Time and place
In reality, events impacting the life of someone frequently occur at the same time. Yet language places on the storyteller who sets out to explain them, a single-file sequence of events. The storyteller should handle time in many ways than as an equally flowing sea to resolve that constraint.
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| Illustration from Victor Hugo's historicalnovel Notre Dame de Paris, showingthe Gipsy Esmeralda being led past the cathe-dral to the gallows. In such macabre scenes,we see medieval Paris through Hugo's eyes. |
The occurrences in a tale may be put in different forms of schemes in time. For example, a man who would keep an appointment at a certain hour may be seen to do so chronologically, or according to clock time, which is also the same for all. In comparison, psychological time varies depending on individual mood. A young man eagerly awaiting his fiancée will be calculating the eternal passing of the clock by his watch, rather than the joy and anticipation that fills every moment. Someone who looks back over a period of years can recollect emotionally according to the time. He would not relive every incident in his life, but he would view time through his feelings by choosing only those that are most important to him.
The storyteller may also travel backward and forward in time, either by using previous experiences to illuminate the present or by viewing the previous in present light. This is amusingly accomplished in his The Life and Thoughts of Tristram Shandy (1759-67), by the English writer Laurence Sterne(1713-68). Shandy himself is what is supposed to write the novel in the first person. When he writes one thing he is continuously reminded of another without any clear link between them. Sterne takes advantage of this to demonstrate how the mind functions. It is not ruled by clock time at all but is at the mercy of the past: Shandy is not "born" until halfway through the novel. He notes: "I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you may perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume-and no farther than my first day's life-'tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I set out...It must follow, an' please your worships, that the more I write-and consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read."
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| English author Emily Bronië had in mind a place she knew intimately-Withius Farm on the wild Yorkshire moors-when she chose the setting for her novel Wuthering Heights (1848), a story of ill-fated love and revenge. |
Here Sterne uses the disparity between the time and clocks because it occurs in the brain. While he does so mainly for a comedic reason, he is a precursor to novelists from the 20th century such as Proust *, James Joyce *, and Virginia Woolf *, who have sought to recapture past time in their novels in the same chaotic fashion unique to memories.
Often a story's action takes place within a given clock-time frame, but the storyteller may refer to incidents beyond that frame either explicitly or by his characters' thoughts. The period of action in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), takės two months; Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway only takes 24 hours, while her Orlando (1928) spans many years. This is normal for the story's events to span only a loosely specified time frame. Two of the main characters at the outset of the Middlemarch are young and unmarried. In the end, they are married and all of their earlier difficulties have been resolved. It is not clear how long it has taken. How long this has taken is not important. An approximate indication of time passing is enough.
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| Above: illustration from The Lord of The Flies (1954), in which England's Louis Golding tells how schoolboys, marooned on a desert island, revert to brutal savagery. |
The storyteller sometimes dispenses entirely with time. In The Castle (1926), by Franz Kafka, "K," the main character, is exposed to disconcerting difficulties in his attempts to interact with the castle's unknown owner, and in The Court, the central character of the same story is on the court but can not figure out why. In both books, the events and incidents are frozen in non-time. Events are presented in a nightmarish way, with no hint of their period or location.
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| Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, 1812. In War and Peace , Leo Tolstoy emphasizes the futility of war by showing the effect of this campaign on his characters' lives. |
For their writing, novelists also use unusual, strange, and alien settings to give their readers scenes and things that are likely to be outside of their own experience. Even most specifically, successful novelists also chose these contexts to portray their characters being exposed to pressures that in common scenes may scarcely be working. Joseph Conrad is a master of this use of the Exotic. He depicts a steamship at the hands of a tropical storm in his epic, short novel, Typhoon (1902). The storm is described as having the greatest dramatic vividness. But that is not the story's principal point. The true purpose of Conrad is to remind us how people behave in uncertain circumstances.
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