Time
Dear Friend,
I’m glad that these reflections on the structure of the novel are yielding you a few clues, pointing you the way into the depths of fiction as if you were a spelunker venturing deep into the heart of a mountain. Now that we’ve touched on the characteristics of the narrator in relation to the space of the novel (which in disagreeably academic language I termed the spatial point of view), I propose that we examine time, a no less important aspect of narrative form, the treatment of which is as crucial as the treatment of space in determining the persuasive power of a story.
On this subject we must also first dispel some prejudices, venerable yet false, in order to understand what a novel is and how it works.
I refer to the naive equation that is often made between real time (to be called, redundant though the definition may be, the chronological time we readers and authors inhabit) and fictional time, a time or passage of time as imaginary as the narrator and characters trapped in it. As with the spatial point of view, huge doses of creativity and imagination go into the creation of the temporal point of view of all the novels we read, although in many cases their authors don’t realize it. The time novels take place in is a fictional creation, just like the narrator and the setting; it is one of the elements the novelist manipulates to liberate his invention from the real world and give it the (apparent) autonomy upon which, I repeat, his power of persuasion depends.
Although the theme of time, a source of fascination for so many thinkers and creators (among them Borges, who made it the subject of many of his works), has given rise to a number of different and divergent theories, all of us, I think, can agree on at least one simple distinction: there are two kinds of time, chronological and psychological. The former exists objectively, independent of human subjectivity. It is in chronological time that we measure the movement of heavenly bodies in space and the positions the planets occupy with respect to one another; it is chronological time that eats away at us from the moment we are born until the moment we die and presides over the fateful life curve of all sentient beings. But there is also a psychological time, of which we are conscious depending on what we are doing or not doing and which figures very differently in our emotional lives. This time passes quickly when we are enjoying ourselves and when we are immersed in overwhelmingly intense, absorbing, or distracting experiences. On the other hand, it drags and seems infinite—the seconds like minutes, the minutes like hours—when we are waiting or suffering and our circumstances (loneliness, a long vigil, catastrophe, a wait for something that may or may not happen) give us a sharp awareness of the passing of time, which, precisely because we desire it to speed up, seems to sputter, slow, and stop.
I assure you that it is the rule (another of the very few binding rules in the world of fiction) that time in the novel is based not on chronological time but on psychological time, a subjective time to which the novelist (the good novelist) is able to give the appearance of objectivity, thereby setting the novel apart from the real world (which is the obligation of all fiction that desires to live of its own accord).
An example might make this clearer. Have you read the wonderful short story by Ambrose Bierce called “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”? It takes place during the American Civil War. Peyton Farquhar, a southern planter who has tried to blow up a rail line, is about to be hanged from a bridge. The story begins as the rope tightens around the poor man’s neck; he is surrounded by the soldiers in charge of his execution. But when the order that will end his life is given, the rope breaks and the condemned man falls into the river. Somehow he manages to swim to shore and dodge the bullets of the soldiers on the bridge and the banks of the river. The omniscient narration is nearly at one with Peyton Farquhar’s consciousness as he flees through the woods toward the safety of his home and the woman he loves, recalling episodes from his past as he runs with the soldiers at his heels. The narrative is harrowing, as is Farquhar’s perilous flight. The house is there, within sight, and when the fugitive crosses the threshold, he at last glimpses his wife’s profile. Just as he is about to embrace her, he is choked by the rope that had begun to tighten around his neck at the beginning of the story one or two seconds before. All of this occurs in the briefest flash; it is an instant, fleeting vision prolonged by the narrative, which creates its own separate time composed of words and different from real time (the objective time of the story’s action, of which barely a second elapses). Doesn’t this example make clear the way in which fiction constructs its own time out of psychological time?
A variation on this theme is a famous story by Borges, “The Secret Miracle.” At the moment a Czech poet named Jaromir Hladik is about to be executed, God grants him another year of life, allowing him to complete—mentally—the drama in verse he had been planning to write all his life, The Enemies. Over the course of this year he successfully completes his ambitious work in the intimacy of his own mind, but the year he experiences is squeezed in between the order of “Fire” given by the head of the firing squad and the impact of the bullets as they riddle their target; that is to say, it lasts barely a fraction of a second, a mere instant. All fictions (and especially good ones) occupy their own time, a temporal system exclusively their own, different from the real time their readers inhabit.
To identify the basic characteristics of novelistic time, the first step is to divine the temporal point of view of the novel in question, which should never be confused with the spatial point of view, although in practice the two are viscerally linked.
There being no way to escape definitions (I’m sure they vex you as much as they do me, since they seem alien to the unpredictable world of literature), let’s venture this one: the temporal point of view is the relationship that exists in all novels between the time the narrator inhabits and the time of what is being narrated. As with the spatial point of view, the novelist has only three to choose among (although the variations are many), and they are determined by the tense in which the narrator tells the story:
- The time the narrator inhabits and the time of what is being narrated may coincide and be one and the same. In this case, the narrator narrates in the present tense.
- The narrator may situate himself in the past to narrate events taking place in the present and the future. And, finally,
- The narrator may situate himself in the present or the future and narrate events that have taken place in the (near or middle) past.
Although in their abstract form these distinctions may seem a little complicated, in practice they are quite obvious and easy to spot once we stop to check what tense the narrator has chosen to tell the story from.
Let’s take as an example not a novel but a story, perhaps the shortest (and one of the best) in the world. “The Dinosaur,” by Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, is one sentence long:
“When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”
A perfect story, is it not? Unbeatable power of persuasion, remarkable concision, perfect drama, color, suggestiveness, and clarity. Suppressing in ourselves all the very rich other possible readings of this minimalist narrative gem, let’s concentrate on its temporal point of view. In what tense is it narrated? In a simple past tense: “he woke up.” The narrator is situated, then, in the future, narrating something that happened—when? In the near or middle past from the narrator’s future point of view? In the middle past. How do I know that the time of the story is a middle and not a near past in relation to the time of the narrator? Because between those two times there is an unbridgeable abyss, a gap, a barrier that abolishes all link or continuity between the two. This is the determining characteristic of the tense the narrator employs: the action is confined to a closed-off past, split from the time the narrator inhabits. The action of “The Dinosaur” takes place, therefore, in a middle past with respect to the time of the narrator; this is an example of case c.
Let us avail ourselves of “The Dinosaur” again to illustrate case a, the simplest and most obvious of the three: in it, the time of the narrator and the time of what is narrated coincide. This temporal point of view requires that the narrator narrate from the present tense:
“He wakes up and the dinosaur is still there.”
The narrator and what is being narrated inhabit the same temporal space. The story is happening as the narrator tells it to us. This tale is very different from the previous one, in which we noted two tenses and in which the narrator, because he was situated in a later time than that of the narrative events, had a full-fledged and complete temporal vision of what he was narrating. In case a, the knowledge or perspective of the narrator is narrower: it only covers what is happening as it is happening; that is to say, as it is being told. When the time of the narrator and the time of the narrative are confused in a present tense (as is usually true in novels by Samuel Beckett or Alain Robbe-Grillet), the immediacy of the narrative is maximized; immediacy is minimal when the narrator narrates in the past tense.
Let’s examine case b now, the least common and certainly the most complex: the narrator is situated in the past and narrates events that haven’t taken place yet but will take place in a near or middle future. Here are examples of possible modes of this temporal point of view:
- “You’ll wake up, and the dinosaur will still be there.”
- “When you wake up, the dinosaur will still be there.”
- “When you have woken up, the dinosaur will still be there.”
Each case (others are possible) constitutes a slight shading, establishing a different distance between the time of the narrator and the time of the narrated world, but the common denominator is that the narrator is narrating events that haven’t taken place yet, that will take place when he has finished narrating them, and over which, as a result, an essential indeterminacy hovers: there is no certainty that they will occur, as there is when the narrator locates himself in a present or future tense to narrate events that have already occurred or that are occurring as they are narrated. Besides shading his story with relativity and uncertainty, the narrator located in the past who narrates events that will occur in a middle or near future reveals himself more aggressively, exhibiting his God-like powers in the fictional universe. Through the use of future tenses, his story becomes a series of imperatives, a sequence of orders commanding that what is being narrated must occur. The dominance of the narrator is absolute and overwhelming when a fiction is narrated from this temporal point of view. Hence a novelist can’t use it without being conscious of it; he can’t use it if he doesn’t mean to manipulate uncertainty and allow the narrator a show of force in order to tell something that only told in this way will achieve power of persuasion.
Once the three possible temporal points of view have been identified, along with the variations permitted by each, and once we have established that the way to decide which point of view is being used is to check the tense that the narrator narrates from and the tense the story is narrated in, it is necessary to add that it would be very strange if a story were told from only one temporal point of view. Although in general one point of view dominates, the narrator usually moves from one temporal point of view to another, in shifts (changes of tense) that are more effective the less they call attention to themselves. This effectiveness is achieved by ensuring the coherence of the temporal system (the shifts in time must keep within certain boundaries) and the essentiality of the shifts, which should not seem whimsical or flashy but rather should lend an extra dimension—density, complexity, diversity, depth—to the characters and the story.
Without getting too technical, we may say, above all when speaking of modern novels, that a story flows in time just as it does in space, since novelistic time is something that stretches, lags, freezes, or suddenly speeds precipitously ahead. The story moves in fictional time as if in a physical territory, coming and going across it, moving forward in leaps and bounds or at a shuffle, leaving blank (wiping out) big chronological periods and going back later to pick up the thread of that lost time, leaping from the past to the future and back to the past with a freedom denied beings of flesh and blood in real life. This fictional time is therefore a creation just like the narrator.
Let’s take a look at some examples of original constructions (or more obviously original constructions, I should say, since all are original) of fictional time. Instead of moving from the past to the present and then back to the future, the Alejo Carpentier story “Journey to the Seed” proceeds in the exact opposite direction: at the beginning of the story, Carpentier’s protagonist, Don Marcial, the Marqués of Capellanías, is a dying old man and we watch him slip through maturity, youth, and childhood and finally retreat into a world of pure, unconscious sensation (“sensorial and tactile”) where the character has yet to be born; he is still a fetus in the womb. The story isn’t being told backwards; in this fictional world, time moves backwards. And, speaking of prenatal states, perhaps we should make reference to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the first several dozen pages of which relate the prebirth biography of the narrator-protagonist, including ironic details about his complicated conception, his development in his mother’s womb, and his arrival in the world. The twists, turns, spirals, and contortions of the tale make Tristram Shandy’s temporal structure a very odd and elaborate creation.
The coexistence in fiction of two or more tenses or temporal systems is also common. For example, in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, time passes normally for everyone except the protagonist, the renowned Oskar Matzerath (he of the glass-shattering voice and the drum), who decides not to age, to abolish time. He succeeds, since by sheer force of will he stops growing and lives a kind of eternal life in a world that ages, perishes, and renews itself all around him, subjected to the inevitable decay imposed by the god Chronos. Everything and everyone fades away, except Oskar.
The theme of the abolition of time and its consequences (disastrous, according to fictional testimony) is a recurring one in fiction. It appears, for example, in a not very successful novel by Simone de Beauvoir, All Men Are Mortal. Julio Cortázar, playing a technical trick, engineered his best-known novel to explode the inexorable law of expiration that all living things must obey. The reader who reads Hopscotch following the rules suggested by the narrator in the Table of Instructions will never finish reading it, since the last two chapters refer endlessly back to each other, and in theory (not in practice, of course) the obedient and disciplined reader must spend the rest of his life reading and rereading those chapters, trapped in a temporal labyrinth with no hope of escape.
Borges liked to quote from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (an author who was also fascinated by the theme of time), in which a man travels to the future and returns with a rose in his hand as proof of his adventure. This impossible displaced rose impressed Borges as a paradigm of the fantastic object.
Another case of parallel times is a story by Adolfo Bioy Casares, “The Celestial Plot,” in which an aviator disappears in his plane and reappears later, telling an extraordinary tale that no one believes: he landed in a different time from the one he took off in. In his fictional universe many different parallel times mysteriously coexist, each with its own features, inhabitants, and rhythms, and the times never meet except in unusual instances like this pilot’s accident, which reveals to us the structure of a universe that is like a pyramid of ascending temporal floors without connection to one another.
The opposite of these multiple temporal universes is a time so intensified by the narrative that the chronology and the passage of time slow down until they almost stop: as we recall, Joyce’s huge novel Ulysses covers just twenty-four hours in the life of Leopold Bloom.
At this point in this long letter, you must be eager to interrupt me with an observation you are barely able to contain: “But in what you’ve written so far on the temporal point of view, I note a mix of different things: time as theme or plot (in the examples by Alejo Carpentier and Bioy Casares) and time as form, a narrative construction in which the plot unfolds (true of Hopscotch and its eternal time).” Fair enough. The only excuse I have (and it is relative, of course) is that I confused things on purpose. Why? Because I believe that it is precisely when you are examining the temporal point of view in fiction that you are best able to notice how inseparable “form” and “content” really are, though I’ve dissociated them in a brutal way to reveal the secret anatomy of the novel.
Time in all novels is, I repeat, a formal creation, since in fiction the story unfolds in a way it never could in real life; at the same time, the passing of fictional time, or the relationship between the time of the narrator and what is being narrated, depends entirely on the story’s being told from a particular temporal perspective. This could be expressed the other way around, too: the story the novel tells depends on the temporal point of view. Actually, it all boils down to the same thing when we abandon the theoretical plane of our discussion and take a look at concrete novels. In them we discover that “form” does not exist (whether it is spatial or temporal or has to do with levels of reality) independently of the stories that give (or fail to give) the novels life and shape through the words in which they are told.
But let’s move on and discuss something else that is common to all fictional narratives. In every story we note moments when time seems to be condensed, revealing its passage to the reader in a tremendously vivid way, seizing his or her full attention, and periods in which intensity flags and the vitality of the episodes lessens; distanced from us, these latter episodes fail to capture our attention and seem ordinary and predictable—they transmit information or commentary that is intended merely as filler and that serves only to link characters or events that would otherwise be left dangling. We may call the former episodes cruxes (live time, with a maximum concentration of occurrences), and the latter episodes dead time, or transition time. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to reproach a novelist for the existence of dead time, of episodes in his novels with nothing more than a linking function. They are useful too, since they establish continuity and create the illusion of a world, of beings immersed in a social setting, which novels must foster. Poetry may be an intensive genre, distilled to the essentials, without waste. The novel may not. Novels are long, unfolding over time (a self-created time), and they play at being “histories,” following the path of their characters within a certain social context. This requires that the novel present informative, connective, inevitable subject matter, as well as the cruxes or episodes of maximum energy that propel the story (and that sometimes change its nature, swerving it into the future or the past, revealing in it unexpected depths or ambiguities).
The combination of cruxes or live time, and of dead or transition time, determines the configuration of time in the novel—that is, the particular chronological system of written stories, which may be broken down into three varieties of temporal point of view. But let me assure you that though what I’ve said about time has advanced us a little in our examination of the nature of fiction, there is still much to be discussed. That will become evident as we address other aspects of the novelistic enterprise. Because we are going to keep unwinding this interminable skein, are we not?
There you see, you’ve got me started, and now there’s no stopping me.