The Speed of a Narrative
Order was about when. Duration is about how fast, and it is the most nearly quantitative idea in literary theory, because it is a ratio between two measurable things: the time the story covers, and the space the discourse spends on it.
Genette identifies four canonical movements:
| Movement | Story time | Discourse time | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ellipsis | some | none | infinite |
| Summary | much | little | fast |
| Scene | some | the same | 1 : 1 |
| Pause | none | some | zero |
A scene is the reference point: dialogue, where twelve minutes of conversation take roughly twelve minutes to read. Summary compresses, he spent three years in Vienna is three years in six words. Ellipsis skips entirely, and it is invisible unless the text marks it (two years later). Pause is description, where the story clock stops while the discourse continues.
A fifth movement, slow-down or stretch, where the discourse takes longer than the story, has no canonical form but occurs, the last seconds before a death spread over pages. Genette notes it is rare, which is itself informative: narrative is normally faster than life, not slower.
The practical value is that the ratio is a choice, and the choice is interpretable. A novel that gives forty pages to one evening and one sentence to the following decade has told you what it thinks matters.
Frequency
Genette's third category asks how many times an event is told against how many times it occurred:
- Singulative: telling once what happened once (the default).
- Multiple singulative: telling times what happened times.
- Repeating: telling times what happened once. (The same murder from four witnesses.)
- Iterative: telling once what happened many times. (Every Sunday we walked to the church.)
The iterative is the one that repays attention. It compresses habitual time into a single telling and is the engine of Proust's opening, a childhood delivered as what used to happen, so that when a single evening finally gets narrated singulatively, the shift itself carries the emotion.
Voice and mood: who speaks, who sees
Genette's sharpest distinction separates two questions usually merged into "point of view":
- Voice: who speaks? The narrator may be a character in the story (homodiegetic; autodiegetic if the protagonist) or outside it (heterodiegetic). The narrating may be at any distance from the events.
- Mood / focalization: who sees? Zero focalization is the unrestricted narrator who knows more than any character; internal focalization restricts the narrative to one character's field; external focalization shows behaviour only, without access to any mind.
The two are independent, and that independence is the point. A heterodiegetic narrator, not a character, can narrate entirely through one character's perception, which is how free indirect style works. Conversely a homodiegetic narrator can withhold their own knowledge, which is how the unreliable narrator works.
Common pitfall: collapsing focalization into person. "First person" and "third person" describe the grammar of the voice, not the restriction of the sight. Most of Mrs Dalloway is grammatically third-person and focalized internally through a succession of characters, a combination that neither "first" nor "third person" can name.