Fiction is the construction of foreshortened temporalities substituted for real time.

Evidence

We all know, but always forget, that the fictive scenes and conversations on the movie screen radically foreshorten reality as the clock ticks and are never — owing to the now codified mysteries of the various techniques of film narrative — coterminous with the putative length of such moments in real life, or in “real time”: something a filmmaker can always uncomfortably remind us of by returning occasionally to real time in this or that episode, which then threatens to project much the same intolerable discomfort we have ascribed to certain videotapes. Is it possible, then, that “fiction” is what is in question here and that it can be defined essentially as the construction of just such fictive and foreshortened temporalities (whether of film or reading), which are then substituted for a real time we are thereby enabled momentarily to forget? — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 218

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines fiction not by narrative or realism but by the projection of fictive temporality that lets us momentarily forget real time.
• XREF: Connects to reader’s silence work: both concern how temporal framing shapes our felt relationship to lived duration. — connects to: Models anticipate and immanently structure the real, leaving no space for fiction. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 397; The modern novel shifts the hero’s dominant relation to reality from space to time — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 364; Modern reified time forces novels to carve out fictional elbowroom — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 347 (+1 more)