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SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

mals and species of birds. 41
I have argued elsewhere, in light of Winnico and Stern's work,
and the work of others that the intersubjective, rhythmic music of
early life, what I have also called “the metrics of being,” provides the
foundations for narrative: “We are creatures of a subjective time
founded in the wordless dialogues of infancy, which is further devel-
42
oped in language and its natural consequence, story.” Stern’s proto-
narrative envelope involves repetition, recollection, and expectation.
The infant recognizes a rhythmical, sensual, emotional pa ern of ex-
change she comes to expect and, if its flow is interrupted, broken, or
cut short, distress may ensue.
Arguably, any parent or person who has had close contact with
a baby will recognize the significance of such repetitions, which take
on a ritual quality: feeding, rocking, bouncing, singing, and games are
repeated again and again and become more complex as the child
grows. There is inevitably a spatial as well as a temporal quality to
these rituals — the baby is in the same house, the same room, the same
chair with the same person or persons, and these recollected repeti-
tions bring familiarity, comfort, and felt emotional meaning. Over
time, these repetitions may become what Ricoeur called Mimesis1, a
semantics of action: one thing inevitably follows another; one thing
seems to cause the next. Psychologists sometimes call these “scripts”
— the anticipated unfolding of a series of routine actions.
The question for me is not whether these dialogical exchanges,
situated in “real” embodied time and space, provide a foundation for
narratives that refer to other times and other spaces or that they con-
stitute pre-narrative experience. I believe they do. Telling a story is al-
ways for another; it takes place in the zone between or among people.
Even when I tell it only to myself, I am another to myself. It is a com-
municative form of being alive with others, and it starts early. Woolf

41 See Sue Taylor Parker, Robert W. Mitchell and Maria Boccia, eds., Self
Awareness in Animals and Humans: Developmental Perspectives (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
42 S. Hustvedt, “Three Emotional Stories,” in Living, Thinking, Looking (Lon-
don: Sceptre, 2012), 188.

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