Past and future bubbling through

Stories covey the passage of time. As one of my editors told me, in narrative “something happens then something else happens, and something else happens.”

Of course, written narratives don’t convey every detail of every second. Writers aren’t stenographers, so the “actual” story (in fiction, the totality of an imagined tale; in non-fiction the real life events) and the written narrative (or movie, or comic strip, etc.) only conveys important slices of the totality of what could be conveyed.

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, during which I gave away an extra peice 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.

The narrative is not always linear. Flashbacks and flashforwards diverge from the natural order of events in the story, so that a narrative that begins in media res jumps around in time. Genette calls all temporal divergences anacronies, using the term prolepsis for jumps forward in time from the predominate temporal flow of the narrative and analepsis for jumps back.

One thing I’ve struggled with is how to bring important information from the past, into a story without having to resort to a full-fledged flashback. In most cases, and in the narrative I’m working on now, I’ve devoted large structural chunks to move back in the story and provide the necessary background for the reader to understand the full nature of a character’s struggles.

But their are more subtle ways to do this. Ernest Hemingway’s story Hills Like White Elephants comes to mind. I need to reread it, but I remeber the story being narrated as a single scene, with no majore temporal fluctuations. But the story is about a conflict which finds its roots in the past (an unwanted pregnancy and the word play which results.) It also seems that flashes of the past might help remind a reader of something important that happens later in a narrative, to related within the main real-time flow (there’s bound to be a better word for this) of the narrative something that brings to the forefront a key idea or emotion.

In Genette’s introduction to order of events in narrative in Narrative Discourse, he uses a number of examples from Proust of small scale annacronies. He’s using them to illustrate the point that they exist. But they are also examples of the sentence structures one might use to let the past (or the future) bubble through into a present narrative.