Time gate

Unlike painting and sculpture, fiction is the art of time. Painting and sculpture is to create a space, with static plane and geometric modeling to retain the moment of time. But the novel represents the flow of time. Those forgotten corners in the years are recalled and recorded by the author in the novel, which is the charm of the novel.

The concept of time in novels can be divided into narrative time and story time. Narrative time is the number of words and pages required by the author to narrate the story. It can also be said that it is the time for the reader to finish reading a novel. Story time, on the other hand, takes us into the story the author is telling, having the same time coordinates as the characters in the story, experiencing the passage of time, the time when a story takes place. If narrative time is an empty house, story time is a bird in this room. There is no consistency between the two kinds of time in the creation. The author can use 20 pages to describe a woman's life, or use hundreds of pages to describe a man's morning.

But in most cases the story time is greater than the narrative time. What the novel creates is a different space from the first world. Its success lies in its authenticity, it is always a projection of the First world. No, it is possible to enter the world narrated by the novel within the narrative time, experience everything that happens in the story and experience the time in the story, so that the time is flexible. You can spend a year or even a lifetime with a fictional character in a few hours, experiencing their sadness, happiness, the passing of time and the fear of death, without paying any attention to the real threat of time. From this point of view, emotion is also the product of time, it has no space coordinates, belongs to the category of time, only strong and plain. What we need to do is to control the story time by mastering the time rhythm of the narrative.

The author can use the blank of the story and the ambiguity of emotion to achieve the balance of time and the sublimation of the theme. Blank is not to say when not to say, with silence to express. He is a good medicine to escape two kinds of time gap, "many years later" how many stories can happen in many years, but the author did not write out, leaving the reader is infinite imagination space. The intensity of emotion belongs to time, so we can analyze and describe it and make it digital. Aesthetically, the moment of beauty is the moment when it reaches the peak, because everyone knows that everything must go downhill when it reaches the peak. The same is true of relationships. The author is well aware of this, so what we should do in the novel is not to vent our feelings, but rather to maintain reason and moderation, to dilute or obscure the feelings, ambiguity is the premise of the representation of time, because time itself is ambiguous.

Time in fiction is not the same concept as time in reality. Classical novels pay attention to the depiction of space, while modern novels lay more emphasis on the core role of time. To some extent, the view of time in modern novels is the same as that in modern physics. It no longer has the direction of mental time and is no longer single linear. When we sigh that time flies in life and feel the ever-present threat of death, physics proves that time has no direction and adds a time coordinate to the three-dimensional space, so the past, present and future become a mixed space.

In the same way, we don't see time flying into the future like an arrow, but we can say that in the modern novel, we are in an ocean of time. In the space of a story, we can see that time with different coordinates diverges in all directions. We can easily go back to the past from the present and jump from the past to the future. "If time is finite, then we are at a point in time. If time is infinite, then we are at any point in time." The directionless time in the novel is infinite, that is to say, the novel eliminates the certainty of reality and shows the uncertainty of time, which is the essence of approaching the world.

"Many years later, facing the firing squad, Aureliano. Admiral Buendia will remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to see ice." At the end of this article, I would like to extract the quotation from the beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which encapsulates all the views of time in modern novels. It is a philosophical time, combining chronological, flashback and prechronological. It can be said that modern novels are the evolution and alienation of this sentence