Realist Pace

Reality principle, reality effect: those two notions—psychoanalytical, narratological, epistemological—have determined our understanding of nineteenth-century literature explicitly for at least half a century. But perhaps they were both, after all, functions of narrative pace. That is what this chapter begins by arguing: that what we consider to be realism is largely a function of pace that mediates between two senses of scene. Scene, like summary, is not an altogether coherent unit. One must acknowledge that it is split between a dramatic-presentational aspect and a pictorial-representational one and that that split is decisive for how realist narrative defines its movement. The central example here is Middlemarch, with Balzac and Flaubert in the near background. But the chapter ends by looking far forward, considering the capacity of narrative fiction to pause and to speak to its reader, from Fielding and Eliot to Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison.