Playing the Accordion: On Narrative Slowness in Literature

Although narrative rhythm is regarded as a crucial aspect of literary fiction, relatively little attention has been devoted to the subject. One way of measuring variations in narrative rhythm has been popularized by Gérard Genette (1972), who defines it as the relationship between the duration of the story and the length of the narrative. Rather than adopting this “intra-textual approach” (Toolan 2001), this presentation focuses on narrative rhythm, more precisely on narrative slowness, in its relation to narrative progression. As remarked by Meir Sternberg (1978), retardatory structure is a direct result of the temporal nature of narrative fiction: since the text is perceived successively by the reader a certain delay in the disclosure of relevant information is absolutely inevitable. This property of the literary medium allows for the creation and manipulation of the reader’s expectations. Strategic slowing down plays an essential role in the creation of narrative suspense, for instance. However, at its most extreme, narrative slowness can, on the contrary, impede the narrative progression and result in a failure to capture the reader’s attention thereby producing boredom. This phenomenon, related to concepts of eventfulness and duration, is sometimes exploited by authors in order to create a particular effect. This can be achieved through numerous narrative strategies, for example, by using repetitions and lengthy descriptions. This presentation focuses on the strategy of stretching the telling of an action in works such as Michel Butor’s La Modification, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget. With the help of the concept of the “accordion effect” (Feinberg 1965, Davidson 1993), which posits that the description of an action can be contracted or endlessly stretched out, this presentation attempts to shed a new light on the relation between narrative rhythm and the length of the narrative.