On Time (part 2)
Big moments and small explosions
Good morning!
A few weeks ago, I wrote about time and length: books that manage to compress or elide long periods of time into a necessarily smaller piece, though various methods of summary or time-jumping or perspective. This week I want to talk about the opposite: writing that expands or dives into a particular moment in time, dwelling there for longer than usual, or longer than the real-time the reader is experiencing. Like compression, this of course happens in pretty much all narrative; real-time and narrative-time are generally never going to coincide. I’m particularly interested today in the extremes, and the methods used to really crack open a moment to create something interesting.
Expanding time (and one of the methods of doing so, the stream-of-consciousness novel) is a hallmark of modernist literature; Ulysses being maybe the ur-example. The novel takes place in a day (the famous Bloomsday, not to be confused with Baltimore’s own Doomsday) and spans roughly 900, densely filled pages that sort of ooze around in the characters’ thoughts, memories, and experiences, lingering here and there before free-flowing to the next thing, never in a hurry. It’s not my cup of tea, but its creativity and influence are undeniable.
Daniel Daiches, an early scholar on the “modern novel,” defines it largely in relation to time and experience:
My theory of the modern novel involved three factors. The first was what I called the breakdown of the implicit agreement between author and readers about what was significant in human experience…. There was no such thing as objective reality, only a sense of reality, which depended on the history of your own conscious. The second factor was the new concept of time and its relation to consciousness which manifested itself in Europe in Bergson's theory of la duree and in America in William James's theory of the "specious present": time was not, as Virginia Woolf observed, a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged but a luminous halo. Or, as William James put it, the present moment did not exist in human consciousness, which was a continuous blend of retrospect and anticipation, a flow of the "already" into the "not yet." The third factor was the new concept of consciousness itself, which was now seen to exist simultaneously on different levels, the surface level being qualified and in a sense conditioned by deeper levels which were the product of the whole earlier history of the individual and perhaps even (in Jungian terms) of the race.1 (emphasis mine)
The passage he’s referencing is from Woolf’s essay “Modern Fiction,” where she writes:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions— trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel… if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style… Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.2
It’s sort of terrifying, sort of a relief, sort of lovely; life of course not a series of distinct things you can slide off like pearls on a string or lock away in a safe but something immersive and colorful, something necessarily nebulous. I of course like plenty of books that proceed with traditional narration and plot and generally write about them here; comparing these forms of narration is not a question of objective quality, but of play, and options.
Given the working title of The Hours, Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway is constrained to about eighteen of them, starting one morning and working into the night (the wee hours of the next day). Though the actual hours passed are clear to the reader— we regularly notice the tolling of Big Ben to mark the hours— Woolf uses stream-of-consciousness to expand cherry-picked moments in order to explore memory, feeling, and character. One thing leads to the next, without logical (temporal) sequence or excuse. In other words, it’s all vibes, but vibes firmly anchored in a trigger, a presence, or person.
But, said Mrs. Dalloway, she had enough on her hands already, quite enough of her own to do without that.
“But, thank you, Lucy, oh, thank you,” said Mrs. Dalloway, and thank you, thank you, she went on saying (sitting down on the sofa with her dress over her knees, her scissors, her silks), thank you, thank you, she went on saying in gratitude to her servants generally for helping her to be like this, to be what she wanted, gentle, generous-hearted. Her servants liked her. And then this dress of hers—where was the tear? and now her needle to be threaded. This was a favourite dress, one of Sally Parker’s, the last almost she ever made, alas, for Sally had now retired, living at Ealing, and if ever I have a moment, thought Clarissa (but never would she have a moment any more), I shall go and see her at Ealing. For she was a character, thought Clarissa, a real artist. She thought of little out-of-the-way things; yet her dresses were never queer. You could wear them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace. She had worn them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace.
Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking. (54)
Woolf blurs direct and indirect speech and stream-of-consciousness with omniscient narration paragraph to paragraph and often line to line; the style lets Woolf dip in and out of time, perception, character, and perspective without wasting time on transitions and over-exposition. The in-scene time takes, what, ten minutes of mending? In that space we are given so much about character, setting, and mood. Similarly, near the end of the book, Mrs. Dalloway looks out her window during her party:
And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen. She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room. (284)
Woolf’s writing is often beautifully lyrical, less literal about the passage or expansion of time. To look at something that is more literal about compression of time, we could consider a story like “Bullet in the Brain,” by Tobias Wolff3, about a man named Anders who happens to be in a bank when it gets robbed, and knows that a masked guy calling him “Bright Boy” is a “The Killers” reference. It’s short— not quite 2,000 words—and about half of it takes place in the split second where, as the title references, a bullet enters Ander’s brain.
After striking the cranium the bullet was moving at 900 feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared to the synaptic lighting that flashed around it. Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, "passed before his eyes."
It is worth noting what Anders did not remember, given what he did remember….. He did not remember a single line of the hundreds of poems he had committed to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will - not "Silent, upon a peak in Darien," or "My God, I heard this day," or "All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?" None of these did he remember; not one. Anders did not remember his dying mother saying of his father, "I should have stabbed him in his sleep."4
Wolff goes on, detailing what could have been significant moments that Anders did not remember before transitioning with “This is what he remembered.” It’s compelling, and uses what might be a tired device (life passing before his eyes) so well that in the temporal span of half a second we switch to “brain time” as Wolff calls it, and can without hurry move through Anders’s life and experience, picking what he wants and ignoring the rest.
Why does it work? It’s a beautiful story and Wolff, on a tightrope, prevents the story from going sentimental or bleak, flippant. The key, I think, lies in the details he chooses, the amount of details, and the space he uses for them:
The details we get about Anders before the shooting are funny and vivid, creating a super clear character (on the surface, at least) before we get to the memory dive
There’s a variety in the list of things he doesn’t remember, both in tone— some are funny, some are sweet, some are sour— and in how they’re conveyed, their specificity. Some are direct quotes (“Let’s hide Mr. Mole!”), while others are feelings (“He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.”)
Almost all (maybe all?) of his non-memories are human, personal. Wolff avoids diving into sensory experiences that could get sidetracked into flowery description (besides “the heat” of the ball field) and instead uses relational examples that can be conveyed quickly and vividly in a sentence or two
What he does remember— the baseball field, the heat— is described well but boils down to two words: they is, they is. It’s unexpected, but like Anders’s personality in the bank, sticky
Flashing back through a life is a risky device— personally I wouldn’t try it, I’m no Tobias Wolff— but the general lesson stands: why hurry? Why not let your character look at a flower, and remember the one she planted with her mother, back when she was too small to hold the watering can herself? I’m not suggested we need to see every thought an association (possibly the reason I’m not a fan of Ulysses, but if that’s your thing I guess go for it) but if you’re smart and choose your digressions purposefully, lingering in a moment can do so much for writing: build character, add motivation, add context, add vibes.
Wishing you good vibes,
Courtney
Things I’m watching/reading/consuming lately:
A neat deep dive (pun intended) on how global internet works, from The Verge.
“When I Was Blind,” by Emily Shetler, in The Delacourt Review.
Really loved
‘s newsletter this week on not quitting “before the miracle.” (She also has a preorder link there for her new novel, which I can’t wait for; Godshot is such an inspiration for my writing on charismatic/traumatic evangelicalism.)Pommes Anna recipe from Smitten Kitchen, which is labor-intensive if you don’t own a mandoline (I am scared of them) but possible and honestly not that bad/extremely worth it for the payoff.
Saw La Chimera in theater and it was absolutely fantastic: looked dreamy and told a lively, beautiful story with breathing room for the audience’s imagination. Plus, there’s a song in the middle. Highly recommend!
My husband’s band tendrills has been putting out some really good new work this year & are still recording new music; here’s the music video for their recent single “PUTT PUTT” with more coming soon 👀
I got this little jasmine Bonsai kit at Epcot and decided to try starting it now that the weather is consistently warmer. I have no idea how it’ll go but I love seeing my seedlings grow every day! (It’s doing better so far than my vegetable seeds, which are still technically on time but which I’m fretting over.)
I attended a masterclass with
Attenberg last week through Baltimore’s CityLit fest at my favorite local indie, Greedy Reads. If you’re a writer you probably already know about Jami and 1000 Words of Summer, but it bears repeating that it was a great class and the book version of 1000 Words is really fun and inspiring.Burning this “Sweet Fig” candle from Brooklyn Candle Studio, which is on sale right now.
It’s kind of an odd review as far as book reviews go— Hardwick spends more time on the biographical details of the Brontës than discussing Gerin’s portrayal of them— but still a very interesting article on their lives and hopes, by Elizabeth Hardwick (reprinted from 1972 in NYBR).
& apropos of nothing, this Harrison Ford all-timer was making the rounds on my twitter feed the other day. Enjoy.
Daiches, David. “What Was the Modern Novel?” Critical Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 4, 1975, pp. 813–19. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342850.
“Modern Fiction.” Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2002.
Realized only in copyediting that my two examples are both Woolf[f]s! Oh no! It’s too late to change it but I am so embarrassed!