Back again he darted from the high-roofed hall, laughing loudly; the arrow burned in the girl, underneath her heart, like a flame. Ever she shot sparkling eyes at Aeson’s son, and in distress prudent thoughts were blown from her chest; no other memory she held but flooded her heart with sweet pain.
‘She had told the lovely-haired maids in her house to set a great three-legged cauldron over the fire, so there could be hot water for Hektor’s bath when he came home from battle – poor child, she did not know that far away from any baths bright-eyed Athene had brought him down at the hands of Achilleus’.
When characters in narrative fiction engage in direct speech, we read via a narrator’s quotation the perspectives, thoughts, and interpretations of those characters on events (past, ongoing, and prospective) in the storyworld in which they operate. And when they don’t speak? We might have difficulty reading them.
‘Prototypically, narrative involves not only a temporal sequence into which events are slotted in a particular way, and not only a dynamic of canonicity and breach; more than this, stories represent – and perhaps make it possible to experience – what it is like to undergo events within a storyworld-in-flux.’
Reading Experiments / The Reading Experience
by Tim Kenny
by Tim Kenny · Published October 10, 2017 · Last modified July 1, 2023
‘Suspense thus essentially relates to the dynamics of ongoing action; curiosity to the dynamics of temporal deformation.’ Some thoughts on the ordering of exposition in the Argonautica’s Lemnian episode and how reordering might affect a reader’s experience and interpretation of the narrative.
‘When he stretched the great bow into a circle, the bow twanged and the string rang out and the arrow leapt – sharp-pointed, eager to fall among the crowd.’ Thoughts on narrative duration using examples from Greek Epic: Gods, Archers and Stretching Time in the Iliad and Argonautica.
An outline of a reader-oriented theory of the novel. Narratives have gaps, narratives are selective, narratives are sketches of a world. What is a reader to do with the indeterminacies? Fill them in!