Chapter 43 time span

Hubert gave Charles and Erin an adorable baby for Christmas.It was a baby boy and his name was Paul.Charles and Irene, childless for many years, were overjoyed.They gathered around the crib watching Paul and couldn't get enough of them.The child is very beautiful, with black hair and black eyes.Charles and Irene ask Hubert where did the baby come from?Hubert said it was from the river bank.His answer puzzled Charles and Irene.The three of them drank sweet hot wine.Paul watched them from the cot.It made Hubert very happy to see Charles and Irene so happy.They drank a few more glasses. Eric was born.

Hubert and Erin have a secret affair.They felt the point was not to let Charles know.For this purpose, they bought a bed and put it in another house near where Charles, Eileen and Paul lived.The new bed is not big, but very comfortable.Paul watched Hubert and Irene thoughtfully.Their affair lasted twelve years and was very successful. Hilda. Charles watched Hilda grow up from the window of his house.At first, she was just a baby, and then she grew to be four years old.Twelve years later, Hilda was sixteen, the same age as Paul.What a beautiful little girl!Charles thought secretly.Paul felt the same way as Charles, who had already licked Hilda's beautiful tits.

Donald Barthelme "Can You Tell Me?" "Come Back, Dr. Kelly Gary" (1964) In section sixteen I talked about the sequence of events and the possible rearrangement of the sequence of events in a novel.Another aspect of novel time is time span.It is measured by comparing the time it takes for events to actually happen and the time it takes to read them.This factor affects the pace of the narrative, the sense of whether what we call a novel is fast-paced or slow-paced.Thrillers are full of conflicts, though sometimes key moments of tension are deliberately delayed in order to heighten the suspense.Stream-of-consciousness novels narrate at length what happened every moment, no matter how banal or dull it may be.A novel like Middlemarch seems close to life in pace because it contains many extended scenes where characters can talk and interact as they would in real life.For readers of the original text of the novel, if you buy this kind of novel that is serialized in bimonthly periodicals for a year, the rhythm of life and art will be more consistent.A puzzling feature of Donald Barthelme's novels is that his descriptions of relationships and relations between the sexes are sketchy, unlike the detailed, concrete descriptions we so often see in short stories.

Barthelme died in 1989.He is an important figure in American postmodernist novels.Postmodernist novels constantly explore the limits of novel form.Of course, in the opening part of the story, besides the time span, the writer deals with the issues of causality, coherence, and consistency of argument in an unconventional way.These features make realistic novels popular, smooth and easy to understand.And these were dismissed or completely disrupted by Barthelme.The kind of motive shown in the excerpt from Middlemarch which we discussed in the previous section is not to be found here.Barthelme suggests that people's behavior is not governed by reason, but by fantasy, luck, and unconscious impulses—in short, that life is "absurd."In this story, he recounts the bizarre, horrific behavior with a realistic, deceptively naive style that owes partly to elementary school reading books and children's "compositions" (simple declarative sentences, no clauses, effects of close repetition of words and omission of quotation marks).The protagonists of the story are Janet and John and their parents and the like, sometimes seeming as stupid as they are.

Strictly speaking, the first paragraph is a "plot" of the novel, but the author only narrates it succinctly.Getting a baby for Christmas and the recipient feels nothing out of place.The gift-giver only "confuses" them by saying that the child was brought "from the other side of the river."They drank the sweet hot wine calmly and did not continue to ask this question. There are only a few short words in the next paragraph: "Eric was born"—we don't know where he was born, or how he was related in time to Paul's arrival. The third paragraph describes an affair between Hubert and Irene.There's a lot to say about their bed—much more than we need to know.Little is given about their relationship, their sexual pleasures, their means of deceiving Charles, and other details we might expect from a story of extramarital affairs.We do not know whether Hubert sent Paul as a gift before or after his affair with Irene.We can deduce that Irene took the children to meet Hubert because "Paul watched Hubert and Irene thoughtfully".Then we learn that "their affair went on for twelve years and was very successful"—a phrase we often use to describe a marriage, not an affair.It is also very confusing to write a sentence describing a specific time followed by a sentence summarizing twelve years of experience.

When the author introduced the character Hilda to us, he only used one word in the whole paragraph—Hilda.We can guess from what follows that she is the girl who lives next door to Charles and Irene.She grew from a baby to a teenager, and the author only used a simple sentence to summarize.If these adults behave like children, the children seem disturbingly precocious: Paul has "licked Hilda's pretty tits" long before Charles conventionally thinks Hilda is a pretty girl.In twenty or so lines, we have obtained enough material for another writer to write a novel.To get a better understanding of this method of writing, the reader must be familiar with the more traditional, more realistic fiction, and deviations are only detectable by comparison with certain rules.