I woke in the middle of the night and was thinking this:
Narrative time is elastic. A 400 page novel can recount events of 80 years, 2 months, or a day. It can be read in a week, a month, or two years. Reading narrative is also an exercise in absorption. Time stops when reading.
Dramatic time is real time, but expanded or contracted. A play takes 2 hours to watch. It represents events of 1 day or so, but each scene is in real time, so to speak. Dramatic time can imitate narrative time, with 10 years between acts, etc... "Jumping oer times/ Turning the accomplishments of many years / into an hourglass." Going to the theater means going there, sitting for a while, and being absorbed in the spectacle.
Lyric time is time stopped, a single moment of time. The poem is short, and does not narrate any significant length of time. The time of reading is ruminative. The poem is read once, or twice, perhaps memorized, returned to over and over again. There is a different kind of absorption.
This is obviously an oversimplification. There are several variables: how long the action of the work takes, how long it takes to read / watch to work / the kind of absorption involved.
2 comments:
"each scene is in real time"
I've been thinking about this when watching movies. Scenes often involve social interactions that are way too efficient. The characters get too much said or done in too short an amount of time. Only what is needed for the plot (though they aren't of course aware of what the plot needs). Restaurant scenes are usually way too short (and not always by clearly marking the passing of courses).
Courtroom examinations and cross examinations (when compared with real-life court TV) are another obvious case.
It can't be helped of course. But there's that sense of compression. I sometimes find myself feeling a bit uneasy when people in films and television shows don't do the little time-consuming practical things that the setting (but not the scene) requires.
There are many such examples. Sex scenes: people have sex in a movie in a restaurant bathroom in 45 seconds. Classroom scenes: the entire class lasts 3 minutes. Clearly the treatment of time is compressed and stylized, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell a story efficiently. A time consuming thing cannot be shown unless it also has some other dramatic purpose, other than practicality.
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