Narrative

The following reflections on "narrative speed" are an attempt to remediate the traditional 'reply' to a scholarly article, followed by a 'reply to the reply' by the first author. Instead, the two authors of this jointly written response to the article published by Kathryn Hume in 2005 have decided from the very beginning to merge their ideas and remarks on the subject. They have tried from the very beginning to conceive their exchange as an integrated dialogue, the results of which they hope to be useful for the whole narrative/Narrative community. Our thanks go also to the participants of the session on "Contemporary Narratology" held during the last International Conference of Narrative (Ottawa, 2006), whose remarks on a draft version of this text have been extremely useful.

Despite the literature gathered by Kathryn Hume in her article on the subject, speed has been one of the most undertheorized issues of narrative theory. Certainly recent theorists have neglected the topic, although many readers consider it one of the decisive parameters of any text and important to the appreciation afforded by the [End Page 349] reading experience. A popular book may be praised as "fast paced," and any book may be disparaged as "too slow paced." If the pace seems inappropriate, the book will be deemed boring or frantic, jumbled, or even unreadable (on the historical and cultural importance of the notion of "aptness" as a master code for aesthetic appreciation, see McAllister). Similar remarks can be made on the importance of speed for the process of writing. The impossibility of writing as fast as one can think is a common complaint in confessions and testimonies by authors on their own practice. The most famous is perhaps that made by Blaise Pascal: "En écrivant ma pensée elle m'échappe quelquefois ; mais cela me fait souvenir de ma faiblesse que j'oublie à toute heure, ce qui m'instruit autant que ma pensée oubliée, car je ne tiens qu'à connaître mon néant" (Pascal 1115) [In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness. (Trotter)]. And who doesn't remember Tristram Shandy's lament he will also write too slowly to be able to tell the story of his whole life (see book 4 of Tristram Shandy, amongst other fragments of the same work). In this article, however, we will focus exclusively on speed and rhythm as narrative structures tackled from a reader's viewpoint.

As the initial survey of the existing literature in Hume's article clearly shows, the research is scarce and quite heterogeneous. The four subfields that she distinguishes (prose portrayal of physical speed, narrative retardation, the amount of story time covered per page, and fictional reflections of cultural speed) are far from representing a unified field. Hence the need to establish first a definition of speed—"the sense of the narrative being accelerated beyond some safe-comprehension-limit" (106)—and then to establish the relationship between "safety" and "comprehension" (Hume 107). In the rest of the article, speed is then analyzed from three different perspectives. The first consists of the techniques used to generate speed (multiplying elements, subtracting expected material, rendering actions fantastic). The second approach involves authorial aims, which may be very different, but overall the politics of speed seem radical, rebellious, and critical of rationality. The third topic is the effects of speed at the level of reading. Those effects are difficult to measure, since they are partly ephemeral (the shock effect does not survive when one rereads) and partly linked to sociological and cultural variations in the audience (age seeming to be a rather important factor).

Starting from this framework, we would like to develop here three main lines of thought that do not totally coincide with the initial triad of techniques, aims and effects. Given the current interest in cognitive narratology, we find it useful to foreground the "effects" rather than the "aims...