Time Flows Downhill

Stories exist in time.

When Walt Disney told a story, his concept of time within the worlds he created was a simple past, present and future.  Once upon a time (past) the story takes place.  The events happen one after another, with no real sense of minutes, hours or days.  One moment follows the next.  The scenes advance time without any specifics though, other than maybe day or night.  It all ends when the characters live happily ever after (future).

J.R.R. Tolkien was much more concerned about careful chronology.  Prior to writing his stories of Middle Earth, he calculated the moon phases for his specially created calendar.  He charted the movement of storms through his world on a calendar.  He researched the amount of time it took to ride a horse across different terrain.

Tolkien not only was meticulous about time, he took risks as a storyteller by looping his stories.  He would follow one group of characters for an extended period.  His telling would then go back in time to pick up another plot and bring it up to the present.  His editors told him that no one would want to read a story where the main characters are absent for more than a hundred pages at a time.  They were wrong.

William Faulkner seems to have been obsessed with questions of time.  His novels rarely follow linear time.  They are instead often filled with chapters that appear contrary to chronological sequence.  This can make his stories difficult to follow.  But at the same time, his narratives are richer as the juxtaposition of events which would generally be separated because of time often reveal deeper meanings.

We tend to expect our narratives to proceed in linear time, but Faulkner shows his mastery of storytelling by refusing to follow convention and expectation.  In The Sound and the Fury, which tells the stories of a families generations in the course of four days.  Benjy, one of the Compson brothers, is mentally challenged and experiences everything as if it is in the present.  Another of the narrating brothers, Quentin is obsessed with time.  The family slave Dilsey narrates the final chapter which is punctuated by the church bell marking the hour for worship on Easter Sunday.

Storytellers have many tools at their disposal.  Faulkner realized that one of them was a time machine.