"Order, Duration and Frequency" by Gerard Genette - Article Summary

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Gerard Genette is a French structuralist.

Genette suggests approaching narrative as though it is a discourse (a discussion, or dissertation on a topic). He discusses time in relation to narrative in terms of order, duration and frequency of events within the narrative.

Order
In most works of literature the order in which events are related in the text is different from the chronological succession of events. Instead there are flashbacks or flash forwards. The story may go back and forth between relating events chronologically or achronologically. 

Anachronisms may be repetitive if the event has already been related in the narrative, or completive if they fill in an earlier blanks in the narrative (recalls) or later blanks in the narrative (announcements). These anachronisms are used to enhance or create meaning in the narrative or foreshadow occurrences. There are variations on these, retrospections within anticipations etc. There are also achronic events, which did not happen at a defined time (a story may be told with location as a reference with no relation to time for instance).

Duration
It is usually hard to define exactly the duration of an event within a narrative. Genette proposes that we define relative duration of events according to the number of pages the event is written on per historical duration of the event (for example 2 pages/minute). We can look at the relative duration of the events and the order in which they are told and get a sense of the pace of the narrative, and which events are relatively important.

An event in terms of its duration per historical length unit can structurally be categorized as follows: summary (narrative time<historical time), dramatic scene (narrative time=historical time), stasis (narrative time>historical time), and ellipsis (skipping over time periods or: narrative time<<<historical time). If the author narrates how a character feels while an event is ongoing, the narrative time does not stop.

Frequency
There are variations on the number of times an event can be related in a narrative. A singulative narrative is an event that happens once and mentioned only once. Another option is to mention several times an event that happened once. Another option is to mention several times what happened several times. This option is more syntactical than informative- repeating the event with the same wording, where the author could as easily have summarized the repetitive events in one breath (an iterative narrative), serves to create emphasis or elaborate upon the occurrence.

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