Analepsis — Genette’s term for narration, after the fact, of an event earlier than the point in the story at which the narrative currently stands. The formal name for what this chapter calls a cutaway. §3.1.
Anachrony — Any discordance between the order in which events occur in the story and the order in which the narrative presents them. The genus of which analepsis and prolepsis are the species. §3.1.
Backstory — The past told: conveyed by summary, implication, report or dialogue, without the reader living through it. One of the two registers into which the fork at §6.2 divides.
Belatedness — In trauma theory, the property by which an overwhelming event is not fully registered at the time of its occurrence and returns afterwards, intrusively and out of sequence. Caruth (1996); contested. §3.7.
Completing analepsis — An analepsis that fills a gap the narrative previously left open; it arrives into a slot the reader already has. Contrasted with the repeating analepsis. §3.3.
Curiosity — Sternberg’s term for the interest generated by uncertainty about the past, as distinct from suspense (the future) and surprise (a past gap the reader did not know existed). §3.4.
Cutaway — This chapter’s cover term for any passage in which the narrative leaves the temporal position of its present action for earlier material, in either register. §2.1.
Distributed exposition — Sternberg’s mode in which antecedents are dispersed throughout a narrative and never gathered. §3.4.
Ellipsis — A stretch of story time passed over in silence. What a completing analepsis later fills. §2.4.
Extent (amplitude) — How much story time an anachrony itself covers. Independent of reach. §3.2.
External analepsis — An analepsis lying entirely before the starting point of the first narrative. §3.3.
First narrative (récit premier) — Genette’s term for the temporal level a narrative establishes as its principal one, against which all anachrony is measured. Without one, there is no anachrony, only a sequence. §3.1.
Flashback — The past dramatised as a scene, moment by moment, subject to every rule governing a scene. The second register of the fork. The term is a twentieth-century import from cinema. §2.1, §3.8.
Interest deficit — This chapter’s first principle: at the moment a cutaway begins, the reader is holding an open present-tense question, and the costs of suspension, frame-holding and chronology-tracking are incurred before the past material delivers anything. Originates here; used in Chapter 5 and Chapter 14. §3.9.
Internal analepsis — An analepsis falling inside the span of the first narrative, and therefore working in territory the reader already occupies. §3.3.
Involuntary memory — Proust’s mémoire involontaire: the past recovered by sensation rather than by the intellect, and not reachable by intention. Register 8. §6.4, §9.1.
Iterative — In Genette’s analysis of frequency, telling once what happened many times: every Sunday he would…. Register 4, and the most underused instrument in the taxonomy. §6.4.
Mixed analepsis — An analepsis beginning before the first narrative and continuing into it. §3.3.
Paralipsis — The omission of information the narrative’s own vantage should have supplied; a lateral rather than a temporal gap. §2.4.
Prolepsis — Narration in advance of an event that will occur later. Formally the mirror of analepsis; practically, a promise rather than a detour, and a means of converting a later analepsis into a completing structure. §3.3.
Reach (portée) — How far an anachrony goes from the present moment of the first narrative: the size of the leap. §3.2.
Register of the past — This chapter’s term for a recognisable way of putting past material on the page. Fourteen are tabulated at §6.4.
Rememory — Sethe’s term in Beloved for a past that persists as a place in the world, which another person can enter. §3.7, §9.5.
Repeating analepsis — An analepsis returning to material the narrative has already covered, in order to recolour it. The most expensive structure in the chapter and the one that produces several of its greatest novels. §3.3.
Return — The point at which a cutaway ends and the first narrative resumes. This chapter’s requirement is that the present be changed, in knowledge, understanding, question or action. §6.6.
Structural domain — The proposed sixth domain: a cutaway used as an architectural device rather than for its content, to control the shape of the whole book. §4.6.
Trigger — The element in the present scene that motivates a cutaway. Ten kinds are tabulated at §6.6; the requirement of one is a consequence of narrative distance rather than an independent rule.