Motive and narrative in Billy Budd
103
Ex. 3.8 (cont.)
(b)
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omitting nothing in Claggart’s accusation and deposing as to the manner in which the prisoner had received it” (105; ch. 21) – to the operatic stage (Ex. 3.8). The shift, in both cases, has temporal implications. The change from book to stage transforms both the duration of single events, and the speed at which they pass within a narrative chain. The scene/summary distinction helps delineate how operatic representation departs from a literary source, but it is also familiar in purely literary narration. As Gérard Genette’s classic analysis of Proust’s style shows, a writer’s control of pace is definable as the ratio established between the “story time” of events depicted (a minute, a year) and the “narrative time” taken to recount this period in words (a sentence, a chapter). Scenes in novels give story and narrative-time more or less equivalent duration (as in sections of direct dialogue, for example); summary, on the other hand, compresses the length of story time to some shorter narrative time. In the realist novel, Genette notes, scene and summary alternate as intermediaries between extremes of temporal movement, in a spectrum from a complete pause in the action (for description of some detail), to ellipsis (where omitted events have “zero” textual duration). Opera, in its focus on a literally “scenic” unfolding of events, lacks the novel’s summary mode of depiction. But opera, like the novel, creates a temporal flow; indeed, music can control time more precisely than can a verbal narrative (where actual reading speeds vary). In opera, the pace of the scene is in a very direct sense, a product of tempo;41 but control of time is also more than a matter of long or short beats or the number of measures allotted a stage action; music that feels “fast” to audiences may convey the