Speed, Rhythm, Movement: A Dialogue on K.

Hume's Article
"Narrative Speed"

Jan Baetens, Kathryn Hume

Narrative, Volume 14, Number 3, October 2006, pp. 349-355 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2006.0008

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/201618

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 DIALOGUE

Speed, Rhythm, Movement: A Dialogue on

K. Hume’s Article “Narrative Speed”
JAN BAETENS AND KATHRYN HUME

The following reflections on “narrative speed” are an attempt to remediate the

traditional ‘reply’ to a scholarly article, followed by a ‘reply to the reply’ by the
first author. Instead, the two authors of this jointly written response to the arti-
cle published by Kathryn Hume in 2005 have decided from the very beginning
to merge their ideas and remarks on the subject. They have tried from the very
beginning to conceive their exchange as an integrated dialogue, the results of
which they hope to be useful for the whole narrative/Narrative community. Our
thanks go also to the participants of the session on “Contemporary Narratol-
ogy” held during the last International Conference of Narrative (Ottawa,
2006), whose remarks on a draft version of this text have been extremely useful.

Despite the literature gathered by Kathryn Hume in her article on the subject,
speed has been one of the most undertheorized issues of narrative theory. Certainly
recent theorists have neglected the topic, although many readers consider it one of
the decisive parameters of any text and important to the appreciation afforded by the

Jan Baetens is professor at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven. He is mainly
working in the field of word and image studies, with a strong interest in photography and contemporary
theory. His “dada” however is the genre of novelization, on which he recently published an essay in the
journal Critical Inquiry (Autumn 2005, vol. 32.1).
Kit Hume is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. Her most recent two
books are American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960, University of Illinois Press, 2000,
and Surviving your Academic Job Hunt: Advice for Humanities PhDs, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005. She has
published recently on Robert Coover and John Edgar Wideman; has completed an article on Gerald
Vizenor, and is working on an article on “diffused satire” and a book on “Aggressive Fiction.”

NARRATIVE, Vol. 14, No. 3 (October 2006)

Copyright 2006 by The Ohio State University
350 Jan Baetens and Kathryn Hume

reading experience. A popular book may be praised as “fast paced,” and any book
may be disparaged as “too slow paced.” If the pace seems inappropriate, the book
will be deemed boring or frantic, jumbled, or even unreadable (on the historical and
cultural importance of the notion of “aptness” as a master code for aesthetic appreci-
ation, see McAllister). Similar remarks can be made on the importance of speed for
the process of writing. The impossibility of writing as fast as one can think is a com-
mon complaint in confessions and testimonies by authors on their own practice. The
most famous is perhaps that made by Blaise Pascal: “En écrivant ma pensée elle
m’échappe quelquefois ; mais cela me fait souvenir de ma faiblesse que j’oublie à
toute heure, ce qui m’instruit autant que ma pensée oubliée, car je ne tiens qu’à con-
naître mon néant” (Pascal 1115) [In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes
me; but this makes me remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as in-
structive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness.
(Trotter)]. And who doesn’t remember Tristram Shandy’s lament he will also write
too slowly to be able to tell the story of his whole life (see book 4 of Tristram
Shandy, amongst other fragments of the same work). In this article, however, we will
focus exclusively on speed and rhythm as narrative structures tackled from a reader’s
viewpoint.
As the initial survey of the existing literature in Hume’s article clearly shows,
the research is scarce and quite heterogeneous. The four subfields that she distin-
guishes (prose portrayal of physical speed, narrative retardation, the amount of story
time covered per page, and fictional reflections of cultural speed) are far from repre-
senting a unified field. Hence the need to establish first a definition of speed—“the
sense of the narrative being accelerated beyond some safe-comprehension-limit”
(106) —and then to establish the relationship between “safety” and “comprehen-
sion” (Hume 107). In the rest of the article, speed is then analyzed from three differ-
ent perspectives. The first consists of the techniques used to generate speed
(multiplying elements, subtracting expected material, rendering actions fantastic).
The second approach involves authorial aims, which may be very different, but over-
all the politics of speed seem radical, rebellious, and critical of rationality. The third
topic is the effects of speed at the level of reading. Those effects are difficult to mea-
sure, since they are partly ephemeral (the shock effect does not survive when one
rereads) and partly linked to sociological and cultural variations in the audience (age
seeming to be a rather important factor).
Starting from this framework, we would like to develop here three main lines of
thought that do not totally coincide with the initial triad of techniques, aims and ef-
fects. Given the current interest in cognitive narratology, we find it useful to fore-
ground the “effects” rather than the “aims.” (It would be absurd to deny that authorial
aims exist, but they are beset with the dangers of intentional fallacy.) Furthermore,
the cultural and historical constructions of speed deserve more attention (and at this
level it becomes possible to discuss authorial aims on a new basis). The three clusters
of remarks we would like therefore to put forward are first, a more complete frame-
work for the narratological analysis of speed techniques; second, a reflection on the
difficulties of measuring speed effects; third, an alternative to the immediate rela-
tionship between speed and innovative or radical writing. Our approach to speed as a
 Narrative Speed, Rhythm, Movement 351

basic narrative phenomenon will therefore be discussed from three different

angles: first, classic narratology; second a more cognitive approach; third, cultural
and literary history.
How can one describe what speed actually “is” in a literary text? How is speed
“encoded” or inscribed with verbal and textual means? (For methodological clarity,
we will leave out here all considerations on nonliterary narrative works, such as
films, drama, or video games.) We believe that the traditional narratological frame-
work remains extremely useful in this regard, for it allows one to distinguish among
three stages or aspects, which are of course not represented or activated in each text,
but whose combination enables the reader to localize all possible speed effects that
may occur in a text.

a) story level: all phenomena of speed that are mentioned, evoked or described
by a text; yet overall speed is also affected by description of objects (a
lengthy description of a country house, its formal gardens, its fine rooms and
the like, for example, is felt by readers not enamored of country houses to
slow a novel down almost unbearably).
b) discourse level: all phenomena of speed that are “copied” by verbal means
(for instance the deletion of “syntax” words in order to keep only verbs and
nouns, as in some futurist “words in freedom”);
c) narration level: all phenomena of speed that are “performed” by the narrator
(for instance the gradual unreadability of words in a handwritten manuscript
made by an narrator running out of time); at this level, medium-specific fea-
tures are very important, since the way typography makes text uniform in
traditional Western print culture has neutralized to a certain extent this level
of narration. Mainstream publishing rarely uses lay-out techniques to dis-
play this type of speed variation, but such variations remain crucial in oral
performances even of previously published texts. While reading aloud a text,
one may slow down the rhythm of a “paced” sequence or increase the
rhythm of a “slow” or “descriptive” sequence: it is not difficult to imagine
that Charles Dickens, who performed and staged his work during his lecture
tours, would exploit this level of narration. Such performative pacing has
again become a significant feature in electronic literature (for instance when
the time allowed for reading the text on screen is determined following cer-
tain constraints by the machine: one may remember one’s bewilderment
when confronted for the first time with the flickering and rapidly appearing
and disappearing text fragments of a work such as Mark Amerika’s Gram-
matron or with some ‘NetArt’ productions by Jodi, a collaboration between
Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans)

Next, one must complete the precise narratological description of speed effects
at the three levels of story, discourse and narration by analyzing what happens at
reading level. How are phenomena of speed “experienced” by the reader? In this re-
gard, one should stress first of all the distinction between narratee, implied reader,
and empirical reader. When the narrator begs patience for a description, the remark
352 Jan Baetens and Kathryn Hume

may actually implicate an implied reader who is capable of reading slowly and pa-
tiently. Examples of this strategy abound in Sterne, but one may add also the oppo-
site and analogous example of André Breton, who makes a plea for the replacement
of boring and slow descriptions by time-saving images (Breton “Manifeste” 15–18).
He will exemplify this when describing his encounters with a mysterious woman in
Nadja. Holden Caulfield speeds up Catcher in the Rye with “If you really want to
hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and
what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before
they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going
into it” (1); he knows that his readers can fill in that material. Sometimes, narratorial
comments may not in fact address the actual reactions of the public. We define speed
effects in terms of feeling lost (through an excess of disjunct information); however,
we admit that some texts fail to achieve this goal even when definitely encoded to
generate such a feeling. Some readers enjoy feeling lost, and others simply will not
feel at all disoriented when reading Burrough’s The Ticket that Exploded or Ishmael
Reed’s The Terrible Twos. Yet other readers might say, like Pauline Kael after seeing
Coppola’s The Cotton Club: “There’s so much going on you can’t take your eyes off
it, but none of it means anything” (Kael 156). Such variability in audience response
cannot be reduced to simple formula. We would like to highlight this last point (i.e.
the possible clash between the speed effects encoded in the text and a ‘resistant’ atti-
tude of the reader, who does not buy these effects) for three major reasons. The first
one is very simple: the degree to which one will stress the divergences between tex-
tually encoded techniques and readerly effects is determined by methodological bi-
ases. (The closer one is to classic narratology and hence to the study of the implied
reader, the more one will minimize these divergences, whereas the more one feels
sympathetic to a more empirically based approach of reading, the more these diver-
gences may be accentuated.) The second has to do with the fact that differences of
appreciation of speed techniques may be seen as an invitation to refocus the topic
and to shift from the study of mere speed to the broader field of rhythm or even
movement, which offers the opportunity to couple speed with slowness, excitement
with boredom, and so on. Third and most important, this type of discussion is also a
shortcut to new theoretical discussions on reading. In this context, it may become
possible to emphasize at least two aspects of reading that are not only crucial for the
understanding of speed effects, but that produce a better understanding of reading as
such.
One is the necessity of taking into account the contextual and syntagmatic sta-
tus of reading effects: how reading is experienced is never just determined by what is
being read here and now, but also by what has just been read and by what one is ex-
pecting to read immediately afterwards. Speed techniques, which can never be used
or evaluated mechanically (i.e. by analyzing a textual fragment deprived of its con-
text), are a good example of this problem. Take for instance the last chapter of
Flaubert’s Sentimental Education: if its temporal “flash” (a decade is represented in
a couple of short paragraphs) is so efficient, it is also because it has been prepared by
300 pages of “non-speed”, and because one “knows” that the end is nigh. In his lec-
ture on “quickness”, Calvino remarks that the effect of speed cannot be stretched
 Narrative Speed, Rhythm, Movement 353

over what he calls longer texts: shorts stories seem to be the natural choice for those
authors who are eager to exploit speed effects from the beginning to the end; in
longer texts (and Flaubert’s book is here a good example), speed effects have to be
used much more sparsely and cautiously. Calvino himself was interested in how effi-
ciently one could convey all that was necessary; his work with Italian folktales grew
out of his desire to study their narrative technique, and he loves a short story by Au-
gusto Monterroso that consists of a single line—“Cuando despertó, el dinosauro to-
davía estaba allí” [When he/she woke up, the dinosaur was still there] (Calvino 51,
translation altered). From a more general viewpoint, one might say therefore that
speed effects (and reading in general) ought to be theorized also in the framework of
montage theory. And what we suggest here at the level of intratextual reading is, of
course, also valid at the level of intertextual reading (what a reader has read—or
done—before and what he or she plans to read—or do—afterwards will prove rele-
vant for the way textually encoded speed or rhythm effects are experienced).
Likewise important is the recognition that reflection on speed helps to turn out
a more open and plural approach to what “reading” may be, since contrary to film for
instance (at least in its traditional form of projected images) there is no synchronic-
ity of text and reception. A good theory of reading should be able to include those el-
ements that strongly affect our reaction towards speed, such as reading pauses,
rereading of fragments, high-speed reading, ‘frog-leap’ reading, and reading back-
wards, i.e. starting the book after having read first its last page, etc. Historical con-
siderations play here a major role: as Calvino stresses repeatedly, nineteenth-century
readers were more patient than today’s readers with descriptions and slowness; con-
temporary readers instead privilege fast or, more precisely, elliptic writing, for they
prefer texts that stimulate their imagination and allow the readers to do part of the
work of the artist. A major aspect of such a theory should be the attention paid to the
notion of “rereading”. Some texts may seem fast on first reading, but less so on
rereading, since some speed effects fade with familiarity. Rereading, however, may
also produce the opposite result: readers of Georges Perec’s A Void, for instance,
maybe become gradually captivated by the formal and semantic complexities of this
book and, more in general, by the work of this writer, so that each new contact with
the work will only produce more bewilderment. Regular rereaders of this novel, pro-
vided they relish the abyssal complexity of the intertextual density of Perec’s writ-
ing, do not lose the sense of speed produced by its first pages; on the contrary, since
they see more things at each new reading, their sense of being overwhelmed and lost
by the multiplicity of the text’s internal and external connections, maintains the
strength of the textual effects at the level of speed. Moreover, with Calinescu in
mind, one may argue that every first reading is always already a rereading that de-
pends on the reader’s expectations, training, literacy, and so forth. Rereading is not
necessarily “more of the same”: a rereading can be a complete new reading, a fresh
start, or it can be completely different for quantitative or qualitative reasons (think
for instance of Borges’s famous statement that Kafka’s “precursors” did not exist
before Kafka’s work itself.) All readers have always known this, and their reading
or rereading of a text has always been influenced by the new or old knowledge of
other texts.
354 Jan Baetens and Kathryn Hume

Let us make a third and last remark concerning the widely accepted relationship
between speed and modern culture. Historically speaking, this interpretation may be
much less homogeneous than it appears today. Contemporary cinema is a major
model for today’s narrative, and from that one may derive the impression that our
culture is relentlessly ‘speeding up’ (whatever the starting point of the whole process
may have been. Some authors identify it with the invention of the first mechanical
clockworks, but this is another discussion). If one takes a broader look at the art of
the twentieth century however, one observes that the aesthetics of speed does not rule
alone. Consider Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, the acme of modernity in its time; it fore-
grounded slowness. Much avant-garde art of the 1950s and the 1960s, during the
heydays of minimalism, promoted not speed but slowness: in those years, the hottest
thing to do was to slow down, not to speed up. If, however, we make the shift to-
wards a broader perspective on rhythm and movement, one need not oppose post-
modern speed and minimalist slowness. Instead we can see that artistic and narrative
innovation and radicalism are not based on rapidity (as we tend to believe today) or
on slowness (as we used to believe some decades ago), but rather oppose the ac-
cepted mainstream narrative speed, (a kind of “average rhythm”, neither too fast nor
too slow and having an accepted balance between fast and slow fragments). We sug-
gest that various forms of counternarrative are characterized by noncanonical ways
of manipulating rhythm that end up disturbing, either by slowing down or speeding
up, the mainstream average rhythm. This average, of course, has no extrahistorical
essence: it consists of a historically moving norm. In short, instead of automatically
linking modernity and speed, which may be true for culture in general but certainly
not for art and literature, it seems to be more appropriate to link modernity with the
disruption of the “classic” balance of fast and slow, action and description, figure
and background, form and ornament, etc. This may explain why we don’t know
whether some repetitive passages in books such as Beckett’s Watt are examples of
slowness or speed: all we know is that in some passages the usual alternation of
slowness and speed is brutally destroyed. The same is probably true for authors like
Stein, whose work is also a theoretical challenge to the clear-cut distinctions of fast
and slow. Finally, as the next step in ongoing discussion of speed and rhythm, it may
become possible to rethink the relationship between action and description, which
are now completely separated. In discussions on speed, we focus on “action,” never
on “description,” whereas there can be “hasty” descriptions, or descriptions generat-
ing their own speed and rhythm effects that are as “crazy” as what is felt by readers
of Jack Cole’s Plastic Man (Spiegelman & Kidd).

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