For the silver screen, the term is particularly evocative, stressing as it does the instantaneous nature of the technique. In the cinema, these are called “flashbacks,” a term which filmmakers have used since the earliest days of the medium. Reversals also occur at higher, macronarrative levels, those of whole episodes. Then the discourse returns to the moment of the soirée which Swann was attending. His micronarrative example is a paragraph of A la recherche du temps perdu in which, after the narrator jumps backwards, telling how Swann had suddenly decided that Bloch (whom he previously disdained) actually was an intelligent person because a Dreyfusard, like himself. He also distinguishes between reversals at the micronarrative and at the macronarrative levels. He cites as a founding instance the eighth line of the Iliad, in which the narrator goes backwards to recount the cause of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. Gérard Genette calls this reversal analepsis, a “going backwards” (Genette 40). Since antiquity, narratives have routinely presented an earlier event in the story at a later moment in the discourse. But narrative discourse need not trace a straight path. The direction is usually forward, from an initial state of affairs to a final one. It directs us from one moment to the next. No listener could ever match Dukas’s melody and rhythm with so specific a narrative as the one Disney assigned to them in an astonishing sequence in Fantasia-Mickey Mouse conjuring up a catastrophic flood by animating a broom to carry water and mop to the strains of marching music, and then, to Dukas’s intensifying crescendos, Mickey’s attempt to slay the original broom with an axe, only to see the fragments proliferate like sown dragon’s teeth, into an endless army of water-carriers that threatens to drown the dreamer and the rest of the world. And even then we cannot correlate individual musical segments with specific story-events. Listening to a musical composition that “narrates,” say, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a specific story matching the music only comes to mind if we know it before hand, in this case either the original, Goethe’s “Der Zauberlehrling,” or some retelling. To endow its elements with “meaning” in the strict sense of unit-by-unit signification, another textual system must be applied. And music can imitate natural sounds: repetitive drumbeats do indeed suggest marching or hoofbeats, but much less specifically than language. True, music evokes moods and emotions-happy, wistful, sad-and composers or their editors stimulate such associations with titles like Les Adiuex or Night on Bald Mountain. Individual musical segments-notes, phrases, and themes-do not explicitly refer to anything in the outside world. (I refer here to “pure” or “absolute” music, not songs with lyrics, program music, operas, or the like.). But unlike narratives, its units are not individually meaningful, at least in the usual sense of the word. Music, of course, more strictly controls our temporal experience, second-by-second. Our eyes’ path may follow reading habits, design principles (the diagonal dominates, according to Sergei Eisenstein), subject matter preferences (“I particularly love the petals of roses!”), or the exigencies of the viewing experience (another museum visitor is partially blocking our view). We approach Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, for example, either from the right, the left, or the middle. Though some works-for example, a painting of a forest with an open path in the foreground-seemingly force us to begin at a given point, many do not. Pure visual art-works do not control the order of our perception as tightly as do narratives. A single-frame historical painting depicts a frozen moment in a story, functioning more as an allusion to than a translation of its series of events. But it does so by applying narrative rules, not those of visual design. Obviously, pictures can tell stories: a multi-frame narrative painting or a comic strip moves from one event or state of affairs to another. Of course, it takes time to view a painting, but that time is not structural, as it is in a narrative (with its two orders––discourse-time and story-time). The “pure” visual arts––paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs––are radically spatial. But, as Lessing argues in the very subtitle of Laocoon––“An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry”––other kinds of discourse do not. Narratives work, as we all know, in both dimensions. “My Next Life Backwards,” by Woody Allen
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