time in fiction

[JULIUS RAPER]

Sergei Eisenstein was the brilliant creator of silent Russian films whose
technical inventions outlive the political subjects of STRIKE (1924),
POTEMKIN (1925), OCTOBER (1928), and others.  Among his many forms of
montage, he includes the conflict between an event and its duration, which
we know as stopped or slowed motion; this montage is akin to metrical
montage by which long and short shots can be mixed for desired effects. 
The use of fictional analogues to montage I once worked out in an essay on
Faulkner (Southern Humanities Review, Winter 1971).  I hope this handles
your question.  If you look for the Faulkner piece and can't find it, let
me know and I'll see if I can dig one up.  Best, JRR




On Tue, 24 Jun 1997, Casimiro Lovato-Winston wrote: 

> 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?
> -------------
> 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
> 
> 
>