Slowed down time and literature
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Cleland has slowed down time, in order to persuade the reader to share the imaginative experience. And this, of course, is precisely what Richardson had done in Pamela, and would do at even greater length in Clarissa. Dr Johnson went straight to the point when he said that if you read Richardson for the sake of the story, ‘your impatience would be so much fretted you would hang yourself. Richardson makes the assumption that Pamela and Clarissa become so real to the reader’s imagination that we want to linger. A century and a half later, Marcel Proust will carry the same assumption to extraordinary lengths, virtually persuading the reader to abandon his normal sense of time. No writer before the time of Richardson would have dreamed of attempting such a feat: Cervantes, Lesage, Defoe, all relied on a profusion of incident to hold the reader’s interest."The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988) by Colin Wilson |
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Colin Wilson aptly observes in the The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders how John Cleland in Fanny Hill had succeeded to slow down time by which he meant that "the time it takes to read [some scenes] is obviously a great deal longer than the time it took to do." He goes on to describe how Richardson had done the same in Pamela and Clarissa, assuming that
- "Pamela and Clarissa became so real to the reader's imagination that we want to linger. A century and a half later, Marcel Proust will carry the same assumption to extraordinary lengths, virtually persuading the reader to abandon his normal sense of time. No writer before the time of Richardson would have dreamed of attempting such a feat: Cervantes, Lesage, Defoe, all relied on a profusion of incident to hold the reader's interest. --page 84.
Richardson and Cleland had the excuse that their era was pre-cinema, Proust wrote his most time-oriented work in In Search of Lost Time (1913 -1927) when cinema was already happening.
The passage from Fanny Hill Wilson cites is:
- "Oh then! the fiery touch of his fingers determines me, and my fears melting away before the glowing intolerable heat, my thighs disclose of themselves and yield all liberty to his hand; and now, a favourable movement giving my petticoats a toss, the avenue lay too fair, too open to be miss’d. He is now upon me; I had placed myself with a jet under him, as commodious and open as possible to his attempts, which were untoward enough, for his machine, meeting with no inlet, bore and batter’d stiffly against me in random pushes, now above, now below, now beside his point; till, burning with impatience from its irritating touches, I guided gently, with my hand, this furious engine to where my young novice was now to be taught his first lesson of pleasure. Thus he nick’d, at length, the warm and insufficient orifice; but he was made to find no breach impracticable, and mine, tho’ often enter’d, was still far from wide enough to take him easily in. By my direction, however, the head of his unwieldy machine was so critically pointed that, feeling him foreright against the tender opening, a favourable motion from me met his timely thrust, by which the lips of it, strenuously dilated, gave way to his thus assisted impetuosity, so that we might both feel that he had gained a lodgement. Pursuing then his point, he soon, by violent, and, to me, most painful piercing thrusts, wedges himself at length so far in, as to be now tolerably secure of his entrance; here he stuck ..."
See also: literary technique
Examples
- Rapture (2002) by Susan Minot
- The Mezzanine (1988) by Nicholson Baker
- The Field of Vision (1956) by Wright Morris
See also
- Cinematic time
- Cinematic effects in literature
- Digression
- Plotlessness
- Digression
- Slow motion
- Stream of consciousness
- Interior monologue
- List of novels, the action of which takes place within 24 hours
