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

identifies a feeling, which, if not present in every writer, is surely one
I have repeatedly experienced and is precisely what Langer delineates
in her philosophy of art — the effort to catch the felt pulse, motion,
and ambiguous meanings of being alive in artistic form for an imagi-
nary reader, an other. While I write, I am also, like the ancient and
Renaissance practitioners of artificial memory, “seeing” the places I
am writing about, usually actual streets or houses or apartments or
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gardens I know well. These mental loci refer to actual places in the
world; the characters and the action are fictional. For me, writing fic-
tion is a rhythmic form of navigation in remembered spaces. Never-
theless, these necessary rhythms and spatial images do not in them-
selves constitute narrative art.
The storyteller does not and cannot include every beat of exis-
tence or every mental image in a narration. Narrative, with its emplot-
ment, as Ricouer argued, is “a grasping together” of temporal experi-
ence; it is necessarily selective, and it requires “a capacity for distanc-
ing itself from its own production and in this way dividing itself in
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two.” In short, in telling a story about my own life or in inventing a
fictional story, I leave out a lot, and I imagine myself (or the character)
in the particular situation, not here and now but there and then. Nar-
ratives organize, delete from, add to, and thereby shape lived time and
space. They create coherence from the perceptual flux that is living.
The real question is: What is the relation between “pre-narrative” ex-
perience and full-blown reflective narrative consciousness, the kind
that makes “the words to fit in?” The distance between pre-narrative
and narrative has become blurred in some writing on the origins of
narrative. There appear to be three consistent elements cited as the
embodied ground for storytelling: proto-conversation, neonatal imi-
tation, and operative intentionality.
In their summary of the arguments for proto-narrative encoun-
ters between mother and child, Michel Imberty and Maya Gratier
write, “Sensitive and constant continuities and games of repetition and

43 See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (New York: Peregrine Books, 1969).
44 Ricouer, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, 61.

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