Narration is a temporal phenomenon. The truth value of that statement is so obvious that we often forget about it yet it is true in two significant ways. First, the act of narration takes place in time; as a printed text extends over lines and pages, so speech extends over seconds, minutes or hours, words follow each other along the linear scale of time. The fact that writing transforms the onedimensional temporality of speech into the three-dimensional spatial reality of books bears indeed

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... ess to the ingenuity of that device. Reading i.e. converting printed words back into [mentally] spoken ones, however, will happen in time again. Second, what is narrated, a sequence of events, happens in time. As Dr. Johnson says in his essay on Milton, History must supply the writer with the rudiments of narration, which he must improve and exalt by a nobler art, must animate by dramatic energy, and diversify by retrospection and anticipation.