10. The Cutaway Across Forms

The apparatus above was developed for the novel. It transfers to adjacent forms with adjustments that need stating, because writers frequently import novel-scale habits into forms that punish them.

10.1 The short story

The story has proportionally less room and a much less forgiving arithmetic. Two consequences follow directly from §3.9.

The deficit does not amortise. In a novel, an expensive cutaway can be paid off over the following fifty pages. A story has no following fifty pages, which means the return must arrive almost immediately — usually within the same paragraph as the cutaway itself.

The dramatised flashback is often unaffordable. A story of four thousand words that spends eight hundred on a past scene has given a fifth of itself to material that is not the present situation. The registers that suit the form are 1, 2, 4 and 13 — the clause of implication, the participial aside, the iterative, and the corrected assumption — because all four deliver a past without stopping the story.

The last row is the form’s real advantage. Because a reader holds a whole story in mind at once, a final revelation about the past recolours every preceding sentence — an effect a novel can only approximate. This is the mechanism of a very large proportion of the canonical short stories in English, and it is a reason to spend a story’s past at the end rather than in the middle.

10.2 The novella

The novella has a novel’s tonal amplitude and a story’s word count, and its characteristic problem in this territory is proportion. A single dramatised flashback in a thirty-thousand-word text is a structural event, not a passage.

The form’s distinctive solution is the one Tolstoy uses (§9.8): make the retrospect the whole design rather than an interruption of it. A novella can afford to be almost entirely analepsis in a way a novel usually cannot, because the reader’s investment in the first narrative has not had time to become the thing they are protecting. Where a novel that leaves its present for two hundred pages has abandoned something, a novella that leaves its present after twenty has simply declared its shape.

10.3 Series and sequels

Series fiction faces a version of the problem that no other form has: the past is a previous book, and the reader may or may not have read it.

Three principles, all of which are versions of the rules already stated.

1. Recap is backstory, and the compression check applies to it. A returning reader needs a clause; a new reader needs a paragraph; neither needs a scene. A dramatised flashback to the previous volume’s climax is the form’s characteristic error, and it is worse than it looks: it is redundant for one audience and unearned for the other.
2. Deliver the past as present-tense consequence rather than as summary — a character behaving in a way the previous volume explains and this one demonstrates. Chapter 9 §10.4 states the same rule for series openings.
3. The iterative is the series writer’s best instrument. They had been doing this for two years now, and it had stopped being remarkable delivers a whole prior volume’s worth of relationship in a sentence, and characterises while doing it.

10.4 The screen comparison, and where it misleads

The cutaway is the one device in this series whose prose form is substantially derived from a screen convention (§3.8), which makes the comparison unusually important — and unusually treacherous.

What film does that prose cannot.

• The transition is instantaneous and unambiguous. A dissolve, a change of colour grading, a change of aspect ratio, and the audience is in the past with no orientation cost whatever. Prose has no equivalent; every clause is paid for.
• The past arrives fully specified. A single frame supplies period, place, ages, weather, class and season simultaneously. A prose flashback must name each of those, in sequence, which is why the construction cost of a long reach (§3.2) is a prose problem and barely a film problem.
• The return is free. A cut back to a face in close-up re-anchors the audience instantly. Prose must write the return, which is why §6.6 spends so long on it.

What prose does that film cannot.

• Grammatical tense. English can place a clause in the past with one auxiliary verb, at no cost, in the middle of a present-tense sentence. Film has no tense; it can only show, and everything shown is in the present. This is the reason the registers at §6.4 numbered 1 to 4 have no cinematic equivalent, and it is prose’s decisive advantage in this territory.
• The iterative. Film struggles to say every Sunday; it must resort to montage, which is a series of singulatives standing in for a habit. A sentence does it.
• Uncertainty about the past. A shot of an event asserts that the event occurred. Prose can narrate a past in the subjunctive — it must have been, perhaps — which is why register 11 is a literary form and Absalom, Absalom! has no film equivalent.

The practical warning. A writer who has absorbed flashback conventions from screen will reach reflexively for register 5, because it is the only register film has. The commonest technical poverty in this territory is a writer with one instrument out of fourteen, and its cause is usually that thirteen of them are invisible on a screen.

10.5 Translated fiction

Two observations, both of which follow the series’ standing distinction between structural and textural claims.

Structural claims survive translation. The reach, extent and type of an analepsis, the order of disclosure, the placement of a cutaway relative to a present scene: all of these are properties of the arrangement, and a translation that reordered them would not be a translation. Everything this chapter says about The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Season of Migration to the North, In Search of Lost Time and One Hundred Years of Solitude is claimed at that level.

The grammatical marking of the past does not survive. This is a sharper problem here than in most chapters, because English marks the cutaway principally by tense, and tense systems differ.

• English relies heavily on the past perfect to signal a step behind the narrative past — and it is a cumbersome instrument, which is why the convention exists of entering a flashback with two or three pluperfects and then reverting to the simple past for the body of it. This convention is a solution to a problem specific to English.
• Languages with grammatical aspect rather than a full sequence of tenses distribute the work differently; Russian, for example, can mark habituality and completion by verb aspect in ways an English translator must render lexically, often with would or used to — which is why the iterative sometimes reads as more marked in English translation than in the original.
• Languages without an obligatory pluperfect may signal the shift by adverbials, by particles, or by nothing at all, leaving the reader to infer the temporal relation from context.

The consequence for a student: a claim about how conspicuous a cutaway feels is a claim about the language it is read in. The observation at §8.10, that italics substitute for construction, is a claim about a typographic convention in anglophone publishing. The observation at §5.3, that tense is the cheapest carrier available, is a claim about English.

10.6 Concordance: concept to novel

A study aid: each concept with the work that best displays it.