The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel by Brian Gingrich (review)

Abstract

W we like it or not, modern life is regulated by pace. We measure our existence by the way we feel: how quickly the days slip away; how slow time becomes when we are doing something we do not wish to do; or how fast it goes by when we are with loved ones. Recently I have been watching a television series and found myself complaining that the time skips happened too often and too quickly, leaving the audience baffled. Or I remember when I first read Moby Dick in my undergraduate years and felt quite lost when I began the notorious cetological chapters that halt the narrative. I did not know how to interpret them or what to make of them and their contribution to the narrative. Although I have studied narratology over the years and learned to make sense of the way narrative pacing works, Brian Gingrich’s The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel has certainly filled in some gaps for me. This study about narrative movement and the novel is comprised of an introduction and five chapters. The introduction lays out the central occupation of the study—“how transformations in pacing made and remade novelistic fiction” (1)—through some fundamental definitions. Many of them are the writer’s own renderings—the term pace meaning, for example, “large-forward-rhythmic-shifting-dynamic-temporal narrative movement” (2). Gingrich also reviews literature on narrative pacing with references to E. M. Forster, Viktor Shklovsky, Erich Auerbach, Roland Barthes, and, extensively, Gérard Genette and his Narrative Discourse.1 The chapters of the book, then, historically trace how narrative pacing has affected and been affected, in turn, by the very fabric of the novel through realism and modernism. The first chapter titled “Narrative Discourse, Literary History” introduces the two most crucial narrative units of pacing, scene and summary, and, along with them, other pacing markers such as ellipses and pauses. The author is careful in this chapter not to assign hasty and rigid definitions, and he acknowledges their limits. He argues that “there is no ground for an analysis of pace that is not of a shifting historical nature” (14). Gingrich then outlines the uses of scene and summary in the classical novel (with examples from Laurence Sterne, James Joyce Quarterly 60.3 2023