The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes by Joan Silber

Author:Joan Silber
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Reference, Fiction - Technique, Technique, Fiction, Writing Skills, Time in Literature, Authorship
ISBN: 9781555975302
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2009-06-23T06:00:00+00:00

FABULOUS TIME

In talking about time, once we turn to nonrealistic fiction—all those stories with action beyond the possible, from magic realism all the way back to the folktale—it's clear that we need to ask different questions of this work. If we're in a realm where the laws of space and time need not operate according to the usual rules, how might a writer use that freedom, and what different techniques are needed?

We've been looking so far at ways of handling time with the assumption that we're meant to "believe" such events could have happened, that verisimilitude or mimesis is a needed component of the story. But in the long history of storytelling, realism is only one strain. For every closely observed Moll Flanders (1722) or Clarissa (1747-48), there's a wild and crazy Tristram Shandy (1759-67) or a fantastical Gulliver's Travels (1726). Even the most hardheaded of realists (I may be among their number) have been expanded and enlightened about fiction's possibilities from reading nonrealistic stories. The term fabulous time is an attempt to detail what's learned from this delight.

The convenient term fabulation—meaning story invention with an element of fantasy—is probably traceable to Robert Scholes's 1967 book, The Fabulators, a study of Durrell, Vonnegut, Southern, Hawkes, Murdoch, and Barth, writers then in the literary foreground. The term magic realist and the rich list of Latin American writers in its first generation—Rulfo, Carpentier, Fuentes, Garcia Marquez—was just beginning its majestic surge. Writers from Gogol to Kafka to Borges and Nabokov were cited as predecessors. A count of more contemporary practitioners might include Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Haruki Murakami (though not all of his works). In fact we are no longer so very picky or polemical about who's in what category, and writers move back and forth.

My ruminations on nonrealistic time really began in thinking about the famous first sentence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." In my experience, at any gathering of fiction writers—a party, a meal at an art colony, an academic meeting—more than one person can recite this first line by heart. One of its beauties is that it contains past, present, and future all in one sentence.

The future for Aureliano Buendia is the anticipated shot of the firing squad. The firing squad! Many pages later, we will in fact discover that this Aureliano Buendia doesn't die in these circumstances. But the sentence holds him in the moment of facing the rifles, and in what he thinks is his final instant he recalls an incident from childhood: "At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses.... The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point." That's a very early childhood—how could a man who lives to face the technology of rifles have grown up

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.