Epiphanic and Everyday Modernisms

The threat to conventional realist pace posed by the lyricism of something like epiphany is the central conflict of this chapter. But it begins by acknowledging another phenomenon: from Flaubert to Hemingway, there has emerged a mode of narration that makes little distinction between scene and summary and also makes little distinction between episodes. Call it interepisodic pacing, a flat refusal to amplify scenes in the service of a dramatic mandate. But then there is Joyce, who begins his career with famously amplified moments of epiphany and then desacralizes them into fleeting moments of consciousness. Between those moments and between the everyday interepisodic events of modernist fiction, a new rhythm and a new pace takes shape. One may see it in Woolf above all. Its deconstruction is envisioned by Mann.

Collapse of the Scenic Method

Beyond the imperative or appearance of realism, some scenic impulse in nineteenth-century fiction determines narrative pace. One looks, then, to Charlotte Brontë, to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even to the realist Balzac in his theatrical tendencies. This chapter reckons with how the scenic impulse that engenders scene-and-summary fiction also leads to its collapse. Chapters become scenes; chapter entries become rising curtains; summaries become prologues for a scene that waits beyond the threshold. One sees it in Zola, Howells, Kate Chopin …. But the seeming culmination appears when Henry James, in the 1890s, avows that he is bound to “the scenic method.” James’s career is one of the most illuminating representations of the arc of the scene-and-summary novel, and its climax appears at the end of the nineteenth century. From there, with late James, one senses a resurgence of romance in the form of narrative lyricism, and one begins to wonder whether pace will be dissolved in that lyrical expanse.

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.

Narrative Discourse, Literary History

Scene and summary: these are the two primary units whose development and transformation guide the course of this study. This chapter examines their value as registers of pace, and it argues that they are truly valuable insofar as they are examined diachronically across literary history. Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James at first appear in the foreground as guides for a history of pacing, but the goal of this study is to avoid any strict teleology and to instead imagine elliptical constructions of literary history that emerge in between distant focal points. The chapter ends by considering the large ellipsis within which this study takes place—“modernity”—and critiquing the methods by which one may relate pace to modernity while offering a way to examine history in pace as it creates themes.

Introduction

We talk about pace. But how do we define it? This introduction suggests that one define it loosely, as something like large, forward, rhythmic, shifting, dynamic, temporal narrative movement, and then analyze it by tracking units of pacing as they move forward in literary history. As for finding the right narrative units, one may look to E. M. Forster, Viktor Shklovsky, Günther Müller, and others, but one does best to look to Gérard Genette and then trace his units backwards to the writers and critics who first developed them. Between Genette and his literary precursors, one discovers a significant literary tradition of pace. And, as for the pace of “fiction”: if pace is narrative’s most elaborate feature, fiction is narrative’s most elaborate form.

Rise of the Scene-and-Summary Novel

From the middle to the end of the eighteenth century, two figures above all serve as focal points for the development of a nascent theory of pacing in European literature: Henry Fielding and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In Fielding one encounters a notion of “prosai-comi-epic” pace that is light, centrifugal, and sprawling but opposed to another tendency that is more solemn, centripetal, and grave. Goethe, in his correspondence with Friedrich Schiller, is concerned with epic and drama: he and Schiller begin to distinguish between those two genres in terms of pace. What one can perceive in the intersection of such discourses is a formation, within novelistic fiction, of several axes of narrative movement that lead to the formation of units like scene and summary. If this seems like a straightforward path toward the nineteenth-century realist novel, one must pause and consider the aspects of romance that are embedded in novel pacing. Here, they appear as westering, world entry, and wandering.