Telling in Time (I): Chronology and Narrative Theory

My main title has two bearings on narrative, one necessary, the other optional, one directed to the medium and the other to the object of narration. On the one hand, telling in is telling in a temporal medium, where all items and structures and effects must unfold in an ordered sequence. Whether viewed from the transmitting or the receiving end, communication there proceeds along a continuum. This is evidently a sine qua non for verbal storytelling, as for all literature and discourse in language, but not for them alone. It applies no less necessarily to a variety of syncretic, multimedia forms of discoursedance, theatre, opera, cinema-whose extension in space yet combines with an irreversible progression in time. Whatever the grouping of their signs at any given moment, it cannot so much as freeze, let alone develop or regroup, except from moment to moment along the communicative process. Nor is this because they signify a narrative-which they usually do-but rather because, like narrative, their signifiers follow a line even in their least narrative moments, as when describing a place or a state of affairs. Temporality in the sense of discourse sequentiality (linearity, directionality) thus controls an assortment of media, art forms, representations. And the straining against the tyranny of time throughout the ages, in modernism, for example, only reaffirms and redefines the tyrant's power with each abortive rebellion. On the other hand, in a sense limited and optional to narrative (factual, fictional, epic, dramatic, operatic, cinematic) as the represen-