Time for Pamela

Richardson’s Pamela (1740), the most influential story of sexual harassment in the workplace ever written,  is remarkable for many things – not least the violence that it does to time itself.

There are certain critics who deal in quantitative ergonomic measurements.  I am not such a critic and I will never be such a critic but I am glad that they exist because I can profit from their work.  They’ve done the math so I don’t have to.  Let them sow and I will reap.

It has been estimated that Pamela, the titular heroine of Pamela, who is constantly sliding into her own itallics (or is it the case that the book title is always stiffening into Roman verticality?)  could not possibly have written all that she writes in the space of a few hours and still do all the things that she’s supposedly writing about.  There aren’t enough hours in the day.  And she’s writing when she should be running at various points as well – the ‘hark, I hear a sound in the corridor’ sort of thing.   At the very least, she should have her arm in a sling and painful wrist cramp to contend with.

Perhaps she wrote in shorthand?  Nope.  It is central to the plot that Pamela’s writings can be read instantly by anyone who discovers them.  Not only does she write longhand -she writes neatly.

The reality is, of course, that Richardson managed to create a new form of time sequence.  Most narratives take less time to narrate than the events supposedly did to enact.  The events of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra took place over about a decade, but he can deliver it in under three hours.  Novels can take us from someone’s cradle to their grave – but we can follow them over a week or two.

There are a few “real time” narratives – which attempt to exactly replicate a temporal sequence.  The Fred Zinnemann movie High Noon is the most obvious example.  A clock reads something like 10.30 when the film opens, and at 12 noon exactly, around 90 minutes later all is done.

Richardson manages in his fiction to achieve something new, a new form of temporal confusion.  He creates narratives that actually take longer in the telling that the events described would naturally take to unfold.  He manages to slow down time, in order to accommodate a weight of descriptive detail.  This suits the truly splendid cruelty and claustrophobia of his works.

The length of Clarissa is central to its cruelty.  It helps us understand Clarissa’s willingness to leave this world and embrace immortality.  The length of Sir Charles Grandison is related to its theology, its endless negotiations, and the sheer knottiness of a kind of determination to “do the right thing”.

The notion that stories can never be properly told because of the sheer density of life itself, is wrestled with by Richardson but not really consciously acknowledged.  The author who fully and explicitly acknowledges the Richardsonian time displacement and who enjoys it – has fun with it – and explores its full absurdity and impossibility – is Laurence Sterne, the man who keeps sending us back, back, back in time with a kind of Epimethean bravura that converts human existence into a game of Grandmother’s footsteps.