Narrative time

I'm just about to finish the chapters in Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse that deal with aspects of time in stories.

So I thought I'd briefly summarize. Very briefly, for these chapters go into far more detail than I've been able to either fully understand or recall.

Genette breaks his discussions of time down to three major headings: order, duration and frequency.

These distinctions assumed the fundamental temporal duality between narrative and story, which I've written about in previous posts. Here's one passage in which I discussed it:

Gennete makes this distinction by calling the totality of events the “story” and the expression of those events the “narrative.” Thus “I walked to the car” is the extremely simple abstracted narrative of my trip to the car this morning (the actual event, or "story"), during which I gave away an extra piece of plywood, noticed a pair of women dumping junk from their minivan on the ground and received a phone call from someone wanting to rent my condo.

Here I'm only going to focus on order, which refers to how the writer organizes the continuous chronological events of the story into narrative sequences. I can narrated my morning walk to the car beginning with seeing the women dumping junk out of their minivan, even though that's not the way it happened in real life. Then I might flashback to when I first came down stairs and gave the plywood away.

A writer generally has three options when it comes to order. The first is to simple travel forward through time at varying speeds (speed being a matter of duration), with one event following another in chronological order.

The other two options come under general heading of what Genette calls anachrony, which I've also written about before. Analepsis (flashback) is narration of events that comes earlier in the story. Prolepsis (flashforward) is narration of events that come later in the story. (Genette uses a term for "first narrative" for the real time of the story, the dominate chronology in which the anachronies are, by definition, subordinate temporal anomalies.)

Genette identifies two metrics of anachrony that help distinguish qualitative demarcations: reach and extent. Here is what Genette says:

An anachrony can reach into the past or the future, either more or less from the “present” moment . . . : this temporal distance we will name the anachrony’s reach. The anachrony itself can also cover a duration of story that is more or less long: we will call this its extent

Thus reach refers to the distance in time a flashforward or flashback takes the reader from the dominant story-time. It is essentially quantitative. The reach of a flashback that takes the reader from a story playing out in 1954 back to events that happened in 1944 is ten years. Thus its reach is less than if it had taken the reader back to the 1800s.

This brings us to the concept of extent. Extent is the length of time traversed by a particular anachrony. An analepsis that returns to 1905 and brings the reader to 1910 before returning to the first narrative, has an extent of 10 years.

Flashbacks can be catagorized based on reach and extent.

A flashback that reaches outside of the limits of the narrative's extreme ends and stays there - say a flashback that returns to the 1800s in a story where the dominant timeline is 1960 to 1965 - is called an external analepsis.

One that remains within the bounds of the narrative is called an internal analepsis (or homodiegetic).

When one begin as external then bring the reader forward into the first narrative, thus breaching the distinction between flashback and the dominate story, it is called a mixed analepsis.

External analepses . . . never at any point risk interfering with the first narrative . . . . [but] with internal analepses: since their temporal field is contained within the temporal field of the first narrative, they present an obvious risk of redundancy or collision.

Genette also identifies particular category of analepses based on its function: the completing analepses or returns. These, he says, serve to "fill in, after the event, an earlier gap in the narrative." Thus the first narrative can skip forward in the chronology of "real" events - an ellipsis - then later return to recount what was missed.

The type of return depends on the type of ellipsis. When the ellipsis is a true gap - what Genette calls an ellipsis pure and simple - the completing analepes just fills in the missing events.

However, another type of internal return, a repeating analepses, or recall, call flesh out paralypsis a kind of ellipsis that is an "omission of one of the constituent elements of a situation in a period that the narrative does generally cover".

A good example of this is in the Life of Pi [SPOILER ALERT], when the Indian man retells the story of his ordeal on the lifeboat, but tells it from realist point of view as opposed to his initial allegorical account. He's been over this ground before, but we learn new things about what happened. Genette says this kind of iterative storytelling is a defining characteristic of Proust's Recherche du temps perdu.

Finally for analepses, Genette designates a flashback that ends where the first narrative begins, forming a smooth return, a complete analepses. One that ends in an ellipsis, thus skipping the story through time and over events, back to the first narrative, is a partial analepsis.

Genette identifies this last structure as a defining characteristic of the modern novel.


Reach and extent define prolepses as well.

External prolepses, Genette says, "function most often as epilogues, serving to continue one or another line of action to its logical conclusion."

Internal prolepses, like internal analepses, become entangle with the first narrative, and Genette sees them as serving at least two functions, to provide advance notice and advance mention. Thus they may result, and often do, in repeating prolepses, that give advanced notice of what will be narrated later.

Advance notice, is distinguished from more subtle analepses that Genette calls advanced mention, and what I think most American's would refer to as foreshadowing. Advance notice then might be called a flashforward - a more explicit hint at what's to come.

One very interesting part of Genette's analysis is that he sees Proust using so many layers of prolepsis within analepsis and vice versa, so many distortions of time, that he uses the word achrony to describe it. He says of achrony that and "anachrony deprived of every temporal connection . . . is an event we must ultimately take to be dateless and ageless."

The truth is that the narrator had the clearest of reasons for grouping together, in defiance of all chronology, events connected by spatial proximity, by climatic identity . . . , or by thematic kinship . . . : he thus made clear, more than anyone had done before him and better than they had, narrative’s capacity for temporal autonomy.

Thus Proust let elements other than time, things that he thought needed to be together in the narrative but weren't in rigid chronology of the "real" story, dictate the structure of his narrative.