time in fiction

[Casimiro Lovato-Winston]

You said: Eisenstein's treatment of time in film provides an excellent
extension of Lessing's fruitful ideas and a helpful analogy for
understanding time in fiction, though the author's control is less exact
than the director's and therefore leaves considerable room for
reader-active encounters with the text.

I would like to know more about this. Do you mean to say that Einstien 
actually worked with film or that filmakers used his ideas of time dilation 
and contracraction. How are these ideas manipulated to make use of a 
relativity/metaphore relationship?
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Original Text
From: JULIUS RAPER <jrraper at email.unc.edu>, on 6/24/97 3:38 PM:
	It was good to see Lessing's name emerge in this discussion.  He
was of course contrasting visual/spatial arts to temporal/verbal arts. 
The latter we experience in time, so it is possible to match dialogue and
action (approximately) to the time lived by the reader during the reading. 
Visual arts exist in space and can be experienced all at once, unless they
are so vast we have to move around them.
	Now, it is possible to handle the presentation of a verbal text in
a more spatial fashion, as when the action gets slowed down by extended
descriptions of a setting, character, object, or prolonged action.  The
effect then resembles that of slowed motion in film or even stopped
motion.  Stream of consciousness, especially time loops or flashbacks in
the mind of a character, has the effect of deploying time spatially,
since the present action or dialogue gets retarded, often radically so, by
what goes on in the character's mind.  Faulkner's ABSALOM contains many
brilliant examples of this stopping of time while a character's mind runs
all over the significance of the moment.  The first chapter of Lot 49,
likewise, runs rapidly over what Oedipa does and thinks after her
appointment to handle Pierce's will but slows tremendously when she
plunges into associations with Rapunzel and the letting down of hair and
tapestries and tears to fill the void--one framed image and association
after the other. 
	Speaking of novels, we might say that the ratio between
action/dialogue time and reader's time determines the speed of the novel.
Summaries may speed up the novel's time, as in the first pages of Lot 49;
spatial treatments slow it down.
	Speaking of readers, each is unique, but slow ones, I suspect,
have more fun.
	Eisenstein's treatment of time in film provides an excellent
extension of Lessing's fruitful ideas and a helpful analogy for
understanding time in fiction, though the author's control is less exact
than the director's and therefore leaves considerable room for
reader-active encounters with the text.
	I've been skipping around in reading list messages; if this stuff
has been covered, please overlook my text-active claim on your time.
					Jack