Genette's Analysis of Narrative Time Relations

Author(s): Seymour Chatman

Source: L'Esprit Créateur , Winter 1974, Vol. 14, No. 4, New Critical Practices, II
(Structuralism, Narratology, "Tel Quel, Change") (Winter 1974), pp. 353-368
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26280067

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 Genette's Analysis of Narrative Time
Relations

Seymour Chatman

ËRARD Genette's elegant analysis1 of the relationship between

story- and discourse-time must form the basis of any current
discussion of narrative. Genette distinguishes three categories of
relations : those of order (ordre), duration (durée) and frequency (fré
quence), exemplifying them by reference to that monument of temporal
manipulation, Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. His is not a
critical book on A la recherche, but rather a treatise on the poetics of
narrative — so that Proust's novel is less an object of than a means to
inquiry. Genette's distinctions are practical and easy to apply, although
he has organized them under forbidding-sounding Greek names.
A. Order. The discourse can rearrange the events of the story as
much as it pleases, provided, of course, that the story-sequence is ul
timately discernible. If not, the plot, in Aristotelian terms, fails in unity.
The problem is particularly real for the cinema because its normal
compositional technique is montage or cutting, and in avant-garde
films it sometimes becomes difficult to tell whether a given cut is a
flashback, or flashforward, or simply an ellipsis followed by the next
(spatially removed) event in the story.
We must distinguish between a normal sequence, where story and
discourse have the same order (A1B2C3D4, where story-order is in
dicated by numbers and discourse-order by letters), and anachronous
sequences (to use Genette's term). An anachrony can be of two sorts :
flashback (analepse), where the discourse breaks the story-flow to recall
events earlier than what precedes the break (A2B1C3D4), and flash
forward (prolepse) where the discourse leaps ahead, taking up events
that are subsequent to intermediate events — but these intermediate
events must themselves be recounted at some later point in the dis

"Discours du récit," Figures III (Paris, 1972), pp. 77-182. This material
is summarized in G. Genette, "Time and Narrative in A la recherche du
temps perdu," Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis Miller (N. Y., 1970),
pp. 93-118.

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 L'Esprit Créateur

course, for otherwise the leap would simply be a long ellipsis withi
the normal order. In other words, flashforwards can only be recogn
retrospectively, after the occurrences of intermediate events, thou
of course, they may hint at their true status ("Only much later wa
John to grasp the full implications of the events I am about to recoun
Other kinds of sequence, like reversal (A4B3C2D1) or random ord
(A3B2C4D1), can be taken as simple permutations of the two ba
anachronies. We can also speak of a zero case, where the discou
proceeds though story-time has stopped, as in passages of pure
cription of character and setting (these are discussed below, un
Duration).
It may be that "flashback" and "flashforward" should be used
senses narrower than that implied by Genette's analepse and prolep
senses specifically cinematic. It does not seem quite appropriate
refer to the traditional narrative summary as a "flashback,"2 and th
may have been good reason for the early filmmakers to employ a n
term for what they thought was a new story-telling technique. For
the cinema, "flashback" refers only to a sub-class of analepse, name
those narrative passages which do not simply "go back" but crea
scene in doing so, often a scene with its own autonomy, that is
troduced by no, or minimal, transition. Films in particular are a
to use nothing more than the simple cut to separate the flashbacke
portion from NOW (the present moment in the story), though som
times, particularly in older films, the transition is more overtly mar
by various optical effects like lap dissolves, "melting" images, and s
on. An even more interesting innovation permitted to films is wha
might be called "partial" or "split" flashbacks. Since there are not o
but two information channels, visual and auditory, one may be kep
in the present and the other flashbacked. The more ordinary case,
course, amounts to normal voice-over first person narration: we
him telling of past events ; then, as his voice continues (now off-scre
we cut back to the visual images themselves. But the reverse — tho
much more rarely used — is also possible: the visual image ma
remain contemporary as the sound flashes back. An interesting insta
occurs in Henning Carlsen's film The Cats.

2. "Flashback" is defined as "Interpolated descriptions or scenes represent

events that happened before the point at which the story opens." M.
Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (New York, 1958), p. 71.

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 Chatman

To the basic distinction between flashback and flashforward (an

alepse and prolepse), Genette adds some refinements. For example, he
points out that these anachronies may occur in nested or hierarchical
structures. For example, in this sentence from Proust's Jean Santeuil:
"Mais il se les rappelait sans la mélancholie qu'il pensait alors devoir
goûter un jour dans le sentiment de ne plus l'aimer." Jean is recalling
at a later date (2) the rainy days (1) when he thought he would some
day (2) have to taste the sense of no longer loving her. Hence:
A2B1C2. (Capital letters indicate discourse order.) But obviously there
are also dependencies here that do not occur in a straightforward ac
count of simple events — Bl, the melancholy he felt long ago is the
product of the act of remembering, A2, and the experience of someday
no longer loving her (C2) is the object of the thought that occurred
to him in those early rainy days (Bl). Hence, in Genette's notation:
A2 [Bl (C2)].
Genette further distinguishes between the "distance" of an anach
rony (portée) and its "amplitude" (amplitude). "Distance" is the span
of time from NOW backward or forward to the inception of the
anachrony ; amplitude is the length of time that the anachronous event
itself takes. Also under portée is considered the kind of junction of
the anachrony with the ongoing story : this can be external, internal or
mixed: an external anachrony is one whose beginning and end occur
before NOW; an internal anachrony begins after NOW; a mixed
anachrony begins before and ends after NOW. Internal anachronies in
turn can be subdivided into those which do not interfere with the inter
rupted story ("heterodiegetic") and those which do ("homeodiegetic").
In the latter case we can distinguish between completive (complétives or
"renvois") and repetitive (répétitives or "rappels"). Completive anach
ronies fill in lacunae — past or future. And among lacunae, Genette
discovers in the rich texture of Proust's novel not only straightforward
or "frontal" ellipses but also lateral ellipses, or, as he dubs them,
paralipses in which what is deleted are not intervenine events but
rather elements which are components of the very situation unfolding
— for example, Marcel's systematic concealment of mention of the very
existence of a member of his family. Repetitive anachronies, on the
other hand, repeat what in fact has been stated before — "the narrative
going back, sometimes explicitly, over its own tracks" — although
perhaps (and, in Proust, frequently) with a different slant on the

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 L'Esprit Créateur

original events. This device has been familiar to the cinema since
Eisenstein.

Flashbacks (analepseç) contain a further possibility of sub-cate

gorization not open to flashforwards, that between partial and complete
forms. A partial flashback leaves an ellipsis between its end and the
resumption of NOW, while complete flashbacks fill in the interval some
how, even if only in a cursory fashion. (The latter distinction applies,
thus, to external analepses, since internal and mixed forms are by
definition already within the NOW period).
Finally, Genette notes several examples of a third possible relation
between story-time and discourse-time, which he labels achrony (and
the figure he calls the syllepse) : here there is no chronological relation
(even inverse or the like) between the two orders, and the grouping
is either random, or based on principles of organization appropriate
to other kinds of texts: on a basis of spatial proximity, similarities
of climate, thematics or whatever. To summarize, consider the diagram
on the following page.
Genette's distinctions are based on the assumption that in each

bears the temporal center of gravity (so to speak). It is against this

central strand that anachronies and achronies can be recognized. But
narratives from time immemorial have included two or more story
strands, and sometimes it is difficult or undesirable to pick one as
having this kind of priority. Each has its own center of gravity, its
own NOW. A classic cinematic example is D. W. Griffith's Intolerance
in which there are four story-strands.
Whether the different story-strands are of equal priority, as in
Intolerance, or one is simply background for the other, as in the
sequence of the Yon ville fair in Madame Bovary, two possible disposi
tions of events may be made. Either there is no time-gap between the
two strands, that is, time is held constant and therefore the two
sequences of events temporally overlap, strand B continuing at the
very next second as if it had never been interrupted (as in Madame
Bovary)-, or such a gap exists, time passing in some sense in story
strand B at the same rate as in the explicitly narrated strand A. The
latter has been aptly called the convention of "unchronicled growth".3

3. Carl Grabo, Technique of the Novel (New York, 1928), p. 215. "When the
story shifts from one sub-plot to another, the characters abandoned pursue
an unrecorded existence which, when we again recur to them, has endowed

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 Chatman

OF STORY

RELATION TO NOW

From External Internal Mixed

Distance Junction With

Interfering Non-Interfering
(homodieg tic)(het rodieg tic)

Completive Repeti ve (G. as igned (an once) no name)

(PROLEPSE)

FLASHFORWARD(PAR LIPSE)(YLEPS )

(rappel)
FLASHBACK (AN LEPS)\LATERAL CHRONIES
NOW OF STORY
(homodieg tic)(het rodieg tic)

TIMERLATIONSOFSTORYAND ISCOURSE
Distance Junction With
From/NYesNo External Internal Mixed
Completive
( renvois) Repeti ve

AMPLITUDERELATIONTO

PartilComplet Interf ingNon-Iterf ing

NORMALORDE ANCHRONIES
YesNo/(PORTÉE)HIRACHIZATON MPLITUDE(PORTÉE)
HIERARCHIZATION

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 L'Esprit Créateur

How does the concept of "exposition" fit into the discussion

narrative order? Exposition is a function rather than a sub-cl
of analepse or prolepse. That function is to provide "necessary info
tion concerning characters and events existing before the action pro
of a story begins."4 That is, the emphasis is strongly on explanatio
Expositions are traditionally done in the summary mode : in the typ
19th-century novel, such summaries were provided in a lump at th
very outset (often in the characteristic perfect tense), or in exposito
summary occurring after an initial in médias res scene. The convent
of "lumped summary" has been questioned by recent novelists
theorists of the novel; Ford Maddox Ford argued, for example,
what he called "chronological looping" as a way of revealing anteced
events. His advice was to "distribute" the exposition, "to get in
character first with a strong impression, and then work backw
and forwards over his past."5 Flashbacks, too, have a more or
expository function, though their necessary abruptness may make
bit unclear at the outset how and which aspects of the main narrat
they are illuminating.
B. Duration. Duration is another relation between discourse-time
and story-time, namely that between the time it takes to perceive
(read, hear, see) the narrative and the time the events depicted in the
story took to occur.
Genette argues that there are four possibilities and names them
more or less traditionally : 1. Summary: discourse-time is shorter than
story-time. 2. Ellipsis: the same as # 1, except that discourse-time is
zero. 3. Scene: discourse-time and story-time are equal. 4. Pause:
discourse-time is longer than story-time, which is zero. Obviously
there is one possible distinction lacking here. Pause is given as the
reverse parallel to Ellipsis, but no reverse parallel is given to Summary.
Let us introduce a new # 4 and renumber Pause as # 5, to preserve
the symmetry: 4. Stretch: the discourse-time is longer than the story
time. 5. Pause : the same as # 4, except that story-time is zero. Genette
is aware of the gap, and indeed names it (scène ralentie): his reason
for disallowing it is his feeling that the cases in which discourse-time

them with greater actuality, as if, indeed, we had passed the interval in
their society though thinking of something else."
4. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction, (New
York, 1959), p. 684.
5. Quoted in A. A. Mendilow, Time and the Novel (New York, 1952), p. 104.

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 Chatman

exceeds that of story-time entail descriptions; these he feels must

really be pauses, since the action is totally halted at a given moment
in story-time, as the appearance of the scene is described. He allows
of the possibility that actions (excluding dialogue) might be narrated
at a rate slower than that at which they would transpire, but argues
that these are not "canonic forms" and have not "truly been realized
in the literary tradition."6 But such a conclusion is not in the spirit
of a theoretical poetics, which wants to clarify not only what is
"literarily," but also what could be. And further, there are a few
narratives in which this possibility is actually utilized; "Occurrence
at Owl Creek" is one. But let us proceed in Genette's order :

1. Summary: the discourse is briefer than the events depicted in

two ways, explicit and implicit. In the explicit case, the narrative state
ment summarizes a group of events; in literary narrative, this may
entail some kind of durative verb or adverb: "John lived in New York
for seven years," "May became one of the best students, although she
started badly." This includes iterative forms like "The company tried
time and time again to end the strike but without success." The im
plicit case is simply an instance of a kind of narrative inference. Any
narrative necessarily implies a selection among the details that may
be reported. A whole raft of details go unmentioned in any narrative
statement.

6. "La simple lecture de ce tableau fait apparaître une asymétrie, qui est
l'absence d'une forme à mouvement variable symétrique du sommaire, et
dont la formule serait Tfemps du] R[écit] > T[emps de 1'] H[istoire] : ce
serait évidemment une sorte de scène ralentie, et l'on pense immédiatement
aux longues scènes proustiennes, qui paraissent souvent déborder à la
lecture, et de beaucoup, le temps diégétique qu'elles sont supposées
recouvrir. Mais, comme nous allons le voir, les grandes scènes romanesques,
et spécialement chez Proust, sont essentiellement allongées par des élé
ments extra-narratifs, ou interrompues par des pauses descriptives, mais
non pas exactement ralenties. Il va de soi d'ailleurs que le dialogue pur
ne peut être ralenti. Reste la narration détaillée d'actes ou d'événements
racontés plus lentement qu'ils n'ont été accomplis ou subis: la chose est
sans doute réalisable en tant qu'expérience délibérée, mais il ne s'agit
pas là d'une forme canonique, ni même vraiment réalisée dans la tradition
littéraire: les formes canoniques se réduisent bien, en fait, aux quatre
mouvements énumérés" (p. 130).
And yet no less than Joseph Conrad has his narrative spokesman,
Marlow (himself no mean theoretician), say about a scene he has just
depicted to his cronies: "All this happened in much less time than it
takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the
instantaneous effect of visual impressions" {Lord Jim, N. Y., 1961, p. 41).

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 L'Esprit Créateur

For verbal narratives there are obviously various kinds of gr

matical and lexical features available for indicating summary, t
aspectual distinctions among verbs and verb forms, for example. So
verbs are by semantic nature punctual: they denote events that
pen once, in a relatively brief span of time, and do not recur.
example, "he jumped," or "he decided," or "he married." These ve
can be made durative, or iterated only by means of external device
like continuous verb forms ("he was jumping"), modals ("he kep
jumping"), repetition ("he jumped and jumped"), and so on. There ar
on the other hand, a class of innately durative verbs — "waited," "c
sidered," "strolled." These by definition refer to a span of time
can only be limited by the addition of other words, like tempo
adverbial contractions: "for an hour," "since Tuesday."
It is interesting to find examples of summary even in areas of d
course where precise co-temporality between discourse and story wo
seem to be de rigueur, for example, in dialogue. Examples of s
marized dialogue — the gist of what a character said, but punctuate
as a single quotation — occur in novelists as early as Jane Austen.
The cinema, on the other hand, has trouble with summary, a
directors have often resorted to devices of one kind or another where
it seemed essential to provide such information. The "montage
sequence" has long been popular: a collection of shots not following
a strict chrono-logic order but showing selected aspects of a history,
whether continuous or iterated, usually connected by continuous music.
But there have also been many "unfilmic" solutions, like peeling
calendars, dates written as legend on the screen, voice-over narrators
explaining what has happened before the beginning of the discourse
(The Third Man is an example). Some directors have been very inge
nious in solving the problem. Citizen Kane, for example, opens with a
newsreel to summarize the life of the protagonist, as well as to provide
reasons for the journalistic inquiry into that life that follows. Another
ingenious solution occurs in Clouzot's Wages of Fear, in which con
tinuous conversation on the sound-track is coupled with different
visuals of the two men talking: in different parts of town, under dif
ferent weather conditions, strolling in different directions, and so on.

2. Ellipsis: is a convenient term for the situation in which the

discourse halts though time continues to pass in the story. Jake Barnes
has lunch with Robert Cohn at the end of Chapter V of The Sun Also

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 Chatman

Rises: then, "We talked about one thing and another, and I left him
to come to the office." Chapter VI begins, "At five o'clock I was in
the Hotel Crillon waiting for Brett." Thus three or four hours are
unaccounted for, and we assume that Jake did his usual journalistic
work at the office, then made his way to the hotel. No need to report
the details. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in one scene
Stephen Dedalus lies in the infirmary at Clongowes Wood College
talking to a boy named Athy, and then has a revery about Brother
Michael telling a crowd of people at water's edge that Parnell was
dead and about his aunt Dante walking by in a velvet maroon dress.
Next there is a space (filled by asterisks in some editions) and we read,
"A great fire, banked high and red, flamed in the grate and under the
ivytwined branches of the chandelier the Christmas table was spread."
No need to present the full term of Stephen's recuperation, his ride
home, the days before Christmas, and so on. All that can be
"understood" by the reader, who is left to reconstruct the probable
details if and as he likes.
Ellipsis Is, of course, as old as The Iliad. But, as many critics have
pointed out, ellipsis of a broad and abrupt sort is particularly charac
teristic of modern narrative. Genette shows, for example, that the
farther we go into Proust's A la recherche, the more daringly abrupt
become the uses of ellipses, as a counterpart to the fact that the
scenes between, though they cover shorter and shorter periods of
story-time, contain greater and greater detail. The whole effect is of an
ever-growing discontinuity between discourse-time and story-time.
The same kind of discontinuity characterizes Mrs. Dalloway.
Ellipsis is sometimes identified with the "straight cut" between
shots in the cinema, the transition between two shots linked together
by a simple juncture, giving the impression during projection that the
first shot is suddenly and instantaneously displaced by the second.7
"Cut" is precisely what the editor does: he cuts the film exactly
at the end of the appropriate frame-border of shot A and at the begin
ning of B, and glues them together. But the terms "ellipsis" and "cut"
should be carefully distinguished. The difference is one of level. Ellipsis
refers, as noted above, to a discontinuity between story and discourse
at the abstract narrative level; "cut," on the other hand, is the man
ifestation of ellipsis at the lower manifestational level; it is a transi

7. Ernest Lindgren, The Art of the Film (New York, 1970), p. 305.

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 L'Esprit Créateur

tional process in a specific medium, hence it operates not at the lev

of discourse, but as an actualization of an element in the discour
in the same fashion as does a blank space with asterisks on the prin
page.
Or more precisely, a cut may convey an ellipsis, but it may simp
represent a shift in space, that is, connecting two actions which
absolutely or virtually continuous (or even simultaneous), as wh
shot A shows a man with his hand turning a door-knob and drawin
the door toward him, and then, after the cut, a reverse shot B fro
out in the hall shows the same door opening, now of course inward
towards the camera, and the man emerging. The discourse is no
continuous than the story in this instance; the cut is simply ne
sitated by the spatial problem of passing the camera through the w
A cut may also be used to show that the next shot takes place i
character's mind, or that it is imaginary. And so with the other tr
sitions that cinematic technology makes possible — the dissolve,
wipe, irising in and out, and so forth. These are all in the repertoir
of cinematic manifestation, not of narrative discourse. In themselv
fli/MT Viotta MA tv» ûo r» i ti no HuItt fVlû r»r\n tovt non lie U/llPtllPr

a given dissolve, for example, means "several weeks later"

matter, "several weeks earlier") or "meanwhile, in anot
town." These transitions have precisely the same status as
devices have in literary narrative, devices like asterisk
type face, or the simple insertion of extra space between

3. The scene is the incorporation of the dramatic pri

narrative : story and discourse here are of equal duration
equal, of course, rather than absolutely so, since there is n
of exact measurements. The two usual components are d
overt physical actions of relatively short duration, the kin
not take much longer to perform than to relate.
Let us turn now to cases where discourse-time is slo
story-time.

4. I have suggested the category stretch to refer to t

in which discourse-time is longer than story-time. By "ov
— i.e., running the camera at a faster speed than its later

8. The " 'blanc,' un enorme 'blanc,' et sans l'ombre d'une tra

Proust speaks of in Contre Sainte-Beuve (quoted by Genette,

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 C.HATMAN

the cinema can manifest stretch in the well-known "slow motion." But
there are other ways in which it can cause discourse-time to take
longer than the story-time which it depicts, for instance, by a kind of
overlapping or repetitious editing. A good example of the technique
occurs at the very end of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point; the heroine
mentally evokes the explosion of a huge mansion, a symbol of decadent
capitalist society: the explosion is made to seem interminable by the
overlapping cutting; the uprushing roar and flare of the explosion
Begin over and over again, each time exposing new parts of the house
to view — a chair, a lamp, the refrigerator bursting open with all the
food flying out, and so on, all to emphasize the heroine's hatred of
the evil of capitalist society and the necessity for totally destroying
it before we can begin again. There is an equally impressive use of
overlapping editing in Eisenstein's October, where the full poignancy
of the initial defeat of the Bolsheviks in Petrograd is associated with
the opening by the Kerensky government of the bridges, to keep the
proletariat back across the river in the slums and away from the Win
ter Palace: by overlapping editing, the bridges seem to open inter
minably, and the frustration and sense of defeat is curiously underlined
by the image of a dead horse which had been used to pull a Bolshevik
wagon, hanging grotesquely from the center of the bridge now raised
■on high. The same technique is used in the famous Odessa steps
sequence in The Battleship Potemkin, stretching out the viewer's ex
perience of the soldiers' descent to the point of excruciation. The
overlap effect has also been used in comedy routines, and has become
popular again with filmmakers like Godard and Bertolucci.
Obviously, literary narratives do not have the resources of overlap
ping editing or slow motion. But they do have the capacity to present
the effect of narrative stretch. Words can be repeated or paraphrased,
•different versions of the same events can be given. In Robbe-Grillet's
Jalousie, "A..." cries out at the sight of the centipede and Franck
looks up — presumably only once in the story. But the statement of
Lina event recurs anu recurs.

In addition to repetitions, there are many

verbal expression seem by their nature to ta
impressionist measure) than the actions them
events is especially interesting. Without
psychological measurement, it seems safe t
that it takes a longer time to say your thou

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 L'Esprit Créateur

and a still longer time to write them down, or to read somebody else
written thoughts. So it is, perhaps, by definition that discourse is longe
than story when it elects to communicate in words what has transpire
in a character's mind; certainly perceptions, but even conceptua
thoughts often seem to flash through our mind with the speed of ligh
compared to the time that it takes to read them in a text. Their full
verbal depiction in a narrative does not do justice to their brevity. Fo
example, Stephen Dedalus in his classroom asks his student Talbot
to recite "Lycidas." Not attending to Talbot's painful, halting delivery
Stephen muses, and his reverie contains 121 words compared to the 39
words of the five verses Talbot must have recited by the time we
pick him up again at the line, Through the dear might of Him that
walked the waves. Stephen's speculation and reminiscences of Paris are
not pronounced; they only "fleet" through his mind. A phrase of
Aristotle occurs to him and reminds him of innocent evenings reading
in a library in Paris (the picture of the delicate Siamese must have
been the briefest of mental flashes); then he returns to reflect on
the appearance of the students and his own present mood, and finally
back to abstract philosophizing.
Indeed, it is not at all uncommon for writers to spend pages and
pages depicting what occurred "in a flash" to a character. A classic
instance is Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," in
which a man being hung for espionage fantasizes an entire escape from
his executioners — breaking his bonds, swimming down the river in
a hail of bullets, crawling ashore, running for miles until he reaches
his home; and when he is just about to clasp his wife "a blinding
white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a
cannon — then all is darkness and silence. Peyton Farquhar was dead ;
his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath
the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge." A fantasy of several hundreds
of words depicts a split-second of consciousness.
The timing of conceptual thought is an obscure matter to us, of
course, and one can equally think of occasions when literal words
seem to pass through the mind at the same relative rate that they
could be spoken or read, or perhaps even more slowly. But certainly
the "flash" effect is so common an experience as to provide a perfectly
adequate impressionistic basis for "stretched" narrative effects.

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 Chatman

5. Pause occurs when story-time stops, though the discourse

continues, as in descriptive passages. Since narrative is essentially a
temporal art, we must recognize that at such moments the narrative
too stops. The most primitive narratives as well as the most sophis
ticated do not hesitate to ask the audience to accept the convention
that time stops momentarily so that a scene may be set.
Many writers have disliked pauses which result from the barefaced
attribution of descriptions to narrators, preferring to "dramatize" them
by integrating them into the plot-action. Zola, as a recent article points
out, had regular formulae for making this sort of transformation.
Desiring, as a naturalist, to detail as much as possible of the surface
of the world in which the story transpires, but refusing to put the
words in a narrator's mouth, he was forced to rely heavily on scenes
in which the characters do it for him: typically, an inquisitive or
knowledgeable person (a painter, an esthete, a stroller, a spy, a tech
nician, or an explorer) finds himself with time on his hands (because
he is taking a walk, or waiting for an appointment, or resting in the
middle of his work), takes the opportunity, for certain psychological
reasons (distraction, oedantrv. curiositv. esthetic Dleasure. or volubil
ity) to inform (instruct, point out, or demonstrate) some complex
object (a locomotive, a garden) to someone who does not know about
it (for reasons of youth, ignorance, or lack of expertise). In other words,
for all intents and purposes the narrative in such intervals is purposely
created for the function of describing something, without giving the
appearance of doing so in a direct fashion.9
It is my impression that description per se is in a certain sense
impossible in the movies, that story-time keeps going as long as images
are projected on the screen, or at least as long as we feel that the
camera (and hence the projector) continues to run. For example, where
a new scene is laid, which might indeed entail a purely descriptive

9. Philippe Hamon, "Qu'est-ce qu'une description?," Poétique, 12 (1972), 465

487. Hamon's formulation is actually a bit more complex than I've repre
sented, for the character may simply see the object in question (in which
case the details are spelled out as a function of the narrative or of his
scanning it: "First he looked at the wheels, then at the drive-crank,
then at the boiler," etc.). Or he may act in some way upon the object,
in which case "La description prendra ici la forme d'une série d'actions
plus ou moins ordonnancée en redondance avec la qualification du person
nage qui l'assume ..." (p. 470) : for example, "X et ses ouvriers s'activaient
à mettre en marche la locomotive ; les roues et les bielles de celle-ci...,"
etc.

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 L'Esprit Créateur

passage in a verbal narrative, we do not have the same sense of the

suspension of story-time in the movie version. In the novel Madame
Bovary, Charles' first experience in the Roualts' farmhouse is inter
mixed with pure descriptive passages. But in watching the (Minelli)
film version, my feeling was that there was no sense that time had
stopped; what we see is Charles (Van Heflin) seeing the things in the
room — in other words, the focus is on the character's act of seeing,
i.e., an event, rather than the things seen, i.e., the existents. And in
that sense, in the sense that time is passing for Charles, story-time is
also passing for us.
The effect of pure description does seem possible in film, however,
where the film seems actually to stop, that is, in the so-called "freeze
frame" effect (the projector of course continues to turn, but only
in a technical sense, since nothing on the screen moves : all the frames
show exactly the same image). An instance occurs in Mankiewicz's
All About Eve: as Eve's (Anne Baxter's) hand reaches out to receive
a coveted theatrical award, the image freezes; story time stops but
several minutes of discourse-time pass as the cynical drama critic
(George Sanders), assuming the function of narrator off-screen, hints
at the dark side of Eve's rise to fame, introduces the other principals
seated around the banquet table, and so on.

C. Frequency. The third relationship that can be posited between

discourse-time and story-time is frequency.10 Genette distinguishes
between the following possibilities:
1. A single discoursive representation of a single story moment,
as in "Yesterday, I went to bed early." This type can be called
"singulary."
2. Multiple representations, each of one of several story moments,,
as in "Monday, I went to bed early; Tuesday, I went to bed early;
Thursday, I went to bed early," etc. This type can be called "multiple
singulary."
3. Several discoursive representations of the same story moment,,
as in "Yesterday I went to bed early; yesterday I went to bed early;
yesterday I went to bed early," etc. This is "repetitive."

10. Gérard Genette's "Essai d'analyse narrative: Proust et le récit itératif,"

in Problèmes de l'analyse textuelle (Montreal, 1971), pp. 177-187, formed'
the substance of the section on fréquence in Discours du récit, pp. 145-182.

366 Winter 1974

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 Chatman

4. A single discoursive representation of several story moments,

as in "Every day of the week I went to bed early" ; this is "iterative." 11
This formulation is self-explanatory, except for the fact that these
examples are of a punctual verb only. It should be noted that the
durative would operate equally well in these examples:
1. "Yesterday I waited."
2. "Monday, I waited, Tuesday, I waited," etc.
3. "Yesterday I waited. Yesterday I waited," etc.
4. "Everyday I waited a while."
The difference is simply that here the time-unit is a span, not a
point in time ; but the relation with discourse remains the same.
Little need be added to Genette's discussion of the first three
categories. The singulary form is of course basic and perhaps oblig
atory, at least in traditional narratives. Genette's second and third
categories are rather cas limites, occurring relatively rarely, for special
effects. But living as we do in extreme times, the limits are more and
more approached. Recall, for example, the exhausting repetition of
events disseminated through Robbe-Grillet's Jalousie: the squashing
of the centipede, A .. .'s serving drinks or brushing her hair, the native
crouching over the liquid surface of the river, etc. These are made
intentionally perplexing because it is not clear whether they are single
discoursive representations of single different, if highly resemblant
story moments (# 1), or multiple discoursive representations of the
same story moment (# 3): e.g., how many times does A... serve
drinks on the veranda to Franck and the narrator, and to which of
these various occasions does each of the various statements cor
respond? It is not easy to say, nor, probably, are we supposed to know.
Genette's fourth category needs further comment. Iterative forms
can make use of a certain vocabulary for their expression in English
as in other languages. They can be communicated by prepositions
like "during" (in certain contexts), by plurals of time nouns or nouns
expressing periods of time, and particularly by special iterative modals
like "would" or "kept" (plus the present participle).

11. Genete goes on to distinguish between the determination and the specifica
tion of iteratives. Determination is the "establishment of the limits, within
the flow of eternal time, between which the iterative series occurs," while
specification is the "indication of the rhythm of recurrence of the
iterative unit." The latter may be definite ("every Sunday") or indefinite
("sometimes"). His general point is that Proust replaced the classical
novelistic pattern of alternation of scene and summary with that of sin
gulary and iterative events.

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 L'Esprit Créateur

Films cannot directly show iteration (or indeed any temporal

generalization), but can only suggest or imply it. For instance, it may
exhibit essentially the same sequence several times, but with sligh
variations, which the audience must interpret as being insignifican
but entailing time lapses. Another way is to depict visually or auditoril
an object which is by nature iterative, e.g., a flashing stop-light or a
ticking clock. The iterative ticking of the latter, floating in or ou
of consciousness, in Orson Welles' The Trial functions as a persistent
connotative sign of the mystery and potential danger of the situation
Thus, Genette's formulation is very powerful and comprehensive.
It accounts, by and large, for the various temporal relations that exis
in narratives as functions of the relation between story-time and dis
course-time. Naturally, some future narrative artist may devise a form
which cannot be accounted for by any combination of the above f
tures. But until then, Genette's schema will enable us to analyze time
relations in narratives in a much more rigorous fashion than ha
hitherto been possible.

University of California
Berkeley

368 Winter 1974

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