The Pace of Fiction: Narrative

Movement and the Novel 1st Edition

Brian Gingrich
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The Pace of Fiction
 The Pace of Fiction
Narrative Movement and the Novel

BRIAN GINGRICH
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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 Acknowledgments

Rachel Bowlby, Maria DiBattista, and Lee Mitchell helped me to imagine this book. It would
not exist without them. Lee, in particular, made me finish it.
Meanwhile, there were other generous people willing to offer commentary and answer
stray questions. Among them, I think now of Peter Brooks, Marshall Brown, Andrew Cole,
Jeff Dolven, Diana Fuss, Dan Hazard, Bruce Holsinger, Liz John, Claudia Johnson, Josh
Kotin, Caroline Levine, Andrew Miller, Deborah Nord, Hope Rogers, Garrett Stewart, Susan
Wolfson, and Michael Wood, as well as Jacqueline Norton, Aimee Wright, Neil Morris, and
the two anonymous readers at Oxford University Press. But I surely overlook many others,
and I ask their forgiveness as I also thank Dan Blank, Sarah Case, Caitlin Charos, Ellie
Green, Jared Greenberg, Jenny Huang, Roz Parry, Meagan Wilson, and the Sewanee English
Department for their heartening support.
I dedicate this, in memory, to Paul Schuyler Gingrich and Margaret Terry Gingrich. I hope
all that I do might carry something of their spirit.
I send the rest of my gratitude to Mariel, for whom my love has grown with each day (so
many days) that I’ve written these pages.
A portion of Chapter 5 of this book appeared in New Literary History, 49, no. 3, in 2018.
 Contents

List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. Narrative Discourse, Literary History
Scene and Summary Resurrected
Traditions Classical and Modern
Lens, Loci, Foci, Ellipse
Narrative Movement and Modernity
2. Rise of the Scene-and-Summary Novel
Fielding and the Prosai-Comi-Epic
Goethe on Epic and Drama
The Novel Intersected
One Day, the West, and the World
3. Realist Pace
Reality Principle, Reality Effect
Senses of Scene
Middlemarch
In Which the Story Pauses a Little, and Looks Forward
4. Collapse of the Scenic Method
And When I Draw Up the Curtain This Time, Reader
Kindly Time
The Scenic Method
Wandering Steps and Slow
5. Epiphanic and Everyday Modernisms
Interepisodic
Epiphany
Everyday
By the Ocean of Time

Bibliography
Index
 List of Illustrations

2.1. Tristram sketches his story (Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 333).

2.2. At the intersection of epic and drama.
4.1. The scenic method in extremis.
 Introduction

We talk about pace. We talk about it often today, talking about movies, stories, streaming TV,
or passing hours and days. We say that it speeds up and slows down, drags, disappoints, picks
up again. We talked about pace in, say, the eighteenth century. Maybe not “pace” explicitly,
but something like it. Fielding and Goethe, talking about movement in epic and drama, used
words like “leaping,” “still-standing,” “forward-striding,” “backward-grasping.” And,
between those two moments, between our contemporary cinematic or streaming or post-
postmodern conceptions of pacing and those eighteenth-century conceptions of pacings epic
and dramatic, people talked about the pace of fiction, the novel.
In fact, this book is not so much about how people talk or talked about pace as about how
the pacing of narratives led them to do so. It’s not about how to make pace or how pace is
best made, but about how transformations in pacing made and remade novelistic fiction.
How to make pace? I can point to the usual principles. Provide action in anticipation of a
deadline; keep the narrator “close” to the action; make the narrator’s voice dramatic; develop
several lines of action, either on a large scale (plot lines between Berlin and Brooklyn) or in
the moment (estranged siblings dining, waiters serving courses between speeches); imply
banality so that one suspects revelation; insert a digression in order to build tension; jump
between short scenes of conflict and mystery; forgo long development, use frequent
flashbacks; alternate short declarative sentences with longer ones, being liberal but not too
liberal with the commas, teasing the reader, delaying gratification, and, hopefully, landing on
precisely the right word. End chapters suspensefully but not melodramatically.
Still, the truth is, beyond the contemporary writing handbooks that offer such guidance,
few people have written much about what we call pace.1
What “we” call “pace.” Yes, there are issues. That “we” is very much Western, “pace”
perversely anglophonic; and “we” have talked about narrative “pace” explicitly for little
more than a century. The Westernness of the “we” will be addressed in due time. As for the
late-modernness and anglophony of “pace”: my aim here is to examine not a term but a
concept. More precisely: my aim is to examine, within narrative movement, a concept
belonging to a discourse significantly older and more expansive than the term itself. Terms
are historically belated, scattered inconsistently across languages, and they tend to come in
the twilight of what they describe. If the word “pace” was not in use throughout the full range
of the literary history that lies in this study, it was not for lack of a concept. Some potent
concept of pace was definitive for the moment I describe, and definitive for narratives within
it.
But terms do matter (they do, to an extent, shape their concepts), and pace is a term that I
use for a reason. There are alternatives. Critics over the past century have written
(remarkably rarely) about rhythm, tempo, duration, speed, progression …. Those terms, in
this study, will not be lost. But pace distinguishes itself. It is appropriately impressionistic,
bounding between metonym and metaphor. In the past it has meant something spatial (a step,
journey, or route; a passage between church pews), something temporal (a “space of time”),
something textual (chapter, canto, episode), and some act of stepping, passing, progressing,
ambulating, or racing.2 If today we know it as a rate of movement, a relation of spatial units
to temporal ones, that is because its mediation of space and time is so thoroughly embedded
in its own history. Still: however unique its range in English may be, pace has its cognates in
Romance languages (pas, paso, passo) and “step-” like counterparts in German and Russian
(Schritt, шаг).3 Pace in the sense of temporal movement is a concept shared (at least) across
Western cultures. And it is shared, precisely, in the realm of narrative tradition. One finds it
in writers’ and critics’ invocations of vitesse, ritmo, cadence, tempo, or темп; more, one finds
it in the movements of narratives themselves. Narrative (and history) created this term. Those
who think that they “know” pace do so because they have “felt” it in some form of narrative
movement.
So: pace, here, is not some simple rebranding of past critical efforts (rhythm, tempo,
speed … ); it continues those efforts in order to designate something more historically and
narratively well defined. For that very reason, I refuse any too-narrow definition of pace
itself. Call it large-forward-rhythmic-shifting-dynamic-temporal narrative movement. And let
me outline those elements only briefly, leaving the details to the footnotes, so as to move past
the formalities and get to the history of some pace of fiction to come.
Large. Actually, midsized is more accurate. Pace in prose fiction of the epoch I am
examining functions predominantly on an intermediate narrative scale.4 One can certainly
speak of pace on a smaller, “micro-” level of narrative, a level of sentences and poetic lines.
Pace, of course, is generated by syntax, meter, punctuation, phonemes, and stresses (and is,
of course, influenced by the semic, symbolic, and cultural-referential textures of words).5
Indeed, I will speak often of pace on the micro-level moving forward. But I will speak of it
there as something that typically accumulates, is subsumed by, and endures on a larger level
of narrative. This larger level is still not so large as to coincide with what one may call
“plot”—either in the colloquial sense of “plot summary,” a sequence of only the most
functional “nuclei,” or as turning points in a large narrative outline or design. Yes, pace is
generated by elements on this “macro-”level, but it does not endure there.6 One cannot really
detect pace on the level of a plot summary, and one hardly experiences pace as an
overarching logic or design. So, this is a “meso-” or “mid-level” pace. “Different scales
activate different structural features.”7 It is a mid-level scale, in constant exchange with the
devices and conventions of the micro and macro, that “activates” narrative pace.8
Forward-rhythmic. “Rhythm” (rythme, Rhythmus, ritmo) is the term that literary critics
have used most frequently to describe something like pace.9 I define it simply as a pattern of
recall developed in sequence. In literary narrative, phrases, themes, and units occur that recall
or repeat-with-a-difference other phrases, themes, or units that occurred previously in the
text; and that recurrence, if it happens enough times at the right intervals, suggests a pattern
across a narrative segment or whole. Rhythm, then, is a special diachronic case of what we
often imagine synchronically or statically as pattern.10 It may tend toward the regular-
metronomic, or toward the irregular-disruptive. In any event, it is not identical with pace.
Pace, say, is a special case of rhythm; always a rhythm, as rhythm is always a pattern; but a
pattern is not always a rhythm nor a rhythm always pace. What distinguishes pace from
rhythm in general is that it moves forward toward senses of endings, projected moments of
closure, climax, or nonnarratable resolution; it is uneven, affective, pulsing with will and
desire …. At this point, pace ascends to its place in a well-worn erotic opposition between
“masculine” narrative movement and more “feminine” rhythms.11 To the extent that narrative
tradition and its theorization have perpetuated that opposition, it is a fact. At the center of this
study there stands the feature of narrative that may be most easily codifiable as masculine.
But then, if one keeps one’s eyes on it long enough, if one analyzes it …. Pace cannot be
pace, its own caricature, forever. It seeks endings, professes to move forward, and then it
doesn’t; it becomes something other, some perhaps even more potent rhythm or pattern. And
then it is pace again, with a difference.
Shifting-dynamic. Pace also differs from mere rhythm (as rhythm from mere pattern) in its
degree of dynamism. Narrative theorists have spoken much of dynamism in the past century,
but ultimately the term has become somewhat diluted. Georg Lukács meant it with reference
to Hegel and Marx; Peter Brooks, with reference to Freud. Perhaps one can recover
something of the term’s potency by noting that Hegel, Marx, and Freud meant it with
reference to classical (Newtonian) physics.12 So consider a cursory analogy. Velocity is the
rate of change of position, acceleration the rate of change of velocity, “jerk” the rate of
change of acceleration …. There have been attempts to analyze a kind of “velocity” in
narrative—speed or vitesse, steady and average. And after all, pace is typically grasped best
when it becomes steady. But its becoming steady is defined by the accelerations and shifts
that precede it. Pace differs from speed in that it is more perceptibly determined by factors of
desire, affect, and “interest,” by degrees of meaningfulness and functionality (all implied by
the text)—determined, one might say, by something like “mass,” in which case pace would
then be closest to a momentum that repeatedly shifts under the impact of forces and their own
derivatives.13 I will not press the analogy further.
Temporal narrative movement. But can one in fact move beyond analogies in speaking of
the relation between narrative pace and the temporality of a physical world? Can narrative
pace itself be designated as temporal? I think so. In the first place, pace, experienced in any
world (physical, sociohistorical, remembered, textual), is always to an extent narrative pace.
To feel pace is to project forward and backward a hypothetical rate of experience, to take a
present impression and imagine it extended along a sequence of events (future, past,
imaginary) that includes certain subjects and is conditioned by external circumstances. It is,
in other words, to sense a certain (present) temporality as an object and to abstract that
temporality across a (past-present-future) chronological line.14 Whether that impression of
temporality is produced by a lived experience in the physical world or by a series of words
on a page is of some consequence, but not for the temporal status of the pace that is then felt
and projected. The different meanings of the word “pace”—a spatial, temporal, or textual
unit; an act or a rate of action—confirm this. To speak of pace, or a pace, is already to
imagine its measurement with respect to time. It matters little whether one then speaks of that
time (with the structuralists or Einstein) as a “chronological illusion” or (with the
phenomenologists) as a “resignification of the world in its temporal aspect.”15
How to analyze pace? Consider past suggestions. In the 1920s, E. M. Forster suggested
that rhythm in the novel could be seen as a recurrence of musical phrases in a narrative, or,
more abstractly, as a relation of novelistic parts to a symphonic whole.16 Viktor Shklovsky
saw artistic rhythm (ритм) as disruption, a device that would in fact “decelerate” the
habitual, automatized rhythms of prose life.17 At mid-century, Günther Müller described the
experience of narrative time as a relation between time of narration and time that is narrated;
Harald Weinrich defined Tempo as a relation between foreground- and background-
temporalities of narration; Erich Auerbach praised the Tempo of Boccaccio and of Voltaire
and marveled at the “sweeping of consciousness” in Woolf.18 By the 1960s a structural
analysis of something like pace seemed close at hand. In 1966 Roland Barthes envisioned
narrative as a series of functions (or turning points) and indices (or fillers), a series producing
“a sort of structural ‘limping’ [boitement],” “an incessant play of potential whose varying
falls give the narrative its dynamism [tonus] or energy.”19 In this way, said Barthes, “le récit
‘marche’.”20 And then, in 1972, with Narrative Discourse, Gérard Genette analyzed narrative
time through the categories of “Ordre,” “Durée,” and “Fréquence.” Genette, acknowledging
that one cannot measure the duration of a literary narrative as the time taken to read it (too
many variables), suggests that one might at least measure the duration of a story (“in
seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years”) in relation to the length of the text in lines
and in pages.21 He attempted as much by segmenting Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu
(1913–27) by its spatiotemporal breaks and measuring each segment’s proportion of pages to
time passed (“Combray: 140 pages for about ten years”; “Un amour de Swann: 150 pages for
some two years”).22 But, the limits of such quantitative analysis being obvious (not so
effective for Genesis or 2001), Genette supplemented it with another mode, more qualitative.
He introduced into the structural analysis of narrative two units that determine narrative
rhythm and that, here, will serve as starting points for the analysis of narrative pace.
So I will start from some units that were … “introduced” by Genette. Or rather,
reintroduced. Among the best qualifications of those units is that Genette, in fact, stole them
—as I steal them now. He stole them from Russia and Germany, from others in France, from
England and the United States; he stole them from writers and critics who had stolen them
from writers who, generations earlier, had begun thinking in terms of those units somewhat
tentatively. Between several distant parts of that line of thievery and my own interference,
one may hope for a coherent narrative of the pace of some version of fiction. Because, after
all, such thievery is tradition. And tradition, in this sense, may be a means of enlivening or
escaping what currently constitutes narrative theory—a field threatened, on the one side, by a
proliferation of for-their-own-sake formalisms, stylistics, and data gatherings; threatened too,
on the other side, by capitulatory gestures to shallower historicisms. Tradition, here, is not a
makeshift alibi for some culture of taste. It is a construction that one observes in its act of
formation—specifically, a construction of a narrative tradition through the formation of a
critical one. Look at Genette, look at Barthes, put pressure on them, watch as they become
incommensurate with categories like narrative theory or structuralism, and then watch as they
become incommensurate with 1972 or 1966. There is a sort of explosion under the pressure
of taking their work seriously, something that, in the case of this study, sends one looking
backward yet further, toward 1921, 1884, 1797, 1749 … ; toward what has been embedded in
the analysis of narrative, and pace, all along. To examine tradition in this way, then, is not to
seek a means of enclosure but to watch thievery in reverse or (mixing metaphors) to watch a
small sequence of exploding historical nodes.
Pace, in what follows, will appear as something determined by both narrative structures
and historical transformations. For the most part I bracket or ignore cognitive processes,
book history, material readerly activities. The “reader” or the “we” that I refer to is, as much
as I can approximate it, a reader implied by structures of pacing in the text. I restore to
Genette’s units the idea of historical transformation. Call it a historical narrativization of
narratology. (I cannot claim to be the first to attempt it.)23 I focus on a set of narrative units
formed by literary tradition, I watch how they develop over time, and I analyze how their
development creates meaning in individual texts.24 To that extent, this is not a discourse upon
narrative, or on pacing; it is an analysis of many pacings, and a history of pace, that always
awaits and welcomes the appearance of culture, ideology—what you will—in the emergence,
through analytic pressure, of narrative themes.
The method here is the means, not the argument. I “read” pace at as many distances, on as
many depths and surfaces, as my time or technology allows me. And I find that pace
manifests itself most powerfully in a kind of middle ground, on a mid-level scale, where the
shifting of narrative takes place between mid-level units. If there are preliminary concerns—
that I start from terms like “structure” and “unit,” that those terms are tainted with old
formalist-structuralism, that formalist-structuralists may have failed precisely in their
attempts to treat an object like pace (their formulas and diagrams being “at odds with the
temporal nature of the analyzed work,” reducing forward rhythms to fixed patterns, making
temporal movement static, “arrest[ing] narrative flow”)—nevertheless, I doubt that what
follows looks much like 1966 or 1972 (too much George Eliot, too little math), and, in any
case, I suspect that the striking absence of attention to narrative movement since the decline
of structuralist-formalist criticism is evidence that those approaches, far from hindering an
analysis of pace, facilitate it in very interesting ways.25 It is true that structural analysis tends
to “dechronologize” narrative; but it does so in order to comprehend chronological effects.26
And so I take my cue from that method, and push past it. One works with structures and units
in order to reach constructions and generations of temporality and, here, pace. Pacing, here,
always implies a potential pace, a process of structuring oriented toward a reading.27 If I
sometimes speak more of pacing than of pace, it is because one sometimes does better justice
to movement by turning away from a description of it and toward an analysis of what makes
it. It matters little, at that point, whether what makes it is consubstantial with it. What, after
all, is the process by which all readers move from lines of letters, words, and phrases to the
imagination of forward temporal movement?
But this is not really a book about structures and units of pacing. It is about watching how
those things are formed, setting them in motion, and seeing how their motions allow one to
see fiction, and the history embedded in it, differently. Perhaps it is worth suggesting that a
historical moment, manifested through a discourse transcribed on a page as a narrative,
dwells beneath a story that one reads. And if that story, comprehended by a reader in
whatever moment, takes on certain attributes of pace—of temporal movement, even dynamic
—imagine: what closer experience does one have to a past “temporality”? What closer, more
intense, dynamic, or complex experience but a function of signs and structures acting as
guideposts, not only to the forward movement of the plot of some story but to the plotting,
forward movement, and construction of time that could have taken place in some other
imagination conditioned by some past historical situation?
Or perhaps it is enough to move forward from what Paul Ricoeur suggested at the start of
the three volumes of Time and Narrative in the early 1980s: at stake in narrative is nothing
less than the temporal character of human experience, and narrative is meaningful to the
extent that it portrays that experience’s features.28 If one even partly believes that, then to
speak not just of narrative but of its large, forward, rhythmic, shifting, dynamic, temporal
movement is to make Ricoeur’s point more emphatically, through narrative’s most elaborate,
least understood phenomenal feature. And as for “fiction”—hardly a rigorous term, either
outdated or all too contemporary; a realm of storytelling slightly larger than the novel yet
narrower than the entire field of narrative utterances—the pace of fiction, one might say, has
a yet more unique capacity to rearrange, condense, emplot, pace, and give the impression of
motivation and significance to the contents of a story. If pace is narrative’s most elaborate
feature, fiction is narrative’s most elaborate form.

The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel. Brian Gingrich, Oxford University Press (2021). © Brian
Gingrich.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858287.003.0001

1 In 2006, narrative “speed” was called “one of the most undertheorized issues of narrative theory” (Jan Baetens and
Kathryn Hume, “Speed, Rhythm, Movement,” 349–50). Not that there hasn’t been interest over the past couple of decades:
see edited collections like Narrative Dynamics (Brian Richardson), Time: From Concept to Narrative Construct (Jan
Christoph Meister and Wilhelm Schernus), and ELH 85, no. 2 (2018), on “time” (Christina Lupton and R. John Williams).
2 OED Online, s.v. “pace (n.1),” accessed March 9, 2018, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/135779.
3 I am indebted to Ana Astafieva, Beatrice Mazzi, and Julien Zanetta for their help with Russian and Romance “paces.”
4 On the quest for the right scale of analysis, see Fernand Braudel’s preface to The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World; Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale”; and Christian Metz, “Problems of Denotation in the
Fiction Film,” in Film Language, 108–47. More recently, see Mark Algee-Hewitt, Ryan Heuser, and Franco Moretti, “On
Paragraphs”; the response to Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading in PMLA 132, no. 3 (2017): 613–89; and Ted Underwood’s
“Why Literary Time Is Measured in Minutes.” In sociology, see Hartmut Rosa, especially Social Acceleration, 24–5, and
“Social Acceleration,” in High-Speed Society, 81–7.
5 For pace on the level of the sentence, see Jenny Davidson, Reading Style, 55–67; on the level of verse, see Roi
Tartakovsky, “The Case for Pace,” and Jonathan Sachs, “Slow Time.” For the full gamut of pace and prose stylistics, see
Garrett Stewart’s career-long development of “narratography” (discussed in Novel Violence, 1–29).
6 Note that my “macro” is on a larger scale than that of Gérard Genette, below.
7 Algee-Hewitt et al., “On Paragraphs,” 21.
8 As for the specification of prose (and the exclusion of Eugen Onegin and Aurora Leigh): verse narration, even if
extended to epic proportions, is distinctly determined by small-scale, line-by-line rhythms (cyclical, recurring) that act
separately from the large-scale, forward-cumulative rhythm of pace. The narrative effects of a long poem result from the
mode and frequency with which readers, closely engaged with metrical rhythms, sense their harmony or disharmony with
the pace shifting or accumulating above them.
9 See Forster’s chapter on rhythm in Aspects of the Novel as well as E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel, and Terence
Wright, “Rhythm in the Novel.” Otherwise, influential studies of rhythm in the past century and a half range from
Nietzsche’s references to rhythm in prose, music, and history to Herbert Spencer’s treatment of rhythm in his First
Principles, to the emphases on poetic rhythm in Symbolism and Imagism (Mallarmé, Yeats, Pound), to the everyday
“rhythmanalyses” of Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos, Gaston Bachelard, and Henri Lefebvre, to the massive Critique du
rythme by Henri Meschonnic and the recent study of rhythmic forms by Caroline Levine (Forms, 49–81).
10 See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 77–8; Nietzsche on Chladnian sound-figures (“On Truth and Lying in a
Non-Moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy, 143–5) and on “das rhythmische Ticktack” (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 80–2);
Frank Kermode on tick-tock (The Sense of an Ending, 44–6); and Walter Ong on orality and signs (Orality and Literacy, 74–
6).
11 “Those of us who know no art of delaying climax or, reading, feel no incipient tumescence, may well be barred from
the pleasure of this ‘full functional act’; nor may we profit from the rhythm method by which it is attained.” Teresa de
Lauretis, of course, works through the seeming “maleness of all narrative movement” with great subtlety (Alice Doesn’t,
108).
12 See Georg Lukács, “Die weltanschaulichen Grundlagen des Avantgardeismus,” in Wider den mißverstandenen
Realismus, 13–48, and Brooks, Reading for the Plot.
13 I mean “implied” in the sense of Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 137–8, and Wolfgang Iser, The Implied
Reader. Georg Simmel describes the experience of the Tempo des Lebens as a product of changes in the quantity and range
of perceptions that assail one in Philosophie des Geldes (539).
14 To this extent pace always exceeds the limits of Bergsonian durée (see Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, esp. 1–24).
15 See Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structural,” 12, and Ricoeur, Temps et récit, vol. 1, 122.
16 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel.
17 Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose and “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.”
18 Günther Müller, Morphologische Poetik; Harald Weinrich, Tempus; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, 180–210, 379–81, 498.
19 Roland Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,” 26.
20 Ibid. Here, marche could mean goes, moves along, functions, works, runs.
21 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 87–8. Genette here builds on the theoretical proposals of Müller (see Morphologische
Poetik, 251–9, 273–5) and Barthes (see “Le discours de l’histoire,” 5–75).
22 Barthes, “Le discours de l’histoire,” 92.
23 Aside from examples like Fredric Jameson or Hayden White, see Robyn Warhol’s Gendered Interventions, 15–16.
The structural analysis of narrative itself was never really ahistorical: Genette was more than willing to allude to the
succession of literary-historical moments.
24 “You define the unit of analysis …, and then follow its metamorphoses in a variety of environments—until, ideally, all
of literary history becomes a long chain of related experiments” (Franco Moretti, Distant Reading, 53–4).
25 Catherine Gallagher, “Formalism and Time,” 231. I cite only Gallagher here out of respect for her articulation of the
problem, but her argument appears already in the early 1980s, in Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other, 55–6, or Ricoeur’s
Time and Narrative, vol. 2, 5.
26 See Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale,” 12, and Le degré zéro de l’écriture: “La structure est le dépôt
d’une durée” (12). Even A. J. Greimas, most conspicuous of narrative detemporalizers, said that his models and
schematisms should be apprehended as “operations,” “dynamic” (“Elements of a Narrative Grammar,” 23–40). As for
Roman Jakobson, “[The] two effective oppositions, synchrony-diachrony and static-dynamic, do not coincide in reality.
Synchrony contains many a dynamic element … ” (“Dialogue on Time in Language and Literature,” 12).
27 Here I echo Ricoeur’s claim that Aristotelian “plot” (mythos) and “imitation” (mimesis) always imply emplotting and
imitating (Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 32–3, 48), as well as Peter Brooks’s insistence that by “plot” he really means plotting,
“the dynamic aspect of narrative … which moves us forward as readers of the narrative text … as it unfurls before us a
precipitation of shape and meaning … construed over and through time” (Reading for the Plot, 35).
28 “L’enjeu ultime aussi bien de l’identité structurale de la fonction narrative que de l’exigence de vérité de toute œuvre
narrative, c’est le caractère temporel de l’expérience humaine”; “le récit est significatif dans la mesure où il dessine les traits
de l’expérience temporelle” (Ricoeur, Temps et récit, vol. 1, 17).
 1
Narrative Discourse, Literary History

Scene and Summary Resurrected

“‘My dear Mr. Bennet,’ said his lady to him one day, ‘have you heard that Netherfield Park is
let at last?’” Mr. Bennet replies that he has not—“‘But it is,’” returns Mrs. Bennet; and so a
conversation begins: the Bennets talk, their speeches and silences reported in short
paragraphs, stage directions strewn lightly between.1 These lines are less famous than the two
that precede them—“It is a truth universally acknowledged …. However little known … ”—
yet they mean as much for the form of the novel that follows. Talking, the Bennets take up
the idea of an opposition between known truths and unknown quantities, carry it into the
storyworld, give it a comic rhythm; and, as they talk, we feel present in their particular space-
time. The narrative mode is akin to drama. But then follow Mrs. Bennet’s train of thought
forward 300 pages, to the moment when her daughters have married the two men brought to
Netherfield Park, and witness a different mode: “Happy for all her maternal feelings was the
day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters. With what delighted
pride she afterwards visited Mrs. Bingley and talked of Mrs. Darcy may be guessed. … Mr.
Bennet missed his second daughter exceedingly; his affection for her drew him oftener from
home than anything else could do.”2 The Bennets are now distant, moving about in the realm
of routine. The narrative whisks over a great span of minor events: “The day on which …
afterwards … often … ”—in this sequence there is the effect of time passing, flowing out
from the end of the story. For this is the end, and between it and the Bennets’ opening
conversation lies the whole of Pride and Prejudice (1813), structured by versions of those
two modes. The first mode is called scene, the second called summary, and, along with
ellipses (forward jumps between chapters) and pauses (breaks to tell of truths universally
acknowledged), they are what make for the temporal movement of Austen’s novel, its pace.
Scene and summary. The terms likely sound unfamiliar or antiquated. They carry the dust
of a mid-century formalism, the jargon of narratological structuralism. They were initially
popularized, by writers and critics, as basic techniques in the crafting of fiction: a scene was a
blend of reported dialogue (apparently direct), transcribed drama (apparently immediate), and
detailed action (“shown” rather than “told”); a summary was a general chronological account
(indirect, distant, told) of compressed or “foreshortened” events. Later they were
reformulated, in Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1972), as basic forms of narrative
movement: a scene was now a segment that went slowly, almost at the rate of a story’s “real
time”; a summary was swift, faster than the events of the story; at their extremes lay ellipses
and pauses.3 Likely they do sound unfamiliar or antiquated. We speak little of craft and
structure today. But the terms still echo in relics of those traditions—in fiction handbooks,
the occasional writers’ workshop, and in the successive editions of Narratology, Mieke Bal’s
classic “Introduction to the Theory of Narrative,” where scene and summary continue to
make an appearance around page 100. For over thirty years their appearance was
accompanied by a statement that their alternation “is generally viewed as the most important
characteristic of the narrative genre.”4 That statement was removed in 2017. In 2018 Gérard
Genette passed away. Scene and summary have not fared well in recent years. But it is not
too late to recover their meaning.
And one should recover their meaning. First, because scene and summary are the best
terms we have for talking about narrative pace; and, second, because they are the kind of
terms we need for talking about narrative in general.
Yet to recover them one has to traverse those traditions of craft and structure again.
Genette’s achievement in 1972, undoubtedly brilliant, was to translate scene and summary
from discourses on craft into the discourse of structure. He adopted them as techniques in the
art of fiction, revealed them as forms of narrative movement, and proposed them as
measurements of speed or vitesse.5 In doing so he completed a shift already begun by the
critics of craft: a shift away from methods of impressionistic belletrism and proto-
phenomenological interpretation—variously focused on fluid literary modes—and toward a
structural analysis focused on fixed formal units.6 My own aim is slightly different. I adopt
Genette’s achievement … and trace it backward. It is in this way that one grasps the full, dual
significance of scene and summary—as both experiential modes (“scene”: dramatic
presentation; “summary”: detached narration) and concretized units (“a scene” or “a
summary,” structural products of either mode, measurable in so many lines or pages of text).
And it is in this way, ultimately, that one may curb certain tendencies in narrative theory
today—a (more European) lingering in calcified units left over from the narratological turn,
or a (more US-American) preoccupation with narratorial positions, degrees of reliability, and
self-questioning storytellers. What was most crucial in studies like Narrative Discourse—
what stands to be most illuminating in the discourse of narrative in general, and what is
missing in so many discourses on narrative now—is a method conscious of critical history
shifting beneath it, conscious of its critical objects shifting themselves. Meanwhile, what
remains refreshing in those craft-based formalisms (so easily dismissed as dull) is an ability
to grasp similar shifts—to grasp both writerly experimentation and its formulization, both
readerly experience and its reification. One need not espouse any one of these critical
moments to appreciate the movement between them. So I take up the discourse of structure,
weave it back into discourses on craft, and search for a method limited by neither. I resurrect
scene and summary, all dust and jargon, and reveal them for what their greatest effects prove
them to be: units of pacing, modes of pace.
Because, again, scene and summary are the best categories we have for talking about
pace. Their dual existence, as narrational modes and narrative units, reflects a duality
inherent in pace itself. We acknowledge that duality when we speak of pace as that part that
went fast or that part that dragged on, struggling to unite the abstract “part” (formed into a
unit by our memory) with the original experience (of swiftness or dragging). We shift
between experiencing those categories as modes and constructing them as units in the same
way that, with pace generally, we shift between perceiving rhythms and imagining them
measured across a chronological timeline. By speaking both of scene and summary and of
scenes and summaries, one speaks of the two poles of experience and chronology whose
mediation constitutes pace.
But scene and summary are also advantageous categories because they are dynamic.
Working in tandem, as two distinct forces, they enact the essential dynamism of pace. A
summary moves swiftly (“Mrs. Bennet … quitted the house under the delightful persuasion
… of having [her] daughter married to Mr. Collins … ) until a scene slows it down (“The
next day opened a new scene at Longbourn. Mr. Collins made his declaration … ”). A scene
plays out dramatically (“Engaged to Mr. Collins! my dear Charlotte,—impossible!”) until a
summary sweeps it forward (“Mrs. Bennet was really in a most pitiable state … ”).7 Their
alternation, their interplay, the contrast of their speeds, constitute the rhythm of narration
that, projected forward as a factor of narrative desire (for the right marriage, at the right
time), moves forward as pace.
More: scene and summary are advantageously qualitative units, able to characterize pace
in experiential terms beyond (a more quantifiable) “fast” or “slow.” They are temporally
distinct, representing two different experiences of time in a way that lends novelistic-fictional
narrative a sense of temporal heterogeneity. They are also the right size for examinations of
pace: midsized, able to capture duration and movement above the micro-level of a sentence
without abstracting it to the macro-level of a plot. They are apt mediators: on the one hand,
between micro- and macro-scales, able to register shifts in punctuation and syntax (“,—
impossible!”) while being registered themselves in the shifting of plot (one year, four
marriages); on the other, between the narrative levels represented by that other pair of
antiquated but still heuristically useful terms—discourse (sjuzhet, discours) and story
(fabula, histoire). Unlike more arbitrary conventional structures such as chapters, paragraphs,
or serial parts, scene and summary are deeply rooted in both discourse and story, sharing in
their fundamentally reciprocal (and they are reciprocal) processes. (A certain moment in a
narrative is deemed to require scenic treatment; another moment is determined by its
treatment through summary.) But, like chapters, paragraphs, and parts, they are nevertheless
conventional. And again this makes them privileged categories of analysis. They are products
of the narrative tradition they would analyze—structures of craft—shaped and concretized by
actual practitioners. Defoe divided his narratives into long “scenes” of misfortune, folly, and
debauchery and “new scenes of life”; Richardson boasted that his novels’ letters contained
both “descriptions and reflections” and conversations “in the dialogue or dramatic way” (the
ever theatrical Lovelace presents several events as scenes and acts); Prévost’s Manon Lescaut
abounds with scènes étranges, fâcheuses, affligeantes, ridicules, extraordinaires, horribles
… fort ágreables; Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloïse performs, epistolarily, a conjuring of
imagined scenes through relation and récit; and Sterne’s eccentric-loquacious narrator
exhorts himself to “drop the curtain, Shandy.”8 Werther, Evelina, and the characters of Les
liaisons dangereuses all experience life in scenes. (A century earlier, Aphra Behn began
Oroonoko, delaying its Story, by presenting its Scene). When David Foster Wallace taught
fiction-writing courses, he would start each semester with a quiz asking students to define ten
technical terms. Number four, between “Narrative Omniscience” and “Plot,” was “Summary
versus Scene.”9
Still, if the terms have become unfamiliar or antiquated, there are reasons for this. Like all
categories that may be applied to the analysis of pace generally (schematically, ahistorically),
their application is limited. In the role assigned them by traditions of craft, they tend to be too
vague and impressionistic: Wayne Booth said that they “pa[y] for broad coverage with gross
imprecision.”10 In the role assigned them by narratology, they risk being too rigid: they
exclude views of the micro and macro due to a constrained midsized focus; they lose their
qualitative-experiential character due to an over-adherence to the binary fast/slow.11 And
while each of those last two limitations can be managed by a skilled critic who is aware of
them (like Genette), at least one other limitation seems insurmountable: by themselves, scene
and summary say little about other crucial aspects of narrative. Crucial for Booth was that the
terms say little about the kind of narrator providing the scene or the summary (and thus say
“very little about literary effect”).12 Genette seems to have agreed: though he relied
predominantly on scene and summary in the second chapter of Narrative Discourse, the one
dedicated to vitesse, he was forced to move beyond them in his chapters on frequency,
perspective, and voice. And so I too, in order to grasp those other aspects’ undeniable impact
on pace, must move beyond the two terms in good time. Or, what amounts to the same thing,
I must expand them.
A minor modification, then, of my earlier claim: scene and summary are the best terms for
starting to talk about pace. As I move forward, they will slowly expand, morph from strict
categories into loose models, give way to other aspects and units, and dissolve. This will be
their greatest value: to function simply as categories and to facilitate the process of their own
dissolution. Like all truly valuable categories of analysis, their limits should be what is most
revelatory about them.
Among those limits, one proves revelatory above all: that of the terms’ historical
character. They cannot be the stable-synchronic categories that traditions of craft and
structure seem to desire. Their meanings shift throughout literary history. Literary-historical
transformations destabilize them. And while that point by itself may mean little today, so
often has it been repeated by scholars heeding the call to always historicize, the particular
circumstances of this case make it undeniable: there is no ground for an analysis of pace that
is not of a shifting historical nature.13
So, as I have said, call this something like a historical narrativization of narratology. I
hope it will be much else. The aim is to analyze pace in its structures—in pacing—and to
analyze pacing in its historical transformations. But first, another kind of historical
distinction has to be made: not simply the distinction that pacing transforms throughout
history, but that pace (as a discourse) belongs to a specific historical moment, and that its
categories develop in a specific moment of that moment as well. Again, one sees this in those
old terms, scene and summary. In the precise circumstances of their historical formation, one
may find nothing less than the meaning of temporal movement in modern fiction—and,
perhaps, in modernity.

Traditions Classical and Modern

Turn to the moment when scene and summary first appear in Narrative Discourse. Again, it
is the second chapter, titled “Durée” but essentially dedicated to measuring vitesse.14 In the
first chapter, on “Ordre,” Genette dealt with narrative “asynchronies,” backward and forward
jumps that he calls analepses and prolepses.15 (I will refer to them moving forward.) Here he
has just proposed his quantitative method of measuring narrative speed—his method of
segmenting a narrative spatiotemporally and calculating each segment’s proportion of pages
to time passed (“Combray: 140 pages for about ten years … ”). But then, likely sensing
weaknesses inherent in such a method, he stops short and looks for a qualitative complement.
He falls upon scene, summary, pause, and ellipsis, and he introduces them as terms rooted in
a stable, classical tradition:
It turns out that narrative tradition, and in particular the novel’s tradition, has … selected four basic relationships that
have become—in the course of an evolution that the (as yet unborn) history [histoire] of literature will some day start
to study—the canonical forms of novel tempo, a little bit the way the classical tradition in music singled out, from the
infinitude of possible speeds of execution, some canonical movements (andante, allegro, presto, etc.) whose
relationships of succession and alternation governed structures like those of the sonata, the symphony, or the concerto
for some two centuries ….16

Canonical forms and movements, structures of centuries: it’s not difficult to find traces of the
tradition Genette is alluding to. Look at Fielding’s “Essays” at the beginnings of the books of
Tom Jones, where he or his narrator, playing rule-maker for a new province of “prosai-comi-
epic Writing,” vows to hasten toward any “extraordinary Scenes” (Book II) while outlining
the roles of ellipsis-like “Spaces of Time” (Book III) and pause-like “Interruptions” (Book
IV) as well.17 Or look, as Genette repeatedly does, to Balzac: his reflective pauses on morals
and finance, his scenic manipulations of melodrama, his vigorous leaps over space and time
suggest the ease of a writer who knows precisely the tools supplied to him by tradition.
Indeed, Genette’s categories prove well configured for most works of fiction from the later
eighteenth through the mid nineteenth century. And choruses of chatty narrators from the
period affirm it: in their self-conscious comments on story “gaps,” “hasty strides,” theatrical
units, and panoramic sweeps, they seem loudly to claim ownership of a scene-and-summary
tradition. The sheer possibility of a parody like Tristram Shandy (1759–67), of a narrator who
boasts, “I do all things out of rule,” stands as evidence for the existence of a rule or standard
to be defied at the time.18 Thus we are led to imagine, with Genette, that there must have
been some entity stable enough to shelter the categories of vitesse early on. And thus enters
the figure—monolithic, elusive—of the classical novel.
The classical novel, the traditional novel, the classical Bildungsroman, not quite modern
fiction …. It is an ideal construct (particular examples always imperfect), with characteristics
well known—economy, balance, teleology leading toward synthesis. On the “macro-”level,
of plot, its movement is one of distention and configuration. Its scenes start small, as
everyday moments in amorphous episodes (the Bennets talk, Wilhelm and Mariane have
champagne and oysters); then comes a turning point (a ball, a journey), a socially articulated
desire (for marriage, a place in the world); the episodic circumstances become plotted; and
the narrative gravitates, against lively resistance (foils and gossip, false expectations and
folly), to its end. On the middle level, of pace, its movement is more varied and dynamic.
More classical-musical. Not just in its canonical tempi (andante, allegro), but in its rhythm
and tonality as well. Rhythm, yes, because of repetitions in plot—as in Volume 3, Chapter 11,
of Pride and Prejudice, when we find ourselves again in a scene with Mr. and Mrs. Bennet,
again discussing Bingley’s arrival at Netherfield Park (“the subject which had been so
warmly canvassed between [the] parents, about a twelvemonth ago, was now brought
forward again … ”).19 But rhythm also in the opening/closing of actions associated with
Bingley’s return: in the anticipations and deadlines (“coming down in a day or two … the
expectation of his arrival … the day of the arrival drew near … ”/“Mr. Bingley arrived”), in
the social conventions (“the gentlemen … were invited and engaged to dine at
Longbourn”/“On Tuesday … the two … were in very good time”), and in the swift force of
causality (“Mr. Bingley called again, and alone”/“The Bennets were speedily pronounced the
luckiest family in the world”).20 Such mid-level rhythms are the work of Barthes’s proairetic
and hermeneutic codes, codes of familiar gestures and suspended disclosures that, like
melody and harmony, and through expectation and delay, weave the text forward in a
contrapuntal tonal unity.21 One need only add to Barthes that each line of code is woven in a
particular scene- or summary-mode, and that such weaving creates more or less distinct
scene- or summary-units. With the sequence of Jane and Bingley’s engagement, the weaving
is a light flurry of summaries and short comic scenes; with the sequence of Elizabeth and
Darcy, the scenes grow longer, fuller, thicker. The trick, in the classical novel, is to make sure
the mode or unit matches the occasion.
But, as the story usually goes, and not without truth, the classical novel soon meets its
downfall. Gradually in the course of the nineteenth century, decisively in the early twentieth,
its conventions are mocked and its categories rejected. A new standard of pacing, and music,
is called for—a purportedly purer one, in which rhythms do not close but are left open-ended,
in which counterpoint is not of the plot but of the sentence. The tonal unity of proairetic and
hermeneutic movements is disrupted; successions of actions and revelations are disordered;
“l’écriture classique a donc éclaté.”22
Critics tend to claim that Flaubert struck the first blow, and one can see why. The guile
with which he blurs the line between scene and summary, with which he teases and
disappoints expectations of canonical movements, is evident. Witness the reckless pace of
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), of Frédéric Moreau’s mercurial-unmotivated life, which
feels like a corrupt summary in search of a meaningful scene that never materializes. One
version of the history of pace in the novel turns on the two-word phrase that opens that
novel’s second-to-last chapter—“Il voyagea”—and then, within the same half page, “ … Il
revint. … Des années passèrent ….”23 Sixteen years pass in this moment. Flaubert gives up
his story to a gust of historical time; the words he offers are hardly enough to make the
ellipsis into a summary, and what he leaves the reader with in the end is not a conclusive
“day on which” followed by an “afterwards” and an “often,” but two paltry scenes in which
Frédéric can only reflect that his pace of development must have skipped over his life’s
meaning.24
After Flaubert—eventually—the deluge: Joyce, Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Kafka, Woolf,
Musil, Toomer, Faulkner …. Narrative movement in these writers depends less on the
presence of canonical movements or tempi than on the reader’s experience of their negation.
Thus, when Genette, shifting from his theoretical to his critical mode in Narrative Discourse,
applies the categories of vitesse to his case-text, the Recherche, he finds that the greatest light
to be shed by the categories is through their own transformation by Proust. Proust may have
sought in his novel to recover something of the temporal meaning squandered in a life such
as Frédéric’s, but he did not do so by returning to classical movements. He was too enamored
with Flaubert’s “change[s] of tempo,” with “the masterly manner in which he managed to
produce the effect of time passing,” to go back.25 In vain does one search the Recherche for
Genette’s categories. The practical summary-compression of days, weeks, or years that one
finds in Don Quijote, Tom Jones, or César Birotteau? “Nothing of the kind in Proust.”26 A
phrase like “said his lady to him one day,” followed by several pages of direct dialogue? One
is more likely to find a paradoxical “used to say to him one day” and a set of speeches tagged
as iterative, habitually recurring, despite their content marking them as singulative.27 Pauses?
All “absorbed” into the act of Marcel’s narration. Ellipses? Hard to pinpoint with any
accuracy. No more steady rhythm of weeks passeds and one day she saids; “the traditional
alternation summary/scene is at an end.” Genette is left to conclude that “Proustian narrative
does not leave any of the traditional narrative movements intact.”28 And to account for the
shift he, like many critics before him, draws a line: the classical novel, its tradition, on one
side; the modern novel, aberration, on the other.
It is to this limited extent that Genette acknowledges the historical character of his
categories. They belong to classical narrative, and are unraveled by the modern.29 To be fair,
one shouldn’t expect him to say much more on the point. Narrative Discourse is “An Essay
in Method”; Genette hopes that the histoire of literature will “some day” be born—just not
necessarily in his pages.
But if I for my part am to offer something to such a history, I have to begin by noting
something curious about Genette’s “narrative tradition.” It’s not simply that the binary
classical/modern is lacking—newer historicisms have made that all too clear, and I will
address it in my own effort of periodization eventually. No, it’s that the very notion of a
classical tradition of vitesse, or pace, is mythical. Genette’s categories are, as he says, “a little
bit” like the classical tradition in music; but only a little. Andante, allegro, presto: those
terms have circulated in Western musical tradition since the seventeenth century. Composers
knew their names, knew their relevance for conventional situations, wrote them on pieces of
paper where they wanted to indicate the tempo for a particular sonata or movement. In
contrast, when Genette picked up the terms scene and summary, adjoining to them ellipsis
and pause, they hadn’t been explicitly acknowledged in narrative tradition for much more
than a half-century. Sure, Defoe, Prévost, Richardson, Rousseau, and Fielding, like Wallace,
referred to “scenes.” But what different scenes!—and what a difference that the first five of
those writers, when they referred to scenes, said nothing of “summaries.” This is the crucial
fact for literary history: when Genette picked the terms up, scene and summary had only been
formulated, very tentatively, in the course of the prior few decades, and in a fairly limited
Anglo-American tradition of criticism. They did not exist as critical concepts in the age of
the classical novel (just as, of course, the concept of the classical novel did not then exist).
They were invented belatedly, retrospectively, at the same time as the later modern novel and
in fact alongside it. These were the very years in which Proust was publishing his Recherche.
And so, yes, one can note a hinge-point in the history of scene and summary, somewhere
around what has been alluded to as the dividing line between classical and modern. But the
hinge itself was built by the moderns, to describe narrative tendencies that were at that
moment threatened and diminishing and that, in the act of being described, were made more
distant than ever. What Genette himself did not acknowledge was that the classical tradition
of scene and summary is essentially a modern one. A minor point, when one first considers it.
And yet, as we will see, of immense importance for the pace of fiction.
Then what really is the “tradition” of scene and summary? One can trace it backward
from where Genette stood in 1972. Before him the most conspicuous commentator on the
terms was Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, and we’ve already gathered what he thought: he
basically equated them with “showing” and “telling” (part descendants of mimesis and
diegesis) and sought to discourage their critical usage. Before Booth, the tradition subsisted
in the writings of novelists eager to draw principles out of their craft. The pairing scene and
summary appears in fact only to have been established in 1947, when the English novelist-
critic Phyllis Bentley, in Some Observations on the Art of Narrative, chose “summary” as a
designation for the previously many-named counterpart of scene and organized her view of
narrative around the two terms.30 Before Bentley were the so-called “Jamesian” critics,
writers like Edith Wharton (whose approximate versions of scene and summary were
“narrative” and “dialogue”), Joseph Warren Beach (“showing” and “telling”), and Percy
Lubbock (“panorama” and “scene,” or “picture” and “drama”).31 Before the Jamesians was,
of course, Henry James himself, whose remarks on something like scene and summary were
scattered and few, ranging from his distinction between the “scenic” and “non-scenic” to his
appraisals of “foreshortening” and “colloquial illustration.”32 Before James there is,
apparently, a precipice: one senses a familiarity with scene and summary among writers
everywhere, one recognizes ancestors of the categories in authorial commentaries and
personal correspondence, but any systematic use of the terms seems to drop off. Scene and
summary must always be projected backward, so to speak, onto classical fiction through the
lens of James’s vague critical remarks.
Such is the frail terminological history of our two categories. It winds its way through
titles like The Craft of Fiction, The Writing of Fiction, and (repeatedly, from James to John
Gardner and David Lodge) The Art of Fiction—only to settle, somewhat comically, with all
the dust of formalism and structuralism, in handbooks for young writers of fiction. (From
2019, a chapter on “Movement and Flow”: “Henry James knew how important scenes are. …
Scene summary; walk, run. … Here’s a basic menu drawn from Genette … ”).33 In the end,
however, the legacy rests largely on these words from Lubbock: “I do not know that they are
the best names, but … they have been used technically in the criticism of fiction, with
specific meaning. … Picture and drama, therefore, I use because Henry James used them in
discussing his own novels, when he reviewed them all in his later years.”34 Novelists made
the tradition—writers reflecting on their works, comparing them to past efforts they deemed
successful, proposing terms tentatively, describing effects, and, occasionally, prescribing
methods in the spirit of craft. Each author repeats the same modest performance. They lament
the mistaken terminology of their predecessors, cite literary narrative’s seeming resistance to
the terminology of technique—so much more easily applied to the material arts (according to
Lubbock) or film (Bentley) or music (Genette)—and criticize the new terminological
solutions that they themselves then put forth. Bentley was “not at all satisfied” with her
terms: scene and summary were “not proper antitheses,” and in any case “all narrative is in
fact a summary to some degree.”35 (Booth and Genette would echo that last point
emphatically.) Lubbock has been one of the easiest targets for novel criticism since the 1960s
—so easy, in fact, that he has been dismissed almost altogether—but one thing he should not
be targeted for is an overly schematic reliance on terms like scene and summary.36 His
“picture” and “drama” are often inscrutable, and it is their inscrutability that keeps them
interesting. James, meanwhile, seems to have attempted every rhetorical obfuscation
imaginable to prevent his remarks from being made into set binaries or simple precepts.37
And yet, scene and summary are, to this day, the best terms we have for talking critically
about pace. (Or starting to.) I can now add two final reasons why this is so: first, because the
“classical” novel manifests scene-and-summary pacing so aptly; and second, because the
“modern” novel opposes it so forcefully. Or better, the modernist novel.38 Within the Anglo-
American context, at least, the term modernism allows one to see a bit of comedy in scene-
and-summary tradition’s establishment. Each phase of that establishment (identification,
codification, reification … ) is echoed by the development of a modernism that would reject
the tradition. James finally publishes the last of his prefaces in the New York Edition of his
works in 1909, a masterful union of craft and criticism and a monument for the great
tradition, and then, “on or about” December of the next year (according to Woolf), “human
character change[s]”; the great tradition will no longer do.39 Lubbock nevertheless keeps up
the Jamesian project, pushing it further into the realm of scholarly criticism with The Craft of
Fiction in 1921, and then … Ulysses, The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room—1922, the year (for a
discontented Willa Cather) in which “the world br[eaks] in two”; the standards of craft have
changed.40
By no means do the various modernisms simply sweep aside the classical model of scene-
and-summary tradition. Scene-and-summary tradition lives on in a late modern phase: it
continues in Wharton, Forster, and Mann, in much socialist realism, in the popular subgenres
of twentieth-century fiction, and in much contemporary global fiction today. More
significantly, it continues by virtue of the very impulses that oppose it. For modernist
narration doesn’t just depart from scene-and-summary structure; it poses as antithetical to it;
and for precisely this reason, scene and summary remain essential to modernist pace.
Critics adhering to scene-and-summary tradition underestimated this opposition just as
much as the heralds of modernism exaggerated it. Most scene-and-summary critics accounted
for modernist narration by claiming that twentieth-century writers simply came to prefer
scene over summary. Such is how Bentley explained Joyce and Woolf, and the account still
lingers in our notion that twentieth-century craft simply advanced from telling to showing.
Meanwhile, critics descendent from the modernist line, like Barthes and Genette, pointing to
a break between the classical and the modern, envisioned a new type of narrative—one not
bound to logico-temporal linearity or hermeneutic-proairetic codes but, rather, writerly,
permutable, symbolic, “outside the constraint of time.”41
One need not choose here between craft-based formalists and modernist-based
structuralists, between continuity and rupture. What one really sees in the pace or anti-pace
of the modernisms is a state in which scene could no longer serve its classical function
anymore. And this state was the result of a literary-historical process that inhered in classical
tradition itself. What Genette glimpsed in his analysis of the Recherche, but did not account
for, was that in the course of the nineteenth century a classical impulse toward scenic
narration had caused classical pacing to break down. The structuring of narratives through
scenes, the marginalization of the role of summary, ultimately deprived scene of the
oppositional force that sustained it; scenic methods brought about the collapse of the relation
between scene and summary. Modernist narration was a testament to this collapse. Scenes
and summaries had been exhausted, or at least laid bare, and writers who perceived this were
left searching for new units of pacing that were opposed to both of those older units at once.
In this way, modernisms made pace on the basis of a new and convoluted type of opposition:
on the one side, scene-and-summary narration, representing a classical form of composition
already superseded; on the other, countless notions of temporality represented by structural
units varyingly epiphanic, everyday, episodic, existential, durational, and consciousness-
bound. Such, at least, is what I will show in the later part of this “history.” But first, a word
about its literary-historical scope.

Lens, Loci, Foci, Ellipse

“Scene and summary must always be projected backward, so to speak, onto classical fiction
through the lens of James’s vague critical remarks.” I said that above, and hid behind the coy
so to speak. Is this to say that the basic terms of this study, which I have had the impudence
to allude to as a history, are merely the vague projections of one man? And not just any man,
but one from whose dominance over the identity of “modern fiction” critics had just begun to
free themselves with a sigh of relief?42 James, the Anglo-, Franco-, Italophile, the pretentious
monologizing painter of aristocratic afterlives and the haute bourgeoisie, false founder of
novel theory, mascot of mid-century formalism, master of dust motes and empty phrases, a
“minor nineteenth-century man of letters” who was only elevated to “the greatest American
novelist” by a few suspect twentieth-century Jamesian cultists—does it all collapse once
more into this?43 And is this “history” then to be the worst of teleologies, subordinating the
past to the lens of a turn-of-the-century present, establishing James, with cloying playfulness,
as the “center of consciousness” for what has passed and for what will then follow him?
No, not quite. But yes, somewhat. My scope and perspective are limited. I cannot make
any traditional claim to an objective history. Though I may use the phrase at times, I cannot
ground my account on any systematic notion of literary “evolution.” And, for better or worse,
my methods have no recourse to big data. Someday I may return to these pages and
punctuate them with graphs and appendices. Ted Underwood has already begun to explore
the pace of fiction in the historical range of this study through distant reading. (He has
essentially returned, with a more sophisticated approach, to Genette’s original quantitative
method.) And he has, despite his aversion to scene-and-summary units, encountered
something similar to what scenes and summaries will reveal here: a certain traction or
friction that confronts summary narration upon the entrance of scene around the “rise of the
novel”; a distinct “slowing” of the pace of fiction by the forces of (dramatic) dialogue and
(pictorial) description; a moment of uncertainty in the early twentieth century as the units of
scene and summary seem to finally break down.44 For my own part, I rely on a method of
literary-historical narration that oscillates between myth and genealogy. On the one hand, I
adopt several narratives from the past that have been used to shape literary history,
combining them to gain momentum for my own account of an evolution of pacing; on the
other, I test the limits of those narratives, commenting on their mythic characters while
allowing their discontinuity to show through. I allow my own hybrid narrative to turn back
on itself, break down, be qualified and revised by subsequent accounts. I search for
occasions, between narrative threads, to reflect on the genealogical formation of the historical
movements being narrated. I take up an old center of consciousness from a new perspective
and expect that old stories then become new.
And no, not just James, or James and Flaubert. To be sure, that pair will appear often as I
move forward, in familiar literary-historical roles: James on the Anglo-American side of
things (totem of critics of craft), Flaubert on the French-Continental (touchstone of
structuralists), both representing a late nineteenth-century prise de conscience, a stage of
reflection for the art of fiction from which all prior Austens and Balzacs are made to look
naive and all later novelists unaware of their form’s obsolescence.45 (“The novel ended with
Flaubert and with James.”)46 In such roles, James and Flaubert may serve as literary-
historical centers of consciousness, theorists of craft, lenses capable of registering many of
the transformations taking place at the hinge-point of classical and modern(ist) pacing. If I
attend more to James here, it is for a number of reasons: partly because Flaubert’s opposition
to classical pace has already been treated implicitly by talented critics;47 partly because that
opposition seems to emerge fully developed early in his career, in the pages of Madame
Bovary (1856); and partly because, though one may find something like a discourse of pacing
in, say, Flaubert’s letters to Louise Colet (“The whole thing has to be swift without being dry.
… I now have fifty pages in a row without a single event … ”), it is largely a negative
discourse, an anxious reveling in the audacity of his transgressions.48 In James, meanwhile,
the discourse of pace is more often a positing than a negating. He struggles both against and
within classical tradition, through a career that spans nearly a half-century, and that struggle
is well documented: first of all in the essays, notebooks, and prefaces that make up the loose
foundation of scene-and-summary discourse proper; more importantly in the long diachronic
development of his narrative structure and craft. And that development—of James’s fiction—
exhibits a remarkably compressed version of the fate of novel pacing over the course of the
nineteenth century.
But, in the first place, James and Flaubert will not only serve here as lenses reflecting on
craft but will also represent what one may call narrative loci—specific devices that,
considered in their historical moment, provide concrete mediations between a realm of social
relations on one level of the text and a realm of cultural production on another. The devices
of the two writers, seen within this (Marxist) framework, are well known and well criticized:
Jamesian point of view on the one side, Flaubertian style indirect libre on the other, both
starting out as defenses against reification, both ending up part of reifying processes of
subjectivization and depersonalization. For Fredric Jameson, they are loci for high-capitalist
reification in general and “the fully constituted or centered bourgeois subject or monadic
ego” in particular.49 Yet Jameson himself has been known to disassociate Flaubert partly
from this fate by associating him with another device: not free indirect style, but a certain
mode of transition—“modulations, chromatic bridge-passages, cinematographic fadeouts or
montages, which allow us to slip from one point of view to another.”50 Indeed, in just three
pages of Madame Bovary (Vol. 2, ch. 6), the narration slips from Emma and the local priest,
to Emma and her child, to Emma and Charles, to Charles and Homais, Charles and Léon,
Léon and Homais, Léon and Binet … —and though Jameson is right to find in such slippages
a displacement of the “central observational and psychic perspective” of Jamesian point of
view and even a new kind of affective perceptual apparatus (Flaubert called it “painting in
monotone without contrasts”), one also finds in it a new kind of pacing.51 From Emma and
the priest to Charles and Homais to Léon and Binet: the transitions are so incessant, so
constantly present, and the events of the story so shifting, that the narration defies the
configurational order of classical pacing and refuses to settle in any distinct scenic or
summary mode. One could call it episodic if it ever landed in a definite episode. Still, this
need not leave James in the role of representing merely a constrained point of view and “an
increasingly subjectivized and psychologized world.”52 That role, in any case, is easier to
trace in the discourses of Jamesianism than in anything written by James. An alternative
device is available to the study of Jamesian as of Flaubertian narrative—is made available,
once again, by an examination of narrative pace. The device I refer to is a particular approach
to scene-and-summary tradition, a device that subordinates summaries or summary
storytelling to scenic vitesse, which James himself half-consciously referred to as the scenic
method. And so, guided by a focus on pace, I move forward with an alternative pair of
devices: on one side James’s scenic method, on the other Flaubert’s interepisodic narration,
both still objective tendencies of what may be called reification, both nevertheless with a
shifting movement capable of destabilizing reifying advancements.
In the second place, these will not be my only lenses or loci. Their presence in this study,
like that of scenes and summaries, will dissolve, morph, and be revised as I move forward
looking backward. Their weight will be qualified as I examine their predecessors, who, of
course, contrary to what the myth of the prise de conscience would imply, cannot be seen as
merely naive. Austen, early master of free indirectness, had her own devices of chromatic
transition: Emma goes to Ford’s store with Harriet, waits at the door, watches the everyday
traffic of Highbury, feels her mind “lively and at ease,” and looks down the road—“the scene
enlarged; two persons appeared; Mrs. Weston and her son-in-law … ”—the narration shifts,
the events form a transition.53 As for Balzac, he reflected quite openly on scenic methods in
his time: for him the emergence of “modern” literature from the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries meant nothing but “the introduction of the dramatic element, of the image, the
picture, of description, of dialogue.”54 What we need, then, rather than a schema according to
which novelistic fiction remains naive until it becomes reflective (with the likes of Flaubert
and James), or according to which scene-and-summary tradition is only a dubious backward
projection (by craft-based formalists and narratological structuralists), is both an
acknowledgment that scene-and-summary discourse emerged late and an allowance that
scene-and-summary concepts were there early on. To that extent, one needs to think of all the
writers who come into view here not just as loci or lenses but as geometrical foci, points
positioned in such a relation to each other that they give shape to a curve or geometrical
ellipse surrounding them—an ellipse circumscribing a temporary-situational historical field
within which one can tell a story, for a while, until the foci weaken, fail, the historical ellipse
fades, and we move further forward, to try again.
Such, in fact, is how I proceed: by gathering pairs and groupings of lenses and letting
them act as foci projecting a temporary vision of pacing within a situational ellipse. The
ellipse will eventually fade, and we will move on working our way forward and backward
(but, like history, mostly forward), setting up new historical ellipses in other moments but not
forgetting the relevance of visions already constructed. I mean this last point to strike a note
of optimism. Though the ellipses fade, the visions of pace constructed by them do not. Those
visions are so many theories of pace—it matters little whether they emerge from authorial
commentaries or narrative structures—whose succession within this part-mythical narrative
serves to represent a tradition with sufficient historical validity. So yes, James (and Flaubert,
and others) as a major lens, reflector, center of consciousness, or focalizer. But also James as
one of several foci whose shifting relations create situational historical ranges and allow for
the uneven development of a necessarily flawed “historical” narrative.
“Before James there is, apparently, a precipice.” I said this above, too, of scene-and-
summary tradition. And it is true—a precipice does appear if one looks backward upon
scene-and-summary tradition from the perspective of twentieth-century formalist-structuralist
criticism, searching only for the discourse of “scenes and summaries.” Yet scene-and-
summary tradition is much greater than that explicit discourse. James himself knew as much;
and, even if one is looking backward past him into an apparently unreflective era of narrative
theory, one can still discern flickering lights in the distance—some nearer, in the nineteenth
century, in the writings of a G. H. Lewes or Sainte-Beuve, a Balzac or Scott; many more
further out, at an earlier thrust of theorization for the novel in its most recent historical “rise.”
Or rather—to rein in the metaphors as we move closer to the lights’ flickering—one sees not
lights but glaring lenses, capable foci: Hegel, Friedrich Schlegel, Madame de Staël, Clara
Reeve, Blanckenburg, Wieland, Lord Kames … but, most of all for our purposes—of pace
—Fielding and Goethe.
 Narrative Movement and Modernity

In a certain moment of a certain recent century, the pace of certain processes began to change
rapidly. It began with developments in the field of such industry or technology. The
appearance of something in this year, and another thing some years later; the invention of this
and this and this; of that, and that; this new immediate means of communication, that new
fast speed of transportation: such a constant stream of innovation resulted in a complete
transformation of human experience on the social as well as the individual level. Time itself
was redefined. The revolutionary forces of -ization and -ization were underway …. The
temporality of daily life under these pressures was becoming …. One social critic referred to
the sheer frenzy of the moment as …. It was a time of sweeping changes, social disruptions,
constant accelerations, unprecedented rates of movement, fluctuations, fragmentation,
overwhelming intensity …. No one could escape the effects of this new pace of modernity.
(Fielding and Goethe wait in the wings. For now, I offer an outline of the historical ellipse
of this study.)
Call the opening paragraph that I offer here an approximation of some master narrative of
modern pace. It surfaces in the opening pages of countless works, with reference to a variety
of moments, technologies, innovations, social movements, and catastrophes. It could well
have appeared in the opening pages here. I do not present it as crude parody. I believe that
one can fill in the blanks and produce a narrative that is more or less true. But I do mean to
point to the overall structure and syntax of such a statement—point, indeed, to its pacing
(lists of technologies and events crescendoing toward blunt social consequence)—to
hopefully strike in the reader some sense of familiarity with its template. It is a template that
is written and rewritten, and it is one that I myself, therefore, have in mind.
But I am suspicious of it. Suspicious of how frequently and easily it is reproduced;
suspicious of the range of content that could fit in the blanks. And so, since that passage is,
after all, narrative, since it is a remarkably compact instance of narrativity in history, I mean
to take it as an occasion to consider the concept of pace as it emerges historically, and to
delimit the extent to which this book deals with history in the form of modernity.
Modernity is largely a trope for a kind of pace.55 It is a trope for many things, surely: a
cult of newness (suggesting the disappearance of the genuinely new), an intensity of
experience (and of desensitization and numbness), an advancement of civilization (plagued
by regressions), a stage of bourgeois development (prophesying its own dissolution), a self-
determination of the West (achieved through imperial-colonial relations to the non-West), the
rise of the nation-state (and its transcendence through global exchange), an age of democracy
(and the origins of totalitarianism), the cutting edge of the present (or an era already
surpassed).56 But what lies behind these things is a notion of extended, forward, dynamic,
accelerating, sociohistorical movement. If such movement, in the forward course of history,
comes to be accompanied by its extreme opposite (compressed, backward, static,
decelerating, isolated … ), that makes it all the more characteristic of what we have come to
know as modernity. Modernity stands for pace and its contradictions.
That much can be supported by the claims of commentators past and present. Modernity
is an era of accumulating, developing, advancing, and striving, a project of defining oneself
through standards of progress and measuring progress through rates of production. It is a
“constant revolutionizing of production” (Marx and Engels), the “tireless unspinning and
historicizing of all there has ever been” (Nietzsche), a state of rapid and perpetual change
—“the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent” (Baudelaire).57 Its exemplary figure is Faust;
its exemplary malady, idleness; its exemplary logic, that of acceleration, speed, or
“dromology.”58
But if the trope of modernity stands for pace, if extended dynamic sociohistorical pace is a
general referent of so many discourses of the modern, that relation is by no means a simple
one. In fact, it is better to say that modernity refers to a twofold process by which a dynamic
sociohistorical pace is first liberated from the sphere of human activity that produced it, and
then acts upon humans as an abstract autonomous force.
In other words, one can distinguish two phases in the relation of pace and modernity. The
first is that of so-called “classical modernity,” from the end of the eighteenth century and in
the wake of the “Dual Revolution” (Industrial, French).59 The pace of technical innovation
and capitalist accumulation already underway in an earlier period begins to show effects so
great that it appears detached from human action. A discourse of modernity emerges in which
dynamic sociohistorical movement is referred to as an independent force. It is in this
moment, says Reinhart Koselleck, that “time becomes a dynamic and historical force in its
own right.”60 The times are described as a galloping flight (Ernst Moritz Arndt, 1806), an
accelerating circuit (Joseph Görres, 1819), a treble-quick rushing (Thomas Carlyle, 1837).61
Human advancement becomes a struggle to keep pace with pace itself—Schritt mit dem
Fortschritt zu halten (Marx, 1867).62 When, at the end of the nineteenth century, Werner
Siemens and Henry Adams look back, separately, on the events of the modern age, each
postulates that history is governed by a dynamic “law of acceleration.”63 And though around
1920 Spengler proclaims the exhaustion of the West’s Faustian soul—and with it “the self-
destruction of dynamic physics”—some dynamic sociohistorical movement still seems to
accelerate beyond human control.64
In the second phase—of a late, reflexive, or modernist modernity—the discourse shifts to
reveal a new form of pace. Here pace is not so much a dynamic sociohistorical force that
exists on an extended chronological scale; it is more of an abstract force that confronts
humans on the scale of concrete individual experience.65 “Pace” refers to a sensation of
hectic surroundings, contracted horizons, imminent deadlines, battering stimuli; a mixture of
exhilaration and exhaustion, élan and ennui.66 One sees something of it already in Rousseau’s
reaction to Paris as a tourbillon social (1762) or in Wordsworth’s concern that London might
reduce the mind to an “almost savage torpor.”67 Friedrich Ancillon grasps it when he refers
to a “love of movement in itself, without purpose and without specific end, … emerged and
developed out of the movement of the time” (1828).68 But it is above all from the late
nineteenth century that this trope of pace proliferates in public discourse. W. R. Greg
denounces a society marked by “speed—the hurry that fills it, the speed with which we
move, the great pressure, under which we work” (1877); Max Nordau diagnoses the
exhaustion and degeneration of individuals incapable of matching the “march of progress”
(1883); Simmel decries the battering Tempo of life brought by the metropolis and the money
economy—“the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli,” “a constant sense
of disorder and psychic shocks” (1900, 1903); John Dewey laments the “mania for motion
and speed” (1927).69 The phrase “the pace that kills,” in just a few decades around the turn of
the twentieth century, develops from a hunting term to a name for a workforce affliction, a
novel about sex and “fast” living, a pamphlet on the danger of automobiles, and a
propaganda film displaying the evils of cocaine.70 Marinetti establishes a “religion-morality
of speed” exalting “aggressive action” (1909). Paul Adam establishes a “cult of speed” fixed
to “la richesse élégante et sportive” (1907). Aldous Huxley pronounces speed “the only
genuinely modern pleasure” (1931).71
What one sees in the course of this second phase is pace itself becoming a trope—an idée
reçue, something like “the pace of modern life.” It is, one can say, a trope for the trope of
modernity. Trope for a trope: this very rhetorical distance may reflect the circumstances of
individuals so alienated from the initial causes of what they experience, so alienated from the
production of dynamic sociohistorical pace by individuals themselves, that they can only
point to the effects as the causes. They point to “modernity,” to the rush and the hurry, the
eccentric sway—exhilaration and exhaustion, excitement and boredom—of “modern life.”
Inevitably the trope of the pace of modern life appears somewhat empty. It stands for many
things, many contradictory aspects of experience on an immediate, everyday, individual
scale, and though one may easily recognize it and feel it, one is far from knowing what it
means.
I have my doubts, then, about how much one can understand of the pace of modernity by
gathering proclamations and commentaries like those listed above. Certainly they are
gatherable; they fill the pages of newspapers, journals, and cultural histories over the past
150 years. And certainly they are worth citing, to the extent that they amount to a critical
mass of discourse necessary for establishing the suggestiveness of a notion (the pace of
modern life) in a given era. But their offerings for an understanding of pace are limited. Once
one has used them to establish a notion, one can do a few things: compare their
suggestiveness in different eras, trace the origins of their connotative character, deconstruct
them, demystify them. Inevitably one finds their contradictions: there is always a
bureaucratic theory of modernity to answer a dromocratic one; one can always say that
modernity contains within itself something that both registers and resists it. These are
significant rhetorical effects of some experience of what we call modern. But they are limited
in what they have to say about what lies beneath (around? beyond? within?) them.
Then again, I also doubt that one can understand much of pace through a simple analysis
of how technical innovation and capitalist accumulation create dynamic sociohistorical
movement. Certainly these are the causes to look to when analyzing the origins of what we
call pace in modernity. But (ignoring the fact that I am hardly prepared to do that kind of
analysis in depth) such analysis alone would miss something essential about pace: in the
same way that it is more than its rhetorical effects, pace is also more than its structural
causes. It is, again, a process—one that, as we have seen, takes place on a large historical
scale, as dynamic sociohistorical movement becomes independent of humans, determines
their individual experiential conditions, and is made by them into a trope; but also a process
that we claim, on an individual scale (before we reduce it to a mere trope) to experience. In
order to grasp pace as something that we experience, we must, it seems, attempt to grasp the
whole of that process.
And it is in narrative fiction that one finds an exceptional opportunity to do so. Only in
narrative does one encounter an extended experience of temporal movement bearing the
structures of another historical moment. And only in fiction does one encounter that
experience in a form so closed, condensed, configured, and plotted that the movement itself
is made to signify. Narratives are composed in specific historical moments, by writers
situated in specific temporal-experiential conditions. In the process of being composed, a
narrative takes on structural features belonging to its situation and moment. Different readers
at different times will then experience that narrative in different ways, but something of those
historical structures will remain as a feature of each reading experience; and so, one may
assume, multiple readers-watchers-listeners may receive an impression of it, experience it
similarly, and share it descriptively. Ricoeur says that a narrative resignifies a historical world
in its temporal dimension, that it refigures temporal experience.72 One may speculate further
and say that a narrative refigures such temporal experience not just for individuals but for
communities. It is to this extent that the pace of fiction expresses and perpetuates so many
paces of modernity.
Yet phenomenology, as a means of relating narrative and history, only takes one so far. It
may acknowledge “historical” moments, but it says little about their social contents. And by
“contents” I mostly mean contradictions, problems in a sociohistorical situation, context, or
environment that invite, from, say, literature, an attempt at their resolution. Here one finds the
basis for a dominant strand of Marxist literary theory over the past century: a hypothesis that
form acts as a symbolic resolution of social contradictions. One might say, following that
supposition, that narrative pace throughout modernity acts as a symbolic resolution of the
contradictions that emerge between the movements of some large sociohistorical pace and
that faux sensation that we call the pace of modern life. Better, one could say that the paces
of so many works of fiction seek to resolve all those contradictory feelings about the pace of
modernity: the simultaneous exhilaration and exhaustion, élan and ennui …. Certainly the
alternation of units like scene and summary—slow and intense; light and swift—seems to
enact some such attempt at resolution. But the formal solution I examine here is a unique
one. “Form,” after all, is a notoriously static or atemporal concept; hardly qualified, it would
seem, to convincingly resolve social contradictions of temporal movement. What makes pace
appear once again so exceptional, then, is that its appearance in a narrative can be seen as
part of a formal solution to a temporal problem that is itself configured toward a temporal
effect. It is a solution to a problem of social rhythms that plays itself out in the long forward
rhythm of narration, an incitement to a readerly-temporal experience occasioned by a past
reaction to a then-contemporary temporal situation.
But again: pace is more than its structural causes or rhetorical effects. It emerges in the
process that links them.
It is more than its structural causes. Pace is no mere reflection or epiphenomenon, no
direct expression of social or technological changes. Ignoring the bad faith of many writers
who would invite such a relation, who seek to portray the speed of modernity, defy it, or
“keep pace with” its technological, social, or scientific progress, one might take the example
of one who still exerts an unmatched influence on the pace of fiction today.73 Though it is
right to note that the pace of Hemingway’s writing is affected by the telegraphic style of early
twentieth-century journalism (and the principles of economy underlying it), it is wrong to
conclude, as many have, that the pace of his narratives is therefore accelerated (or
decelerated). One would do much better to describe his writing as an effort to impose a
focalized sense of concentration upon a worn-out, unmotivated, parodic form of telegraphic-
journalist style, a style that seems to indicate that the moment in which newspapers and
novels were aligned, in which the unheard-of was the subject of both forms, has passed; there
is now only the same kind of “news” and news writing (all said, heard of, and done).
Narrative movement in Hemingway shows a process of forging psychological,
phenomenological, or artistic economy from the skeletal form of such social-technological
economies as telegraphic journalism. An easily consumable form becomes somewhat
undigestible, strange; something configured to swiftness is made obstinately slow, if not by
the refusal of linkages or meaning than by its simple-unwieldy-rhythmic syntax.
Pace is more than its rhetorical or discursive effects. One gains relatively little by
focusing on isolated instantiations of the trope of pace in narrative texts, combing stories for
select quotes about exhaustion or new speed technologies. A spare cultural reference dropped
in the midst of a narrative is hardly capable of carrying with it a process of dynamic
sociohistorical movement, and it has little motivation or influence on a narrative’s movement.
What matters, rather, is that that cultural reference, entering into a narrative as a hardened
abstraction or idée reçue, has the potential to then be woven into the other codes of the text,
carried forward, dissolved, de-tropified (its semantic contents disseminated), only to be
reconstructed by the movement of the narrative into a particular textual theme. If there
appears, five paragraphs into the Joyce story “After the Race” (1914), the line, “Rapid
motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money,” that
line matters less for its cultural-referential function—an expression of some trope of modern
pace from the perspective of a certain public in a certain historical moment (Dublin, The
Gordon Bennett Cup Race, 1903)—than for the fact that, when it appears, the race referred to
in the story’s title is already over; the sentences are sparkling but perfunctory, the movement
unmotivated and near-episodic. The trope (of modern pace, as racing) is reconstructed and
thematized as superficial richness, sensation detached from the substance of events (like the
races of Nana and L’Éducation sentimentale before it, but with a difference).74
I am speaking, perhaps anachronistically, of the “literariness” of narrative fiction. Or
choose what term you prefer. If to grasp pace in any (modern) narrative is to grasp the
process by which structures of pacing lead to the creation of rhetorical effects, then to grasp
pace in a “literary” narrative is to witness how those rhetorical effects become themes.
Literariness, in the historical scope of this study, has to do with a thematics of pace, the
capacity of narratives not just to refigure a kind of dynamic sociohistorical movement but to
make it yield themes under the pressure of a closed and reflexive form. Such thematization
certainly resembles the process of cultural troping that I have described above—a process by
which a large sociohistorical phenomenon like pace is reduced to an empty commonplace
(“the pace of modern life”). But if thematization parallels, or imitates, cultural troping, it
does so at a second degree, in the manner of a symbolic parody or mythology. Whereas a
cultural trope in its development is gradually emptied of meaning and detached from the
movement that makes it, a theme is gradually filled, and carried forward.

The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel. Brian Gingrich, Oxford University Press (2021). © Brian
Gingrich.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858287.003.0002

1 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 3. When I speak of short paragraphs, I mean those arranged for the first printing of
the novel and imitated by most publications since.
2 Ibid., 263.
3 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, 94–5: “These four basic forms of narrative movement, that we will hereafter call
the four narrative movements, are the two extremes … (ellipsis [ellipse] and descriptive pause [pause]) and two
intermediaries: scene [scène], most often in dialogue, which … realizes conventionally the equality of time between
narrative and story; and what English-language critics call summary [sommaire]—a form with variable tempo (whereas the
tempo of the other three is fixed, at least in principle), which with great flexibility of pace covers the entire range included
between scene and ellipsis. We could schematize the temporal values of these four movements fairly well with the following
formulas, with ST designating story time and NT the pseudo-time, or conventional time, of the narrative:
pause: NT = n, ST = 0. Thus: NT > ∞ ST
scene: NT = ST
summary: NT < ST
ellipsis: NT = 0, ST = n. Thus: NT < ∞ ST”
4 Mieke Bal, Narratology, 4th ed. In previous editions of Narratology, the passage in question appeared as this:
“Whether or not [one’s] attention is spread more or less evenly across the fabula, there will always be an alternation of sorts
between extensive and summarizing presentation. This alternation is generally viewed as the most important characteristic
of the narrative genre; be that as it may, it is clearly an important marker. [Percy] Lubbock already made a distinction
between these two forms, the scene and the summary” (3rd ed., 100). In the most recent edition the middle sentence was
removed.
5 From here on “vitesse” refers to narrative speed in Genette’s sense, and “categories of vitesse” refers to the group
scene/summary/pause/ellipsis (which he calls mouvements).
6 Compare Fredric Jameson on the critical tendencies of genre theory in “Magical Narratives,” 135–8, and Nicholas
Dames on the transition from “physiological” to formalist novel theory in The Physiology of the Novel, 25–72. In the
background of all this stands Georg Lukács’s description of the effects of reification: “Time sheds its qualitative, variable,
flowing nature; it freezes [erstarrt] into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum … : in short, it becomes space.”
(History and Class Consciousness, 90).
7 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 75, 89, 93.
8 See, for example, Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 47, 111; Defoe, Moll Flanders, 85, 103, 148, 187, 211; Defoe,
Roxana, 25, 162, 187, 221; Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, 35, 762–846; and Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 203.
9 David Foster Wallace, The David Foster Wallace Reader, 606.
10 Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 154. See Booth’s investigation of “showing” and “telling,” pp. 23–9, for a
corollary to my tracing of scene-and-summary tradition.
11 Ted Underwood criticizes scene and summary on both fronts: as vague units that can hardly be distinguished from one
another, and as binary categories that keep us from seeing literary time as a continuum. “The binary contrast between scene
and summary is a critical convention unsupported by much solid evidence.” I am inclined to say that the convention itself is
the evidence. “Why Literary Time is Measured in Minutes,” 344, 355.
 12 “When we think of the radically different effect of a scene reported by Huck Finn and a scene reported by Poe’s
Montresor, we see that the quality of being ‘scenic’ suggests very little about literary effect. And compare the delightful
summary of twelve years given in two pages of Tom Jones (Book III, ch. i) with the tedious showing of even ten minutes of
uncurtailed conversation in the hands of a Sartre when he allows his passion for ‘durational realism’ to dictate a scene when
summary is called for …. The contrast between scene and summary, between showing and telling, is likely to be of little use
until we specify the kind of narrator who is providing the scene or the summary.” Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, 154–5.
13 See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 9.
14 On “vitesse” versus “durée,” see Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, 34.
15 Seymour Chatman refers to flashbacks and flashforwards (Story and Discourse, 64), and Mieke Bal refers to
retroversions and anticipations (Narratology, 3rd ed., 83). Müller referred to Zeitsprünge and Rückgriffe (Morphologische
Poetik, 305–7).
16 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 94.
17 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 137, 53, 99, 78.
18 Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 203.
19 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 226.
20 Ibid., 225–39.
21 Roland Barthes, S/Z, esp. 28–30, 75–6.
22 Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture, 10. Translation: “Classical writing was thus shattered … ”.
23 Gustave Flaubert, L’Éducation sentimentale, 541. Translation: “He travelled. … He returned. … Years went by ….”
24 “It is as if the temporal gearbox of the narrative had made a radical change in its ratios … ”; Peter Brooks, Reading
for the Plot, 207.
25 Marcel Proust, “About Flaubert’s Style,” in Marcel Proust: A Selection from His Miscellaneous Writings, 234–5.
26 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 97. “If we examine … the narrative pacing [régime] of the Recherche, what we are first
compelled to note is the almost total absence of summary in the form it had during the whole previous history of the novel”
(95).
27 For examples of such paradoxical “pseudoiterative” tags (disait, repondait, exigeait), see Marcel Proust, Du côté de
chez Swann, 54, 63, 187.
28 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 105, 109, 112.
29 And beyond the modern? It is, sadly, beyond the explicit range of this book, and perhaps beyond the range of Genette.
See Brian Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse,” in Narrative Dynamics, 47–63.
30 Phyllis Bentley, Some Observations on the Art of Narrative. Bentley’s chapters “The Use of Summary” and “The Use
of Scene” were reprinted in a 1967 anthology that Genette read—and in which he must have appreciated one of the editor’s
expressions: the “rhythm of scene and summary”; Philip Stevick, ed., The Theory of the Novel, 46. Note also that, though
“summary” was not customarily paired with scene until the generation of Bentley, Lubbock and James do use the term in
their writings as something distinguishable from scene. See, for example, Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction, 62, and
Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition, 1316.
31 Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction, 72–3; Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James, lxxvi–lxxxiv;
Lubbock, Craft of Fiction, chs. 5–8, 11, 13–14, and 18.
32 See Henry James, “London Notes” (1897), in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English
Writers, 1403–4; “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, 115–39; “Prefaces to the New York
Edition” (1907), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, 1039–52, 1304–21.
33 Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode, 45–6.
34 Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction, 110.
35 Bentley, Some Observations, 8.
36 Lubbock is only slightly more schematic than James himself. And his qualified endorsement of scene over its pictorial
alternative is, like Bentley’s similar quasi-endorsement, much subtler than it has been portrayed to be. “For criticizing the
craft of fiction we have no other language than that which has been devised for the material arts; and though we may feel
that to talk of the colours and values and perspective of a novel is natural and legitimate, yet these are only metaphors, after
all, that cannot be closely pressed. … Such phrases may give hints and suggestions concerning the method of the novelist;
the whole affair is too nebulous for more” (The Craft of Fiction, 11).
37 “James’s prefaces …, those shrewd and indispensable explorations into the writer’s craft, offer no easy reduction of
technique to a simple dichotomy of telling versus showing, no pat rejection of all but James’s own methods. And, in fact,
James’s methods were surprisingly varied. … It is true that he found himself more and more interested in exploring what
could be done with the ‘scenic art’ and less and less satisfied with narrating in his own voice. And he was convinced that he
had found a way to perform the traditional rhetorical tasks in an essentially dramatic way. … But his general emphasis is on
the fact that the house of fiction has ‘not one window, but a million,’ that there are, in fact, ‘five million’ ways to tell a story,
each of them justified if it provides a ‘center’ for the work.” Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 23–4.
38 Modernism: however unstable the term may be (though surely no more unstable than modern), it provides a useful
specificity at this moment. “Modern” will, throughout this study, designate a period of both “classical” and “more modern”
fiction (a period of classical and later modernity). And so I resort to taking up a term whose dimensions (like those of scene,
summary) are much more heavily determined in English-language spheres, applying it to European, American, and
otherwise Western-traditional entities to refer to a more modern modernity. On the historical development of the term
modernism, which indeed has rich Francophone (modernisme) and Hispanophone (modernismo) histories but which gained a
privileged status through anglophone New-Critical movements, see Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism, 19–24.
39 Virginia Woolf, “Character in Fiction,” in Selected Essays, 38.
40 Willa Cather, Not Under Forty, in Stories, Poems, and other Writings, 812.
41 Barthes, S/Z, 30.
42 Jameson, Antinomies of Realism, 182, and “Response to ‘Roundtable,’” 1086–9. But see also Jameson’s “Remarks on
Henry James,” 296–306.
43 Jameson, Political Unconscious, 210. See also Dames, Physiology of the Novel, 25–37, and Max Beerbohm, “The
Mote in the Middle Distance.”
44 Underwood, “Why Literary Time Is Measured in Minutes,” 352–60; “[From 1719 to 2000] fiction goes from covering
several days on each page, to covering roughly thirty minutes. That’s a hundredfold compression of time. It must be one of
the biggest, simplest changes in the history of fiction” (348).
45 See James’s notorious portrait of Austen, her graceful “unconsciousness,” in “The Lesson of Balzac,” 117–18.
Interestingly, James portrays Austen’s naiveté by comparing her to Balzac, whom later French critics and “new novelists”
would view as naive in comparison with the likes of Flaubert.
46 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” 482–3.
47 See, for example, Proust’s “À propos du ‘style’ de Flaubert,” in Contre Sainte-Beuve, 586–600; Gérard Genette,
“Silences de Flaubert,” in Figures, 223–43; Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty; Brooks, Reading for the
Plot, 171–215; and Franco Moretti, The Way of the World, 153–79.
48 Flaubert, letters from July 22, 1852, September 19, 1852, and January 15, 1853, in his Correspondance, vol. 2, 136,
159–60, 238. “Il ne me paraît pas non plus impossible de donner à l’analyse psychologique la rapidité, la netteté,
l’emportement d’une narration purement dramatique”; “Il faut que tout cela soit rapide sans être sec, et développé sans être
épaté”; “J’ai ainsi maintenant 50 pages d’affilée, où il n’y a pas un événement. … Le lecteur [aime] autant voir plus de
mouvement. — Enfin il faut faire comme on a conçu. Si je voulais mettre là dedans de l’action, j’agirais en vertu d’un
système et gâterais tout.”
49 Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. 2, 154, 220–1.
50 Ibid., 222–3. See also Jameson on Flaubert’s “affective style” (Antinomies of Realism, 39–40) as well as Vladimir
Nabokov on Flaubert’s “structural transitions” (Lectures on Literature, 151–5) and Jean Rousset on his “modulations”
(Forme et signification, 117–22).
51 Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, in Correspondance, vol. 2, 238 (“peindre couleur sur couleur et sans tons
tranchés”); Jameson, Political Unconscious, 222. See Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 95–7.
52 Jameson, Political Unconscious, 221.
53 Jane Austen, Emma, 161.
54 Honoré de Balzac, “A Study of M. Beyle” (1840), in Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, xii.
 55 See Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte (in Futures Past, 75–92) and Jameson’s suggestion that modernity be
considered not as a philosophical concept but as a “rhetorical effect,” a “trope,” and a “narrative category” (A Singular
Modernity, 31–41).
56 See Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, esp. 246–8 and 266–70; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large; Hannah
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air; Rita Felski, Doing Time; Susan
Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions”; and Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time.
57 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 476; Friedrich
Nietzsche, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, 182 (“Das unermüdliche Zerspinnen und Historisiren alles Gewordenen”); Charles
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, 403. Baudelaire is in fact saying that
every age has its own modernity, but it also seems Baudelaire’s idea “could only have come up in the modern period in
which he was writing: in other words, in a world conscious in a new way of change, rapid change, as the normal condition of
life” (Rachel Bowlby, “Half Art,” 48).
58 See Berman, All That Is Solid; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, pp. 46–60; Rosa, Social Acceleration; and
Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics. “Dromology” is Virilio’s term, developed from the Greek dromos (racecourse).
59 Osborne (Politics of Time, 5–9) uses “classical modernity” to refer to the second of three phases of modernity that
Berman (All That Is Solid, 16–17) proposes. It runs from the 1790s to around 1900 and is bounded by an early modern and a
late modern phase. On “The Dual Revolution,” see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution.
60 Koselleck, “Neuzeit,” in Futures Past, 236.
61 Ernst Moritz Arndt, Geist der Zeit, part 1, 9:49, 9:64 (“Die Zeit ist auf der Flucht”; “Was damals [i.e. twenty years
ago] im Schritt ging, geht jetzt im Galopp”); Joseph Görres, Deutschland und die Revolution, 71 (“Vieler trägen
Jahrhunderte Gang hat in ihr [i.e. the Revolution] zum Kreislauf von Jahren sich beschleunigt”); Thomas Carlyle, The
French Revolution, 421. See also examples in Koselleck, Futures Past, 12, and Amanpal Garcha, From Sketch to Novel, 3.
62 See, for example, the chapter on “Das allgemeine Gesetz der kapitalistischen Akkumulation” in Das Kapital, esp. 579,
601–2, 652, 658.
63 See Rosa, Social Acceleration, 42, and Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 395–14.
64 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, esp. 216–20. See also Koselleck, “Is There an Acceleration of History?,” in
High-Speed Society, 113–34.
65 Rosa analyzes social acceleration in three forms: technological acceleration (“the speeding up of intentional, goal-
directed processes of transport, communication, and production”), acceleration of social change (“the acceleration of
changeover in jobs, political party preferences, intimate partners … or of change per unit of time in occupational and family
structures, artistic styles, etc.”), and the acceleration of the pace of life (“through an increase of episodes of action and/or
experience per unit of time that is linked with a scarcity of temporal resources”). The last two are the most relevant here.
“Social Acceleration,” 81–7.
66 “As early as Schopenhauer a characteristic antinomy had emerged in bourgeois life: boredom and intoxication. It
obtained further theoretical elaboration in Nietzsche and reached a culmination in literature at the turn of the century”
(Georg Lukács, preface to Writer and Critic, 13).
67 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 99; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, 551.
68 Friedrich Ancillon, quoted in Koselleck, Futures Past, 241. See also Koselleck, “Is There an Acceleration?,” 121: “It
was after the French and the Industrial Revolutions that acceleration began to become a general experiential principle.”
69 W. R. Greg, Life at High Pressure, in Robert V. Levine, A Geography of Time, 153; Max Nordau, Degeneration, 542;
Georg Simmel, Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben, 9–10, and Philosophie des Geldes, 540; John Dewey, “The Mania for
Motion and Speed,” in High-Speed Society, 61–3. See also “The Hurry of Modern Life.”
70 See “Overwork and Under-Rest”; “Hard Work”; “The Pace that Kills”; “Speed and Morality”; “It Is the Pace that
Kills”; and “What Is ‘The Pace that Kills’?” The novel is Edgar Saltus’s The Pace that Kills; the pamphlet is T. C. Foley’s
The Pace that Kills; and there are two propaganda films with the title, one silent, from Willis Kent Productions in 1928, the
other a talkie distributed by “States Rights” in 1935.
71 F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, 21;
Paul Adam, La morale des sports, 449–50; Aldous Huxley, “Wanted, a New Pleasure,” 263. See also Kern, Culture of Time
and Space, esp. 109–30, and Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook.
 72 See Ricoeur, Temps et récit, vol. 1, 122, and vol. 3, 9.
73 Plot the positions that commentators on modern art took toward “keeping pace” with techno-socio-scientific progress:
Nordau prophesied that art and literature would not adapt to the “march of progress” but would instead become a “pure
atavism” cultivated by women and children (Degeneration, 542–3); Apollinaire saw it as natural that “les arts et les mœurs”
should achieve “la hauteur des progrès scientifiques et industriels” (Programme de Parade, in Œuvres en prose complètes,
866); Adolf Loos agreed, but blamed stragglers for slowing down “das Tempo der kulturellen Entwicklung” (“Ornament und
Verbrechen,” in Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 1, 280); and Otto Wagner found the rapid pace of modern society to be too much
for art: “Bedürfnis und Konstruktion halten mit der strebenden Menschheit gleichen Schritt, diesem kann die majestätisch
schreitende Kunst nicht folgen” (Moderne Architektur, 65–6, 95). Margaret Storm Jameson responded to the debates with
irony: “When men spilt life wantonly to show their love of it, art ran joyously to keep pace with the revellers” (“England’s
Nest of Singing Birds,” 175). Finally, Robert Graves and Laura Riding Jackson dismissed the rhetoric altogether: the claim
that art “should keep pace with new developments in painting, music, and philosophy, and with civilization in general” was
an empty “boast” by young intellectuals, a matter of “temperamental politics” (A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 216–18).
74 James Joyce, Dubliners, 32.
 2
Rise of the Scene-and-Summary Novel

Fielding and the Prosai-Comi-Epic

Fielding and Goethe: take these two mid to late eighteenth-century “lenses” as “foci” that,
placed opposite the lens-foci of twentieth-century craft-formalism and narratological
structuralism, define the overarching ellipse of this study. Call it “modern” fiction, the
“golden age” of narrative, the “bourgeois age” of the novel. Here, I call it scene-and-
summary tradition. By no means the only tradition that could be conceived of, but a
legitimate one. It stands out in cycles of writerly activity: commentaries on craft,
composition, the crystallization of narrative structures, and the reception of those
commentaries, compositions, and structures by other writers who then (with whatever degree
of anxiety or influence) imitate, modify, or oppose them. The goal here is to discern, amid the
backward projections of twentieth-century lenses and the forward projections of eighteenth-
century ones, a tradition coherent enough to support the forward movement of this history.
And so Fielding and Goethe stand somewhere around the origins of scene-and-summary
tradition and shed light on how scene and summary take shape. They will have nothing to say
about that pair of terms explicitly, and they will not, on the surface, sound much like their
twentieth-century counterparts. They may have more in common with Aristotle and far-
distant ancient-classical lenses. And yet, if they look toward the classical, they move toward
the modern. If their concern is with the distinction between epic and drama, it is also a
concern with the meeting point between those two genres, a concern that cannot but envision
their intersection and lead to a nascent theory of the rise, or resurrection, of the novel in
modernity. At the core of that theory: the scene-and-summary novel.
Enter Fielding—or the Fielding-narrator of Tom Jones (1749), who claims to be founding
“a new Province of Writing” and who pauses his narrative at the beginning of each book to
reflect on that province with an “Essay.”1 The essays cover many topics—love, plagiarism,
the marvelous, and (frequently) the faults of modern critics—but they tend to focus on
narrative craft, on principles of narrative structure, and, to a remarkable extent, on narrative
pace. Countless commentators have praised Tom Jones for its structure and plot. Consider it,
now, as an exercise in pacing.
Fielding’s focus on narrative movement appears early in Tom Jones, in a well-known
essay introducing Book II. He takes up the task of “Shewing what Kind of a History this is,”
and he approaches it, tellingly, by showing his method of pacing.2 He declares that he will
not be pursuing the method of
the painful and voluminous Historian, who, to preserve the Regularity of his Series, thinks himself obliged to fill up
as much Paper with the Detail of Months and Years in which nothing remarkable happened, as he employs upon those
notable Æras when the greatest Scenes have been transacted on the human Stage.
Such Histories as these do, in reality, very much resemble a News-Paper, which consists of just the same Number
of Words, whether there be any News in it or not. They may, likewise, be compared to a Stage-Coach, which
performs constantly the same Course, empty as well as full. The Writer, indeed, seems to think himself obliged to
keep even Pace with Time, whose Amenuensis he is. (TJ, 52–3)

Not the method of the Historian who preserves Regularity, but that of those who “disclose the
Revolutions of Countries”:
When any extraordinary Scene presents itself …, we shall spare no Pains nor Paper to open it at large to our Reader;
but if whole Years should pass without producing any Thing worthy of his Notice, we shall not be afraid of a Chasm
in our History; but shall hasten on to Matters of Consequence, and leave such Periods of Time totally unobserved ….
My Reader then is not to be surprized, if, in the Course of this Work, he shall find some Chapters very short, and
others altogether as long; some that contain only the Time of a single Day, and others that comprise years; in a Word,
if my History sometimes seems to stand still, and sometimes to fly. (TJ, 53)

Surely one can see origins of Genette in these statements. More than two centuries before
Narrative Discourse, Fielding anticipates all four of Genette’s categories of vitesse: clearly
enough Scenes (especially “extraordinary” ones), but also pauses (still-standing), summaries
(passing-flying), and ellipses (chasms, unobserved periods). He even tracks the vitesse of
Tom Jones quantitatively, noting the years, weeks, days, and hours that pass in each book
(“Book IV: Containing the time of a Year”; “Book IX: Containing twelve Hours”) and
oftentimes the space of text required to narrate them (“Book IV, Chapter I: Containing five
Pages of Paper”). Between Fielding and Genette, then, one can begin to establish a narrative
tradition of at least some theoretical coherence.3
But Fielding’s pace is not just theoretical. Though there are plenty of gaps between his
commentaries on craft and his practice, there are plenty of manifestations as well.
Throughout Tom Jones he does indeed fly, pause, and leap chasms. The pauses, especially in
the form of the Essays, are obvious. But then, so are the chasms: at the beginning of Book III
he proudly skips twelve years that offer “nothing worthy of a Place in this History” (78). As
the narrative proceeds, the various metaphors for pace that he has gathered up in his
discourse emerge in the storyworld as devices of pacing. At one stretch of Sophia’s journey
toward London—Book XI, Chapter 9—her coach suddenly becomes a worthy model for the
narrative’s movement. Sophia and her companions
made such good Expedition, that they performed a Journey of ninety Miles in two Days, and on the second Evening
arrived in London, without having encountered any one Adventure on the Road worthy the Dignity of this History to
relate. Our Pen, therefore, shall imitate the Expedition which it describes, and our History shall keep Pace with the
Travellers. (TJ, 396)

On to London, then, and to the adventures that lie there. Yet that instance, in which the
pace of the action (in the story) offers itself as a model for the pace of the plot (the narration),
is an exceptional one. Fielding’s method is based on the assumption that the pacing of
narratives need not seek to imitate the paces of storyworlds. There will indeed be a moment
and a movement in which writers argue the opposite: Proust tries his hand as time’s
amanuensis; Joyce, Döblin, and Dos Passos fill their pages with the empty content of
newspapers; Stein gives her repetitions and continuities the regularity of a stagecoach (or
automobile). Sartre will theorize modernist approximations of “real” time as the aspiration of
durational realism. But, to the extent that such modernists do attempt a durational kind of
realism, apparently immediate and intense, their effects owe more to the author of Pamela
and Clarissa than to that of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones.4 Theirs is a “realism of
presentation”; Fielding’s, a “realism of assessment.”5 Fielding’s pace does not imitate nature
but improves upon it. It does not simulate some constant, even, naturalized rhythm or flow.
Fielding rejects regularity in its deep etymological sense, as a sign of straightened or correct
movement.6 He stands at a distance from his narrative, assessing, commenting, cutting and
condensing its parts, arranging them to produce a pace bearing a meaning that nature itself
lacks. In this as in many ways he prepares the way for Sterne in Tristram Shandy (1759–67),
who likewise cuts, condenses, and arranges, commenting so as to “lay bare” his technique,
but who in his commentaries rearranges and “transposes” his parts so as to spurn “natural”
temporality altogether.7 “This, Sir,” boasts Tristram near the end of Volume I, “is a very
different story from that of the earth’s moving round her axis, in her diurnal rotation ….”8
And he shows as much when he sketches his story at the end of Volume VI (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Tristram sketches his story (Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 333).

Far from earthly rotation, natural, cyclical, and regular, far from the periodic rhythm of
Ciceronian prose, this movement is unbalanced, disruptive, scattered—a corollary of the
narrator’s own scattered mind.9 For Sterne as for Fielding, narrative pace means irregular
pacing.
Against regularity. And in favor of … ? Contrast (Fielding’s word), Variety (Sterne’s). Or,
on the Continent, difference—as in “la différence du mouvement qui résulte de la vitesse ou
de la lenteur” (Rousseau).10 Again one sees early reflections of twentieth-century critics:
Genette will speak of “l’opposition de mouvement entre scène détaillée et récit sommaire,”
and James will find the relation between the “scenic” and the “non-scenic” to be a matter “of
possible variety, of effective expressional change and contrast.”11 Still, with Fielding, one
cannot speak yet of scenic and non-scenic, scène and sommaire. The author of Tom Jones is
concerned with contrast as a principle of craft generally, and as a defense of his province of
writing: the “prosai-comi-epic.”
Prosai-comi-epic? Like most of Fielding’s terms (and Tristram’s sketch), it is playful, not
meant to be too serious or systematic. He uses it sparingly throughout his career, and
somewhat inconsistently, mainly as a way of elevating his work into a classical realm and
contrasting it with the romances and novels of his day.12 Though he introduces it—in the
preface to Joseph Andrews (1742)—by referring to an ancient-classical model, he knows that
the model is an obscure one. Aristotle does indeed allude to a type of poetry that is neither
tragedy nor dramatic comedy nor serious epic, a type represented by certain “lampoons” and
by the (pseudo-)Homeric Margites and that would seem to encompass most ancient forms of
the romance or novel; but he does little more than allude to it, and the representatives that he
mentions are conveniently, for Fielding’s public, “entirely lost.”13 So Fielding, untethered to
an identifiable precedent, has the freedom to define his province somewhat intuitively and by
negation—distinct from the otherwise poetic in that it is non-verse; distinct from the tragic or
serious in that it is “light,” “ridiculous,” or “ludicrous” (including characters from lower
stations of life); and distinct from the dramatic in that it is more “extended” and
“comprehensive” (with a greater degree of variety).14 His rejection of “romance” is largely a
rejection of certain cultural connotations (femininity, Frenchness). Otherwise, he may just be
trying to distinguish his work from Richardson’s own “new Species of Writing” (by contrast
serious-grave, private-dramatic, uncomprehensive in its focus on small social groups even if
voluminous in its details of character consciousness). In fact, Richardson and Fielding alike
tend to speak of their Species only as things to be “hinted” at.15 The prosai-comi-epic is more
of an ad hoc construction than a definite genre. Ian Watt dedicates a whole chapter of The
Rise of the Novel (1957) to downplaying its significance as a “theory of fiction.”16
Nevertheless, the prosai-comi-epic has its worth for a history of pacing. It manages, first
of all, to incorporate into the Aristotelian comi-epic certain qualities of narrative movement
—a flight-and-leap kind of progress, light, centrifugal, and mobile. But it also manages,
through its very character as an ad hoc construction or hint, to be taken up as a major
reference point for later traditions of the novel. Precisely because it is allusive and
occasional, precisely because it is a reaction against the contemporary model of Richardson,
and precisely because Fielding and Richardson end up (for better or worse) as “the two
fathers of the novel” in the originary myth of the tradition I am considering—because of all
this, the prosai-comi-epic is worth considering as one of two alternative-complementary
tendencies defining the tradition as a whole.17
 “Fielding is the epic writer, Richardson the dramatic.”18 Fielding on the side of the comi-
epic, and light centrifugal sprawl; Richardson the serio-dramatic, and solemn centripetal
gravity. Between the two tendencies: the novel. That notion is old, trite, reductive, but for all
of those reasons relevant to the culture that maintained and maintains it. Certainly the notion
was embedded in twentieth-century discourses of craft and the novel. One can classify
theories of the novel by the degree to which they privilege one tendency or the other. If the
serio-dramatic finds its advocates among the Jamesians, the comi-epic finds a representative
in Mikhail Bakhtin.19 Bakhtin displayed his indebtedness to Fielding’s commentaries openly
and defined the novel as a sociolinguistic rearticulation of each element of Fielding’s
formula. With Bakhtin, the “prosaic” becomes not simply non-verse but a variety of speech
patterns linked with the everyday; the comic becomes the socially diverse and carnivalesque;
the epic or romance becomes the representation of a decentralizing, heteroglot polyphony. In
this way, Bakhtin, well known for defining the novel against the (classical) epic, turns out to
be the most (prosai-comi-)epic of novel theorists. In the loose qualitative terms of narrative
movement, Bakhtin is the theorist of light centrifugal sprawl.
But for now one can turn back to the terms of craft and to the point made above: the
prosai-comi-epic method is distinguished above all by the principle of contrast. More:
contrast, for Fielding, is above all a principle of pacing. Those who have commented on the
prosai-comi-epic in Fielding’s work have overlooked this as much as those who have
commented on contrast. Watt sees the epic in Tom Jones as “mainly a question of scale”
(sweeping, socially varied) and otherwise as an effect of surprise and mock-heroic battles.20
He ignores the fact that at the only point in the novel where Fielding discusses the epic
explicitly—the essay of Book V—the subject is not scale, surprise, or heroism, but contrast.
Meanwhile, critics like Wolfgang Iser, who recognize contrast as a “key to the narrative” of
Tom Jones, ignore its essential relation to the prosai-comi-epic.21 But the relation is crucial:
contrast is the principle by which the prosai-comi-epic generates pace. When Fielding
introduces contrast in the essay of Book V—“a new Vein of Knowledge, which if it hath
been discovered, hath not, to our Remembrance, been wrought on by any antient or modern
Writer”—he introduces it to explain his method of pacing (Tom Jones, 138). He uses it to
defend his practice of pausing for essays at all. Yes, he admits, the essays may be
“digressive” and “dull,” but they are “essentially necessary” to “all prosai-comi-epic
Writing” (137). He cites an epic example: just as Homer’s “slumbers” have a place in his
works, digressions have a role in prosai-comi-epic “Design.” Fielding’s essays, in their very
“dullness,” serve to “contrast and set off the rest” (139).
The rest? The other units of Tom Jones, created by so many lines of contrast: eighteen
books, two hundred chapters organized by length and duration in a process of compositional
segmentation unknown to the novel up to that point; but also units of speed—those very
flights and chasm-leaps referred to in the essay of Book II, whose sustained alternation with
essay-pauses and digressions allows for the dynamic movement of pace. And this movement,
of alternation, becomes a movement of accumulation as well. It is a movement of “little
Incidents,” “little Circumstances” building momentum—as in, say, the brazenly suggestive
introduction of Sophia’s “Muff” in the novel (around the beginning of Book V): Jones is …
incapacitated, recovering at the Westerns’ with a … broken limb; Mrs. Honour catches him
touching and kissing Sophia’s muff; Honour tells Sophia, and Sophia, one evening, playing
the harpsichord, ends up rescuing that muff after her father throws it into the fire. Fielding
inserts himself:
Though this Incident will probably appear of little Consequence to many of our Readers; yet, trifling as it was, it had
so violent an Effect, on poor Jones, that we thought it our Duty, to relate it. In reality, there are so many little
Circumstances too often omitted by injudicious Historians, from which Events of the utmost importance arise. The
World may indeed be considered as a vast Machine in which the great Wheels are originally set in Motion by those
which are very minute, and almost imperceptible but to the strongest Eyes. (TJ, 135, 146–7)

Forgoing any detailed psychoanalytic gloss on the episode, one can at least glimpse within it
the devices that lead to an accumulation of pace. There is rhythm, in what E. M. Forster calls
the “easy” sense (“repetition plus variation”): the laden muff will return and accrue meaning
as a motif later on (on a bed, in Upton).22 There is causality, in the motion of those minute
wheels causing Jones to feel violent effects and the vast machine-world to move
consequentially (as “in Reality”). Flagrantly, there is desire—not only because the erotic
object and the romance around it affect a hero with whom we implicitly identify, but because
that object becomes a metonym for all the “little Circumstances” that motivate the narrative
process, drive it forward with a grinding of gears, and strive, like Eros itself, to build “ever
larger unities.”23
Again, what Fielding suggests, Tristram Shandy carries to the most extreme of
conclusions. More cavalier in his transpositions of narrative parts and disruptions of time,
more brazen in his suggestions, Sterne draws lines of contrast more freely. In Tristram
Shandy the very “variety” that digressions allow for makes them—far from “dull”—“the life,
the soul of reading.”24 Digressions and progressions combine in the same movement: “I have
… so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within
another, that the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going ….”25 The “machine,”
here, is not Fielding’s more social machine-world. Nor is it, we know, some physical “diurnal
rotation.” The machine and the world of Tristram Shandy converge in Tristram’s own mental
microcosm.26 The world is the mental work done by his narration: a complex of wheels,
turning in all variety of directions, shifting speeds, carrying the momentum of the same
mechanism, maintaining the dynamic movement of the whole.
Perhaps this goes somewhat too far. Fielding never made any great claims for
“dynamism.” Nor, for that matter, did Tristram Shandy. There is a difference between the
machines that they cite as models for narrative movement and the motors that would become
models for the nineteenth-century imagination.27 Even if one does follow the notion that
Fielding’s “tendency” is a comi-epic contrast of progressions, digressions, flights, pauses,
and leaps that generate dynamic narrative movement (a light centrifugal sprawl, an irregular-
unregulated stagecoach), and even if one does follow the implied corollary that the
Richardsonian tendency is serio-dramatic, regular-voluminous, in a way homogeneous (a
solemn centripetal gravity whose figure would be, to use Fielding’s words, “the human
Stage”)—even then, one senses that that characteristic dynamism of the novel is not yet a
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rouvan luo, jonne hänet oli äkkiä kutsuttu, ja kun hän mennessään
kohtasi sisarenpoikansa, noin kaksikymmenvuotiaan nuorukaisen,
joka äsken vasta oli tullut maalta, niin hän käski tätä olemaan pihalla,
mutta ei muistanut antaa määräystä kapteeniin nähden. Juostuaan
portille Mitja kolkutti. Nuori mies tunsi hänet heti: Mitja oli jo useasti
antanut hänelle juomarahaa. Hän avasi Mitjalle heti pikkuportin,
päästi hänet sisälle ja riensi iloisesti hymyillen ennakolta
ilmoittamaan, että »Agrafena Aleksandrovnaa ei nyt olekaan
kotona».

— Missä hän sitten on, Prohor? — kysyi Mitja äkkiä pysähtyen.

— Äsken lähti matkaan, noin pari tuntia sitten, Timotein kanssa,

Mokrojeen.

— Miksi? — huudahti Mitja.

— Sitä en voi tietää, jonkun upseerin luo, joka kutsui heitä, sieltä
lähettivät hevosetkin…

Mitja jätti hänet ja syöksyi kuin mielipuoli sisälle Fenjan luo.

5.

Äkillinen ratkaisu

Fenja istui keittiössä mummon kanssa, ja molemmat olivat

aikeissa käydä makuulle. Luottaen Nazar Ivanovitšiin he olivat
taaskin jättäneet ovensa lukitsematta. Mitja juoksi sisälle, syöksyi
Fenjan kimppuun ja tarttui hänen kurkkuunsa.
 — Sano heti, missä hän on, kenen kanssa on nyt Mokrojessa? —
karjaisi hän raivoissaan.

Molemmat naiset alkoivat vikistä.

— Ai-ai, sanon, ai, hyvä ystävä Dmitri Fjodorovitš, heti sanon

kaikki, en salaa mitään, — lausui nopeasti puolikuoliaaksi pelästynyt
Fenja. — Hän meni Mokrojeen upseerin luo.

— Minkä upseerin luo? — ärjyi Mitja.

— Entisen upseerin, sen saman, sen entisen upseerinsa, joka oli

viisi vuotta sitten, jätti ja matkusti pois, — vikisi Fenja edelleen yhtä
nopeasti.

Dmitri Fjodorovitš veti pois kätensä, joilla oli puristanut hänen

kurkkuaan. Hän seisoi Fenjan edessä kalmankalpeana ja
äänettömänä, mutta hänen silmistään näkyi, että hän oli ymmärtänyt
heti kaikki, kaikki kerrassaan hän oli ymmärtänyt puolesta sanasta
viimeistä pikku piirrettä myöten ja arvannut kaikki. Fenja-raukka ei
tietenkään sillä hetkellä voinut tehdä havaintoja siitä, oliko Mitja
ymmärtänyt vai eikö. Siinä asennossa kuin hän oli ollut istumassa
arkulla Mitjan juostessa sisälle, siinä hän oli edelleenkin koko ruumis
vavisten ja kädet eteen ojennettuina, aivan kuin hän olisi tahtonut
puolustautua, ja tähän asentoon hän näytti jähmettyneen.
Pelästyneet, kauhun suurentamat silmäterät tuijottivat Mitjaan
liikkumattomina. Mutta Mitjan molemmat kädet olivat silloin juuri
veren tahrimat. Matkan varrella, juostessaan, hän luultavasti oli
kosketellut niillä otsaansa pyyhkien hikeä kasvoiltaan, niin että
otsaan ja oikealle poskelle oli jäänyt punaisia veritahroja. Fenja oli
joutumaisillaan hysteeriseen tilaan, vanha keittäjätär taas oli
hypännyt pystyyn ja katseli mielipuolen tavoin melkein tajuttomana.
Dmitri Fjodorovitš seisoi noin minuutin verran ja vaipui äkkiä
koneellisesti Fenjan viereen tuolille.

Hän istui eikä oikeastaan miettinyt mitään, vaan oli ikäänkuin

pelästynyt ja tyrmistynyt. Mutta kaikki oli selvää kuin päivä: tuo
upseeri — hän tiesi siitä, tiesi varsin hyvin kaiken, oli kuullut
Grušenjkalta itseltään, tiesi tuon upseerin lähettäneen kuukausi
sitten kirjeen. Siis kuukausi, kokonainen kuukausi oli tätä asiaa
puuhattu aivan salassa häneltä aina siihen asti kuin tämä uusi mies
nyt oli saapunut, eikä hän ollut tätä edes ajatellutkaan! Mutta kuinka
hän oli voinut, kuinka hän oli voinut olla sitä ajattelematta?
Minkätähden hän oli silloin kerrassaan unohtanut tuon upseerin,
unohtanut heti, kun oli saanut tietää hänestä? Siinä oli kysymys, joka
seisoi hänen edessään aivan kuin kummitus. Ja hän katseli tätä
kummitusta todella pelästyneenä, kauhistuksesta kylmenneenä.

Mutta äkkiä hän alkoi hiljaisesti ja lempeästi niinkuin hiljainen ja

ystävällinen lapsi puhella Fenjan kanssa, aivan kuin olisi kokonaan
unohtanut, että oli häntä äsken niin pelästyttänyt, loukannut ja
rääkännyt. Hän alkoi äkkiä tavattoman ja hänen asemassaan
suorastaan hämmästyttävän täsmällisesti kuulustella Fenjaa. Ja
Fenja puolestaan, vaikka katselikin oudostellen hänen verisiä
käsiään, alkoi myös ihmeteltävän auliisti ja nopeasti vastailla hänen
kaikkiin kysymyksiinsä aivan kuin kiiruhtaen esittämään hänelle koko
»totisimman totuuden». Vähitellen hän alkoi melkeinpä ilomielin
esittää kaikkia yksityiskohtia, tahtomatta ollenkaan tuottaa sillä
tuskaa ja ikäänkuin rientäen kaikin voimin ja sydämestään tekemään
palveluksen Mitjalle. Hän kertoi Mitjalle aivan seikkaperäisesti myös
koko sen päivän kulun, Rakitinin ja Aljošan käynnin, miten hän,
Fenja, oli seisonut vahdissa, miten rouva oli lähtenyt ja miten hän oli
huutanut ikkunasta Aljošalle semmoiset terveiset sanottaviksi
hänelle, Mitenjkalle, että »ikuisesti muistaisi, kuinka hän oli
rakastanut häntä tunnin». Kuultuaan terveisistä Mitja äkkiä naurahti,
ja hänen kalpeille poskilleen sävähti puna. Sillä hetkellä sanoi Fenja
hänelle, hituistakaan enää pelkäämättä uteliaisuutensa seurauksia:

— Miten teidän kätenne, Dmitri Fjodorovitš, ovatkaan ylt'yleensä

veriset!

— Niin, — vastasi koneellisesti Mitja, katsahti hajamielisesti

käsiinsä ja unohti heti ne sekä Fenjan kysymyksen. Hän vaipui taas
äänettömyyteen. Siitä asti kuin hän oli juossut sisälle, oli kulunut jo
parikymmentä minuuttia. Hänen äskeinen pelästyksensä oli mennyt
ohi, mutta ilmeisesti hänet jo alkoi saada täydelleen valtaansa
jonkinmoinen uusi järkähtämätön päättäväisyys. Hän nousi äkkiä
paikaltaan ja hymyili miettiväisesti.

— Herra, mitä teille on tapahtunut? — lausui Fenja osoittaen taas

hänen käsiään, — lausui sen säälivästi, aivan kuin olisi hänelle
kaikkein lähin olento nyt hänen surussaan.

Mitja katsahti taas käsiinsä.

— Tämä on verta, Fenja, — lausui hän katsoen Fenjaan omituisin

ilmein, — tämä on ihmisen verta, ja hyvä Jumala, miksi se onkaan
vuodatettu! Mutta… Fenja… täällä on eräs lauta-aita (hän katsoi
Fenjaan aivan kuin esittäisi tälle arvattavaksi arvoituksen), eräs
korkea aita ja peloittavan näköinen, mutta… huomenna päivän
koitteessa, kun »aurinko lentää ylös», Mitenjka hyppää tämän aidan
yli… Sinä et ymmärrä, Fenja, mikä aita se on, no, ei se mitään…
samantekevää, huomenna kuulet ja ymmärrät kaiken… mutta nyt
hyvästi! En häiritse, vaan poistun, ymmärrän poistua. Elä, minun
riemuni… rakastit minua tunnin, niinpä muistakin ikäsi Mitenjka
Karamazovia… Hänhän nimitti minua aina Mitenjkaksi, muistatko?

Näin sanoen hän äkkiä lähti ulos keittiöstä. Mutta Fenja pelästyi
tätä hänen lähtöään miltei vielä enemmän kuin hänen äskeistä
sisääntuloaan ja päällekarkaustaan.

Täsmälleen kymmenen minuuttia tämän jälkeen Dmitri Fjodorovitš

astui sisälle sen nuoren virkamiehen Pjotr Iljitš Perhotinin luo, jolle
hän äsken oli pantannut pistolit. Kello oli jo puoli yhdeksän, ja Pjotr
Iljitš oli juotuaan kotonaan teetä juuri pukenut taas ylleen lievetakin
lähteäkseen »Pääkaupunki»-ravintolaan pelaamaan biljardia. Mitja
tapasi hänet ovella. Nähdessään hänet ja hänen veren tahrimat
kasvonsa virkamies huudahti:

— Herra Jumala! Mikä teidän on?

— Katsokaas, — lausui Mitja nopeasti, — tulin hakemaan

pistolejani ja toin teille rahat. Monin kiitoksin. Minulla on kiire, Pjotr
Iljitš, pyydän, pian.

Pjotr Iljitš ihmetteli yhä enemmän: Mitjan käsissä hän näki äkkiä
tukun rahoja, ja, mikä oli tärkeintä, hän piteli tätä tukkua ja astui se
mukanaan sisälle sillä tavoin kuin ei kukaan pitele rahoja eikä tuo
niitä sisälle: kaikkia seteleitä hän kantoi oikeassa kädessään aivan
kuin näytteillä, pitäen kättä eteensä ojennettuna. Poikanen,
virkamiehen palvelija, joka oli ottanut Mitjan vastaan eteisessä kertoi
myöhemmin, että tämä oli tullut samalla tavoin eteiseenkin rahat
käsissä, oli varmaankin siis kadullakin samoin kantanut niitä
edessään oikeassa kädessään. Rahat olivat sadan ruplan seteleitä,
ja hän piteli niitä verisin sormin. Kun asiasta huvitetut henkilöt
myöhemmin kysyivät Pjotr Iljitšiltä, paljonko rahoja oli ollut, niin hän
selitti, että silloin oli vaikea laskea niitä silmämäärällä, kenties niitä
oli kaksituhatta, kenties kolmetuhatta, mutta tukku oli iso, »tiivis».
Itse Dmitri Fjodorovitš taas, kuten hän niinikään myöhemmin todisti,
»oli myös tavallaan kuin poissa suunniltaan, mutta ei juovuksissa,
vaan ikäänkuin jonkinmoisessa innostuksen tilassa, hyvin
hajamielinen, mutta samalla näytti ikäänkuin keskittäneen
ajatuksensa johonkin, aivan kuin olisi jotakin ajatellut ja johonkin
pyrkinyt pääsemättä kuitenkaan päätökseen. Oli hyvin kiireissään,
vastaili jyrkästi, hyvin omituisesti, oli joinakin hetkinä niinkuin ei olisi
murheissaan, vaan jopa iloinenkin.»

— Mutta mikä teidän on, mikä teidän nyt on? — huudahti taas
Pjotr Iljitš katsellen vierastaan oudostellen. — Missä te olette noin
veristynyt, oletteko kaatunut, katsokaa!

Hän tarttui hänen kyynärpäähänsä ja asetti hänet kuvastimen

eteen. Nähdessään veren tahrimat kasvonsa Mitja vavahti ja rypisti
vihoissaan kulmiaan.

— Hyi hitto! Tätä vielä puuttui, — mutisi hän vihaisesti, siirsi

nopeasti setelit oikeasta kädestään vasempaan ja tempasi äkisti
taskustaan nenäliinan. Mutta nenäliinakin oli aivan verinen (tällä
samalla liinalla hän oli pyyhkinyt Grigorin päätä ja kasvoja): tuskin
ainoakaan paikka oli valkoinen, eikä veri vain ollut alkanut kuivua,
vaan liina oli ikäänkuin kovettunut ruttuun eikä ottanut auetakseen.
Mitja paiskasi sen vihaisesti lattiaan.

— Hyi perhana! Eikö teillä ole jotakin riepua… pyyhkiäkseni…

— Te olette siis vain tahraantunut ettekä haavoittunut? Peseytykää

sitten mieluimmin, — vastasi Pjotr Iljitš. — Tuossa on pesulaite, minä
annan siitä vettä.
 — Pesulaite? Se on hyvä… mutta mihin minä pistän tämän? —
sanoi hän osoittaen merkillisen tietämättömän näköisenä sadan
ruplan setelien tukkua ja katsellen häneen kysyvästi, aivan kuin
toisen olisi pitänyt päättää, mihin hän panisi omat rahansa.

— Pistäkää taskuun tai pankaa tänne pöydälle, eivät ne häviä.

— Taskuun? Niin, taskuun. Se on hyvä… Ei, näettekö, tämä kaikki

on roskaa! — huudahti hän aivan kuin heräten äkkiä
hajamielisyydestään. — Katsokaahan: me suoritamme ensin
loppuun tämän asian, pistolit nimittäin, antakaa te ne minulle
takaisin, ja tässä ovat rahanne… sillä minulle on hyvin, hyvin
tarpeen… eikä aikaakaan, aikaakaan ole hituistakaan…

Ja hän otti tukusta päällimmäisen sataruplasen sekä ojensi sen

virkamiehelle.

— Mutta minulla ei ole antaa tästä takaisin, — huomautti tämä, —

eikö teillä ole pienempää?

— Ei ole, — sanoi Mitja katsahtaen taas tukkuun, ja ikäänkuin ei

olisi varma sanoistaan hän koetti paria kolmea päällimmäistä seteliä,
— ei ole, kaikki ovat samanlaisia, — lisäsi hän ja katsoi taas
kysyvästi Pjotr Iljitšiin.

— Miten te olette noin rikastunut? — kysyi tämä. —

Odottakaahan, minä lähetän pojan käväisemään Plotnikoveilla. Ne
sulkevat kauppansa tavallisesti myöhään, — ehkäpä he vaihtavat.
Hei, Miša! — huudahti hän eteiseen.

— Plotnikovien puotiin — suurenmoinen asia! — huudahti Mitjakin,

aivan kuin jokin hyvä ajatus olisi noussut hänen mieleensä. — Miša,
— kääntyi hänen huoneeseen tulleen pojan puoleen, — katsohan
juokse Plotnikoveille ja sano, että Dmitri Fjodorovitš käski sanomaan
terveisiä ja että hän tulee kohta itse… Ja kuulehan: varustakoot
hänen tulokseen samppanjaa, noin kolme tusinaa, ja että laittaisivat
sen samalla lailla laatikkoon kuin silloin kun menin Mokrojeen…
Minä otin heiltä silloin neljä tusinaa (kääntyi hän äkkiä Pjotr Iljitšin
puoleen), kyllä he tietävät, älä ole huolissasi, Miša, — kääntyi hän
taas pojan puoleen, — ja kuule: sitten vielä juustoa, strassburgilaisia
piiraita, savustettua siikaa, siankinkkua, kaviaaria, no niin, kaikkea,
kaikkea, mitä heillä vain on, noin sadalla tai
sadallakahdellakymmenellä ruplalla, niinkuin oli ennen… Ja kuule:
etteivät unohtaisi makeisia, konvehteja, päärynöitä, kaksi tai kolme
arbuusia, tai neljä, — ei, yksi arbuusi riittää, mutta suklaata,
karamelleja, tuoksukaramelleja, — kaikkea, mitä silloin panivat
mukaani Mokrojeen, niin että samppanjan kanssa tulisi kaikkiaan
noin kolmellasadalla ruplalla… No, nyt pitää olla aivan samalla
tavalla. Ja muista, Miša, jos sinä Miša… Hänen nimensähän on
Miša? — kääntyi hän taas Pjotr Iljitšin puoleen.

— Malttakaahan, — keskeytti Pjotr Iljitš kuunnellen ja katsellen

häntä levottomana, — menkää mieluummin itse, niin sanotte siellä
kaikki, hän toimittaa asian väärin.

— Väärin toimittaa, näen, että väärin toimittaa! Oh, Miša, ja minä

kun jo olin suudella sinua asian toimittamisesta… jos toimitat oikein,
niin saat itsellesi kymmenen ruplaa, alahan laukata… Samppanjaa,
se on pääasia, samppanjaa on heidän tuotava esille, ja myös
konjakkia, sekä punaista että valkoista, ja kaikkea mitä silloinkin.
Kyllä he tietävät, miten silloin oli.
 — Mutta kuulkaa toki! — keskeytti Pjotr Iljitš jo kärsimättömänä. —
Minä sanoin: juoskoon hän vain vaihtamassa rahan ja sanomassa,
etteivät panisi puotia kiinni, ja te menette sitten itse ja sanotte…
Antakaa tänne setelinne, mars, Miša, toinen jalka on tuossa ja toinen
tuossa! — Pjotr Iljitš nähtävästi lähetti mahdollisimman pian pojan
matkaansa, sillä niinkuin Miša oli pysähtynyt vieraan eteen katsellen
silmät selällään hänen verisiä kasvojaan ja verisiä käsiään, joissa oli
rahatukku vapisevien sormien välissä, niin hän oli jäänyt
seisomaankin, suu auki ihmettelystä ja pelosta ja luultavasti
paljoakaan ymmärtämättä siitä kaikesta, mitä Mitja hänelle määräsi.

— No, nyt mennään peseytymään, — sanoi Pjotr Iljitš jurosti. —

Pankaa rahat pöydälle tai pistäkää taskuunne… Kas niin,
menkäämme.
Ottakaahan takki yltänne.

Ja hän alkoi auttaa häntä takin riisunnassa sekä huudahti taas

äkkiä: —
Katsokaa, takkinnekin on veressä!

— Ei se… ole takki. Vain vähän tässä hihan luona… Se on vain

tässä, missä nenäliina oli. Taskusta on tihkunut. Minä istuuduin
Fenjan luona liinan päälle, ja silloin veri imeytyi läpi, — selitti Mitja
heti omituisen luottavasti. Pjotr Iljitš kuunteli kulmakarvojaan
rypistäen.

— Kylläpä olette ollut hommassa; olette varmaankin tapellut

jonkun kanssa, — mutisi hän.

Alettiin peseytyä. Pjotr Iljitš piteli vesikannua ja kaateli siitä vettä.

Mitja piti kiirettä ja aikoi jättää kätensä huonosti saippuoiduiksi.
(Hänen kätensä vapisivat, kuten Pjotr Iljitš myöhemmin muisti.) Pjotr
Iljitš käski heti saippuoimaan enemmän ja hankaamaan paremmin.
Hän ikäänkuin asettui Mitjan käskijäksi tällä hetkellä, sitä enemmän,
kuta pitemmälle tultiin. Huomautamme tässä: nuori mies oli
rohkealuontoinen.

— Katsokaa, ette pessyt kynsien aluksia; no, hangatkaa nyt

kasvojanne, kas tästä: ohimoilta, korvan luota… Tässä paidassako
te lähdettekin? Mihin te olette lähdössä? Katsokaa, koko oikean
hihan reuna on veressä.

— Niin, veressä on, — huomautti Mitja katsellen paidan

hihankäännettä.

— Muuttakaa siis toiset alusvaatteet.

— Ei ole aikaa. Mutta kas, nähkääs… — jatkoi Mitja edelleen yhtä

luottavasti pyyhkiessään jo kasvojaan ja käsiään pyyheliinalla ja
pukien ylleen takin, — minä käännän tästä hihan reunaa, niin se ei
näy takin alta… Näettekö!

— Sanokaa nyt, missä olette saanut tuon paukauksen? Oletteko

tapellut jonkun kanssa? Eiköhän taas ravintolassa, niinkuin
silloinkin? Kas taas kapteenin kanssa, niinkuin silloin, löitte häntä ja
raastoitte? — lausui aivan kuin entisestä moittien Pjotr Iljitš. — Ketä
vielä olette piessyt… tai ehkäpä olette tappanut?

— Roskaa! — lausui Mitja.

— Miten niin?

— Ei tarvitse, — sanoi Mitja ja naurahti äkkiä: — minä litistin

äsken torilla kuoliaaksi erään ämmän.
 — Litistitte kuoliaaksi? Ämmän?

— Ukon! — huudahti Mitja katsoen Pjotr Iljitšiä suoraan kasvoihin,

nauraen ja huutaen hänelle kuin vähäkuuloiselle.

— Heh, hitto vieköön, ukon, ämmän… Oletteko tappanut jonkun?

— Me sovimme. Kävimme kiinni toisiimme — ja sovimme.

Yhdessä paikassa. Erottiin ystävinä. Eräs hölmö… hän antoi minulle
anteeksi… nyt on jo varmasti antanut anteeksi… Jos olisi noussut,
niin ei olisi antanut anteeksi, — sanoi Mitja iskien äkkiä silmää. —
Mutta tiedättekö, hitto hänestä, kuuletteko, Pjotr Iljitš, hiisi hänet
vieköön, ei tarvitse! Tällä hetkellä en tahdo! — tokaisi Mitja
päättävästi.

— Sitä minä vain, että onpa teillä halua joutua tekemisiin jokaisen
kanssa… niinkuin silloin aivan jonninjoutavasta asiasta tuon
alikapteenin kanssa… Olette tapellut ja nyt kiidätte huimaa vauhtia
juopottelemaan — siinä koko teidän luonteenne. Kolme tusinaa
samppanjaa — mihin niin paljon?

— Bravo! Antakaa nyt pistolit. Jumal'auta, ei ole aikaa. Tekisi mieli

puhella kanssasi, ystäväiseni, mutta ei ole aikaa. Eikä ensinkään ole
tarviskaan, puhuminen on myöhäistä. Ahaa! Missä ovatkaan rahat,
minne minä ne pistin? — — huudahti hän ja alkoi työnnellä
taskuihinsa käsiään.

— Pöydälle panitte… itse… tuolla ne ovat. Unohditteko? Totisesti,

teille on raha vain kuin roskaa tai vettä. Tässä ovat pistolinne.
Omituista, kellon käydessä kuutta panttasitte ne kymmenestä
ruplasta, mutta kas miten teillä nyt on tuhansia. Kaksi tai ehkäpä
kolme?
 — Ehkäpä kolme, — naurahti Mitja työntäen rahat housujen
sivutaskuun.

— Te pudotatte ne tuolla tavoin. Onko teillä kultakaivos, vai mitä?

— Kaivos? Kultakaivos! — huusi Mitja kaikin voimin ja aivan

vääntelehti naurusta, — haluatteko, Perhotin, kaivokseen? Eräs
rouva täällä lyö teille heti pöytään kolmetuhatta, että vain lähtisitte.
Minulle löi jo rahat pöytään, hän pitää ihmeen paljon kaivoksista!
Tunnetteko rouva Hohlakovin?

— En ole tuttu, mutta olen kuullut ja nähnyt. Onko hän todellakin

antanut teille kolmetuhatta? Noin vain pudotti pöytään? — sanoi
Pjotr Iljitš katsoen epäilevästi.

— Mutta huomenna, kun aurinko lentää ylös, kun ikuisesti nuori

Foibos kohoaa korkeuteen, ylistäen ja kiittäen Jumalaa, huomenna
menkää hänen luokseen, rouva Hohlakovin luo nimittäin, ja kysykää
häneltä itse: pudottiko hän minulle eilen pöytään kolmetuhatta vai
eikö? Tiedustakaahan.

— Minä en tunne teidän suhteitanne… kun te kerran puhutte noin

vakuuttavasti, niin hän siis on antanut… Mutta te pistitte rahat
kouraanne ja laskettelette täyttä kyytiä, ei kuitenkaan Siperiaan…
Mutta mihin te nyt olette menossa?

— Mokrojeen.

— Mokrojeen? Nythän on yö!

— Mastruque oli kaikessa, Mastruque ei nyt ole mikään! — lausui

Mitja äkkiä.
 — Kuinka ei mikään? Tuolla lailla tuhannet käsissä, eikö olisi
mikään?

— En minä puhu tuhansista. Hiiteen tuhannet! Minä puhun naisen

luonnosta…

»Herkkäuskoinen hän on,

petollinen, paheellinen.»

Minä olen samaa mieltä kuin Odysseus.

— En ymmärrä teitä!

— Olenko humalassa vai?

— Ette humalassa, mutta vielä pahempaa.

— Minä olen henkisesti humalassa, Pjotr Iljitš, henkisesti

humalassa, ja riittää, riittää jo…

— Mitä te nyt, lataatteko pistolin?

— Lataan pistolin.

Mitja oli todella avannut pistolilaatikon, aukaissut ruutisarven ja

tiputti huolellisesti ruutia sekä laittoi latingin. Sitten hän otti luodin, ja
ennenkuin pisti sen sisälle, hän nosti sen kahden sormensa välissä
eteensä kynttilän yläpuolelle.

— Miksi te katselette luotia? — sanoi Pjotr Iljitš seuraten

levottomana ja uteliaana hänen toimiaan.

— Muuten vain. Kuvittelua. Jos sinun päähäsi pistäisi laskea tämä

kuula aivoihisi, niin katselisitko sinä pistolia ladatessasi tätä vai etkö?
 — Minkä tähden sitä olisi katseltava?

— Kun menee minun aivoihini, niin on mielenkiintoista katsoa sitä,

millainen se on… Muuten tämä on pötyä, hetkellistä pötyä. No, nyt
se on valmis, — lisäsi hän pistettyään luodin sisälle ja tiivistettyään
sen tappuroilla. — Pjotr Iljitš, hyvä ystävä, se on roskaa, kaikki on
roskaa, jospa tietäisit miten suuressa määrässä roskaa! Annahan
minulle nyt palanen paperia.

— Tässä on paperipala.

— Ei, sileätä, puhdasta, jolle kirjoitetaan. Kas niin. — Ja ottaen

pöydältä kynän Mitja kirjoitti paperille nopeasti kaksi riviä, taittoi
paperin neljään osaan ja pisti liivintaskuun. Pistolit hän pani
laatikkoon, lukitsi laatikon pienellä avaimella ja otti sen käsiinsä.
Sitten hän katsoi Pjotr Iljitšiin ja hymyili pitkään ja miettivästi.

— Nyt menemme, — sanoi hän.

— Minne menemme? Ei, odottakaahan… Kenties te tahdotte

lähettää sen aivoihinne, luodin nimittäin… — lausui Pjotr Iljitš
levottomana.

— Luoti on roskaa! Minä tahdon elää, minä rakastan elämää!

Tiedä se.
Minä rakastan kultakutrista Foibosta ja hänen kuumaa valoansa…
Rakas
Pjotr Iljitš, osaatko sinä väistyä?

— Miten väistyä?

— Jättää tien vapaaksi. Rakkaalle ja vihatulle olennolle antaa

tietä.
Ja niin että vihattukin tulisi rakkaaksi, — antaa sillä tavoin tietä!
Ja sanoa heille: Jumala kanssanne, menkää, kulkekaa ohi, mutta
minä…

— Mutta te?

— Riittää, menkäämme.

— Jumaliste, minä sanon jollekulle (Pjotr Iljitš katsoi häneen),

etteivät päästäisi teitä sinne. Miksi teidän nyt on mentävä
Mokrojeen?

— Nainen on siellä, nainen, ja riittää jo sinulle, Pjotr Iljitš, loru on

lopussa!

— Kuulkaahan, vaikka te olettekin villi, niin minä aina olen jostakin

syystä teistä pitänyt… siksipä nyt olenkin levoton.

— Kiitos sinulle, veli. Minä olen villi, sanot sinä. Villi-ihmisiä, villi-
ihmisiä! Yhtä asiaa minä sinulle vain vakuutankin: villi-ihmisiä! Ahaa,
siinä on Miša, minäpä olinkin unohtanut hänet.

Miša tuli sisälle kiireissään tuoden tukun vaihdettua rahaa ja

ilmoitti, että Plotnikoveilla »kaikki rupesivat puuhaan» ja kantelevat
pulloja sekä kalaa ja teetä — heti paikalla kaikki valmiina. Mitja
sieppasi kymmenruplasen ja antoi Pjotr Iljitšille sekä viskasi toisen
kymmenruplasen Mišalle.

— Ei saa! — huudahti Pjotr Iljitš. — Minun talossani ei saa, ja se

on sitäpaitsi joutavaa hemmoittelua. Pankaa pois rahanne, pankaa
tänne, mitä te niitä tuhlaatte? Huomenna ne jo ovat tarpeen, tulette
luokseni pyytämään kymmentä ruplaa. Miksi te tungette kaikki
sivutaskuun? Pudotatte siitä!
 — Kuule, hyvä mies, mennäänkö Mokrojeen yhdessä?

— Kuule, tahdotko, niin heti avaan pullon, juodaan elämän malja!

Minun tekee mieleni juoda ja ennen kaikkea sinun kanssasi. En ole
koskaan juonut kanssasi, mitä?

— Ehkäpä ravintolassa, miksei, menkäämme, minä olen itsekin

juuri sinne lähdössä.

— Ei ole aikaa ravintolassa, vaan Plotnikovien puodissa,

peräkamarissa.
Tahdotko, että annan heti arvattavaksesi erään arvoituksen?

— Anna.

Mitja veti liivinsä taskusta paperipalan, levitti sen auki ja näytti.

Selvällä ja isolla käsialalla oli siihen kirjoitettu:

»Rankaisen itseäni koko elämäni tähden, koko elämäni

rankaisen!»

— Ihan todella, minä sanon jollekulle, lähden heti sanomaan, —

lausui paperin luettuaan Pjotr Iljitš.

— Et ennätä, ystävä-kulta, mennään ja juodaan, mars!

Plotnikovien puoti oli melkein vain yhtä taloa tuonnempana Pjotr

Iljitšin asunnolta, kadun kulmauksessa. Se oli suurin herkkukauppa
kaupungissamme, rikkaitten kauppiaitten oma, eikä sinänsä
ollenkaan huono puoti. Siellä oli kaikkea, mitä jossakin
pääkaupungin puodissakin, kaikkia herkkutavaroita: »Jelisejevin
veljesten pulloihin panemia» viinejä, hedelmiä, sikareja, teetä,
sokeria, kahvia ym. Aina oli puodissa kolme kauppa-apulaista ja
asioilla kaksi juoksupoikaa. Vaikka seutumme oli köyhtynyt,
tilanomistajat hajaantuneet muualle, kaupankäynti vähentynyt, niin
herkkukauppa kukoisti kuten ennenkin, vieläpä vuosi vuodelta yhä
paremmin: näiden tavarain ostajista ei ollut puutetta. Mitjaa odotettiin
puodissa kärsimättömästi. Muistettiin kovin hyvin kuinka hän kolme
tai neljä viikkoa sitten oli samalla tavoin yhdellä kertaa ottanut
kaikenlaista tavaraa ja viinejä muutamalla sadalla ruplalla käteistä
rahaa (velaksi hänelle ei tietenkään olisi mitään uskottukaan),
muistettiin, että samoin kuin nytkin hänellä oli ollut käsissä
kokonainen tukku sataruplasia ja hän oli heitellyt niitä kevyesti
ympärilleen, tinkimättä, harkitsematta ja tahtomatta harkita, mihin
hän tarvitsi niin paljon tavaraa, viiniä ym. Koko kaupungissa kerrottiin
sitten, että hän oli silloin ajanut Grušenjkan kanssa Mokrojeen ja
»pannut menemään yhtenä yönä ja sitä seuraavana päivänä
kolmetuhatta yhdellä kertaa ja palannut hurjastelumatkaltaan ilman
ainoatakaan lanttia, yhtä tyhjänä kuin oli maailman syntynyt».
Mustalainen oli silloin nostanut jalkeille kokonaisen mustalaisjoukon
(joka siihen aikaan kuljeksi meidän tienoillamme), ja nämä
puhdistivat kahdessa vuorokaudessa häneltä, juopuneelta, pois
kaikki rahat ja joivat määrättömästi kalliita viinejä. Kerrottiin,
naureskellen Mitjalle, että hän oli juottanut Mokrojessa
talonpoikaismoukille samppanjaa, syöttänyt konvehteja ja
strassburgilaisia piiraita maalaistytöille ja akoille. Naureskeltiin myös
meillä, varsinkin ravintolassa, Mitjan omalle ja silloin julkisesti
tekemälle tunnustukselle (ei tietystikään naureskeltu hänelle vasten
naamaa, sillä vasten naamaa nauraminen hänelle oli hieman
vaarallista), että Grušenjkalta hän ei ollut koko tästä »rymystä»
hyötynyt sen enempää kuin että Grušenjka oli antanut hänen
suudella jalkaansa, mutta mitään muuta ei ollut antanutkaan.
 Kun Mitja ja Pjotr Iljitš saapuivat puodin luo, niin he näkivät sen
ovella jo valmiina kolmivaljakon, peitteellä varustetut rattaat
kelloineen ja kulkusineen sekä kyytimies Andrein, joka odotti Mitjaa.
Puodissa oli jo ennätetty »laittaa kuntoon» yksi laatikko melkein
kokonaan kaikkine tavaroineen ja odotettiin vain Mitjan tuloa, jotta
laatikko voitaisiin naulata kiinni ja viedä rattaille. Pjotr Iljitš
hämmästyi.

— Mistä olet ennättänyt saada kolmivaljakon? — kysyi hän

Mitjalta.

— Sinun luoksesi juostessani kohtasin tämän Andrein ja käskin

hänen ajaa suoraan tänne puodin eteen. Ei ole syytä tuhlata aikaa!
Viime kerralla menin Timofein kyydissä, mutta Timofei on nyt tö-tö-tö,
ennen minua kiitänyt matkaan erään velhon kanssa. Andrei,
myöhästymmekö paljon?

— Vain tunnin verran ennen meitä saapuvat perille, eikä täyttä

sitäkään, vain tunnin kaiken kaikkiaan ennättävät edelle! — lausui
Andrei kiireesti. — Minähän laitoin Timofein matkaan, tiedän, kuinka
he ajavat. Eivät he aja niinkuin me, Dmitri Fjodorovitš, kuinka ne
meille riittäisivät. Eivät ennätä edes tuntia aikaisemmin! — sanoi
innokkaasti Andrei, punapartainen, ei vielä vanha kyytimies,
laihanpuoleinen, alusnuttuun puettu mies, viitta vasemmalla
käsivarrella.

— Viisikymmentä ruplaa juomarahaa, jos jäät vain tunnin jäljelle!

— Tunnista menemme takuuseen, Dmitri Fjodorovitš, heh, eivät

pääse edelle puoltakaan tuntia, saati sitten tunnin!
 Vaikka Mitja touhusikin asiaa järjestäessään, niin hän puhui ja
määräili hieman omituisesti, sikin sokin eikä järjestyksessä. Aloitti
yhtä ja unhotti lopun. Pjotr Iljitš huomasi tarpeelliseksi puuttua asiaan
ja ryhtyä auttamaan.

— Neljälläsadalla ruplalla, ei vähemmän kuin neljälläsadalla, jotta

olisi täsmälleen niinkuin silloinkin, — komensi Mitja. — Neljä tusinaa
samppanjaa, ei yhtään pulloa vähemmän.

— Mihin sinä tarvitset niin paljon, mitä se tarkoittaa! Seis! — ärjäisi

Pjotr Iljitš. — Mikä laatikko tämä on? Mitä siinä on? Onko tässä
todellakin neljälläsadalla ruplalla?

Hänelle selittivät touhuissaan olevat kauppa-apulaiset sulavin

puhein, että tässä ensimmäisessä laatikossa on ainoastaan puoli
tusinaa samppanjaa ja »kaikenlaisia ensi hätään välttämättömiä
asioita», kuten haukepaloja, konvehteja, tuoksukaramelleja ym.
Mutta pääosa »tarpeista» pannaan laatikkoihin ja lähetetään tuossa
paikassa erikseen kuten silläkin kertaa, eri rattailla ja niinikään
kolmivaljakolla, ja ennättää perille ajoissa, »vain tunnin verran
myöhemmin se tulee perille kuin itse Dmitri Fjodorovitš».

— Ei enempää kuin tuntia myöhemmin, ei tuntia enempää, ja

pankaa mahdollisimman paljon tuoksukaramelleja ja pitkiä makeisia;
tytöt pitävät semmoisista, — vaati Mitja innokkaasti.

— Pitkiä karamelleja — olkoon menneeksi. Mutta mitä sinä teet

neljällä tusinalla? Yksi riittää, — lausui Pjotr Iljitš jo melkein
suuttuneena. Hän alkoi tinkiä, hän tahtoi laskun, hän ei ottanut
rauhoittuakseen. Kuitenkin hänen onnistui pelastaa kaiken kaikkiaan
vain sata ruplaa. Sovittiin siitä, että tavaraa otettaisiin enintään
kolmensadan ruplan arvosta.
 — Mutta hitto teidät vieköön! — huudahti Pjotr Iljitš aivan kuin olisi
äkkiä ajatellut asiaa tarkemmin. — Mitä tekemistä minulla tässä
oikeastaan on? Viskele rahasi menemään, jos kerran olet ne
ilmaiseksi saanut!

— Tänne, taloudenhoitaja, tänne, älä suutu, — puhui Mitja vetäen

häntä puodin peräkamariin, — täällä annetaan meille heti pullo ja me
härppäämme. Oh, Pjotr Iljitš, lähdetään yhdessä, sillä sinä olet hyvä
mies, minä pidän tämmöisistä.

Mitja istuutui pienelle korituolille aivan pikkuisen pöydän ääreen,

jota peitti hyvin likainen pikku liina. Pjotr Iljitš istuutui vastapäätä
häntä, ja silmänräpäyksessä ilmestyi pöytään samppanjaa. Kysyttiin,
eivätkö herrat haluaisi ostereita, »aivan ensiluokkaisia ostereita,
kaikkein viimeisintä lähetystä».

— Hiiteen osterit, en minä syö, eikä tarvitse mitään, — vastasi

melkein vihaisesti Pjotr Iljitš.

— Ei ole aikaa syödä ostereita, — huomautti Mitja, — eikä ole

ruokahaluakaan. Tiedätkö, ystävä, — lausui hän yhtäkkiä
tunteikkaasti, — minä en ole koskaan rakastanut kaikkea tätä
epäjärjestystä.

— Kuka sitä sitten rakastaa! Kolme tusinaa, hyväinen aika,

moukille, se tekee lopun vaikka kenestä.

— En minä siitä puhu. Puhun korkeammasta järjestyksestä.

Minussa ei ole järjestystä, ja kaikki menee hiiteen! Koko elämäni on
ollut epäjärjestystä, ja täytyy panna toimeen järjestys. Sutkauttelenko
nyt, vai mitä?