On Time (part 1)
Expansion, contraction, and the passage of time
Good morning, readers.
After writing last week about time and narrative in regards to length, I thought I’d write more about time inside a narrative, or perhaps the time that makes the narrative. Narrative by definition is something transitional. First A, then B. Not only does it exist within time (A happened first, and then B happened next, with maybe more stuff between), but it’ll take time to tell you about something moving between two points. Even a six-word story will take time to read, to be comprehended. One of the fun things about literature (and other narrative work, like film) is that the elements of time don’t need to match; the telling/observing/reading of the story might (and usually does1) take much more or much less time than actually passes within the story, between beginning and end.
In the article “Some Notes on Time in Fiction,” for The Mississippi Quarterly, Eudora Welty remarks :
[T]ime is like the wind of the abstract. Beyond its all-pervasiveness, it has no quality that we apprehend but rate of speed, and our own acts and thoughts are said to give it that. Man can feel love for place; he is prone to regard time as something of an enemy. Yet the novelist lives on closer terms with time than he does with place. The reasons for this are much older than any novel; they reach back into our oldest lore…. The novelist can never do otherwise than work with time, and nothing in his novel can escape it. The novel cannot begin without his starting of the clock; the characters then, and not until then, are seen to be alive, in motion; their situation can declare itself only by its unfolding. While place lies passive, time moves and is a mover. Time is the bringer-on of action, the instrument of change.2
(The whole article is good (and not very long)). Welty is such a place-driven writer that it makes sense for her to place time against place in order to better see what both bring to the narrative: place may have an effect on things in a narrative, and a place may seem to “do” things or change, but it can’t do any of that without time. (That same logic is how we get place-out-of-time fairy tales, I think, like Brigadoon or that town in Big Fish; timelessness creates changelessness, stagnation, and therefore an unnaturalness or unhealthiness to humans.)
To start, I want to look stories that compress time: cover a lot of narrative time in a small amount of pages. The first example that comes to mind, maybe because it’s so extreme (and good, & deservedly famous), is Ted Chiang’s “Tower of Babylon,” a novelette that imagines what would have happened if A) the ancient Babylonians succeeded in building their tower to heaven, because they live in B) a world that follows ancient Hebrew cosmology, where a flat earth is crowned by the vault of heaven. It’s an interesting example because it sets itself the challenge of conveying both long time and immense size, or distance. The protagonist, Hillalum, is a miner who has been summoned to the tower because the build has been completed, and it is time to breach heaven.
In the first page or so, Chiang begins to communicate the scale of the tower, and the scope of the project, with a few complementary methods:
Outright telling us, in the first few lines, the size of the tower:
It takes a full month and a half to climb to the towers summit.
Were the power to be laid down across the plain of Shinar, it would be two days journey to walk from one end to the other. While the tower stands, it takes a month and a half to climb from its base to its summit, is a man walks underburdened. But few men climb the tower with empty hands; the pace of most men is much slowed by the cart of bricks that they pull behind them. Four months passed before the day a brick is loaded onto a cart of and the day it is taken off to form a part of the tower3.
Through gossip: when our protagonist arrives in Babylon, guides he meets at the foot of the tower tell him tall tales about the devastation of dropping your trowel and knowing you can’t get a new one for four months.
& through memory. Before the journey begins, the protagonist looks at it and reflects:
Hillalum thought of the story told to him in childhood, the tale following that of the Deluge… And how, many centuries ago, there began the construction of the tower, a pillar to heaven, a stair that men might ascended to see the works of Yahweh, and that Yahweh might descend to see the works of men.
It seems at first glance like the examples I’m pulling here are about place, not time, but of course (as Welty points out) the two are interconnected. The tower isn’t just set dressing: Hillalum and the others must interact with it, live on it, and ultimately transcend it. Chiang prepares us for how long Hillalum’s journey is going to take by emphasizing, first, the span he must cross, before showing us the journey itself. In about fifteen pages, both years and miles pass as they first climb, and then begin the miners’ digging project. We see specific detail throughout the climb, such as:
One day Nanni came to him hurriedly and said, “A star has hit the tower!”
“What!” Hillalum looked around panicked, feeling like he had been struck by a blow.
“No, not now. It was long ago, more than a century. One of the tower dwellers is telling the story; his grandfather was there.”4
Space and time are entwined; stories pass over centuries.
Importantly, Chiang keeps the story feeling alive and present by focusing on tangible & awesome details: night rising on the tower, onions growing on balconies miles above the earth, how the building materials are changed for the levels nearest the sun. Distance and time are conveyed without leaving the reader exhausted, or bored, but also without skipping over the journey.
For years the labor continued. The pulling crews no longer hauled bricks but wood and water for the fire setting. People came to inhabit those tunnels just inside the vault's surface, and on hanging platforms they grew downward-bending vegetables. The miners lived there at the border of heaven; some married and raised children. Few ever set foot on the earth again.
Expansion and contraction need to happen at the same time, like a magic trick: contracting the scope of the narrative to fit inside a 35-page story, while providing space for it to expand in the reader’s mind. It feels odd to call such a long story concise, but really that’s the best way to put it. It’s not that there’s nothing extraneous, it’s just that every line serves the scale of the story. Read the story, if you haven’t; the ending is really fantastic.
To look at this on a larger scale, take a novel like Wuthering Heights, which spans decades. In the novel, Brontë compresses the story via frame narrative: Mr. Lockwood meets his bizarre landlord Heathcliff, falls ill, and is told the saga of the Lintons and Earnshaws and Heathcliffs from his housekeeper Nelly (conveniently, their former companion/housekeeper) while he recuperates. The first few chapters (& last), outside the frame, allow the reader his present-day observations of the family before we rewind, via Nelly, to get the whole tale:
Before I came to live here, she commenced—waiting no farther invitation to her story—I was almost always at Wuthering Heights… So, from the very beginning, he bred bad feeling in the house; and at Mrs. Earnshaw’s death, which happened in less than two years after, the young master had learned to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and Heathcliff as a usurper of his parent’s affections and his privileges; and he grew bitter with brooding over these injuries.5
The use of an in-text narrator allows Brontë to skim quickly, lighting on relevant anecdotes as they would seem important to Nelly, with the benefit of Nelly’s hindsight & commentary, without obligation to work year by year through young Heathcliff’s life. We enough details to understand his character and his relationship with his adopted family in childhood in the space of maybe two to three pages, and then the main thrust of the story (the family tensions after Mr. Earnshaw’s death) begins. Because we also have a listener (our proxy) as well as a narrator, Brontë enjoys commenting on the storytelling style and length as well:
“Well, you must allow me to leap over some three years; during that space Mrs. Earnshaw—”
“No, no, I’ll allow nothing of the sort!”
[…]
“If I am to follow my story in true gossip’s fashion, I had better go on; and instead of leaping three years, I will be content to pass to the next summer—the summer of 1778, that is nearly twenty-three years ago.”
It’s funny, and it illustrates the characters of both Nelly and Lockwood, but really it just allows justification, a sort of understandable human logic for Brontë to move the story at the pace she sees fit. We trust Nelly, so we trust her to move us in time. Eventually, she dispenses with the narrative breaks, but Nelly’s voice remains until the story has “caught up” with present day.
Two really different techniques (out of perhaps an infinite amount) that achieve a similar effect: compressing a large span of time into a small (relatively) amount of pages. A few other examples off the top of my head: Barkskins, by Annie Proulx, which covers centuries by taking a segment at a time and then jumping generations; Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi which also goes a generation at a time; Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett, which moves via memory/discussions of memories (though in a “typical” third-person way, not with a frame narrative like Wuthering Heights); and perhaps Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, which if I remember correctly narrows in on three particular inflection points of Pip’s life. If there’s any fun or major examples I’ve missed please share!
Next time my plan is to review a few examples of the opposite: authors who linger in or stretch out time to create a very different experience for the reader.
Til then,
C
What I’m reading/watching/consuming lately:
All of the news about the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, but I specifically want to quote the president of Mexico talking about the six migrant workers who were doing construction work on the bridge and died in the accident:
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico confirmed in a news conference that two of the missing workers were Mexican citizens. He refused to identify them but said that their families were being assisted by the government. Mr. López Obrador added that the episode showed how migrant workers in the U.S. often take risky jobs. “That is why they do not deserve to be treated as some irresponsible and insensitive politicians in the United States tend to treat them,” he said.6
This interview with Diane Seuss, by William Lessard, in the Heavy Feather Review:
DS: I’m frustrated when I hear conversations around diversity with no mention of the powerful impact of class, poverty, work, on every aspect of the poem. On voice, on access, and on nuances of understanding. The MFA can be a very valuable and supportive experience for writers, but one has to be careful of becoming a product of a hermetic system. It’s important to retain your quirks. For instance—where are you from, and what landscape made you?
Shōgun, on FX/hulu. I wasn’t sure if this would be for me but it’s a lot of fun and looks fantastic. Really good performances by Hiroyuki Sanada (of course) and Anna Sawai & others (including Cosmo Jarvis who is so stupid but still reluctantly winning), beautiful sets/costumes, and as others have set is actually lit so you can see it on your television.
David Marchese’s interview with Jeremy Strong. I find his thoughtfulness so interesting (and wish I was seeing Enemy of the State!).
The Druid Hill Park daffodils (above). They’re likely done by now but I rolled around on the hill last weekend, avoided falling into traffic, and watched some MICA kids shoot what seemed like a gorgeous video. So special.
- ’s newsletter on why the Oscars “I’m Just Ken” performance was so good perfectly expresses why I love musical theater (& Ryan Gosling) so much (emphasis mine):
The reason this performance hit so hard for me is that I am normally a somewhat cynical person, but my heart melts in the presence of unabashed sincerity and pure skill—the exact combination of musical theater. When I first saw “Defying Gravity” in Wicked I could only manage a garbled gasp when Elphaba flew. The second I hear the opening notes of “Bring Him Home” from Les Miserabales I’m weeping. These songs ONLY work when the performer is 120% dedicated, willing to fall flat on their face rather than only give 99% with any whiff of self-consciousness or irony.
“False Friends,” by Giulia Carla Rossi, in the html review. A really fun (and moving) interactive essay about language and assimilation. (The whole issue is really great! I am dumb at code and have only gotten dumber since my early internet days but I like this a lot!)
“Donald Darko,” by Tyler Barton, in hex.
Peanut Butter Eggs for Easter, which I need to make myself because my family
hates mehasn’t mailed me any (which to be fair would probably not work due to factors like “heat” and “food safety.”) I don’t have a copy of the family cookbook but this Taste of Home looks similar AND was submitted by a lady named Ethel from Elizabethtown just like my great-grandmother, so I think it’s legit.
The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4, Special Issue: Eudora Welty (Fall 1973), pp. 483-492 (10 pages) https://www.jstor.org/stable/26474132
“The Tower of Babylon,” by Ted Chiang, in Stories of Your Life and Others. Vintage Books, 2016. PDF online here but the whole collection is really worth reading.
This is also an example of one of the things that makes Chiang’s writing so special: the ability to take a speculative idea like What if the Tower of Babylon was real, practically, or What if robots needed to breathe oxygen but couldn’t product CO2? or What if aliens arrive but speak a language totally foreign to us? and extrapolate living, logical detail out of it. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea— all respect to the kind of people that just want to read about space aliens shooting guns without worrying about geopolitics— but I really dig it.
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847.
Linked to the NYT because that’s where I found that specific quote, but I must shoutout the importance of local news at a time like this: the Baltimore Banner has been doing great reporting.