# what is a temporal art **Opening (not a real abstract):** In an interview aired on National Public Radio, novelist Margaret Atwood discussed the problem of adapting her novel, The Handmaid's Tale, to the film screen. One of the great difficulties of transforming a novel into a film, Atwood observed, is that novels have what she called "stretchy time." Films, she said, have what she called "set time." This temporal difference was significant enough, Atwood told her interviewer, that she became quite nervous about writing the screenplay for her novel and, in the end, entrusted the task to Harold Pinter. 1 It is a common critical observation about the various arts, at a fairly general level, that some of them are temporal arts, and some are not, or that some arts are more purely temporal than others. Lessing, for example, is well known for his argument that painting is a spatial art, **Authors:** [[levinson]]