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1 Narrative Speed in Contemporary Fiction Many contemporary novels subject their readers to a breathless sense that the events are hurtling by too fast for real understanding. Scenes and focal figures change quickly, and helpful transitions are missing. The resultant feeling of excessive rapidity is what I mean by narrative speed, and for many readers, this speed produces frustration and serious discomfiture. This effect occurs so frequently in contemporary fiction, and its mechanics are so readily grasped, that it seems a good place to start investigating fiction that denies readers their expected comforts. The immediate lesson to be learned? Relax. Give up the assumption that you must control a text. Then, perhaps, you can enjoy it. Why has speed become a commonplace in fiction? What effects do authors seek by using it? Why do they refuse to supply the connections and transitions that would help their readers? These questions confront readers of numerous recent novels, and they invite us to ask how one might best understand speed as a narrative technique and as a factor that makes readers feel rebuffed or even attacked. Narrative theory to date seems to offer Narrative Speed in Contemporary Fiction 15 relatively little insight into these problems. Critics have so far theorized pace (fast or slow) in just four basic fashions: (1) prose portrayal of physical speed; (2) narrative retardation; (3) the amount of story time covered per page; and (4) fictional reflections of cultural speed. Critical concern with portraying physical speed focuses on the modernist fascination with the sensation of speed and how to represent it in painting, sculpture, and writing. This is only marginally relevant to the kind of frantic narrative I am trying to analyze, because narrative speed does not necessarily increase as one describes physical speed, though the two sometimes coincide. Thomas De Quincey’s prose, for example, actually slows down as he attempts to catalog the sensations of fear provoked by a speeding mail coach. One significant connection between mechanical speed and prose speed has been helpfully analyzed by Stephen Kern.1 In exploring the speed-up mechanisms of the modernist era—bicycle, telegraph , telephone, car, and film—he notes that reporters wired stories to their newspapers. He attributes to this practice the paring away of unnecessary words, the “telegraphic” style that gains recognition in the writing of Ernest Hemingway.2 A second way to theorize narrative pace—retardation—was propounded by Viktor Shklovsky. His approach was conditioned by his viewing folktales as growing from a kernel that could be rendered in a sentence or two. For them to become stories demanded ways of delaying. Likewise, many novels could be summarized in a paragraph. Shklovsky focuses on techniques for slowing down, and gives no thought to speeding up. Hence, for him, stories always consist of a string of delaying devices. He analyzes retarding techniques such as defamiliarization,3 repetitious structures, and the framing of tales within tales. Even characters can function as delaying devices: Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson, he avers, exists “to retard the action” (104). Shklovsky’s famous image of art slowing our automatic visual processing to make us see the stoniness of a stone puts retardation at the heart of his aesthetic. Structuralist desire to make literary study a science is what generates the third approach, namely, quantifying literary speed. Gérard Genette tried to describe narrative speed in numeric terms so that texts could be compared mathematically. He conceives of speed primarily as a ratio between the time span covered in the novel and the number of pages allotted to it, so that Proust’s volumes contain passages that cover variously one minute 16 Chapter 1 of social action to a page all the way to one century to a page.4 Genette’s Narrative Discourse Revisited reuses this measure of speed and notes that Eugénie Grandet averages ninety days per page, while Proust averages five and a half days.5 Being able to derive a number this way is useful for the traditional fiction that concerns Genette, but it does not explain the contemporary phenomenon. Robert Coover achieves the effect of upsetting speed in the three-hundred-plus-page Gerald’s Party, which covers roughly a dozen hours, or very approximately two and a half minutes’ action per page. The novel is very slow in Genette’s terms, but not in readers’ experience of the text.6 The fourth approach to speed almost passes as a given for many current texts. Critics simply postulate...

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