much of dynamism in the past century, but ultimately the term has become somewhat diluted. Georg Lukács meant it with reference to Hegel and Marx; Peter Brooks, with reference to Freud. Perhaps one can recover something of the term’s potency by noting that Hegel, Marx, and Freud meant it with reference to classical (Newtonian) physics.12 So consider a cursory analogy. Velocity is the rate of change of position, acceleration the rate of change of velocity, “jerk” the rate of change of acceleration …. There have been attempts to analyze a kind of “velocity” in narrative speed or vitesse, steady and average. And after all, pace is typically grasped best when it becomes steady. But its becoming steady is defined by the accelerations and shifts that precede it. Pace differs from speed in that it is more perceptibly determined by factors of desire, affect, and “interest,” by degrees of meaningfulness and functionality (all implied by the text) determined, one might say, by something like “mass,” in which case pace would then be closest to a momentum that repeatedly shifts under the impact of forces and their own derivatives.13 I will not press the analogy further.
Temporal narrative movement. But can one in fact move beyond analogies in speaking of the relation between narrative pace and the temporality of a physical world? Can narrative pace itself be designated as temporal? I think so. In the first place, pace, experienced in any world (physical, sociohistorical, remembered, textual), is always to an extent narrative pace. To feel pace is to project forward and backward a hypothetical rate of experience, to take a present impression and imagine it extended along a sequence of events (future, past, imaginary) that includes certain subjects and is conditioned by external circumstances. It is, in other words, to sense a certain (present) temporality as an object and to abstract that temporality across a (past-present-future) chronological line.14 Whether that impression of temporality is produced by a lived experience in the physical world or by a series of words on a page is of some consequence, but not for the temporal status of the pace that is then felt and projected. The different meanings of the word “pace” a spatial, temporal, or textual unit; an act or a rate of action confirm this. To speak of pace, or a pace, is already to
imagine its measurement with respect to time. It matters little whether one then speaks of that time (with the structuralists or Einstein) as a “chronological illusion” or (with the phenomenologists) as a “resignification of the world in its temporal aspect.”15
How to analyze pace? Consider past suggestions. In the 1920s, E. M. Forster suggested that rhythm in the novel could be seen as a recurrence of musical phrases in a narrative, or, more abstractly, as a relation of novelistic parts to a symphonic whole.16 Viktor Shklovsky saw artistic rhythm (ритм) as disruption, a device that would in fact “decelerate” the habitual, automatized rhythms of prose life.17 At mid-century, Günther Müller described the experience of narrative time as a relation between time of narration and time that is narrated; Harald Weinrich defined Tempo as a relation between foreground- and backgroundtemporalities of narration; Erich Auerbach praised the Tempo of Boccaccio and of Voltaire and marveled at the “sweeping of consciousness” in Woolf.18 By the 1960s a structural analysis of something like pace seemed close at hand. In 1966 Roland Barthes envisioned narrative as a series of functions (or turning points) and indices (or fillers), a series producing “a sort of structural ‘limping’ [boitement],” “an incessant play of potential whose varying falls give the narrative its dynamism [tonus] or energy.”19 In this way, said Barthes, “le récit ‘marche’.”20 And then, in 1972, with Narrative Discourse, Gérard Genette analyzed narrative time through the categories of “Ordre,” “Durée,” and “Fréquence.” Genette, acknowledging that one cannot measure the duration of a literary narrative as the time taken to read it (too many variables), suggests that one might at least measure the duration of a story (“in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years”) in relation to the length of the text in lines and in pages.21 He attempted as much by segmenting Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) by its spatiotemporal breaks and measuring each segment’s proportion of pages to time passed (“Combray: 140 pages for about ten years”; “Un amour de Swann: 150 pages for some two years”).22 But, the limits of such quantitative analysis being obvious (not so effective for Genesis or 2001), Genette supplemented it with another mode, more qualitative. He introduced into the structural analysis of narrative two units that determine narrative rhythm and that, here, will serve as starting points for the analysis of narrative pace.
So I will start from some units that were … “introduced” by Genette. Or rather, reintroduced. Among the best qualifications of those units is that Genette, in fact, stole them as I steal them now. He stole them from Russia and Germany, from others in France, from England and the United States; he stole them from writers and critics who had stolen them from writers who, generations earlier, had begun thinking in terms of those units somewhat tentatively. Between several distant parts of that line of thievery and my own interference, one may hope for a coherent narrative of the pace of some version of fiction. Because, after all, such thievery is tradition. And tradition, in this sense, may be a means of enlivening or escaping what currently constitutes narrative theory a field threatened, on the one side, by a proliferation of for-their-own-sake formalisms, stylistics, and data gatherings; threatened too, on the other side, by capitulatory gestures to shallower historicisms. Tradition, here, is not a makeshift alibi for some culture of taste. It is a construction that one observes in its act of formation specifically, a construction of a narrative tradition through the formation of a critical one. Look at Genette, look at Barthes, put pressure on them, watch as they become
incommensurate with categories like narrative theory or structuralism, and then watch as they become incommensurate with 1972 or 1966. There is a sort of explosion under the pressure of taking their work seriously, something that, in the case of this study, sends one looking backward yet further, toward 1921, 1884, 1797, 1749 … ; toward what has been embedded in the analysis of narrative, and pace, all along. To examine tradition in this way, then, is not to seek a means of enclosure but to watch thievery in reverse or (mixing metaphors) to watch a small sequence of exploding historical nodes.
Pace, in what follows, will appear as something determined by both narrative structures and historical transformations. For the most part I bracket or ignore cognitive processes, book history, material readerly activities. The “reader” or the “we” that I refer to is, as much as I can approximate it, a reader implied by structures of pacing in the text. I restore to Genette’s units the idea of historical transformation. Call it a historical narrativization of narratology. (I cannot claim to be the first to attempt it.)23 I focus on a set of narrative units formed by literary tradition, I watch how they develop over time, and I analyze how their development creates meaning in individual texts.24 To that extent, this is not a discourse upon narrative, or on pacing; it is an analysis of many pacings, and a history of pace, that always awaits and welcomes the appearance of culture, ideology what you will in the emergence, through analytic pressure, of narrative themes.
The method here is the means, not the argument. I “read” pace at as many distances, on as many depths and surfaces, as my time or technology allows me. And I find that pace manifests itself most powerfully in a kind of middle ground, on a mid-level scale, where the shifting of narrative takes place between mid-level units. If there are preliminary concerns that I start from terms like “structure” and “unit,” that those terms are tainted with old formalist-structuralism, that formalist-structuralists may have failed precisely in their attempts to treat an object like pace (their formulas and diagrams being “at odds with the temporal nature of the analyzed work,” reducing forward rhythms to fixed patterns, making temporal movement static, “arrest[ing] narrative flow”) nevertheless, I doubt that what follows looks much like 1966 or 1972 (too much George Eliot, too little math), and, in any case, I suspect that the striking absence of attention to narrative movement since the decline of structuralist-formalist criticism is evidence that those approaches, far from hindering an analysis of pace, facilitate it in very interesting ways.25 It is true that structural analysis tends to “dechronologize” narrative; but it does so in order to comprehend chronological effects.26 And so I take my cue from that method, and push past it. One works with structures and units in order to reach constructions and generations of temporality and, here, pace. Pacing, here, always implies a potential pace, a process of structuring oriented toward a reading.27 If I sometimes speak more of pacing than of pace, it is because one sometimes does better justice to movement by turning away from a description of it and toward an analysis of what makes it. It matters little, at that point, whether what makes it is consubstantial with it. What, after all, is the process by which all readers move from lines of letters, words, and phrases to the imagination of forward temporal movement?
But this is not really a book about structures and units of pacing. It is about watching how those things are formed, setting them in motion, and seeing how their motions allow one to
see fiction, and the history embedded in it, differently. Perhaps it is worth suggesting that a historical moment, manifested through a discourse transcribed on a page as a narrative, dwells beneath a story that one reads. And if that story, comprehended by a reader in whatever moment, takes on certain attributes of pace of temporal movement, even dynamic imagine: what closer experience does one have to a past “temporality”? What closer, more intense, dynamic, or complex experience but a function of signs and structures acting as guideposts, not only to the forward movement of the plot of some story but to the plotting, forward movement, and construction of time that could have taken place in some other imagination conditioned by some past historical situation?
Or perhaps it is enough to move forward from what Paul Ricoeur suggested at the start of the three volumes of Time and Narrative in the early 1980s: at stake in narrative is nothing less than the temporal character of human experience, and narrative is meaningful to the extent that it portrays that experience’s features.28 If one even partly believes that, then to speak not just of narrative but of its large, forward, rhythmic, shifting, dynamic, temporal movement is to make Ricoeur’s point more emphatically, through narrative’s most elaborate, least understood phenomenal feature. And as for “fiction” hardly a rigorous term, either outdated or all too contemporary; a realm of storytelling slightly larger than the novel yet narrower than the entire field of narrative utterances the pace of fiction, one might say, has a yet more unique capacity to rearrange, condense, emplot, pace, and give the impression of motivation and significance to the contents of a story. If pace is narrative’s most elaborate feature, fiction is narrative’s most elaborate form.
The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel. Brian Gingrich, Oxford University Press (2021). © Brian Gingrich.
DOI: 10 1093/oso/9780198858287 003 0001
1 In 2006, narrative “speed” was called “one of the most undertheorized issues of narrative theory” (Jan Baetens and Kathryn Hume, “Speed, Rhythm, Movement,” 349–50). Not that there hasn’t been interest over the past couple of decades: see edited collections like Narrative Dynamics (Brian Richardson), Time: From Concept to Narrative Construct (Jan Christoph Meister and Wilhelm Schernus), and ELH 85, no. 2 (2018), on “time” (Christina Lupton and R. John Williams).
2 OED Online, s v “pace (n 1),” accessed March 9, 2018, http://wwwoed com/view/Entry/135779
3 I am indebted to Ana Astafieva, Beatrice Mazzi, and Julien Zanetta for their help with Russian and Romance “paces ”
4 On the quest for the right scale of analysis, see Fernand Braudel’s preface to The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World; Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale”; and Christian Metz, “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film,” in Film Language, 108–47. More recently, see Mark Algee-Hewitt, Ryan Heuser, and Franco Moretti, “On Paragraphs”; the response to Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading in PMLA 132, no 3 (2017): 613–89; and Ted Underwood’s “Why Literary Time Is Measured in Minutes ” In sociology, see Hartmut Rosa, especially Social Acceleration, 24–5, and “Social Acceleration,” in High-Speed Society, 81–7.
5 For pace on the level of the sentence, see Jenny Davidson, Reading Style, 55–67; on the level of verse, see Roi Tartakovsky, “The Case for Pace,” and Jonathan Sachs, “Slow Time.” For the full gamut of pace and prose stylistics, see Garrett Stewart’s career-long development of “narratography” (discussed in Novel Violence, 1–29)
6 Note that my “macro” is on a larger scale than that of Gérard Genette, below
7 Algee-Hewitt et al., “On Paragraphs,” 21.
8 As for the specification of prose (and the exclusion of Eugen Onegin and Aurora Leigh): verse narration, even if
extended to epic proportions, is distinctly determined by small-scale, line-by-line rhythms (cyclical, recurring) that act separately from the large-scale, forward-cumulative rhythm of pace The narrative effects of a long poem result from the mode and frequency with which readers, closely engaged with metrical rhythms, sense their harmony or disharmony with the pace shifting or accumulating above them.
9 See Forster’s chapter on rhythm in Aspects of the Novel as well as E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel, and Terence Wright, “Rhythm in the Novel ” Otherwise, influential studies of rhythm in the past century and a half range from Nietzsche’s references to rhythm in prose, music, and history to Herbert Spencer’s treatment of rhythm in his First Principles, to the emphases on poetic rhythm in Symbolism and Imagism (Mallarmé, Yeats, Pound), to the everyday “rhythmanalyses” of Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos, Gaston Bachelard, and Henri Lefebvre, to the massive Critique du rythme by Henri Meschonnic and the recent study of rhythmic forms by Caroline Levine (Forms, 49–81).
10 See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 77–8; Nietzsche on Chladnian sound-figures (“On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy, 143–5) and on “das rhythmische Ticktack” (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 80–2); Frank Kermode on tick-tock (The Sense of an Ending, 44–6); and Walter Ong on orality and signs (Orality and Literacy, 74–6)
11 “Those of us who know no art of delaying climax or, reading, feel no incipient tumescence, may well be barred from the pleasure of this ‘full functional act’; nor may we profit from the rhythm method by which it is attained.” Teresa de Lauretis, of course, works through the seeming “maleness of all narrative movement” with great subtlety (Alice Doesn’t, 108)
12 See Georg Lukács, “Die weltanschaulichen Grundlagen des Avantgardeismus,” in Wider den mißverstandenen Realismus, 13–48, and Brooks, Reading for the Plot.
13 I mean “implied” in the sense of Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 137–8, and Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader. Georg Simmel describes the experience of the Tempo des Lebens as a product of changes in the quantity and range of perceptions that assail one in Philosophie des Geldes (539)
14 To this extent pace always exceeds the limits of Bergsonian durée (see Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, esp. 1–24).
15 See Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structural,” 12, and Ricoeur, Temps et récit, vol. 1, 122.
16 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel.
17 Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose and “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy ”
18 Günther Müller, Morphologische Poetik; Harald Weinrich, Tempus; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, 180–210, 379–81, 498
19 Roland Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,” 26.
20 Ibid. Here, marche could mean goes, moves along, functions, works, runs.
21 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 87–8. Genette here builds on the theoretical proposals of Müller (see Morphologische Poetik, 251–9, 273–5) and Barthes (see “Le discours de l’histoire,” 5–75).
22 Barthes, “Le discours de l’histoire,” 92.
23 Aside from examples like Fredric Jameson or Hayden White, see Robyn Warhol’s Gendered Interventions, 15–16. The structural analysis of narrative itself was never really ahistorical: Genette was more than willing to allude to the succession of literary-historical moments
24 “You define the unit of analysis , and then follow its metamorphoses in a variety of environments until, ideally, all of literary history becomes a long chain of related experiments” (Franco Moretti, Distant Reading, 53–4).
25 Catherine Gallagher, “Formalism and Time,” 231 I cite only Gallagher here out of respect for her articulation of the problem, but her argument appears already in the early 1980s, in Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other, 55–6, or Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, vol 2, 5
26 See Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale,” 12, and Le degré zéro de l’écriture: “La structure est le dépôt d’une durée” (12) Even A J Greimas, most conspicuous of narrative detemporalizers, said that his models and schematisms should be apprehended as “operations,” “dynamic” (“Elements of a Narrative Grammar,” 23–40). As for Roman Jakobson, “[The] two effective oppositions, synchrony-diachrony and static-dynamic, do not coincide in reality. Synchrony contains many a dynamic element ” (“Dialogue on Time in Language and Literature,” 12)
27 Here I echo Ricoeur’s claim that Aristotelian “plot” (mythos) and “imitation” (mimesis) always imply emplotting and imitating (Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 32–3, 48), as well as Peter Brooks’s insistence that by “plot” he really means plotting, “the dynamic aspect of narrative … which moves us forward as readers of the narrative text … as it unfurls before us a
precipitation of shape and meaning … construed over and through time” (Reading for the Plot, 35).
28 “L’enjeu ultime aussi bien de l’identité structurale de la fonction narrative que de l’exigence de vérité de toute œuvre narrative, c’est le caractère temporel de l’expérience humaine”; “le récit est significatif dans la mesure où il dessine les traits de l’expérience temporelle” (Ricoeur, Temps et récit, vol 1, 17)
Narrative Discourse, Literary History
Scene and Summary Resurrected
“‘My dear Mr. Bennet,’ said his lady to him one day, ‘have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?’” Mr. Bennet replies that he has not “‘But it is,’” returns Mrs. Bennet; and so a conversation begins: the Bennets talk, their speeches and silences reported in short paragraphs, stage directions strewn lightly between.1 These lines are less famous than the two that precede them “It is a truth universally acknowledged …. However little known … ” yet they mean as much for the form of the novel that follows. Talking, the Bennets take up the idea of an opposition between known truths and unknown quantities, carry it into the storyworld, give it a comic rhythm; and, as they talk, we feel present in their particular spacetime. The narrative mode is akin to drama. But then follow Mrs. Bennet’s train of thought forward 300 pages, to the moment when her daughters have married the two men brought to Netherfield Park, and witness a different mode: “Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters. With what delighted pride she afterwards visited Mrs. Bingley and talked of Mrs. Darcy may be guessed. … Mr. Bennet missed his second daughter exceedingly; his affection for her drew him oftener from home than anything else could do.”2 The Bennets are now distant, moving about in the realm of routine. The narrative whisks over a great span of minor events: “The day on which … afterwards … often … ” in this sequence there is the effect of time passing, flowing out from the end of the story. For this is the end, and between it and the Bennets’ opening conversation lies the whole of Pride and Prejudice (1813), structured by versions of those two modes. The first mode is called scene, the second called summary, and, along with ellipses (forward jumps between chapters) and pauses (breaks to tell of truths universally acknowledged), they are what make for the temporal movement of Austen’s novel, its pace.
Scene and summary. The terms likely sound unfamiliar or antiquated. They carry the dust of a mid-century formalism, the jargon of narratological structuralism. They were initially popularized, by writers and critics, as basic techniques in the crafting of fiction: a scene was a blend of reported dialogue (apparently direct), transcribed drama (apparently immediate), and detailed action (“shown” rather than “told”); a summary was a general chronological account (indirect, distant, told) of compressed or “foreshortened” events. Later they were reformulated, in Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1972), as basic forms of narrative movement: a scene was now a segment that went slowly, almost at the rate of a story’s “real
time”; a summary was swift, faster than the events of the story; at their extremes lay ellipses and pauses.3 Likely they do sound unfamiliar or antiquated. We speak little of craft and structure today. But the terms still echo in relics of those traditions in fiction handbooks, the occasional writers’ workshop, and in the successive editions of Narratology, Mieke Bal’s classic “Introduction to the Theory of Narrative,” where scene and summary continue to make an appearance around page 100. For over thirty years their appearance was accompanied by a statement that their alternation “is generally viewed as the most important characteristic of the narrative genre.”4 That statement was removed in 2017. In 2018 Gérard Genette passed away. Scene and summary have not fared well in recent years. But it is not too late to recover their meaning.
And one should recover their meaning. First, because scene and summary are the best terms we have for talking about narrative pace; and, second, because they are the kind of terms we need for talking about narrative in general.
Yet to recover them one has to traverse those traditions of craft and structure again. Genette’s achievement in 1972, undoubtedly brilliant, was to translate scene and summary from discourses on craft into the discourse of structure. He adopted them as techniques in the art of fiction, revealed them as forms of narrative movement, and proposed them as measurements of speed or vitesse. 5 In doing so he completed a shift already begun by the critics of craft: a shift away from methods of impressionistic belletrism and protophenomenological interpretation variously focused on fluid literary modes and toward a structural analysis focused on fixed formal units. 6 My own aim is slightly different. I adopt Genette’s achievement … and trace it backward. It is in this way that one grasps the full, dual significance of scene and summary as both experiential modes (“scene”: dramatic presentation; “summary”: detached narration) and concretized units (“a scene” or “a summary,” structural products of either mode, measurable in so many lines or pages of text). And it is in this way, ultimately, that one may curb certain tendencies in narrative theory today a (more European) lingering in calcified units left over from the narratological turn, or a (more US-American) preoccupation with narratorial positions, degrees of reliability, and self-questioning storytellers. What was most crucial in studies like Narrative Discourse what stands to be most illuminating in the discourse of narrative in general, and what is missing in so many discourses on narrative now is a method conscious of critical history shifting beneath it, conscious of its critical objects shifting themselves. Meanwhile, what remains refreshing in those craft-based formalisms (so easily dismissed as dull) is an ability to grasp similar shifts to grasp both writerly experimentation and its formulization, both readerly experience and its reification. One need not espouse any one of these critical moments to appreciate the movement between them. So I take up the discourse of structure, weave it back into discourses on craft, and search for a method limited by neither. I resurrect scene and summary, all dust and jargon, and reveal them for what their greatest effects prove them to be: units of pacing, modes of pace.
Because, again, scene and summary are the best categories we have for talking about pace. Their dual existence, as narrational modes and narrative units, reflects a duality inherent in pace itself. We acknowledge that duality when we speak of pace as that part that
went fast or that part that dragged on, struggling to unite the abstract “part” (formed into a unit by our memory) with the original experience (of swiftness or dragging). We shift between experiencing those categories as modes and constructing them as units in the same way that, with pace generally, we shift between perceiving rhythms and imagining them measured across a chronological timeline. By speaking both of scene and summary and of scenes and summaries, one speaks of the two poles of experience and chronology whose mediation constitutes pace.
But scene and summary are also advantageous categories because they are dynamic. Working in tandem, as two distinct forces, they enact the essential dynamism of pace. A summary moves swiftly (“Mrs. Bennet … quitted the house under the delightful persuasion … of having [her] daughter married to Mr. Collins … ) until a scene slows it down (“The next day opened a new scene at Longbourn. Mr. Collins made his declaration … ”). A scene plays out dramatically (“Engaged to Mr. Collins! my dear Charlotte, impossible!”) until a summary sweeps it forward (“Mrs. Bennet was really in a most pitiable state … ”).7 Their alternation, their interplay, the contrast of their speeds, constitute the rhythm of narration that, projected forward as a factor of narrative desire (for the right marriage, at the right time), moves forward as pace.
More: scene and summary are advantageously qualitative units, able to characterize pace in experiential terms beyond (a more quantifiable) “fast” or “slow.” They are temporally distinct, representing two different experiences of time in a way that lends novelistic-fictional narrative a sense of temporal heterogeneity. They are also the right size for examinations of pace: midsized, able to capture duration and movement above the micro-level of a sentence without abstracting it to the macro-level of a plot. They are apt mediators: on the one hand, between micro- and macro-scales, able to register shifts in punctuation and syntax (“, impossible!”) while being registered themselves in the shifting of plot (one year, four marriages); on the other, between the narrative levels represented by that other pair of antiquated but still heuristically useful terms discourse (sjuzhet, discours) and story (fabula, histoire). Unlike more arbitrary conventional structures such as chapters, paragraphs, or serial parts, scene and summary are deeply rooted in both discourse and story, sharing in their fundamentally reciprocal (and they are reciprocal) processes. (A certain moment in a narrative is deemed to require scenic treatment; another moment is determined by its treatment through summary.) But, like chapters, paragraphs, and parts, they are nevertheless conventional. And again this makes them privileged categories of analysis. They are products of the narrative tradition they would analyze structures of craft shaped and concretized by actual practitioners. Defoe divided his narratives into long “scenes” of misfortune, folly, and debauchery and “new scenes of life”; Richardson boasted that his novels’ letters contained both “descriptions and reflections” and conversations “in the dialogue or dramatic way” (the ever theatrical Lovelace presents several events as scenes and acts); Prévost’s Manon Lescaut abounds with scènes étranges, fâcheuses, affligeantes, ridicules, extraordinaires, horribles … fort ágreables; Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloïse performs, epistolarily, a conjuring of imagined scenes through relation and récit; and Sterne’s eccentric-loquacious narrator exhorts himself to “drop the curtain, Shandy. ”8 Werther, Evelina, and the characters of Les liaisons dangereuses all experience life in scenes. (A century earlier, Aphra Behn began
Oroonoko, delaying its Story, by presenting its Scene). When David Foster Wallace taught fiction-writing courses, he would start each semester with a quiz asking students to define ten technical terms. Number four, between “Narrative Omniscience” and “Plot,” was “Summary versus Scene.”9
Still, if the terms have become unfamiliar or antiquated, there are reasons for this. Like all categories that may be applied to the analysis of pace generally (schematically, ahistorically), their application is limited. In the role assigned them by traditions of craft, they tend to be too vague and impressionistic: Wayne Booth said that they “pa[y] for broad coverage with gross imprecision.”10 In the role assigned them by narratology, they risk being too rigid: they exclude views of the micro and macro due to a constrained midsized focus; they lose their qualitative-experiential character due to an over-adherence to the binary fast/slow. 11 And while each of those last two limitations can be managed by a skilled critic who is aware of them (like Genette), at least one other limitation seems insurmountable: by themselves, scene and summary say little about other crucial aspects of narrative. Crucial for Booth was that the terms say little about the kind of narrator providing the scene or the summary (and thus say “very little about literary effect”).12 Genette seems to have agreed: though he relied predominantly on scene and summary in the second chapter of Narrative Discourse, the one dedicated to vitesse, he was forced to move beyond them in his chapters on frequency, perspective, and voice. And so I too, in order to grasp those other aspects’ undeniable impact on pace, must move beyond the two terms in good time. Or, what amounts to the same thing, I must expand them.
A minor modification, then, of my earlier claim: scene and summary are the best terms for starting to talk about pace. As I move forward, they will slowly expand, morph from strict categories into loose models, give way to other aspects and units, and dissolve. This will be their greatest value: to function simply as categories and to facilitate the process of their own dissolution. Like all truly valuable categories of analysis, their limits should be what is most revelatory about them.
Among those limits, one proves revelatory above all: that of the terms’ historical character. They cannot be the stable-synchronic categories that traditions of craft and structure seem to desire. Their meanings shift throughout literary history. Literary-historical transformations destabilize them. And while that point by itself may mean little today, so often has it been repeated by scholars heeding the call to always historicize, the particular circumstances of this case make it undeniable: there is no ground for an analysis of pace that is not of a shifting historical nature.13
So, as I have said, call this something like a historical narrativization of narratology. I hope it will be much else. The aim is to analyze pace in its structures in pacing and to analyze pacing in its historical transformations. But first, another kind of historical distinction has to be made: not simply the distinction that pacing transforms throughout history, but that pace (as a discourse) belongs to a specific historical moment, and that its categories develop in a specific moment of that moment as well. Again, one sees this in those old terms, scene and summary. In the precise circumstances of their historical formation, one may find nothing less than the meaning of temporal movement in modern fiction and,
Traditions Classical and Modern
Turn to the moment when scene and summary first appear in Narrative Discourse. Again, it is the second chapter, titled “Durée” but essentially dedicated to measuring vitesse. 14 In the first chapter, on “Ordre,” Genette dealt with narrative “asynchronies,” backward and forward jumps that he calls analepses and prolepses. 15 (I will refer to them moving forward.) Here he has just proposed his quantitative method of measuring narrative speed his method of segmenting a narrative spatiotemporally and calculating each segment’s proportion of pages to time passed (“Combray: 140 pages for about ten years … ”). But then, likely sensing weaknesses inherent in such a method, he stops short and looks for a qualitative complement. He falls upon scene, summary, pause, and ellipsis, and he introduces them as terms rooted in a stable, classical tradition:
It turns out that narrative tradition, and in particular the novel’s tradition, has selected four basic relationships that have become in the course of an evolution that the (as yet unborn) history [histoire] of literature will some day start to study the canonical forms of novel tempo, a little bit the way the classical tradition in music singled out, from the infinitude of possible speeds of execution, some canonical movements (andante, allegro, presto, etc ) whose relationships of succession and alternation governed structures like those of the sonata, the symphony, or the concerto for some two centuries …. 16
Canonical forms and movements, structures of centuries: it’s not difficult to find traces of the tradition Genette is alluding to. Look at Fielding’s “Essays” at the beginnings of the books of Tom Jones, where he or his narrator, playing rule-maker for a new province of “prosai-comiepic Writing,” vows to hasten toward any “extraordinary Scenes” (Book II) while outlining the roles of ellipsis-like “Spaces of Time” (Book III) and pause-like “Interruptions” (Book IV) as well.17 Or look, as Genette repeatedly does, to Balzac: his reflective pauses on morals and finance, his scenic manipulations of melodrama, his vigorous leaps over space and time suggest the ease of a writer who knows precisely the tools supplied to him by tradition. Indeed, Genette’s categories prove well configured for most works of fiction from the later eighteenth through the mid nineteenth century. And choruses of chatty narrators from the period affirm it: in their self-conscious comments on story “gaps,” “hasty strides,” theatrical units, and panoramic sweeps, they seem loudly to claim ownership of a scene-and-summary tradition. The sheer possibility of a parody like Tristram Shandy (1759–67), of a narrator who boasts, “I do all things out of rule,” stands as evidence for the existence of a rule or standard to be defied at the time.18 Thus we are led to imagine, with Genette, that there must have been some entity stable enough to shelter the categories of vitesse early on. And thus enters the figure monolithic, elusive of the classical novel.
The classical novel, the traditional novel, the classical Bildungsroman, not quite modern fiction …. It is an ideal construct (particular examples always imperfect), with characteristics well known economy, balance, teleology leading toward synthesis. On the “macro-”level,
of plot, its movement is one of distention and configuration. Its scenes start small, as everyday moments in amorphous episodes (the Bennets talk, Wilhelm and Mariane have champagne and oysters); then comes a turning point (a ball, a journey), a socially articulated desire (for marriage, a place in the world); the episodic circumstances become plotted; and the narrative gravitates, against lively resistance (foils and gossip, false expectations and folly), to its end. On the middle level, of pace, its movement is more varied and dynamic. More classical-musical. Not just in its canonical tempi (andante, allegro), but in its rhythm and tonality as well. Rhythm, yes, because of repetitions in plot as in Volume 3, Chapter 11, of Pride and Prejudice, when we find ourselves again in a scene with Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, again discussing Bingley’s arrival at Netherfield Park (“the subject which had been so warmly canvassed between [the] parents, about a twelvemonth ago, was now brought forward again … ”).19 But rhythm also in the opening/closing of actions associated with Bingley’s return: in the anticipations and deadlines (“coming down in a day or two … the expectation of his arrival … the day of the arrival drew near … ”/“Mr. Bingley arrived”), in the social conventions (“the gentlemen … were invited and engaged to dine at Longbourn”/“On Tuesday … the two … were in very good time”), and in the swift force of causality (“Mr. Bingley called again, and alone”/“The Bennets were speedily pronounced the luckiest family in the world”).20 Such mid-level rhythms are the work of Barthes’s proairetic and hermeneutic codes, codes of familiar gestures and suspended disclosures that, like melody and harmony, and through expectation and delay, weave the text forward in a contrapuntal tonal unity.21 One need only add to Barthes that each line of code is woven in a particular scene- or summary-mode, and that such weaving creates more or less distinct scene- or summary-units. With the sequence of Jane and Bingley’s engagement, the weaving is a light flurry of summaries and short comic scenes; with the sequence of Elizabeth and Darcy, the scenes grow longer, fuller, thicker. The trick, in the classical novel, is to make sure the mode or unit matches the occasion.
But, as the story usually goes, and not without truth, the classical novel soon meets its downfall. Gradually in the course of the nineteenth century, decisively in the early twentieth, its conventions are mocked and its categories rejected. A new standard of pacing, and music, is called for a purportedly purer one, in which rhythms do not close but are left open-ended, in which counterpoint is not of the plot but of the sentence. The tonal unity of proairetic and hermeneutic movements is disrupted; successions of actions and revelations are disordered; “l’écriture classique a donc éclaté.”22
Critics tend to claim that Flaubert struck the first blow, and one can see why. The guile with which he blurs the line between scene and summary, with which he teases and disappoints expectations of canonical movements, is evident. Witness the reckless pace of L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), of Frédéric Moreau’s mercurial-unmotivated life, which feels like a corrupt summary in search of a meaningful scene that never materializes. One version of the history of pace in the novel turns on the two-word phrase that opens that novel’s second-to-last chapter “Il voyagea” and then, within the same half page, “ … Il revint. … Des années passèrent …. ”23 Sixteen years pass in this moment. Flaubert gives up his story to a gust of historical time; the words he offers are hardly enough to make the
ellipsis into a summary, and what he leaves the reader with in the end is not a conclusive “day on which” followed by an “afterwards” and an “often,” but two paltry scenes in which Frédéric can only reflect that his pace of development must have skipped over his life’s meaning.24
After Flaubert eventually the deluge: Joyce, Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Kafka, Woolf, Musil, Toomer, Faulkner …. Narrative movement in these writers depends less on the presence of canonical movements or tempi than on the reader’s experience of their negation. Thus, when Genette, shifting from his theoretical to his critical mode in Narrative Discourse, applies the categories of vitesse to his case-text, the Recherche, he finds that the greatest light to be shed by the categories is through their own transformation by Proust. Proust may have sought in his novel to recover something of the temporal meaning squandered in a life such as Frédéric’s, but he did not do so by returning to classical movements. He was too enamored with Flaubert’s “change[s] of tempo,” with “the masterly manner in which he managed to produce the effect of time passing, ” to go back.25 In vain does one search the Recherche for Genette’s categories. The practical summary-compression of days, weeks, or years that one finds in Don Quijote, Tom Jones, or César Birotteau? “Nothing of the kind in Proust.”26 A phrase like “said his lady to him one day,” followed by several pages of direct dialogue? One is more likely to find a paradoxical “used to say to him one day” and a set of speeches tagged as iterative, habitually recurring, despite their content marking them as singulative.27 Pauses? All “absorbed” into the act of Marcel’s narration. Ellipses? Hard to pinpoint with any accuracy. No more steady rhythm of weeks passeds and one day she saids; “the traditional alternation summary/scene is at an end.” Genette is left to conclude that “Proustian narrative does not leave any of the traditional narrative movements intact.”28 And to account for the shift he, like many critics before him, draws a line: the classical novel, its tradition, on one side; the modern novel, aberration, on the other.
It is to this limited extent that Genette acknowledges the historical character of his categories. They belong to classical narrative, and are unraveled by the modern.29 To be fair, one shouldn’t expect him to say much more on the point. Narrative Discourse is “An Essay in Method”; Genette hopes that the histoire of literature will “some day” be born just not necessarily in his pages.
But if I for my part am to offer something to such a history, I have to begin by noting something curious about Genette’s “narrative tradition.” It’s not simply that the binary classical/modern is lacking newer historicisms have made that all too clear, and I will address it in my own effort of periodization eventually. No, it’s that the very notion of a classical tradition of vitesse, or pace, is mythical. Genette’s categories are, as he says, “a little bit” like the classical tradition in music; but only a little. Andante, allegro, presto: those terms have circulated in Western musical tradition since the seventeenth century. Composers knew their names, knew their relevance for conventional situations, wrote them on pieces of paper where they wanted to indicate the tempo for a particular sonata or movement. In contrast, when Genette picked up the terms scene and summary, adjoining to them ellipsis and pause, they hadn’t been explicitly acknowledged in narrative tradition for much more than a half-century. Sure, Defoe, Prévost, Richardson, Rousseau, and Fielding, like Wallace,
referred to “scenes.” But what different scenes! and what a difference that the first five of those writers, when they referred to scenes, said nothing of “summaries.” This is the crucial fact for literary history: when Genette picked the terms up, scene and summary had only been formulated, very tentatively, in the course of the prior few decades, and in a fairly limited Anglo-American tradition of criticism. They did not exist as critical concepts in the age of the classical novel (just as, of course, the concept of the classical novel did not then exist). They were invented belatedly, retrospectively, at the same time as the later modern novel and in fact alongside it. These were the very years in which Proust was publishing his Recherche.
And so, yes, one can note a hinge-point in the history of scene and summary, somewhere around what has been alluded to as the dividing line between classical and modern. But the hinge itself was built by the moderns, to describe narrative tendencies that were at that moment threatened and diminishing and that, in the act of being described, were made more distant than ever. What Genette himself did not acknowledge was that the classical tradition of scene and summary is essentially a modern one. A minor point, when one first considers it. And yet, as we will see, of immense importance for the pace of fiction.
Then what really is the “tradition” of scene and summary? One can trace it backward from where Genette stood in 1972. Before him the most conspicuous commentator on the terms was Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, and we’ve already gathered what he thought: he basically equated them with “showing” and “telling” (part descendants of mimesis and diegesis) and sought to discourage their critical usage. Before Booth, the tradition subsisted in the writings of novelists eager to draw principles out of their craft. The pairing scene and summary appears in fact only to have been established in 1947, when the English novelistcritic Phyllis Bentley, in Some Observations on the Art of Narrative, chose “summary” as a designation for the previously many-named counterpart of scene and organized her view of narrative around the two terms.
30 Before Bentley were the so-called “Jamesian” critics, writers like Edith Wharton (whose approximate versions of scene and summary were “narrative” and “dialogue”), Joseph Warren Beach (“showing” and “telling”), and Percy Lubbock (“panorama” and “scene,” or “picture” and “drama”).
31 Before the Jamesians was, of course, Henry James himself, whose remarks on something like scene and summary were scattered and few, ranging from his distinction between the “scenic” and “non-scenic” to his appraisals of “foreshortening” and “colloquial illustration.”
32 Before James there is, apparently, a precipice: one senses a familiarity with scene and summary among writers everywhere, one recognizes ancestors of the categories in authorial commentaries and personal correspondence, but any systematic use of the terms seems to drop off. Scene and summary must always be projected backward, so to speak, onto classical fiction through the lens of James’s vague critical remarks.
Such is the frail terminological history of our two categories. It winds its way through titles like The Craft of Fiction, The Writing of Fiction, and (repeatedly, from James to John Gardner and David Lodge) The Art of Fiction only to settle, somewhat comically, with all the dust of formalism and structuralism, in handbooks for young writers of fiction. (From 2019, a chapter on “Movement and Flow”: “Henry James knew how important scenes are. … Scene summary; walk, run. … Here’s a basic menu drawn from Genette … ”).33 In the end,
however, the legacy rests largely on these words from Lubbock: “I do not know that they are the best names, but … they have been used technically in the criticism of fiction, with specific meaning. … Picture and drama, therefore, I use because Henry James used them in discussing his own novels, when he reviewed them all in his later years.”34 Novelists made the tradition writers reflecting on their works, comparing them to past efforts they deemed successful, proposing terms tentatively, describing effects, and, occasionally, prescribing methods in the spirit of craft. Each author repeats the same modest performance. They lament the mistaken terminology of their predecessors, cite literary narrative’s seeming resistance to the terminology of technique so much more easily applied to the material arts (according to Lubbock) or film (Bentley) or music (Genette) and criticize the new terminological solutions that they themselves then put forth. Bentley was “not at all satisfied” with her terms: scene and summary were “not proper antitheses,” and in any case “all narrative is in fact a summary to some degree.”35 (Booth and Genette would echo that last point emphatically.) Lubbock has been one of the easiest targets for novel criticism since the 1960s so easy, in fact, that he has been dismissed almost altogether but one thing he should not be targeted for is an overly schematic reliance on terms like scene and summary.36 His “picture” and “drama” are often inscrutable, and it is their inscrutability that keeps them interesting. James, meanwhile, seems to have attempted every rhetorical obfuscation imaginable to prevent his remarks from being made into set binaries or simple precepts.37 And yet, scene and summary are, to this day, the best terms we have for talking critically about pace. (Or starting to.) I can now add two final reasons why this is so: first, because the “classical” novel manifests scene-and-summary pacing so aptly; and second, because the “modern” novel opposes it so forcefully. Or better, the modernist novel.38 Within the AngloAmerican context, at least, the term modernism allows one to see a bit of comedy in sceneand-summary tradition’s establishment. Each phase of that establishment (identification, codification, reification … ) is echoed by the development of a modernism that would reject the tradition. James finally publishes the last of his prefaces in the New York Edition of his works in 1909, a masterful union of craft and criticism and a monument for the great tradition, and then, “on or about” December of the next year (according to Woolf), “human character change[s]”; the great tradition will no longer do.39 Lubbock nevertheless keeps up the Jamesian project, pushing it further into the realm of scholarly criticism with The Craft of Fiction in 1921, and then … Ulysses, The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room 1922, the year (for a discontented Willa Cather) in which “the world br[eaks] in two”; the standards of craft have changed.40
By no means do the various modernisms simply sweep aside the classical model of sceneand-summary tradition. Scene-and-summary tradition lives on in a late modern phase: it continues in Wharton, Forster, and Mann, in much socialist realism, in the popular subgenres of twentieth-century fiction, and in much contemporary global fiction today. More significantly, it continues by virtue of the very impulses that oppose it. For modernist narration doesn’t just depart from scene-and-summary structure; it poses as antithetical to it; and for precisely this reason, scene and summary remain essential to modernist pace.
Critics adhering to scene-and-summary tradition underestimated this opposition just as
much as the heralds of modernism exaggerated it. Most scene-and-summary critics accounted for modernist narration by claiming that twentieth-century writers simply came to prefer scene over summary. Such is how Bentley explained Joyce and Woolf, and the account still lingers in our notion that twentieth-century craft simply advanced from telling to showing. Meanwhile, critics descendent from the modernist line, like Barthes and Genette, pointing to a break between the classical and the modern, envisioned a new type of narrative one not bound to logico-temporal linearity or hermeneutic-proairetic codes but, rather, writerly, permutable, symbolic, “outside the constraint of time.”41
One need not choose here between craft-based formalists and modernist-based structuralists, between continuity and rupture. What one really sees in the pace or anti-pace of the modernisms is a state in which scene could no longer serve its classical function anymore. And this state was the result of a literary-historical process that inhered in classical tradition itself. What Genette glimpsed in his analysis of the Recherche, but did not account for, was that in the course of the nineteenth century a classical impulse toward scenic narration had caused classical pacing to break down. The structuring of narratives through scenes, the marginalization of the role of summary, ultimately deprived scene of the oppositional force that sustained it; scenic methods brought about the collapse of the relation between scene and summary. Modernist narration was a testament to this collapse. Scenes and summaries had been exhausted, or at least laid bare, and writers who perceived this were left searching for new units of pacing that were opposed to both of those older units at once. In this way, modernisms made pace on the basis of a new and convoluted type of opposition: on the one side, scene-and-summary narration, representing a classical form of composition already superseded; on the other, countless notions of temporality represented by structural units varyingly epiphanic, everyday, episodic, existential, durational, and consciousnessbound. Such, at least, is what I will show in the later part of this “history.” But first, a word about its literary-historical scope.
Lens, Loci, Foci, Ellipse
“Scene and summary must always be projected backward, so to speak, onto classical fiction through the lens of James’s vague critical remarks.” I said that above, and hid behind the coy so to speak. Is this to say that the basic terms of this study, which I have had the impudence to allude to as a history, are merely the vague projections of one man? And not just any man, but one from whose dominance over the identity of “modern fiction” critics had just begun to free themselves with a sigh of relief?42 James, the Anglo-, Franco-, Italophile, the pretentious monologizing painter of aristocratic afterlives and the haute bourgeoisie, false founder of novel theory, mascot of mid-century formalism, master of dust motes and empty phrases, a “minor nineteenth-century man of letters” who was only elevated to “the greatest American novelist” by a few suspect twentieth-century Jamesian cultists does it all collapse once more into this?43 And is this “history” then to be the worst of teleologies, subordinating the past to the lens of a turn-of-the-century present, establishing James, with cloying playfulness,
