The Art of Time in Fiction
How should we "write time" in fiction? Joan Silber has some answers
This is the nineteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with The Art of Time in Fiction, Joan Silber’s craft book about considering how to shape narrative time in fiction.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
In practice, Joan Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction, part of Graywolf Press’ The Art Of craft series edited by Charles Baxter, reads more like a literature survey of different examples of narrative time than a craft book (which is fine). Silber organizes her survey into categories of narrative time: “classic time,” “long time,” “switchback time,” “slowed time,” “fabulous time,” and “time as subject,” producing various examples of short stories or novels that invoke these modes of narrative delivery.
In this post, I will briefly discuss Silber’s definitions of “classic time” and “switchback time.” What forms the basis of the time frame most writers rely upon is what Silber calls “classic time”:
A favorite assumption—in writing workshops, in books on writing, and in the ordinary conversations of lay readers—is that a story or a novel will rely chiefly on scene, carefully interspersed with a little necessary summary. (Silber 11)
Her chief example of this narrative-timeline style is The Great Gatsby, a short novel crammed with event and plot and yet sticks with scene-writing familiar to cinema and theater. Despite Gatsby’s brevity, the novel has a lot of scenes which each drive to a particular dramatic moment. To demonstrate this characteristic of Gatsby, Silber highlights the scene when Nick invites Daisy over to tea as a pretext for Gatsby and Daisy to reconnect. This scene involves Gatsby leaving Nick’s house as Daisy arrives, then with Gatsby returning to the doorway of the house to make a nervous, dramatic entrance, even as he is soaked in the rain. Nick then goes outside himself while he lets the former flames process each other’s presence in his foyer.
As Silber explains, “The choreography could not be more like a comic farce, with characters exiting and entering through the rooms of the set” (Silber 16). In Silber’s telling, we are given this scene in all its tedious movements because the scene is dramatic—two lovers, long lost from each other, suddenly in the same room—and Fitzgerald knows how to milk the moment to comic effect, one in which each zoomed-in exchange builds to a catharsis—Gatsby and Daisy reunited again. The stage-iness of the scene apparently owes its lineage to the long tradition of theatrical storytelling, but that’s not to say that such storytelling is the only way to depict time. It’s just the way that most people think storytelling should be presented. Silber tries to explain the appeal of this narrative method:
What does it say about readers’ expectations if the maneuvers of time in Gatsby can feel “classic”? It would seem that we expect stories to come in close for the key points and get to the next spots with all due haste. We’re impatient modern readers and we want the immediacy of scene. Movies have helped build this hunger in us, but not only movies. As readers, as audience, we want to directly hear what people are saying, we want to see their faces while they’re saying it…. And we want a sense of destination…. The stream of events [in Gatsby] is always rising to reach a point (Silber 19-20).
Though Silber expresses some reluctance to state this more emphatically, movies have certainly reinforced the tendency toward classic time. Many Victorian novels engaged with long summaries or omniscient narrators, but most popular literary 20th century novels were scene-focused—why else would readers want to hear dialogue and see their faces while they are saying it? Moreover, the key aspect of Silber’s analysis, that scenes rise to a point, is a dramatic component older than Aristotle’s Poetics. If a scene does not rise to a point, then it’s not really a satisfying scene. I’m not sure what Silber is getting at in terms of time, because hopefully most storytelling, regardless of time structure, reaches some sort of point (or realization) by the end (or beginning), or wherever a postmodern structure determines that point should be (for example, Infinite Jest’s climactic ending is presented at the beginning, but it still has an ending, technically).
However, what Gatsby excels at that, that my own work doesn’t always do well, is Fitzgerald’s ability at fast-forwarding through time to get to the next big scene by using strategic amounts of summary. To summarize the series of parties held at Gatsby’s estate, Silber notes how Fitzgerald name-drops various people who give a sense of habitual time in the list:
Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before… (Fitzgerald, qtd. in Silber 18-19).
Fitzgerald’s description of Benny and his rotating cast of four girls helps get across the number of parties attended without ever having to describe each and every one. By being specific and general at the same time, we as readers are alerted to the magnitude and habitual nature of Gatsby’s parties.
Another trope that my work often over-relies on is that of what Silber calls “switchback time,” which is Silber’s elaboration on the more-cinematic techniques of flashback and backstory: “I’m using it to mean a zigzag movement back and forth among time frames, the method of a fiction that alternates between different ‘eras’… then and now and further back are all partners with an investment in the outcome” (Silber 45). Silber resists the idea of backstory as a footnote submissive to a main timeline, rather she believes more effective fiction toggles between different timelines to achieve a better unity of the whole.
As you might expect, I’m not entirely convinced of this argument. A narrative has to be propulsive in the A-plot for the secondary plots to matter; I don’t think it’s advisable to have equally-weighted plots in a narrative; eventually one has to rise to the fore and be more compelling than the others. For example, most of John Le Carré’s novels were class acts, and yet most of his later (and less powerful books) (Our Kind of Traitor, The Russia House, etc.) almost comically depend on flashbacks-upon-flashbacks to fit the backstory into a present timeline, the point of telling inevitably becoming the most important timeline.
In addition, the mode of narration that Silber seems to be describing sounds like the book equivalent of Nocturnal Animals, a film which follows the life of a character played by Amy Adams in the present, interspersed with some flashbacks about her relationship with a character played by Jake Gyllenhaal in the past, alongside Amy Adams’ interpretation of the Jake Gyllenhaal character’s novel—in which she casts Gyllenhaal as the novel’s protagonist. The movie is successful, but the present Amy Adams timeline is still forefronted as the most important one.
You do have to make one timeline the most important, and so 99 percent of the time even seemingly equally-weighted plot threads end up being recursive ‘flashbacks,’ eventually. That rule might be excepted by Silber’s example of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.”
As a chief example of ‘switchback’ time, Silber references “Sonny’s Blues,” about a narrator who is reflecting on his brother’s arrest on a heroin charge (the titular Sonny), which famously begins “I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work” (Baldwin, qtd. in Silber 54).
Baldwin’s narrator is able to recall three memories related to Sonny’s life which gives Sonny’s life more depth—the story of their father’s dead brother, as told by their mother, the narrator arguing with Sonny about pianos, and the death of the narrator’s daughter to polio. The triptych-flashback style of this narration can show how the narrator is trying to know Sonny more intimately, but all these reflections still feed into the narrator’s present moment, and yet that present moment is merely a frame story that does not necessarily have the same dramatic intensity as the flashbacks. As Silber states: “Baldwin, with the skill to handle any viewpoint… surely would have had no trouble making Sonny the teller… But Baldwin was after something else: the depth of understanding that only a resonance of time frames could bring about” (Silber 56).
That depth of understanding is facilitated by Sonny’s reflection. “Sonny’s Blues” is a story about a man thinking about a man’s life, which is a complex way to approach timelines, and yet in each snippet he does evoke a scene.
In Silber’s telling, then, scene and backstory thus seem fundamental building blocks to narrative strategy, the challenge resides in where to put each component and having the dramatic rationale and acumen to pull it off.
Works Cited
Ford, Tom (Director). Nocturnal Animals (Focus Features, 2016).
Silber, Joan. The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as it Takes (Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2009).