take Bail’s “uses of silence” to move now to gap. This is the fastest, when the text goes mute and we can leap over eons of story time. White space! Overused often, but so useful. All sorts of things can “happen” in white space: a few minutes, a month, centuries—leaving a place for a reader to ponder or guess. On the other side of the gap, back in the stream of words, you might need to figure out what you missed. In Salarrué’s short-short “We Bad,” a sliver of space between the story’s halves equals several hours one night—but in this space, a man and his son are murdered. This we learn obliquely a few paragraphs after the gap: “In the nearby gully, Goyo and his youngster fled bit by bit in the beaks of vultures.” Salarrué doesn’t have to picture the murder. He makes us do it, makes us complicit.
So: scene = real time; summary = fast; ellipsis or gap = fastest. Now, back down the scale from real time. If the printed words showing a story event take more time to read than the event would: dilation. Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” about a book critic named Anders who gets caught in a bank robbery, is the best showcase I know of all speeds, especially dilation. (Try reading the story line by line, noting the speed of each.) Here is one of two specimens of dilation in “Bullet.” We’re mid-story, once the robber has grown annoyed with Anders; in the below lines we’ll start with real-time/scenic treatment (dialogue, narration) before making a deft switch. Anders has caught the robber’s attention and been told to look away:
Anders fixed his gaze on the man’s shiny wing-tip shoes.
“Not down there. Up there.” He stuck the pistol under Anders’ chin and pushed it upward until Anders was looking at the ceiling.
Anders had never paid much attention to that part of the bank. . . . The domed ceiling had been decorated with mythological figures whose fleshy, toga-draped ugliness Anders had taken in at a glance many years earlier and afterward declined to notice. Now he had no choice but to scrutinize the painter’s work. . . . The ceiling was crowded with various dramas, but the one that caught Anders’ eye was Zeus and Europa—portrayed, in this rendition, as a bull ogling a cow from behind a haystack. To make the cow sexy, the painter had canted her hips suggestively and given her long, droopy eyelashes through which she gazed back at the bull with sultry welcome. The bull wore a smirk and his eyebrows were arched. If there’d been a bubble coming out of his mouth, it would have said, “Hubba hubba.”
“What’s so funny, bright boy?”
Story time passes as we gaze with Anders at the ludicrous ceiling: we know this because the robber responds to Anders’s evident snickering: “What’s so funny, bright boy?” I’ve deleted several lines from the passage, yet it still takes a bit longer to read about the ceiling than for Anders to study it. Dilation: text time is greater than story time. Wolff dilates extravagantly a few lines later, when the robber (spoiler alert) shoots Anders in the head:
The bullet smashed Anders’ skull and ploughed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down into the thalamus. But before all this occurred, the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neuro-transmissions. Because of their peculiar origin these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory.
What follows is a brilliantly counterintuitive pause. All action in the story has stopped, and we are told instead what is not happening: what Anders doesn’t remember. Not his first lover and “the cordial way she had with his unit,” not his wife, not his daughter, not the sweet moments when he saw that he loved literature. The account of what Anders did not remember goes on for a page, and while we read, the story has frozen. Lots of text, but no event: the slowest narrative speed, a pause. But given what we are waiting for—to see what Anders does remember, and for the bullet to “do its work and leave the troubled skull behind”—I’m happy to sit suspended.
When the pause is over, we learn at last what Anders recalls, in a return to scenic treatment. But it’s the sort of scene that exists in memory, occupying an enchanted space in Anders’s altered brain-time: “This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects . . .” Do you hear that word heat? A single word, small as can be. But it takes up time: the long diphthong; the reconfiguration of my inner mouth to move from remembered to the opening H; another reconfiguration to move from that final t and onward. Heat. This single word slows me, creates a lull between the act of remembering and what’s remembered. This word clears a glade in the mind for the potent, lingering scene that will be Anders’s final memory and the end of his story.
Why have a menu of speeds? For illusion, economy, variety, of course. Also for magic and power. See the reader, paralyzed by a white page marked with tiny pictures. Only her eyes move, from cluster to cluster of letters, a dot or two, a curl, but in her brain: synaptic lightning, a whirring glade, heat.
PATTERNING WITH SPEEDS OR FLOW
Choosing different types or lengths of words, sentences, and speeds lets you design a narrative as variegated as a garden. But you can also create patterns with speeds, manipulating the story so that repetitions and rhythms emerge just below the surface. You can switch among narrated action, a reflective pause, speedy summary, more action, a curious gap, a pause for comment, and so on: you can make a pattern of flow and still-spots. Chandra’s story “Shakti” is a fine specimen of this.
VIKRAM CHANDRA’S “SHAKTI”
This long story from Love and Longing in Bombay is about Sheila Bijlani and her cheery ambition to rise socially, which means battling the old-world socialite Dolly Boatwalla. It’s a mini–mock epic told by gossiping men:
What you must understand about Sheila Bijlani is that she was always glamorous. Even nowadays, when in the corners of parties you hear the kind of jealous bitching that goes on and they say there was a day when she was nothing but the daughter of a common chemist-type shopkeeper growing up amongst potions and medicines, you must never forget that the shop was just below Kemp’s Corner. . . . [S]he saw the glittering women who went in and out of the shop, sometimes for aspirin, sometimes for lipstick, and Sheila watched and learnt a thing or two.
Two pages of chatty summary follow Sheila as she becomes a hostess for Air France, marries unlikely, sweaty Bijlani, who manufactures “mixies” (blenders), and lands in a huge apartment on Malabar Hill. “So now Sheila was on the hill, not quite on the top but not quite at the bottom, either, and from this base camp she began her steady ascent. . . . [T]he top of the hill was the Boatwalla mansion, which stood on a ridge surrounded by crumbling walls.”
Clear lines. Sheila belongs to a world of mixies and airplanes: newness, fluidity, ascent. Dolly, atop the hill, belongs to crumbling walls and old freighters (she is a “kind of stately ship”). A battle will rage between women and social classes, and it will last years, from a snubbing to a blackballing, to the founding of an exclusive club, to a marriage proposal to a buyout effort, and at last to a marriage-merger. Chandra could sum up all incidents in a few sentences, or give each incident full scenic treatment. Neither would be smart. Instead, he gives each element its due time on the page. He shows scenes that are truly dramatic, where something happens that we must see, and intersperses them with summary, gaps, and so on. Good pacing. But the variations in speed over forty pages also reveal two patterning systems that help give the story motion and form.
I see the first system in the content of the scenes. Each (insulting) act meets a counteract: attack A, counterattack A’, attack B, counterattack B’. This system of retribution has a larger parallel in the social rectification going on throughout the story: the Sheilas of India will rise,
