TIME IN FICTION

In the early 20th Century a famous professor at Harvard College claimed that all the reading that a first-rate mind needed could be fitted into a single five-foot bookshelf.  A publisher took him up on it, and the resulting “Harvard Classics” (everywhere known as “The Five Foot Shelf”) was hugely popular, published in several editions.  Christopher Beha, now editor-i-cheif at Harpers magazine, read his way through the whole Harvard Five Foot Shelf and lived to tell the tale (just barely, though not because of the reading -- the story's in his book The Whole Five Feet).  Beha, after consuming all of those, went on to read all of the auxiliary Shelf of fiction (which was excluded from the original), and from Fielding's Tom Jones, the first in the series, he quotes this:

My reader then is not to be surprized if, in the course of this work, he shall find some chapters very short, and others altogether as long; some that contain only the time of a single day, and others that comprise years; in a word, if my history seems sometimes to stand still, and sometimes to fly.  For all which I shall not look on myself as accountable to any court of critical jurisdiction whatever:  for I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, and so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein.

He is indeed the founder of a new province of writing, and has isolated here exactly the central mode of that new form, the novel:  that is, the management of time, the succession of "showing" and "telling" by which the representation of time is made in novels.  Perhaps earlier candidates for this invention can be found in the literature of other languages, but it's interesting to see it self-consciously propounded as a new liberty, a new means, in English.

Comments

  1. TheophylactSeptember 14, 2020 at 9:49 AM

    And then, shortly after, Laurence Sterne beat time with a large stick, and it's never been quite the same since.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. roony j. welchSeptember 14, 2020 at 5:39 PM

      Excellent. Yes, you're right. If Fielding invented the course of realistic novels (or novels that treat story and events realistically) then Sterne invented the strain of fiction that doesn't care.

      Delete

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